Introduction to the Panel with Elizabeth Hay, Lisa See, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Juan Villoro at the San Miguel Writers Conference

READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM www.madam-mayo.com

I wasn't planning to post this since it's not a complete essay, only an introduction to a panel, but it has come up in so many conversations since the panel was held this past February, I thought I'd offer it here-- and with links in case you'd like to learn more about these extraordinary writers.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL 
GLOBAL MIGRATION: PEOPLE AND THEIR STORIES

BY C.M. MAYO

PANELISTS: 
ELIZABETH HAY, LISA SEE, 
LUIS ALBERTO URREA, AND JUAN VILLORO 

SAN MIGUEL WRITERS CONFERENCE

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, FEBRUARY 2016

TRANSCRIPT

Good morning, Buenos días! Bienvenido! Welcome! What an joy of a conference this is. If my memory serves me, I participated in what was the very first of these conferences. I know it was more than 10 years ago. And that was an outstanding conference, but wow, it has gotten not only bigger but better and better. What we have here in this conference is unique: A gathering in the heart of Mexico, of writers from Mexico, writers who may or may not be Mexican living in Mexico, writers visiting Mexico, writers from so many different cultures.  

The day before yesterday, here, over there by one of those big white tents, I ran into one of my favorite Mexican writers, who happens to be a native of San Miguel de Allende, and baptized in the Parroquía, that otherwordly gothic church that is impossible to miss. Araceli Ardón. She was on the faculty last year, and some other years. So I mentioned to Araceli that I was going to moderate this panel today on Global Migration: People and their Stories.

Well, why do we write?

And Araceli told me that in his writing workshop, years ago, Carlos Fuentes—who was, without a doubt, one of Mexico’s greatest writers— Carlos Fuentes said something that, like a beacon in the night, had guided her as as writer. In Spanish, Fuentes said: “La literatura tiene que dar voz a los silencios de la historia." 

Literature must give voice to history’s silences. 

As we go on with this panel, I would like to invite you to keep those words of Carlos Fuentes present in your mind.

Global Migration: it’s in the news. We see it, we hear it, we read about it every day. Those of us who are from the US and Canada are keenly aware , on many levels, of our histories with migration, and this includes, in most cases, our own family histories.

For those who are new to Mexico-- and I know that quite a few if you are--an extra special welcome to you.

I’d like to underline something that could be... shall we say... fruitful to keep in mind as we proceed, and that is that Mexico, too, has had and continues to accept important numbers of immigrants. For example, Mexico’s literary figures include many who were immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Spain, of course, but also from Germany— and that includes Carlos Fuentes—from France, Italy, Ireland, Japan, China, Africa, Central America, Cuba, Argentina, Poland (Elena Poniatowska!) and Russia— it’s a long list.

And it also includes immigrants from the Middle East-- that flow of immigrants, from the Middle East, by the way, goes back many, many decades. 

Rose Mary Salum, a Mexican writer of Lebanese descent, recently published a visionary anthology entitled, in Spanish, Delta de las arenas, cuentos árabes, cuentos judíos, a title I would translate as Delta of Sands: Arab and Jewish Short Fiction from Latin America. It is a large and splendid and very interesting book, by the way.

There are also notable flows of migration within Mexico itself. Just to give one example, many people have come from small towns and farms to live in large cities, and in so doing making them larger: Mexico City, Querétaro, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana... Farm workers, migrant workers, who might go north to Oregon or Florida, also go to the Mexican states of Baja California or Sinaloa.

Another example: Many Mexican artists, professionals and retirees have come from Mexico City have come to live here in San Miguel de Allende—there is quite a bit less traffic, among other attractions. 

And Mexico has indigenous groups from Mayas to Nahuas to Zapotecs, and members of these communities have moved all over the map of the Mexican Republic, and beyond. Of course, thousands of years ago, the ancestors of these peoples immigrated to what is now Mexico by way of the bridge under what is now the Bering Straight. And they too have important and rich storytelling, poetic, and literary traditions.

I myself am an immigrant to Mexico. I came from the US to live in Mexico City 30 years ago. So that’s why all my books are about Mexico. And I also translate Mexican writers, which brings me to a Mexican writer I am very proud to say I have translated: Juan Villoro. It was his short story about Mexican punk rockers that appears in my collection, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. 

Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s most outstanding writers, and it is truly a privilege, a stellar privilege, to have him here with us. 

