Leaving Guatemala for AmERiCa by David Unger
In 1957, when I was not quite seven, I discovered that social relations in the United States were governed by race and ethnicity. It was a Saturday morning, and my parents, two brothers and I were eating breakfast around the green Formica table in our Hialeah, Florida kitchen. The windows were cranked wide open and still it was fry-eggs on-the-sidewalk hot, years before air-conditioning became an affordable option. Imagine living through a Florida summer that begins in May and ends in October, 12 miles from the beach, fans circulating swampy mosquito-laden air. Immobile air.
A voice shot through the windows.
“Tomato boy. Tomato boy.”
I ran to our jalousie-window front door and opened it. A twelve-year-old boy, wearing a tight short sleeve shirt and black pants eyed me with an expression of resignation and boredom.
He stood three steps below me holding a reed basket filled with fist-sized red bursts. “ — matoes? dollah a box, “ he drawled. His skin was purple and smooth as a plum. He was shoeless. How could his bare feet bear the weed stickers, the burning asphalt?
Another lanky teenage colored boy, as African Americans were known back then — if you used the polite term — sat at the back of a green late 40’s Ford pickup truck; stacks of boxed tomatoes rose along the wooden side rails beside him. This sixteen-year-old wore a white tee shirt and seemed happy to be sitting. An older Negro (another fifties appellation) leaned his arm against the driver side window. The engine coughed, grey smoke puffed and putted out of the muffler.
I ran back to my parents and told them that the tomato boys were here and that the tomatoes looked yummy. My mother took a dollar out of her change purse.
I gave the boy the bill.
He put a four-pound box in my arms. “I need it back,” he said, tapping the box. His forehead was beaded in sweat.
I nodded, smiling, and he grinned back. If he hadn’t been working, we could have played catch, Indian Ball or Flies and Grounders in our back yard. I knew a lot about baseball already — reading the Sports page of The Miami Herald had made me an English reader. This kid could be another Mays or Robinson, maybe even a Satchel Paige.
My parents Luis y Fortuna, with my brothers Leslie y Felipe and me in the white sweatshirt.
Could I ever really be friends with this boy?
Most likely he lived on a farm and didn’t go to school. Because he was “colored,” he wouldn’t be allowed into the Food Fair, Rexall’s Drug Store or Schell’s Hobby Shop. Maybe his Pop could buy a six pack at Mike’s Liquor if he trusted a white guy with his money.
The tomatoes were perfectly round. They were grown in fields about a mile away, in Opa-locka, behind the airbase. In colored town. I’d been warned by Jerry Easley never to ride my bike in “Niggertown.” “One them “jungle bunnies” will steal your bike, Jewboy.”
From a 1956 Miami Herald article about this “immigrant family” fleeing “Communism” in Guatemala
When we came to the U.S. from Guatemala in 1955, my father was already 57. There was a recession in Florida, one of the state’s never-ending rags-to-riches and riches-to rags seesaw. There were no job opportunities for anyone, certainly not the elderly, especially if they had weird accents. My father’s English was heavily German-inflected.
After emigrating to Guatemala in 1933, he ran the Royal Home, a combination hotel and restaurant for British nationals. Then later, he managed the canteen at the American base, though he’d fought for Germany, during the first world war. Before coming to America, he and my mother had opened La Casita, a restaurant that served champagne, steaks and Lobster Newburgh, which became Guatemala City’s best restaurant. In our last year there, my parents won the concession to supply Pan American Airways with hot meals for passengers on their newly established routes to Central America.
My father was a people person. In the 1920’s, after the war, he’d managed a troupe of magicians who traveled from Hamburg all the way to Cartagena and Guayaquil. He was cultured and gregarious — he dressed in wool suits and was always polite and deferential. He sold tickets at a movie house in Guatemala City and then took a slow boat to China where he was the night clerk in Shanghai’s famous Palace Hotel, before the Japanese invaded and he returned to Guatemala.
My father witnessed the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. He was the night clerk at the Palace Hotel. He told us that the Japanese soldiers went in the hotel and pulled out any Chinese and shot them pointblank.
He had an impossible time getting a job in Miami, but finally he was hired as a host at a Dobb’s House, a restaurant on West 36th Street, across from the then fledgling Miami Airport and a long bus ride from our Hialeah home. It was his kind of job — greeting and seating guests. The only problem was his high standards: he was critical when his manager substituted paper for cloth napkins his first week of work and when he overheard the manager cursing the Negro dishwashers as “lazy beasts.”
One day, a couple came into the restaurant. My father escorted them to a table near the air-conditioner. During the meal, the manager came up to my father and asked why he had seated “them niggers” in an area reserved for white people. My father said that he didn’t know there were different sections for people of different colors in the restaurant.
“Can’t you see they’re black?”
“And so? What difference does that make?” He had previously worked six months for the railroad in Livingston, Guatemala, a totally Garifuna village.
“Unger, next time a couple of “niggers” come, sit them in the back.”
“But it’s too hot back there.”
“You do what I tell you to do!”
That was my father’s last day working at Dobb’s House.
There were no colored kids in my Palm Springs Elementary School in Hialeah though I knew that some lived closer to the school than me. Also, few Latinos.
My classmates were the children of working-class parents: airline mechanics, policemen, plumbers, milkmen and the occasional single mother cocktail waitress or on rare occasions, a cashier at the Food Fair or a hairdresser at the local salon. None of our neighbors had college degrees, none spoke a word of Spanish. They knew nothing of opera or art, like my father. None were Jewish.
When a classmate got angry at you, he’d call you tomato boy or nigger. It was normal. My brothers and I never called anyone “nigger” because it was an ugly sounding word and we had often been called kikes, spics and dirty Jews; we had black eyes and curly hair to prove we were foreigners. One Saturday morning we found that someone had thrown rotten eggs against the side of our house. Another time someone painted a wooden wire roll with the words “Dirty Jues. Get out.” Like the tomato pickers, we suspected that we weren’t really welcomed.
One afternoon when I was sixteen or so my father and I were at Miami International Airport, waiting for my mother to return from visiting her mother in Guatemala. We were walking down the concourse when we suddenly saw a towering Negro, well over six feet tall, walking towards us. He was busting out of a suit that barely concealed rippling muscles. The man was quite handsome, with short-cropped hair and a smile that implied royalty.
We knew it was Muhammad Ali. He was in Miami training at the 5th Street Miami Beach gym to fight Big Cat Cleveland Williams later in the year. A two-time felon, Williams, was a puncher with a mustache and a bullet still lodged in his hip to underscore his mettle. But all his power proved hopeless when Ali scored a decisive 3rd round TKO at the Astrodome in November of 1966.
