The Latin American
novel, our novel, cannot betray the great spirit that has shaped – and
continues to shape – all our great literature. If you write novels merely to
entertain – then burn them!
Miguel Angel Asturias
“The great works of our
countries have been written in response to a vital need, a need of the people,
and therefore almost all our literature is committed. Only as an exception do
some of our writers isolate themselves and become uninterested in what is happening
around them; such writers are concerned with psychological or egocentric
subjects and the problems of a personality out of contact with surrounding
reality.”
Miguel Ángel Asturias
“Life is not an easy
matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and
cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above
personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in
Exile, 1935
Generally speaking, art
is an expression of man’s need for a harmonious and complete life, that is to
say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has
deprived him. That is why a protest reality, either conscious or unconscious,
active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really
creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.
Art and Politics in Our
Epoch (1938)
Translation is often an
act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden -David Unger
Nobel Prize-winning
Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias’s masterpiece Mr President was
published in 2022 by Penguin. It is the
first English translation in more than half a century. Translated by award-winning
writer and translator David Unger and features a foreword by Nobel laureate
Mario Vargas Llosa and an introduction by the writer and biographer Gerald
Martin.
Asturias’s Mr President was
inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. The novel was subsequently
banned in Guatemala. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel is a surrealist masterpiece,
and a devastating attack on capitalism not just in Guatemala but around the
world. It is to Penguin’s credit that such an important book has been given the
translation it deserves. The new Penguin Classics edition is timely. David
Unger says, “Mr. President has more to say to an American in 2022 than it did
in 1962 when we knew less about the shenanigans of the CIA and the liaison
between the military and the industrial complex.”
Miguel Ángel Asturias
(1899-1974) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, the first Latin
American novelist to receive such an honour. Although one of his main
occupations was as a diplomat he is primarily known as a fiction writer.
Mr President, although written
from 1922 to 1932, wasn’t published until 1946 partly due to self-censorship
and was also banned by the Guatemalan state. Asturias quite rightly feared that
President Ubico (1931-1944) would assume that he was the dictator being
depicted.
Foreword
The foreword is by Mario
Vargas Llosa. Llosa is the noble Prize author of twelve novels, including Death
in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter, and The War of the End of the World, 1995, he was awarded the
Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most coveted literary honour, and
the Jerusalem Prize. His recent book Harsh Times was a described by Hari
Kunzru, as "A compelling and propulsive literary thriller “in his New York
Times Book Review.
Llosa correctly states “Mr.
President is qualitatively better than all previous Spanish language novels and
one of the most original Latin American texts ever written. He continues that without
Asturias, “there would be no García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende,
Laura Restrepo, Laura Esquivel, José Lezama Lima, or Roberto Bolaño.”
Llosa believes that Miguel
Ángel Asturias “wasn’t fully aware of how great a novel he had written and
whose magnitude he would never again repeat, because the novels, short stories,
and poems he wrote afterward were closer to the narrower, somewhat demagogic
literature of “committed” dictator novels that he had earlier championed. He
hadn’t realized that the great merit of Mr. President was precisely that he had
broken that tradition and raised the politically engaged novel to an altogether
higher level “.[1]
Introduction
Every great author needs
someone who will defend their work to the death if necessary. Miguel Asturias
has Gerald Martin. Martin who is the author of the superb biography of García
Marquez is currently working on a biography Vargas Llosa. Penguin will publish
Asturias’s Men of Corn in 2025[2].
Martin has translated and written a foreword for the new book. In his
introduction to “Mr. President” Martin writes “What is magical realism, if not
the solution to writing novels about hybrid societies in which a dominant
culture of European origin is juxtaposed in multiple ways with one or more
different cultures that in many cases are ‘premodern’? It was not Gabriel
García Márquez who invented magical realism; it was Miguel Ángel Asturias.”
What makes Mr President
such an important book. Martin elaborates “it’s a novel 'very like a play, a
tightly concocted drama (at times a theatre of marionettes),' equally cinematic
and poetic. It is reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett in its surreal flights
within the consciousnesses of the mad or dying, or within the narrative of myth
... The novel’s vision is relentlessly dark, but its execution is exhilarating,
daring, even wild. Asturias’s boldness is repeatedly arresting, and his
descriptions unforgettable...Such electrifying vividness animates every page”.