So now I am going to formally introduce him, as our first speaker. And then, in turn, I will introduce each one of our panel. And then, after each has had the opportunity to speak, for about 10 to 12 minutes, we will take your questions and comments.

The questions at hand are: Why are stories of migration, or stories in some way inspired by migration, so vital? And what is it that elevates them to the level of “literary”? What are the challenges for writers who may be far removed from the culture in respecting their subjects, respecting their own creative process, and, ultimately, respecting their readers? And how is literature itself changing with such infusions?

+ + + 

If you would like to buy an MP3 recording of the entire panel, that is available from the San Miguel Writers Conference here.

P.S. It was at this conference, shortly after this panel, in fact, that I met Texas historian and novelist Carolina Castillo Crimm and she so kindly gave me an inscribed copy of De León: A Tejano Family History. Because I'm writing a book about Texas, I devoured it faster than a plate of Pody's BBQ. I highly recommend it as essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Texas, Northern Mexico, the borderlands, and indeed the United States itself. Check out my Q & A with Carolina Castillo Crimm about De León here.

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

(Centennial Lecture 2015 for the University of Texas of El Paso)

Marfa Mondays #13: 
Historian John Tutino on Looking at Mexico in New Ways

A Conversation with Michael K. Schuessler
on Pita Amor, Elena Poniatowska, Sor Juan and Alma Reed

The Memoirs of Maximilian's Gardner, Wilhelm Knechtel

Translating Across the Border

I invite you to visit my "For Mexicophiles" page here.

Your comments are ever and always welcome.

click here.

One of these days my next newsletter will go out. 

I welcome you to sign up here.

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers: Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

[Yours Truly and Patricia Dubrava
with a chapbook of my translation of a short story
 by Agustín Cadena. We both translate Cadena.]

For the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference in Tucson late last month, apart from participating on Mark Weiss's excellent panel "Translating Across the Border," I proposed and chaired a panel that addressed a topic that, in truth, could have been considered for translating poets and writers in any of the populated continents:

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:  

Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

The panelists were Yours Truly (transcript of my talk follows), Jeffrey C. Barnett, Patricia Dubrava, and Clare Sullivan. In the audience: several very distinguished literary translators (lotus petals upon y'all). The Q & A was extra crunchy, and in true ALTA fashion, in the sweetest way. (Seriously, literary translators, and especially the crowd that regularly attends ALTA conferences, are angelically generous and encouraging. If any of you reading this have ever thought of trying literary translation and/or attending a literary translator's conference, my recommendation is, YES!) 

[LAS TRES AMIGAS: 

Yours Truly, Clare Sullivan, and Patricia Dubrava.]

[Jeffrey C. Barnett, C.M. Mayo, Patricia Dubrava]

Transcript of C.M. Mayo's Remarks 

for the panel on 

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers

ALTA, Tucson, Arizona, 

October 31, 2015

I started translating in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Mexico City is Mexico's capital, but it's not analogous to Washington DC or, say, Ottowa, Canada. The megalopolis, "the endless city," as Carlos Monsivaís calls Mexico City, is like Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, all piled into one. In other words, its the political capital, financial capital, publishing capital, cultural capital, and television and movie capital. Oh, and business capital, too. Yes, there are other important cities in Mexico, and they have become more important in many ways, and some of them have some excellent writers and poets. But Mexico City is MEXICO CITY.

Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party, the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power, about to enter the last decade of its more than 70— yes, 70—years in power. How did it last so long? There are many answers to that question but the main one relevant for our topic at hand is that the PRI attempted to bring everyone, whether farmers, campesinos, industrialists or intellectuals, and that would include poets and writers, under its own big tent. It had its ways. Stick and carrot— or bone, as Mexicans like to say.

You may be aware that after two consecutive presidential administrations under the PAN or the Partido Acción Nacional, over the past decade, Mexico's Presidency has since returned to the PRI. But it's not exactly a return to the past. Not exactly.

I'm not going to get all political on you, I simply want to underline the fact that back in early 1990s, the Mexican literary establishment, concentrated in Mexico City, was heavily influenced by and subsidized by the PRI government. Just to give you a notion of this: If you were to go into a library and look at some back issues of the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine of the time— of course that would be Octavio's Paz's Vuelta— you would see a large number of advertisements from government-owned entities and Televisa, the party-allied television conglomerate. There were literary gatekeepers, as there are everywhere in this world, but in Mexico City at that time, they were ginormously powerful. Octavio Paz was king.