My father was all of five foot eight and a fiery boxing fan. We religiously watched the Wednesday and Friday Cavalcade of Sports fights on television with him. We loved Luis Rodriguez, Floyd Patterson and Federico Fernandez who had style and hated boxers like Carmen Basilio and Gene Fullmer who pummeled their opponents during clinches, threw low blows when the referee’s vision was blocked, delivered rabbit punches that hammered the back of their opponent’s necks. Emile Griffith was our favorite boxer though he “killed” Benny ‘Kid’ Peret in the ring after continuously taunting the gay boxer by calling Griffith a “maricon.”
Ali was ballet encapsulated — handsome, witty, and defiant. He wasn’t colored or a Negro — he was beyond classification. He was a proud black man with the gift of gab. My father admired him not only for his boxing, but because he spoke his mind and somehow, unlike himself, seemed to revel in his audacity.
We went up to Ali. “I want to shake your hand,” my father said to him.
Ali smiled and shook my father’s puny mitt.
“You make your people proud,” my father said, barely able to spit out his words in an intelligible English.
“Thank you,” said the champ, a bit bemused.
Ali gave me his autograph on a card that had the fight song of my new high school in Miami Springs on it. As he was signing, my father added: “You know, you can come to my house for dinner any time you want.”
What my father was saying was that in separate-raced Miami where signs warned blacks and dogs to stay out of Miami Beach after 6 PM, my father would be honored to break bread with Muhammad Ali despite what the neighbors would say…
“I just might do that,” Ali said. He smiled in a way that made me think he understood what my father meant.
In 1964, when I was in the middle of 9th grade, my parents had moved from Hialeah to Miami Springs — from a house with no air-conditioning to one with central air. As soon as we moved in, that first week, we had worshippers from the local Methodist, Lutheran and Baptist churches come and visit. We never told them we were Jewish, only that we were not interested in religion.
In 10th grade, I took a World Humanities seminar taught by Mr. Gonzalez, a Cuban exile. It was a course in which we read Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and discussed race, Communism, The John Birch Society and the Vietnam War. We read The World’s Great Religions, and defined what made someone an atheist or an agnostic. We listened to classical music and compared Mozart to Beethoven to Stravinsky.
There was one black kid in the class. Skid was a towering, skinny kid who sported a scraggily goatee. He always wore black shades even indoors and he would look over their tops when he whispered to me sitting beside him. He had a nice smile and a very red tongue which protruding from his buckteeth.
His mother had been coming to our house once a week to do the ironing and the folding since my mother worked full-time as a secretary at Pan American Airways. Skid and his mother lived across the canal from Miami Springs in the black part of Hialeah. The poor treeless part where the streets were rutted and the telephone poles wobbled.
Skid and I breached the racial divide five days a week. We really liked each other. He talked like a Black Panther and I like a future Students for a Democratic Society member.
We agreed that Satch Paige of the Negro Leagues was probably the greatest pitcher ever, till Sandy Koufax, a Brooklyn southpaw, calmed his wildness and went 25–4 and won pitching’s Triple Crown in 1963. He was Jewish and his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, made him a hero in the larger Jewish community. But we both understood why it was necessary to have different heroes that reflected our ancestry without talking about it.
In our senior year in 1968, Mr. Gonzalez, invited us to be on a local TV show that aired on Saturday mornings called “Youth and the Issues.” I remember sitting in the lobby with Skid, his mother and my mother waiting for our moment to go film our segment. Martin Luther King had been assassinated a month earlier and Newark and Gary, Indiana had gone up in flames. LBJ had decided not to seek re-election and the Vietnam protest movement was in full throttle.
I remember that our host, a likeable liberal, was more interested in getting across his argument that democratic America would find peaceful solutions to each and every one of our problems. He was a happy warrior ala Hubert Humphrey style. Skid spoke admiringly of Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael, claimed Malcolm X was the man; I admired Ernest Gruening, William Fulbright and Al Gore’s father, all of whom had voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I remember we had fun on that show, frightening our host. But what the hell? In the lobby, Skid went home with his mother and I with mine. It was a beyond awkward when Skid’s mom said to us: “See you on Saturday morning.”
In my yearbook Skid wrote something like “Say brother. With your bright mind and good heart you are going to go far in life. One day maybe our children will play together. Keep being the way you are.”
Skid’s words nearly broke my heart. He knew that the gap between us, in southern Florida, had been insurmountable for teenagers of our generation. There would have been hope for his dream to be true, but I had already decided that I wanted to get as far away from Miami as I could. I eventually ended up in Boston and later learned that Skid had enlisted to fight in Vietnam.
The separation of races was entrenched in Miami. The Negroes lived in Opa- Locka, Allapattah, Overtown and a hot and ghetto city called paradoxically Liberty City — this is where my brother and I went to buy beer in high school, giving young black men a fifty cents tip to get us a six-pack of Busch Bavarian for $2.50.
Miami Negroes were very angry when during the Kennedy Administration thousands of Cubans came to Miami to escape Castro and were given several hundred dollars as soon as they arrived. Then Cuban adults received $100 a month for a whole year to get readjusted in the U.S. At the time, the minimum wage was a buck and a quarter in Miami, which meant that if you worked a 40-hour week you earned $150 a month after taxes. Nobody ever gave the colored people any support when they came to Miami from Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama to work as crop pickers. Or should I say from Palatka or Pensacola, Florida, where many of their relatives had at one time been lynched.
Within two years, the industrious Cuban exiles had bought up most of the gas stations and shoe repair shops in Miami and soon replaced the black porters and maids in most of the Miami Beach hotels. Calle ocho, less than a mile from Liberty City, became the main thoroughfare for them.
The Negroes had no choice but to sit on their hands and watch. Eventually they rioted later in 1968 Frankly, who could blame them? Unfortunately, they burned down, in frustration, the few businesses in their neighborhoods which would then take decades to rebuild.
By the time Obama became president in 2008, I had lived in New York City for upwards of 35 years. My wife and I campaigned for him on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a poor white ghetto that reminded me of the Hialeah of my youth. White people answered their doors suspiciously. They didn’t know who John McCain was; I think many thought Obama was trying to oust George W. Bush — their kind of American — from the White House. It was a rough day of door knocking, in the pouring rain. Our solace was when we knocked on the door of a black family, whose hearts welled up with pride at seeing two white fifty year olds campaigning for their man — think Satchel Paige — in the cold, pouring rain. We gave their kids all our Obama buttons, which we were supposed to sell for a dollar each. His election seemed providential: maybe my adoptive country had finally achieved the greatness of what the Constitution says should be a “more perfect union.”
I wonder if Skid made it out of Vietnam and returned to Hialeah. Did he ever become an electrician? Under different circumstances, I think we might’ve stayed friends, but the social and racial gap between us in the ’60s, in the south, was titanic.