Translation
All great books need a
great translation. After fifty years Mr President finally has that kind of translation,
David Unger fully deserves the plaudits his translation has received. In 2014, Unger was awarded the Miguel Ángel
Asturias National Prize in Literature for lifetime achievement, the most
important literary prize in Guatemala. As a debt of gratitude to the country of
his birth Unger decided to take on a new and difficult translation. The main
purpose was to restore this great novel to the pantheon of world literature.
Having read the previous
publication of the novel with the translation by Fraces Partridge I was curious
to find out Unger’s opinion. Unger told me in an interview I did with him on my
website “Partridge’s translation is mostly workman-like but suffers, as I say
in the introduction, with many Anglicisms and a failure to recognize many
Guatemaltequismos—particularly Guatemalan words and terms that she didn’t fully
understand. Mr. President is a very American novel, one that lends itself to
translation in the American vein. Words like “coppers,” “blimey,” and “lorry”
are acceptable terms in the English language but are not inviting to North
American readers. Further, she didn’t have a clue about certain Guatemalan
foods, birds and plants that have entered the American vernacular through the
immigration of nearly 60 million Latin Americans into the U.S. In some ways,
she was hopelessly overmatched though I find that she also came through with
some lovely descriptions, a la Bloomsbury style.[3]
It is perhaps an
understatement to say that translating this book was an extraordinarily
difficult undertaking. But David Unger’s lucid and masterful new translation of
Mr President presents an opening for a new generation of readers around the
world to appreciate this “influential, and wrongly maligned masterpiece”.
Joel Whitney writes “Mr.
President is decidedly hard to translate, as it relies on poetic alliterations
and onomatopoeia, devices learned from surrealism’s inventors and other
avant-garde movements. But it also relies on Asturias’s very keen ear to the
street, his love of myth and Indigenous culture, and Unger proves to be a
masterful transformer. Much of the translation is truly of another time,
rendering not just Central American Spanish but also Guatemalan neighbourhood-,
class-, and period-specific slang. The praise for Unger’s
translation is highly deserved. But the fact of Penguin Classics and Unger
choosing this unfairly suppressed book is long overdue, the wait like being
unburied, with your eyes open”.[4]
As Whitney says in his
article the release of Asturias’s Mr President could not be timelier. As Unger
explains “I wanted the novel to really speak to our generation and our time,” It
is not only in Latin America that the tyranny of the dictator’s rule, but this
tyranny is a global phenomenon. The current genocide being carried out in Gaza
by the Israeli fascist government is but one example of this worldwide trend of
the rule of the dictators. The Israeli president Netanyahu’s
speech before Congress, showed that this fascist war criminal still defended genocide
in Gaza, stating, “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between
barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and
those who sanctify life.”[5] The reception Netanyahu’s speech received by
the flunkeys in the White has been compared to that of Adolf Hitler when he
addressed the German parliament in the 1930s.
The
CIA and the Suppression of Mr President
As I said in the
introduction Asturias’s novel although finished in 1932 was not published until
1946. What is perhaps not so well known
is the role of the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) role in
the suppression of this great novel. This criminal act is one of the reasons
why Asturias has not had the international recognition his work deserves. This
is not the case in Latin America where the novel according to literary scholar
Gerald Martin was “the first page of the Boom.[6]
Without Asturias, [the Boom] might not have developed.” Said Martin.
Asturias’s novel was
released at the beginning of the Cold War. Latin America was seen by the United
States as its own backyard and began installing several right-wing
dictatorships many of which carried out genocide on an industrial scale. On the cultural front it helped set up and
backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom[7],
an anti-Communist front created to push pro-American articles and stories through
magazines like Mundo Nuevo and other similar magazines around the world such as
Encounter. To his credit Martin defended Asturias and opposed this right-wing
organisation and its puppet magazines. Martin played no small role in
discrediting this CIA front.