Though Octavio Paz met his maker some years ago, in some ways things remain the same. Mexico City is where it's at. The government still plays an important, though lesser role. Letras Libres, successor to Vuelta, remains a leading magazine of influence, and in fact it does publish some of the best writing you'll find anywhere.

But since the early 1990s there have been political and economic sea-changes in Mexico. Power is more dispersed. Other political parties have become far more powerful. On the right and the left they rival the PRI and on many an occasion, beat the PRI at the ballot box.

And even more than the political and economic changes, the technological changes have been sea-changes. I'm talking about the rise of digital media, from blogging to YouTube, podcasting, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and publishing— and by the way, amazon is now in Mexico with www.amazon.com.mx.

To find a Mexican writer to translate, you no longer have to travel to Mexico City and get chummy with the powers that be who can make recommendations and, perhaps, invite the anointed to tea. Now, say, from Boston or Hong Kong or Cleveland, you can follow any given Mexican writer's blog, and comment thereupon. Or, say, send her a Tweet!

I would love to tell you the story of how, in the late 1990s, I started my bilingual magazine, Tameme, which published many Mexican writers, and my experiences with putting together the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion— no easy task, since the idea of the TLC series is to provide writing about the whole country— and that would include writing from and about Baja California, Yucatan, Chiapas, Chihuahua...

At present I am translating a batch of Mexican writers: Ignacio Solares, a novelist born in Ciudad Juárez, long based in Mexico City; Agustín Cadena, who was born in the state of Hidalgo and is living in Hungary; Araceli Ardón who was born in San Miguel de Allende and lives in Querétaro; and yet another, Rose Mary Salum, who is from Mexico City and now based in Houston, Texas.

But I don't want to take time from my fellow panelists and what I hope will be a rich question and answer session. The main thing I want to emphasize is that, as literary translators, we can play a powerful role in influencing who and who is not read in English. Who to translate? It's good to ask for advice from the powers that be of the literary establishment in, say, Mexico or Cuba or Chile, and maybe even choose to translate one of them. They might be blast-your-wig-to-the-asteroid-belt fabulous! But we also have to recognize that there are power structures in literary communities, some of them entangled with political structures, and we need to acknowledge and examine, in our own minds, and our own hearts, what part we play in that or choose not to play. And why.

#   #   #

We may have been visiting the southwest this year, but ni modo, after the panel we ambled over to Sinbad's for Iraqi tea and babaganoushe. 

Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Patricia Dubrava's blog post on ALTA

My review of Ilán Stavans Octavio Paz: A Meditation

My talk for ALTA 2014:

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Translating Across the Border: 

Transcript of C.M. Mayo's remarks for the panel on 

"Translating the Other Side," ALTA, October 29, 2015.

Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance, edited by Sarah Cortez
(with my translation of a poem by Agustin Cadena)

Mexico City Melissa Garden 

(30 second video)

Cosecha del FIL: In Celebration of "Literal"

Translating Across the Border: Transcript of My Talk for the American Literary Translators Association Panel, "Translating the Other Side," Tucson, Arizona

[C.M. Mayo and Wendy Burk at the "Translating Across the Border" panel
American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference,
Tucson, 2015.
Mark Weiss, chair of the panel, is in the back on the right.]

Translating Across the Border
Transcript of a Talk by C.M. Mayo

American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)

Conference 38, Tucson, October 29, 2015

Panel: "Translating the Other Side"

Moderator, Mark Weiss. 

Panelists: Wendy Burk, Catherine Hammond, C.M. Mayo

Muchísimas gracias, Mark Weiss, and thank you also to my fellow panelists, it is an honor to sit on this dias with you. Thank you all for coming. It is especially apt to be talking about translating Mexican writing here, a jog from the Mexican border, in Tucson—or Tuk-son as the Mexicans pronounce it.

I grew up in Northern California and was educated in various places but mainly the University of Chicago. As far as Mexico went, until I was in my mid-twenties, I had absorbed, to use historian John Tutino's term, the “enduring presumptions.” Translation: I had zero interest in Mexico.

You know that old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans? 

What brought me to translating Mexican poetry and literary prose was that I married a Mexican—my fellow graduate student at University of Chicago— and we moved to his hometown, Mexico City, in 1986. I am happy to say that we are about to celebrate our 30^th anniversary. 

For me, as a writer, and as a translator, these decades, mainly spent in Mexico City, have been a grand adventure in learning and exploring the cultures, histories, and geography of Mexico and of course, learning Spanish. I cannot claim that I speak and write Spanish like a native—I started learning Spanish when I was 24 years old. But after three decades in Mexico... well, after three decades of living in any country, if you haven’t learned the language, at least to level of conversation and daily business... I was about to say something unkind.