David Unger received Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize for lifetime achievement in 2014, though he writes in English and lives abroad. Novels include In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful (Mosaic Press, 2023), The Mastermind, (Akashic Books, 2016) [translated into ten languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Turkish and Polish], The Price of Escape (Akashic Books: 2011; into German, Romanian and Spanish) and Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, 2004). He has translated 18 titles including his celebrated re-translation of Guatemalan Nobelist Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr. President (Penguin Classics, 2022), Folktales for Fearless Girls (Penguin, 2019), The Popol Vuh, (Guatemala’s pre-Columbian creation myth) and books by Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), Enrique Lihn (Chile), Silvia Molina (Mexico), Nicanor Parra (Chile), Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), Elena Garro (Mexico) and Teresa Cárdenas (Cuba). He has also translated many stories by Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), Denise Phe-Funchal (Guatemala), Sergio Ramirez Mercado (Nicaragua), among others.
His children’s books are José Feeds the World (Duopress, 2024), Moley Mole/Topo Pecoso (Green Seeds Publishing, 2021). Sleeping With the Light On (Groundwood Books, 2020), and La Casita (2011, CIDCLI).
Other books include Ni chicha, ni limonada (F y G Editores, 2019, 2009) ). His short stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Medium, Puertos Abiertos (FCE, 2011), Guernica Magazine (February 2016, April 2011, November 2007 and August 2006) and Playboy Mexico (October 2005).
Mr President by Miguel Ángel Asturias Translated by David Unger-Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa- introduction Gerald Martin-Penguin Classics Paperback July 2022-320 pages
“Our Latin American literature has always been a committed, a responsible literature,” Miguel Ángel Asturias 1973.
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/
Canción by Eduardo Halfon-Published by Bellevue Literary Press on September 20, 2022, 160 pages, $17.99 paperback
“Every writer of fiction is an imposter,”
Eduardo Halfon
“Literature is not about answers. But questions”:
Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción
“We only found marbles, toys, coins, cooking utensils, sandals and flip-flops next to their bodies.”
Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team
“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
“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”
― Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Eduard Halfon’s novel just over 150 pages is written in the first person and contains autobiographical segments. It begins with the author visiting Tokyo for a conference to honour Lebanese writers. The innocent-sounding title of the book refers to a killer known for his not-so-pretty voice.
Halfon has a deceptively natural way of portraying the murderously complex social and political issues arising from the bitter civil war in Guatemala 1960-1996. Halfon’s prose is simple but exquisite. Canción like all of Halfon’s previous books Polish Boxer, Monastery, and Mourning is excellently translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn.
The book would appear to be meticulously researched and in a recent interview Halfon explains his methodology “When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history must be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story.
That weaving is very organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground? What should be in the background? It’s a very natural process of selection and placement. The research in books like Canción must be very methodical because I am trying to recreate a specific moment in time. So, newspapers, records, logbooks, accounts, the CIA file on my grandfather’s kidnapping—these were all available to me. Sometimes I need little details, but mostly I just need the prop of facts for the theatre to be believable. That is, for the atmosphere to be believable. I’m not interested in the facts, but in the smell and taste that the facts leave behind.”[1]
David L. Ulin writes “Like so much of Halfon’s writing, the narrative of “Canción” unfolds in an elusive middle ground where heritage becomes porous. For anyone familiar with his project, this will not come as a surprise. The author is a diasporic figure: Born in Guatemala City, raised there and in Florida and educated in North Carolina, he has lived in Europe and Nebraska. His metier is family: the way we are shaped by it and the way we push back on or move beyond it; how it both supports and limits us. In “The Polish Boxer” (2012), his first book to be translated into English, this leads him to consider his other grandfather, who survived Auschwitz with the help of a fighter who came from his village. “Mourning,” his most recent book, revolves in part around his uncle Salomon, whose drowning as a child resonates in “Canción” as well.”[2]
Like many of his generation of Guatemalan writers Halfon never witnessed first-hand the murderous civil war and faced the problem of how to write a book which includes historical facts and events he didn’t witness. As Halfon correctly says “Every writer of fiction is an imposter “. When he returned to Guatemala in 1993, he suffered persecution. Along with other writers and journalists, he was targeted by the government. Halfon often spoke of how he was followed and threatened in his own house after his first novel was published in 2004.
The treatment of writers and journalists by the Guatemalan state shows that the so-called peace accord brokered by the United Nations was nothing of the sort. The Guatemalan civil war was a social, economic and political disaster. Andrea Lobo writes “Nearly a quarter million people were killed between 1962 and 1996 in Guatemala, 93 percent at the hands of pro-government forces. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification classified the massacre of Mayan Indians, treated by the military as a potential constituency for guerrillas, as genocide, including the destruction of up to 90 per cent of the Ixil-Mayan towns and the bombing of those fleeing.[3]
Halfon believes that not much has changed since 1996, He writes that “Certain things in Guatemala are simply not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women are being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are only discussed and commented on in whispers, or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic and unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common”.[4]
Unfortunately, this will not change with the election of the new government of Bernardo Arévalo. Arevalo’s election was challenged by dominant sections of the Guatemalan capitalist oligarchy who sought to overturn his election through many legal cases alleging electoral fraud, illegal financing and other irregularities. All of which failed.
As Andrea Lobo writes “Arévalo is the son of the country’s first elected president, Juan José Arévalo (1945-1951), who remained within the left nationalist government of his successor Jacobo Arbenz when it was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated military coup in 1954. A series of military-civilian dictatorships followed, crushing opposition from below to protect the interests of US capitalists and their local partners.
Cancion is well worth a read, as are his previous books. It remains to be seen if Halfon’s next novel reflects illusions that exist within left Guatemalan journalists and writers regarding the new Arevalo government.
[1] “Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción-//www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/10/12/literature-is-not-about-answers-but-questions-an-interview-with-eduardo-halfon-author-of-cancion/
[2] Review: How a Guatemalan kidnapping inspired Eduardo Halfon’s auto fictional ‘Cancion’ www.latimes.com
[3] wsws.org
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/the-writing-life-around-the-world-by-electric-literature/2015/nov/04/better-not-say-too-much-eduardo-halfon-on-literature-paranoia-and-leaving-guatemala
Interview with David Unger- Author of Jose Feeds the World
Q.How did you get involved in the project of José Feeds the World?
A. I’ve been friends with Mauricio Velázquez, the publisher of Duopress, for over 20 years. Mauricio is a Mexican national who has been living in the U.S. for maybe 25 years and worked previously as an editor for Rosen Publishers. In the fall of 2022, knowing of my previous children’s books, he asked me if I would be interested in writing a non-fiction book about Chef José Andrés. Since I was familiar with the chef and the amazing work of his World Central Kitchen, I jumped at the chance. Mauricio offered valuable editorial comments, but basically he allowed me to craft my own book. It has been an amazing experience.