Miguel Ángel Asturias
was born on October 19, 1899, one year after dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera came
to power. “My parents were quite persecuted, though they were not imprisoned or
anything of the sort, “said Asturias. The treatment of his parents no doubt heavily
influenced not only his decision to write about injustice and social inequality
throughout Latin America but to become an activist. Asturias joined the Generation
of 1920, and became politically active organising organize strikes and
demonstrations. As Asturias writes in
his Nobel Prize speech “All Latin American literature, in song and novel, not
only becomes a testimony for each epoch but also, as stated by the Venezuelan
writer Arturo Uslar Pietri, an “instrument of struggle”. All the great
literature is one of testimony and vindication, but far from being a cold
dossier these are moving pages written by one conscious of his power to impress
and convince”.[8]
Asturias’s Mr President was
groundbreaking in so many ways. As Joel Whitney points out in his excellent
article[9]
Mr President was published five years before George Orwell’s 1984, and captures
the mass propaganda uses of new technologies: Asturias writes: “Every night a
movie screen was raised like a gallows in the Plaza Central. A hypnotized crowd
watched blurred fragments as if witnessing the burning of heretics. … Society’s
crème de la crème strolled in circles … while the common folk gazed in awe at the
screen in religious silence.” This fear proves atmospheric, as the president’s favourite
advisor, Miguel Angel Face, undertakes a secret mission: to prompt the
president’s main rival, a general, to go on the run. Why? The president needs a
scapegoat, and running is a confession of guilt, he says. But irony is in
constant collision with this fear, mirroring the young Asturias’s wonder at the
discredited, delusional imprisoned dictator. Unaware that the president has
orchestrated the general’s escape, a judge advocate shouts, “I want to know how
he escaped! … That’s why telephones exist; to capture government’s enemies.”
This judge also warns a suspected witness: “Lying is a big mistake. The
authorities know everything. And they know you spoke to the General.”[10]
As was mentioned earlier
Asturias played a central role in the development of the Boom movement. This movement
consisted of a relatively young group of writers, Cortázar; Vargas Llosa;
Gabriel García Márquez, of Colombia; and Carlos Fuentes, of Mexico, to name but
a few of the better-known authors. Asturias was recognised as their natural
predecessor. And was credited with the invention of Latin American magical
realism which went on to influence the likes of García Márquez. Instead of
acknowledging his debt to Asturias Garcia Marquez somewhat ungraciously denied
Asturias had any influence on his work.
According to Graciela
Mochkofsky “Many of the Boom authors, starting with García Márquez, dismissed
Asturias’s work as archaic, and denied that it had any influence on their
writing. Asturias didn’t help matters when, during an interview, he agreed with
a suggestion that García Márquez, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” had been
heavily influenced or even plagiarised Balzac’s “The Quest of the Absolute”.[11]
It must be said that
Asturias prodigies were a little ungrateful to their master. Julio
Ramón Ribeyro defended Marquez saying, “it is difficult to find authentic
points of reference between García Márquez’s book and Balzac’s.” Carlos Fuentes
bizarrely said that Asturias “shows profound signs of senility.” Juan García
Ponce echoed Fuentes writing “It is not that Asturias speaks like that because
he is senile; what happens is that he was born senile. He continued “Asturias’
opinions, like his books, are not the same as those of his readers, but rather
the same as those of his readers, they are not worth it.” Behaving like a spoilt
brat Gustavo Sainz writes that Asturias’s books “do not stand the test of a
second reading; furthermore, these works no longer impress us as they did
before; fifteen years ago they were the best, but now Latin America has
wonderful writers like Cortázar, Fuentes and others who make Asturias look
bad.”[12]
These writers are wrong
in so many different ways that it would take a book to explain why. So, to
finish this review of such a landmark book on more positive note I will leave
that final words to the translator David Unger explaining why he will not be
translating anymore of Asturias more complex books. “It’s important for a
writer and a translator to recognize their limitations. I don’t think I have
the skills to successfully render many of Asturias’s more complex and
indigenous novels into English. It can be done, but not by me. If I have
contributed to the reassessment of Asturias in the Anglo world, then I will be
pleased. But I think I will stop here when I am, hopefully, ahead of the
game—Claire Messud said in Harper’s that my translation was “brilliant.” I’ll Savor
that compliment for now and evermore![13]
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/my-president-mario-vargas-llosa/
[2]
Men of Maize Paperback – 10 Mar. 2025 by Miguel Ángel Asturias (Author), Héctor
Tobar (Foreword), Gerald Martin (Introduction, Translator)
[3] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=david+unger
[4] A
novel The CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress-
https://www.publicbooks.org/a-novel-the-cia-spent-a-fortune-to-suppress/
[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/25/lmic-j25.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Boom
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom
[8] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/lecture/
[9] A novel
The CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress-
https://www.publicbooks.org/a-novel-the-cia-spent-a-fortune-to-suppress/
[10] Mr.
President (Penguin Classics) Paperback – 12 July 2022
[11] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-timely-return-of-a-dictator-novel
[12] https://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/celos-miguel-angel-asturias-gabriel-garcia-marquez
[13] https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/07/14/death-hope-and-humor-david-unger-on-translating-miguel-angel-asturiass-mr-president/
