Ilan Stavans’ new anthology, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry ($50), came out this March. The 700+ page volume includes work by a wide range of poets from throughout the Americas, writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and many other languages. My own bias toward the region’s poetry admitted, I believe the anthology to be the most important and exciting to come out this year. Stavans and I corresponded by email, as he prepared for his bilingual reading at McNally Jackson, featuring María Negroni, Odi González, and Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán, this 22 April.
DS
The volume covers a hundred years of ground, beginning with Cuban Jose Martí (b. 1853) and ending with Mazatec poet Juan Gregorio Regino (b. 1962). But beyond that temporal range, it also includes poets from throughout North, Central, and South America and working in a wide variety of languages—including the obvious Spanish and Portuguese, a smattering of indigenous languages like Mapuche, Nahuatl, and Isthmus Zapotec, and even some surprises, like French and Ladino. How did you decide whom to include in this anthology, and what were the basic criteria for inclusion?
For years I dreamed of an anthology of the best, as well as the most representative, poetry written in Latin America from Modernismo to our fractured present, a book through which the region’s history—the ideological, social, economic, scientific, religious, and aesthetic trends—could be understood. When my friend Jonathan Galassi endorsed the idea, I felt like flying…
Journalists have a say on how the present ought to be read, historians offer us an interpretation of the past, and politicians entertain themselves with the future. But poets, I believe, have a more accurate, more intimate understanding of time: its sequence, its secrets. I wanted to look at Latin America through the eyes of these most articulate of witnesses.
The region, needless to say, is heterogeneous. That, in short, dictated my editorial mandate: what do we see when we see not only from our perspective but from that of many? Latin America, then, is many Latin Americans. That multiplicity starts and ends with language. Spanish and Portuguese are the standard conduits, but the hundreds of indigenous languages are equally important. And the immigrant languages are, too. And, why not add also, invented languages.
As an editor, my criterion is formed, in equal measure, by knowledge and intuition. Or maybe intuition and knowledge. For instance, there’s no twentieth-century Latin American poetry without Rubén Darío, even though he was born in 1865. I adore Darío’s poetry; the question is what from him to include. “To Roosevelt” is essential; in fact, I believe it’s the centrifugal poem around which everything else rotates. And “Lo fatal,” where Darío brings back Quevedo. And his “Sonatina,” the most un-Nicaraguan poem every written, and also the most Nicaraguan. With plentiful, influential poets like him (or Mistral, or Borges, or Neruda, or Vallejo, or Drummond de Andrade), I gave myself the luxury of including an assortment of choices.
Whom did I include? Path-finders, innovators, visionaries. And, needless to say, master crafters of linguistic gems. In poetry, I love humbleness, which doesn’t mean I love accessibility for accessibility sake. For me it’s important that the poet is simultaneously direct and indirect.
Are there other poets—perhaps personal favorites—that you would like to have included but didn’t? Or others that might not belong in this grouping but that you consider deserving of an English-language audience?
Oh God, the original manuscript I submitted to FSG was, if not twice as long, surely with at least a third more. I had poems written originally in Russian, Japanese, Italian, and Yiddish, among other languages. I also had several poets, many of them born after 1950, from Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and Colombia.
Last year I was talking at the BBC with David Huerta and Isthmus Zapotec poet Víctor Terán, and I found it interesting that Huerta, while acknowledging the quality of Terán’s poetry, pretty strongly believed it to be part of a tradition distinct from his own poetry. It seems, in your introduction at least, that you might draw stronger connections between those traditions, as well as from other contemporary indigenous traditions. How have the aboriginal languages of the Americas permeated the Spanish-language tradition? Why do writers as diverse as Huerta, de la Cruz, and Regino belong together?
If language is fate, so is geography. Judging from your comment, David Huerta sees Spanish—Mexican Spanish—as the unifier. I, instead, put the emphasis on the Mexican, however conflicted that term might be. My own first language was Yiddish. Still, I belong to the Mexican cultural tradition. And so do Terán, de la Cruz, Regino, and other indigenous poets, as well as immigrant poets. And outsiders.
I guess I’ve just stumbled on the right word: outsider. Every tradition is defined by outsiders.
This brings us to my next question. In your introduction you coin the term “Menardismo,” after Pierre Menard, which followed the Modernismo movement that launched twentieth-century Latin American poetry. What does it mean?
The act, and art, of pretending to be part of a tradition, and by pretending, finding, finding a place in it. Menard is more Cervantian than Cervantes.
Modern Latin America is an invention: a confluence of cultures, a juxtaposition of disparate realties. I wanted the volume to reflect that contradiction. That’s why I asked the publisher to use the back-cover not for show-biz blurbs but for a single, mind-changing quote by Roberto Bolaño: “True poets don’t belong to any country.” In other words, all these Latin American poems are really not Latin American—they are universal. Bolaño continues: “For them the only borders that ought to be respected are the borders of dreams. The trembling borders of love and lovelessness, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of morality.”
I love how you end your introduction to this volume: “This anthology, in short, refuses to accept Robert Frost’s dictum that poetry is what gets lost in translation. Just the opposite: poetry refurbishes itself through translation because translation is power.” Can you say more about the power of translation or the power of the translator? What are some examples of poetry’s refurbishment?
Translation is betrayal. But translation is also empowerment. Latin America became modern by imitating other cultures. Or, to put it better, by translating other cultures. Through translation one makes the foreign native and vice versa. All poets write in a foreign language, even when they are monolingual. And all fine poets are translators: they translate the world for us. That is, they explore it by refusing to pigeonhole it.
What translations are you reading now? Are you working on any yourself?
I read translations all the time: from Arabic, Serbian, Mandarin. As of late, I’ve been rereading the Bible in different languages and also in different translations.
As for current projects, I’m translating all of Pablo Neruda’s odes. The ode, as you know, was Neruda’s favorite mode and I’m intrigued by the multiple ways he renewed it. And I’ve just finishing a translation of Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas, which I’m calling The Plain in Flames. Rulfo is a poet of the short story. Some of the pieces in this volume are simply perfect. They remind me of the perfection achieved in the short story by Mauppassant, Chekhov, and Babel.
The FSG Book of Twenty-first-Century Latin American Poetry must be slated for 2111, right? What contemporary poets will start it off?
I won’t be around by then.
Me neither, I’m afraid. But I hope it is as successful and varied an anthology as yours. Thanks for your time, and congratulations.
April 2011