Q. How different is writing a children's book than one with more adult themes.
A I published La Casita, my first children’s book in 2012, and I have published four other kid’s books since then. What you might not know, Keith, is that I have translated 8 children’s books, including three by Guatemalan Nobelist Rigoberta Menchú, for the Canadian publisher Groundwood Books. Through this translation work, I went through a kind of apprenticeship. Obviously writing children’s books requires a different skill set than writing adult fiction. In all my work, I have been interested in how characters adjust and change, and how experience transforms their lives—this obsession is imbedded in me…It also helps that I have three daughters and five grandchildren.
Q.What was the relationship between you and Marta? Did the illustrations come first or did the words.
A. I was familiar with the children’s books that Marta did for Source Books, now the parent company of Duopress. Her illustrations for the books The Girl Who Heard the Music, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady really impressed me: they are lyrical, expansive and very child oriented. I wrote the text and I was overjoyed when Mauricio said that Marta, who comes from a village close to Jose Andres’s birthplace, WANTED to illustrate my book, for obvious reasons. I am the beneficiary of her amazing talent.
Q. I can see on Facebook you have already taken the book into schools etc. How has it been received both in schools and in the media.
A.It has been a wonderful experience to present the book, primarily in book store presentations. There is nothing greater than feeling the enthusiasm of young readers—their responses are always uncensored and quite electric. Younger kids respond more to the illustrations, but 7- and 8-year-olds understand the narrative that Marta has illustrated and ask quite interesting questions.
Q.what are you working on now? Do you plan any more collaborations with Marta?
A.I have written a couple of other children’s book texts, but haven’t found a publisher. I would love to collaborate with Marta or with Marcela Calderón, the illustrator of my previous kid’s book called Topo pecoso/Moley Mole. Both are so talented, but publishers decide what is printed and who illustrates text.
José Feeds the World: How a Famous Chef Feeds Millions of People in Need Worldwide February 29 2024, by David Unger and illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguéns.
David Unger’s new book is the true story of José
Andrés, an award-winning chef, food activist, and founder of World Central
Kitchen.[1]
This disaster relief organisation helps working-class communities when
catastrophe hits. Although primarily aimed at children,
adult readers learn much from Unger's understated and thoughtful text.
The book is beautifully illustrated by Marta Alvarez
Miguéns, a freelance illustrator based in La Coruña, Spain. Her previous works
have included A Tiger Called Tomás, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady, which was
named a Best STEM Book by the Children's Book Council and the National Science
Teachers Association.
Jose Andres and his organisation are very busy at the
moment. Every day, a new disaster, war, appears, coupled with the massive
growth of world poverty and hunger. According to The State of Food Security and
Nutrition in the World 2022, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and World
Health Organization (WHO), have reported that up to 828 million people, nearly
11 per cent of the world’s population, faced hunger in 2022. The number has
grown by about 140 million since the start of the pandemic.
There is no doubt about Andres's sincerity and
bravery in alleviating world hunger and poverty, saying, “What we’ve been able
to do is weaponise empathy. Without empathy, nothing works.”.But the cruel reality
is that Andres's work is insufficient to defeat world hunger and poverty.
Jean Shaoul writes, “World leaders are acutely aware
of the repercussions of the spiralling cost of food as workers demand pay
increases and take to the streets in protest over their deteriorating living
conditions in rich and poor countries alike. But the fight for decent wages,
affordable food, necessities and a massive increase in wages means that the
working class must unite across workplaces, industries, countries and continents
in a global political struggle against the capitalist class and its governments
and to put an end to the imperialist war.”[2]
Harsh Times: A Novel, Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Adrian Nathan West, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $28.00, November 2021
Mario Vargas Llosa
What is Art? First of all, Art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; Art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; Art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, Art cognises life. Both Art and science have the same subject: life reality. But science analyses, Art synthesises; science is abstract, Art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, Art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, Art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.
A.Voronsky-Art is the Cognition of Life
“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Whether or not you agree with Noble laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s political outlook, his novel Harsh Times about the Coup in 1950s Guatemala is a cracking read. According to Edward Docx, “It speaks to our times”. However, the general reader would do well to delve into the history books of this period, especially Guatemala's history, to fully appreciate the novel's power.
As Docx correctly states, “In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope; artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character.”
Vargas Llosa stays very close to some facts, but not all of them. However, he manages to weave a path to the lives of real and fictional characters. Vargas is not a stranger to writing novels that include historical events in Latin America. His tendency to reduce the ideological battles of the Cold War to little more than a minor deviation of “a democratic ideal” is a dangerous simplification of complex historical processes and tends to downplay the role of U.S. imperialism in the tragic events in Guatemala. Perhaps more damaging is Vargas’s insistence that the novelist has no obligation to represent historical facts.
As Ivan Kenneally writes, “ In a lecture he delivered on his own, The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to represent historical facts at all faithfully. The events as they truly transpired—to the extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials” for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention he emphatically espouses discussing another of his works, The War of the End of the World. The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive, to imaginatively materialise a world that does not reproduce but rather negates the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can induce joy, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise. Its believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact. Still, it is a function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”.
Llosa’s playing fast and loose with historical truth is dangerous and has political and historical consequences. His viewpoint is opposed by Kenneally who writes again “If the authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality, then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?[1]
Like many of his generation Llosa began his early career somewhat sympathetic to the revolutionary left’s ideals. The glorification of revolutions such as the Cuban was not confined to a generation of Latin American intellectuals such as Llosa. Several petty-bourgeois radical groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (U.K.) complemented them. Bert Deck writing in the International Socialist Review said “The Cuban revolution has shattered the old structure of radical politics in Latin America by providing a new example to follow. New currents and tendencies are emerging. Two roads present themselves to the Latin American revolutionists: “The Guatemalan Way” or “The Cuban Way.” Fidelismo, a more revolutionary alternative to the Communist parties, already exists. The possibility of avoiding the trap of popular front politics has been improved immeasurably. In this new, open situation, the Marxists have an unprecedented opportunity to win support for a consistent revolutionary program. In the complex process of political realignment within the workers movement lies the hope of avoiding future Guatemalas – the hope for a Socialist United States of Latin America.”[2]
The British Trotskyists from the Socialist Labour League opposed this political line saying “Even if Castro and his cadre were “converted” would that make the revolution a proletarian revolution? … If the Bolsheviks could not lead the revolution without a conscious working class support, can Castro do this? Quite apart from this, we have to evaluate political tendencies on a class basis, on the way they develop in struggle in relation to the movement of classes over long periods. A proletarian party, let alone a proletarian revolution, will not be born in any backward country by the conversion of petit-bourgeois nationalists who stumble “naturally” or “accidentally” upon the importance of the workers and peasants. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and Britain recognise full well that only by handing over political “independence” to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[3]
Over time, politically, Llosa began shifting further to the right. During the 1980s, he became a champion of free markets and political liberalism, standing as a centre-right presidential candidate in the Peruvian presidential election in 1990. More recently, his rightward drift has become more open. In 2014, he joined the Mont Pelerin Society, the organisation founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 that has become famous for neoliberalism.[4]
Llosa’s sharp shift to the right coloured his analysis of the early Cold War period. He lamented that the C.I.A.-sponsored Coup against Arbenz had caused too many young people in Latin America to turn towards communism and that the United States had crushed “the liberal democratic aspirations” of the people.