My husband has his own and very distinguished career as an economist but I call him my Translation Assistant. Although I would say I am fluent in Mexican Spanish, as all of you well know, literary translation can be fluky-tricky. Many a time he has rescued me from what would have been toe-curling embarrassment. May we all have our translation assistants. 

It was back in the early 1990s, when I started writing my own poetry and short fiction, that I had two epiphanies. First epiphany: I could do this! I mean, I knew some Spanish and at the same time, I could write literary fiction and poetry myself. I was beginning to get my own stories and poems published in well-regarded literary journals, such as the Paris Review, The Quarterly, Southwest Review. That gave me a shot of confidence. To this day, I really believe that the best literary translators are not necessarily the most fluent, the most perfectly bilingual, but rather, those who can render the work into the same literary level in the target language.

And the second epiphany was that appallingly little Mexican work was being translated into English.There were some books, mainly from university presses, the occasional anthology, and here and there, a poem in a literary magazine, but I was in Mexico City, in Coyoacán, I could see what was going on, the rich, flourishing literary culture. It was obvious to me that this was not registering in the literary communities north of the border, not the way it should. 

For me, getting to know Mexican poets and writers was not difficult. Back in those days of yore, before the Internet ... well, one important poet, Manuel Ulacia, was my neighbor. We would often see each other out walking our dogs. 

But let me back up for a broader perspective.

Mexico shares a 2,000 mile border with the United States, spanning the southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and the greater part of Texas. And Mexico has some of the richest literary traditions in the world. 

It starts with the codexes of the Maya and the Aztecs, and others—and as a quick side note, there is a book forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press by archaeologist Dr. Carolyn Boyd, in which she argues that the White Shaman rock site near the U.S.Mexico border in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, which is thousands of years old, is actually a codex— and basing some of her arguments on the work of Mexican anthropologists, Dr. Boyd has decoded it. It tells the story of creation. And so we can think about “White Shaman” as the first known book in North America. North America, of course, includes Mexico. And the Texan side of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands was once part of Mexico. 

And speaking of books, you may recall the hullabaloo about the 14.2 million dollar sale of a copy of the first English language book printed in the New World, The Whole Booke of Psalmes of 1640. Well, that was more than one hundred years after the first Spanish language book was printed in Mexico City. That was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana, printed in 1539. And there may have been an even earlier book printed in 1537, Escala Espiritual par llegar al cielo, but no known copies survive.

In the prologue to my anthology of 24 Mexican writers, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, I write, “Mexican literature—a vast banquet—is one of the greatest achievements if the Americas. And yet we who read in English have gone hungry, for so astonishingly little of it has been published.” 

Mexico: A Literary Traveler’s Companion was published in 2006 and although I know many of you and other members of ALTA, and other translators, have since then published many Mexican works in translation, and anthologies, this scarcity, this appalling scarcity of translations of works from our neighboring country, continues. 

I could go on with names, book titles, and numbers from the publishing industry, but it would be too sad.  To give you the simplest and most concrete sense of how sad this situation is, when the sales team asked for blurbs for Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, I really had a problem. Of course there are many anthologies of English language writing about Mexico. But Mexicans writing about Mexico? I would have to ask a Mexican for a blurb. But what Mexican?

Octavio Paz? Yes, he won the Nobel Prize. But he was dead. 

Carlos Fuentes? He was in the anthology himself, so asking him for a blurb would have been awkward. Anyway, he wasn't answering his email.

Sales reps and bookstore buyers, for the most part, did not recognize the name of any Mexican writer. 

Salma Hayek? I suggested. 

The sales rep answered, “WOW! That would be GREAT!”

(No offense intended to Ms Hayek, an accomplished Mexican actress and producer. But methinks a blurb from her, had I been able to wrangle one, would have carried about as much clout as that of, say-- to scramble it into Texanese, porquois pas-- a rodeo barrel racing champion opining on the national polo team.)

We ended up using a blurb Isabelle Allende had provided for the Traveler’s Literary Companion series itself—a series from Whereabouts Press that includes many countries, among them, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and as far afield as Australia and Viet Nam.

And I managed to wrangle a blurb from a translator who is a queen among us—I know many of you will recognize her name—Margaret Sayers Peden. She wrote: 

“This delicious volume has lovingly gathered a banquet of pieces that reveal Mexico in all its infinite variety, its spendid geography, its luminous peoples. What a treat!” 