His book faithfully reconstructs the events in Guatemala that began with the 1944 October Revolution and ended with the Coup in 1954. The election of Jacob Arbenz. Welcomed by many left-leaning media outlets who hoped that the election of the liberal Arbenz would bring about a new “democratic spring,” Arbenz’s election was met with uncontrollable rage by American Imperialism.
Even the so-called “democratic spring” under J.J. Arévalo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, who, unlike Bernardo, came to power based upon a program of democratic, agricultural and social reforms, proved most fundamentally that there is no peaceful or reformist road for the masses in Guatemala and other semi-colonial countries to secure their democratic and social rights.
In 1954, the United States carried out a coup d’état to remove Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz from power, cancelling land reforms. The elected government of Arbenz by introducing a limited agrarian reform that infringed upon the vast holdings of the politically influential United Fruit Company drew the wrath of U.S. Imperialism.
Dwight Eisenhower would later acknowledge, “We had to get rid of a Communist Government which had taken over.” Llosa, the book stops at the 1954 coup. The Coup led to decades of dictatorships, The subsequent Guatemalan elites murdered over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of whom came from the indigenous Mayans.
Eduardo Galeano characterised the decades of dictatorship that followed in his book Open Veins of Latin America: “The World Turned its Back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine-gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”
As Hegel said, “An idea is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To generalise means to think”. Whatever its faults and many, Llosa’s new book certainly makes you think, and it does “ speak to our times”. It is perhaps an irony of history when the latest election occurred in Guatemala this year. Bernardo Arévalo, a candidate promoted by the pseudo-left and U.S. imperialism, won the election. Juan José Averalo's son Arevalo was president after the 1944 October Revolution. There is absolutely no basis for describing Arévalo as a left, democratic or progressive alternative to the clientelism of Guatemala’s ruling elite, whose subordination to foreign capital and U.S. imperialism is the main cause of the rampant poverty, inequality, authoritarianism and corruption that characterise Guatemalan social life.
[1]Mario Vargas Llosa: Harsh Times and the “Fantastical Repudiation of Reality”
March 10, 2022 Ivan Kenneally-https://openlettersreview.com/posts/mario-vargas-llosa-harsh-times-and-the-fantastical-repudiation-of-reality
[2] Guatemala 1954 – The Lesson Cuba Learned: International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.53-56.
[3] Letter of the NEC of the Socialist Labour League to the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, May 8, 1961 – Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 3.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
Interview With Guatemalan Writer David Unger
“Brought up between three cultures and two languages, David Unger has managed to capture with much irony and passion the trials and tribulations of a Jewish family in 1980s Guatemala. The story of three brothers, of the shocks between civilizations that are so in vogue these days, and of the plurality of cultures that coexist in Latin America, Life in the Damn Tropics is a novel that one reads with much perplexity and immense pleasure.”
— Jorge Volpi, author of In Search of Klingsor
"In The Mastermind, David Unger’s compelling antihero reminds us of the effects of privilege and corruption, and how that deadly combo can spill from the public to the private sphere. Unger’s Guillermo Rosensweig is on a hallucinatory journey in which everything seems to go right until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down."
--Achy Obejas, author of Ruins
1 How did the possibility of translating the new book come about?
In 2016, I published my most recent novel, The Mastermind (New York: Akashic Books), which is based rather loosely on real events that caused an existential crisis in Guatemala and almost brought down a left-of-centre government in 2009. It’s a book that has been translated into ten languages. At the time, I felt that I wanted to give back to my birthplace in a unique way. Over the years, I’ve translated 16 books, so it seemed that I should attempt to re-translate Guatemala's Nobel prize in literature author Miguel Angel Asturias’s first and most powerful novel. I contacted the Balcell’s Agency which gave me the green light, but due to some copyright issues, I had to wait until 2022 to publish my translation of Mr. President with Penguin Classics.
2. What do you think of the previous translation by Frances Partridge? What problems were involved after the last translation was over fifty years ago?
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 into 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 What kind of research, historical or otherwise, was involved?
Keith, I mostly tried to figure out what Asturias was saying and concentrated fully on the Spanish text. The novel is a depiction of the Estrada Cabrera regime (1898-1920) and mixes high and low language. There are surrealist bursts and many indigenous Guatemalan terms. I worked with two Guatemalan writers/friends who helped me decipher some 250 queries that I had. Both love the work of Asturias and were, indeed, helpful. At times, we were all stumped, and I had to make a leap of faith based on what I thought Asturias was getting at. It is an amazing novel that has a very strong narrative push though there are moments of exquisite descriptions. The Spanish version of Mr. President carries a glossary of about 200 words to help readers, but I wanted to create a version that wouldn’t pull the reader out of the novel to consult with this glossary. This was the main purpose of my translation.
4 Could you explain the importance of Mr. President in Latin American literature?
I am not the only one to say it—Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru’s Nobel Prize novelist) and Gerald Martin (Asturias’s most important scholar and the biographer of Garcia Marquez and soon Vargas Llosa)--, but Mr. President is without question the most important Latin American novel of the 20th century. It introduced surrealism and magical realism into writing and, at the same time, portrayed a dictator who poisons all aspects of society—the social fabric, the legal system, friendship and love—in order to maintain his power. The unnamed president of an unnamed country is only interested in his power, his vanity and his machinations. Does it sound familiar? Let’s mention Trump, Ortega and Bolsonaro. It is a novel that is really a rich tapestry of Latin American life, infused with betrayal, violence and abuse.
5 Given the current situation in Guatemala, would you not agree that the book's release is very prescient?
Definitely, all the reviewers in the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The NY Times, The New York Review of Books express their astonishment about how accurate the novel is in depicting our Latin American reality. Guatemala, in particular, is a dysfunctional country thanks to the “Pacto de corruptos”—the Pact of Corrupt entities—that has a stranglehold on the country. We had primary elections ten days ago, and by surprise, Bernardo Arevalo—the son of what was a brilliant Guatemalan president in the 1940s—made the August 20th runoff. The industrialists, military officers and narco-traffickers are accusing him of being a Communist and that his Semilla Party (Seed Party) wants to destroy capitalism, the Church, marriage, the schools, tortillas, tamales, the volcanoes. Do you get my drift? These megalomaniacs don’t want to give up an ounce of their power. It is disgusting. But I believe that despite these forces of evil, he will succeed. He is a centrist with good values, and, most important, he isn’t corrupt.
6 What are you working on now?
I am at the airport (my flight was delayed) on my way to take part in the Guatemala International Book Fair (FILGUA). There I will present the Spanish version of my children’s book Sleeping With the Lights On (a fictionalized account of the U.S.-directed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954) and discuss Mr. President with Miguel Angel Asturias’s son. I don’t think I have another novel in me—I don’t have anything new to say—but I will continue to write children’s books and translate. I’ve written four novels and, a collection of short stories, 4 children’s books and translated nearly 20 books from Spanish, and I am happy with what I have done.
About the Author
Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.
BY DAVID UNGER:
Sleeping With the Light On
CHILDRENS, 2020
The Mastermind
NOVEL, 2015
La casita
PICTURE BOOK, 2012
The Price of Escape
NOVEL, 2011
Para mi eres divina
NOVEL, 2011
Ni chicha ni limonada
SHORT STORIES, 2010
Life in the Damn Tropics
NOVEL, 2002
Review: Monkey Boy- Francisco Goldman-336pp. Grove Press. £14.99.
— Alberto Manguel
Reading has a history. But how can we recover it?'
Robert Darnton
"For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for in different books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and privileges of active life, one very important question — Why? Why, that is, this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to discover Macaulay's Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli's novels and then Dr Bentley's biography?
Virginia Woolf on Sir Thomas Browne
But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?
—Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître, 1796
"The Bishop Gerardi case, it showed Guatemalans that what they had thought was impossible and which usually is impossible could be done, that you could get justice for a crime like that in a country where - of complete impunity, where state crimes always go unpunished. And the courage of that prosecutor and the young people who investigated that day is like nothing I have ever seen or witnessed in my life. It is - it was the great honour of my life to be close to them and to work with them for so many years".
Francisco Goldman
In our country, the truth has been twisted and silenced. Discovering the truth is painful, but it is, without doubt, a healthy and liberating action.
Msgr. Juan Gerardi, Never Again, xxiv.
In his book The History of Reading, the writer Alberto Manguel makes the following pertinent and insightful comment "We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function".
I am sure Francisco Goldman would agree with that sentiment because his latest book is written in the spirit of that comment. Monkey Boy is not an orthodox autobiography. The author employers an alter ego, Francisco Goldberg, much like the writer Philip Roth and many others do to examine certain aspects of his or her life with great effect. This type of autobiographical novel should not be seen as a "dying genre" but is, in reality, a form of writing that seeks to make sense not only the life of a writer but their place in the world, and through his or her book, we can begin to understand our place in the world. A great man once said, "Art is the Cognition of Life.[1]
Goldman is fond of Marcel Proust, saying, "Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first." The reader should take this on board when reading this book, and it is their first clue on how to approach this excellent book.
The real narrator of "Monkey Boy" is course, Francisco Goldman. Goldman mixes fiction and fact to great effect in this novel autobiography. He is a seriously gifted and thoughtful writer, and like all high-level works of literature, his book works on many different levels. Monkey Boy is an open dialogue with its readers. The book poses the question, "who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?
Goldman believes there should be a dialectical relationship between author and reader, and the reader for him is not just a passive bystander. Goldman does his utmost to de-mystify the writing process saying, "Sometimes people want to mystify where novels come from, but often novels come from the most obvious source, simply what the writer is most persistently thinking about".
Goldman thinks about many things, and it is gratifying that in this age of instant gratification and the rise of inane videos produced by the TikTok generation, someone spends so much time trying to raise people's intellectual level.
Childhood
By any stretch of the imagination, Goldman had a really bad childhood. He was the son of a Jewish father and a Guatemalan mother, and his early life was spent in the predominantly working-class area of Boston. The novel depicts his own experiences, including being physically assaulted by his dad and being physically and verbally abused at school.
The title of the book stems from these disturbing experiences. As Goldman explains, "I chose it as the title because part of the source of the book was that I wanted to go back and look at some very difficult years, my childhood and adolescence. You know, a couple of years ago, I had a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, which brought me back up to Massachusetts for the first time in years. And I got together with some of my old high school friends, people who played on that sophomore football team that you read about in the book. And one of them laughed and said to me, oh, yeah, I remember now. Everybody used to say you look like a monkey. And it sort of came back to me there, you know, that how much of my childhood and youth had been sort of shaped by these kinds of nicknames, which, you know, we can interpret in so many different ways in the course of the book".[2]
I suppose you could say that Goldman is lucky in one sense in that being such an outstanding writer, he has been able to understand his terrible childhood and, through writing about it, come to terms with it. Many people, including myself, are not that lucky. Not that I had a terrible childhood far from it, but I was on the receiving end of a bully at secondary school, much like most people are. The bully made children's lives hell until he picked on the wrong guy who battered him. His bullying days were abruptly ended. The most perverse aspect of this story is that he tried to befriend me on Friends Reunited a long while back. I was tempted to meet him and give him another beating or hire someone bigger than me to do it, but I turned him down. I am, after all, a civilised human being.
This book is an easy read primarily because Goldman is such a good writer. But it would be a mistake to believe that this is an easy book to understand. While an uninformed reader would still get a lot out of the book, you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the history and political situation in Latin America, particularly Guatemala, which is an important part of Goldman's life.
Guatemala is a rich and beautiful country, but it is a hell hole for most of its people. It is one of the world's unequal countries, with most of its people being socially and politically disenfranchised. As Angelina Godoy points out in her book,[3] "Guatemala has the seventh-highest degree of income inequality in the world, and the highest in Latin America … Some 83 per cent of the population – and 90 per cent of the indigenous population – lives in poverty. And although most Guatemalans are poor, regardless of their ethnicity, the socioeconomic exclusion of the country's indigenous – mostly Mayan – majority by the ladino minority has led to an especially notable disconnect between the few fairer-skinned elites who control the bulk of the county's resources and the mostly indigenous masses who toil in its fields and factories. Yet just as peasants often cultivate subsistence plots on the sides of volcanoes, the country's social and economic structure is pitched atop these unstable relations of mass exclusion. Like the land that occasionally rumbles beneath Guatemala's feet, the nation they have constructed atop this precarious social scaffolding has been prone to periodic eruptions of brutal violence".
The Art of Political Murder
Goldman's book, The Art of Political Murder, is a masterpiece of journalistic investigation and writing. Its writing and publication came close to getting him killed, and Goldman received several death threats. For much less, the Guatemalan death squads have killed many journalists and political figures.