Bless her heart.

Apart from the anthology and various contributions to other anthologies and literary magazines, for a few years I founded and edited Tameme, a bilingual literary journal of new writing from Canada, the US and Mexico. That was a project I did with my dad, Roger Mansell, who had 25 years of experience in the graphic arts and printing business in San Francisco. So if I do say so myself, the three issues of Tameme and two chapbooks were quite beautiful and they should be collector’s items. Unfortunately my dad passed away, and with my own books to write, Tameme was more than I could handle.

But I have continued to translate. A few of the writers and poets I have translated in recent, post-Tameme years include Agustín Cadena for BorderSenses and Chatahoochie Review and various anthologies, most recently, Sarah Cortez’s Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance. I also recently published a story by Ignacio Solares in Lampeter Review, and am working on a second story by Solares and another by Araceli Ardón. 

A story by Rose Mary Salum was published in a very fine a new literary magazine edited by Dini Karasik called Origins. And I am also working on translating Rose Mary Salum's forthcoming book, El agua que mece el silencio, as The Water That Rocks the Silence. 

Apart from Tameme, the largest translation project I have undertaken to date is a strange one, and I bring it up because I know that for many of you the question of rights is a concern. A book that is out of copyright, you can grab that, you can translate that. Go to it! 

Last year for ALTA, when the topic was “Politics and Translation,” for two different panels I talked about that book, or rather my book about that book. The title of my book is METAPHYSICAL ODYSSEY INTO THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION: FRANCISCO I. MADERO AND HIS SECRET BOOK, SPIRITIST MANUAL. And it does include the complete first translation of Spiritist Manual. 

Francisco Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was overthrown in a coup d’etat and murdered. Madero was a Spiritist medium, that is, he believed he could communicate with the dead—and so can you! His secret book, Spiritist Manual, written in 1910—the year he launched the Revolution—and published under a pseudonym when was president elect in 1911, is... all about that. And I translated it because nobody else had. 

As I said in my panel talk last year,

I cannot deny other motives and the millions of other participants in that Revolution of 1910. But its spark, and the way it played out, and, I believe, Madero's murder, become a radically different story once we take into account his Spiritism.

My aim with my book and my translation of Madero's book is to deepen our understanding of Madero, both as an individual and as a political figure; and at the same time, deepen our understanding of the rich esoteric matrix from which his ideas sprang, in other words, not to promote his ideas nor disparage them, but explain them and give them context. 

It is also then my aim to deepen our understanding of the 1910 Revolution and therefore of Mexico itself, and because the histories are intertwined, therefore also deepen our understanding of North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and more— for as long as a book exists, should someone happen to read it, it can catalyze change in understanding (and other changes) that ripple out, endlessly. 

Such is the wonder, the magical embryonic power of a book, any book, whether original or in translation: that, even as it rests on a dusty shelf for a hundred years, or for that matter, an unvisited digital "shelf," if it can be found, if it can be read, it holds such potential.

To conclude: I mainly translate contemporary Mexican short fiction and poetry. It is a labor of love and, as an English language writer who lives in Mexico City, a way for me to engage with Mexico and with my Mexican colleagues. And finally, translating is a way to bring what I can, whether it be a monster on a platter or algún taquito sabroso, to the literary banquet.

To quote myself again from the prologue of Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, “Throughout Mexico there are so very many writers whose work has yet to be translated, or, though translated, deserves a far wider readership in English.” 

Any and all of you who have an interest in translating Mexican literature— know that you have my heartfelt good wishes.

THANK YOU.



Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.



***UPDATE: See the post about my other talk for the ALTA Conference, Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers: Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Araceli Ardón Visits La Casa Azul

NPR Interview with C.M. Mayo on the Art of Literary Translation

Preface to Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion

Five Quick Questions for Agustin Cadena, author of Las tentaciones de la dicha

Q & A with ALTA member Roger Greenwald, Translator of Gunnar Harding

Restituto Rodríguez and an Excerpt from The Museum on the Parque Juárez

Really, I am at work on my Far West Texas book (I don't plan to interrupt it again as I did to write Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution), but well, actually, I am at work on a novel, if at a glacial pace. It's a comedy of manners set in an imaginary town with some features (such as the Parque Juárez) that might sound like San Miguel de Allende... or Antigua... or someplace west of Peru in an alternative universe overgrown with ferns. 