"The Art Of Political Murder" is about the assassination of Juan Gerardi, a bishop and human rights activist. Goldman explains why he was killed "Because the army and the guerrillas in the peace accords - the army were the victors. The guerrillas were, you know, a very defeated force that was pulled into the peace accords and wanted to survive. They decided that there would be no accounting for the war's crimes, a war in which 200,000 civilians have been killed, that there be complete amnesty. And Bishop Gerardi already knew that that was not the way forward, that a country cannot have peace with that kind of incredible crimes against humanity going unaddressed and unforgiven.[4]
This search for justice for the oppressed animates Goldman's book. As he writes, " There are many reasons I wanted to go back and write about this time in my life. One is I was thinking about, you know, the kinds of hierarchies I place on myself, right? Without a doubt, the - such a formative experience, the most formative period of my life, was the time I spent in my 20s covering the wars of Central America Guatemala, writing my first novel. But, you know, being so close to that, you know, was, in fact, a genocide, a terrible, terrible war. The way that that takes centrality in your life, every time you sit down to write, you think, well, you know, really, that is the key experience. I owe that yet again to go back there and find more meaning from that.[5]
The Art of Political Murder is now a documentary film showing on HBO. It has been produced by Academy Award winners George Clooney and Grant Heslov. I have included a discussion with the author and the director shown on Youtube. Goldman fully collaborated with this excellent documentary and said, "it is kind of amazing that a prosecutor had the guts and gumption to pursue the evidence. And they convicted three members of the military for the killing, and probably those who ordered it still were never brought to justice".
According to Goldman, the exact figure of how many people were killed during this investigation is unknown. But at least ten potential witnesses were killed. The younger brother of the chief prosecution lawyer was found tortured and murdered in 2006. According to Goldman, "They had torn a leg off while he was still alive".What worries you is that they can go after people close to you. My wife loved Guatemala, but I had to tell her: 'You will never set foot there again".
Goldman believes the Guatemalan elite is drenched in the blood of hundreds of thousands of people, along with its partner in crime, Yankee imperialism. Goldman is one of the few internationally recognised writers who has written about this genocide. The indigenous population has received hundreds of years of colonial and imperialist exploitation and death. Even today, 80 per cent live under the official poverty line. The plunder of Guatemala as a platform for cheap labour and natural resources by transnational corporations continues today. The country has been turned into a militarized concentration camp to benefit Guatemalan and American capitalism.
While the book is predominantly about Goldman coming to terms with the political choices, the book delves into a lot of his personal life. Many important women play a crucial role in his personal and political development. His mother, of course, plays a central role and numerous girlfriends, most of whom seem to be beautiful and a lot younger than Goldman. He seems to have an uncanny knack for attracting beautiful young women into his life. Goldman's personal life is not without tragedy. Losing his wife Aura Estrada, who died in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007, was a devastating loss written about in the brutally honest book Say Her Name[6]. The book reminded me of Isabel Allende's book about her daughter Paula.[7]
I fully recommend this book and hope it gets the wide audience it deserves. Let us hope Hollywood does a good job when it buys the rights. The book undoubtedly gives us a deep insight into this extremely rare and gifted writer. Perhaps more importantly, it gives you a political and historical understanding of the country that is a big part of who Goldman is.
Notes
Guatemala as a National Crime Scene: Femicide and Impunity in Contemporary U.S. Detective Novels Susana S. Martínez DePaul University, Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2008], smartine@depaul.ed
"The Divine Husband and the Creation of a Transamericana Subject." Latino Studies. Vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer): 190 – 207.
"Jewish characters, subalternity, and the rewriting of the foundational narrative in Francisco Goldman's The Divine Husband," presented at "Returning to Babel:Jewish Latin American Experiences and Representations," University of Nebraska - Lincoln; April 19.
"Discovering Her: Gender and Truth in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night ofWhite Chickens," presented at the Latin American Studies Associate Annual Congress; May 24; Chicago, IL
Understanding Francisco Goldman (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) by Ariana E. Vigil (Author) Ariana E. Vigil is an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of War Echoes: Gender and Militarisation in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production. avigil@email.unc.edu
About the Author
Francisco Goldman is the author of Say Her Name (2011), winner of the Prix Femina Etranger, and of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle 2014, was awarded the Premio Azul in Canada. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was awarded the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including The Pen/Faulkner and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and The WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. In December 2020, the documentary film of that book will be shown on HBO. He has received a Cullman Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim, a Berlin Prize, and was a 2018-19 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded a 2018 PEN Mexico Award for Literary Excellence. He co-directs the Premio Aura Estrada and teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, The Believer, and numerous other publications. Monkey Boy, his latest novel, is out now from Grove Atlantic. Francisco lives with his wife Jove and their daughter Azalea in Mexico City.[8]
[1] https://mehring.com/product/art-as-the-cognition-of-life/
[2] https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[3] Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America Paperback – 15 May 2006 by Angelina Godoy
[4] https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[5] https://www.kunr.org/2021-05-11/novelist-francisco-goldman-revisits-his-difficult-childhood-in-monkey-boy
[6] Say Her Name Hardcover – 1 Aug. 2011-by Francisco Goldman (Author)
[7] The Aura Estrada Prize is awarded biannually with the intention of honoring aspiring female writers like Aura who are under 35, write in Spanish, and live in either Mexico or the United States.
[8] https://lithub.com/author/francisco-goldman.
Review: Sleeping with the Light On by David Unger • Illustrations by Carlos Aquilera-Groundwood Books Ltd, Canada (10 Nov. 2020)
David Unger’s new book is an intelligent, tender and extremely readable account of two children growing up in civil war-torn Guatemala in the early 1950s. Sleeping with the Light according to the author is based on one of the titles included in the book of short stories Ni chicha ni limonada, which he published in 2009 with the Guatemalan publishing house F&G Editores.
Seen through the eyes of young Davico and his older brother Felipe they witness the United states inspired coup d’etat which took place in Guatemala in 1954. The military coup which overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz government paved the way for the Central American country to become a staging ground for numerous counterrevolutionary operations carried out by the United States and its secret service organisation the CIA throughout Latin America.
The elected government of Arbenz had tried to initiate a limited amount of agrarian reforms but were opposed by the US and the politically influential United Fruit Company who controlled most of the country.
Throughout the 70s and 80s writes Jeffrey St. Clair the then Guatemalan president Ríos Montt said “We do not have a policy of scorched earth,” he sneered. “We have a policy of scorched communists.”
The fact that David Unger feels the need to write about this in 2020 is not because this very dark chapter in Guatemalan history is a closed book but unfortunately is very much alive in the thoughts of millions of Guatemalans at home and millions of Latin Americans who suffered similar fates in their own countries. Themes addressed in Unger’s book are also addressed by a new generation of Guatemalan and Latin American writers.
According to one writer “The CIA and other US agencies still refuse to declassify documents containing information ranging from the identity of individuals responsible for these crimes against humanity to the actual location of secret prisons and mass graves”.