Anyway, I am delighted to announce that my amiga the Mexican writer Araceli Ardón has brought out a gorgeous anthology of artworks by surrealist painter Restituto Rodriguéz paired with original works, apropos of those artworks, by Mexican writers including Araceli Ardón, Agustín Cadena, Mónica Lavín, Silvia Molina, Pedro Angel Palou... and Yours Truly, with an excerpt from the novel-in-progress. 

(Restituto Rodríguez, Surrealista was published by the State of Querétaro, Fondo Editorial Querétaro, Código Áureo, Valverde Internacional, and the City of San Juan del Río, Querétaro. ISBN 978-607-96622-0-2).

Herewith:

Restituto Rodríguez, Surrealista
Edited by Araceli Ardón
Showing "El Prestigio," 2005
and the text of C.M. Mayo's
"Excerpt from the novel The Museum on the Parque Juárez"

Excerpt from the novel The Museum on the Parque Juárez

By C.M. Mayo

Pam Havelotte, accompanied by her advisor, Don Teddy, had been drinking café and rejecting pinturas all morning. Her Museum on the Parque Juárez had been filled but for one wall, this trumpet-blast of a wall, that needed a painting, one very special one... for it would be the first encountered by visitors arriving from the north gallery, that is to say, those agog from Liliana Cartwright’s early oeuvre, including the very significant sculptures, Jirafa IV and Jitomate VII. 

And now, upon the easel: the Restituto Rodríguez.

Teddy stirred another lump of sugar into Mrs. Havelotte’s café. He went on in his pudding-smooth and peppered-with-Spanish way, while she, silently sipping, wondered: What did the artist mean by that priest, looking left, so full of the dread of Judgement Day? The reptile perched on his head—such tiny claws, buckteeth! The umbrella, the helicopters, the waif-like figure on a chair on a pillar... Whatever Don Teddy said, that it was evocativa, rather than narrativa, that it deconstructed something... multifaceted, geometría de composición... She had long ago learned to settle into the woollen-walled comfiness of her own intuitions as easily as if she’d twisted a dial behind her earring, for Don Teddy was so wise. If he’d told her to live in a tent in Antarctica, she would have asked him, what equipment should she buy?

Pam Havelotte handed her cup and saucer to a gloved hand that seemed to disappear as surreptitiously as it had appeared. Still considering the painting, one arm akimbo, she took a step back. Then she crossed her arms. “Yes!” 

Teddy shot out his bottom lip. Mrs. Havelotte was going to find out, but he was not going to be the one to tell her, that the padre in this picture was the very doppelgänger of Teriasu’s first husband, Alfonzo, who had disappeared one fine morning to be turned up by her detectives, three years later, half naked and bald, in an ashram in Idaho. And whether it was or it wasn’t, he realized now, with a cold twinge in his stomach, Teriasu was going to conclude that the figure in that chair was herself. It was Teriasu who had sold her family’s 17^th century stables so that her classmate from Sacred Heart, Pamelita, as she called Mrs. Havelotte, could elbow her museum onto the Parque Juárez. Why had Teriasu done that? It was a puzzling thought, like that little green lizard, and as he walked off into the Parque Juárez, arm-in-arm with Mrs Havelotte, Teddy had the sense that rain, somehow, was about to fall from the blue sky, and that that creature had lept out of its two dimensions and perched itself on his head. All through lunch, he kept patting the top of his head.

#        #        #

Here is my translation of the text on the back of the book:

Restituto Rodríguez was born in 1931 in an old house in the Historic Center of San Juan del Río, Querétaro. He studied accounting and worked in various governmental agencies until his retirement, at which time he took a road of no return, dedicating himself body and soul to painting, a jealous lover that had bewitched him since childhood.

The two genres of his work have been portraits and surrealism, the language of which he uses with great fluency. In his youth, he imbibed the works of masters in this genre such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. In time he worked out his own style; today, his work, an audacious proposal, is completely derived from his personal experience, nurtured by the events of eight decades  in which he has lived with his eyes open and soul unveiled.

This book contains a  selection of his works together with the valuable contribution of 20 outstanding writers, offering poetry and short fiction from the United States, Hungary, Spain, Panama and various parts of Mexico, all inspired by the fantastic images created by Restituto Rodríguez.

Junípero Serra in the Sierra Gorda

Araceli Ardón

Marfa Mondays #10 A Visit to Swan House

The Memoirs of Maximilian's Gardner, Wilhelm Knechtel

Five Quick Questions for Agustin Cadena