Unger’s storyline is deceptively and deliberately simple, but it would be a mistake of the reader to believe that this is just a simple tale of childhood. To a certain extent, David attempts to come to terms with his own childhood experiences. The book David will forgive saying is part if not all, autobiographical. If this is the case, then he follows in the footsteps of all great writers in drawing from a part of their own life experiences in order to write their stories.
The book in which each chapter begins beautifully illustrated by the Mexican writer and illustrator Carlos Aquilera Unger deals with several pressing political and social issues. Unger deals with the very real problem of racism and immigration. Before and during the Second World War several German immigrants were forced to leave both Germany and the United States. In one part of the book, the Father of the boys said he did not leave Germany to die like a dog in Guatemala.
Recently I asked David about the book in a very good interview he said “Sleeping With the Light On is based on a short story entitled “La Casita,” that appeared in my 2009 book Ni chicha, ni limonada (F y G Editores). I took this sweet autobiographical tale and enlarged it into a chapter book. The major themes of the book deal with family conflicts, war and loss, but since it is for children 6-9, these themes are introduced and dealt with gently. As to your second question: I am not a career writer, so I only write when I have something to say—I published my first novel at age 52. When an idea or a character gets a hold of me, that is when I begin to write. It has not happened in five years because I have nothing to say. This awful covid pandemic, I would say, has almost rendered me mute”.
Let us hope this gifted writer is not rendered mute for too
long. The Spanish version of this book will appear soon. I believe it can be
purchased in Sophos in Guatemala let us hope it can be published throughout
Europe and Latin American soon. It can be purchased on Amazon in the UK.
About the Author:
David Unger was born in Guatemala City in 1950 and now lives
in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Price of Escape (Akashic Books,
2011), Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha,
ni limonada (F & G Editores, Guatemala, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010) and
Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, Plaza y Janes (Mexico, 2004),
Locus Press (Taiwan, 2007). He has translated sixteen books into English,
including works by Nicanor Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara Jacobs,
Mario Benedetti and Rigoberta Menchu. He is considered one of Guatemala’s major
living writers even though he writes exclusively in English.
Interview With Guatemalan Writer David Unger
I have followed the work of David Unger for nearly two decades. His new book is out in early November. Called Sleeping with the Light I will review it at a later date. Carlos Velez Aguilera beautifully illustrates the book. As a prelude to publication, I interviewed David about his work and a bit about the new book.
1. Tell me how you began to write. What drew you to writing?
There is no simple answer to this. When we left Guatemala, I was four, and my parents insisted we speak English, a totally new language to me when we arrived in an Anglo culture that was completely foreign. I learned early to develop counter-narratives to the realities all around me. When I read A.E. Houseman and Dylan Thomas in high school, on my own, I realized I could use language as a vehicle for expressing what I was feeling and visualizing. That is when I gave up wanting to become an engineer. I dedicated 30 years to writing poetry and translating before I published my first novel in 2002.
2 Would it be fair to say that Garcia Marquez influenced your work? What do you make of “ Magical Realism”? Do you believe Latin American authors are still influenced by it?
I loved reading No One Writes to the Colonel and One Hundred Years of Solitude, two of the most important novels in the contemporary Latin American literary canon. I met Gabo briefly on various occasions and even published a long essay about our strange encounters. When I was in high school, I read almost every novel John Steinbeck ever wrote and soon thereafter, read many Graham Greene and Ian Fleming novels, oddly enough. I loved the Magical Realist moments in Gabo’s work, but I was not so enamoured by the efforts of notable followers like Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie and even Toni Morrison. There followed many writers who thought that the stranger the imagery, the more imaginative the writing. I guess I prefer novels with strong characters that have the historical grounding to those novels of literary fancy, flight or invention.
3. Marquez would mostly consult with historians when writing do you see this as a good or bad thing? Do you use historians or their work when planning a new project?
Most of my novels are set in a recognizable social, political and historical context: Life in the Damn Tropics depicts a middle-class Jewish family in Guatemala of the 80s during the darkest period of the armed conflict; The Price of Escape takes place in Puerto Barrios (an awful port city) in the late 30s and confronts the monstrosity of the United Fruit Company and World War II; The Mastermind is my riff on Guatemala City in 2009 when lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg accused President Colum, in a pre-recorded tape, of killing him when, in fact, he orchestrated his own death. I read a lot of history to establish the right context for the stories I tell, but in the end, I am more interested in how my characters mostly muddle their way through challenging times. I am mostly interested in transformation, shitty characters being redeemed.
4 There appears to be a good crop of new writers from Latin America, including some new Guatemalan writers like Eduardo Halfon. I liked his book Mourning which is an attempt by a new generation of young writers to deal with or understand Guatemala’s bloody history. What do you make of them?
You have picked a talented writer in Halfon. His short stories and short novels are intertwined with his own biography and thus his childhood in Guatemala and his Jewish ancestry are constant themes. There are other writers such as Denise Phe-Funchal and Javier Mosquera Saravia, both of whom I have translated, who explore Guatemalan realities in a highly personal, but no less authoritative point of view. And then there are masters like Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Augusto Monterroso who have achieved international acclaim. Most writers, excepting Mosquera and Phe-Finchal, have written their best work outside of Guatemala, which is not a very hospitable country. The daily murders and corruption are huge obstacles for writers seeking tranquillity and distance to write effectively.
5 Tell me a little about your new book. Where did you get the idea from? Tell me a little about the writing process, i.e. how do you work as an author.
Sleeping With the Light On is based on a short story entitled “La Casita,” that appeared in my 2009 book Ni chicha, ni limonada (F y G Editores). I took this sweet autobiographical tale and enlarged it into a chapter book. The major themes of the book deal with family conflicts, war and loss, but since it is for children 6-9, these themes are introduced and dealt with gently. As to your second question: I am not a career writer, so I only write when I have something to say—I published my first novel at age 52. When an idea or a character gets a hold of me that’s when I begin to write. It hasn’t happened in five years because I have nothing to say. This awful covid pandemic, I would say, has almost rendered me mute.
6 Could you tell me any future writing projects? If this is a bit hush-hush ignore this question.
Nothing hush-hush about my new project. I am doing a
retranslation of Guatemala Nobelist Miguel Angel Asturias novel El señor
presidente. It was written almost one hundred years ago, over a ten-year period
when MAA was living in Europe and is a powerful portrait of a corrupt dictator
and how he tramples lives to maintain his power. It gave rise to other dictator
novels including Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch; Roa Bastos’s I,
The Supreme and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. It first appeared in 1965
translated by Francis Partridge, full of Anglicism’s and lacking the texture of
Guatemala and Guatemalan life and history. Penguin Classics will be publishing
my translation, with a preface by Mario Vargas Llosa, in 2022. This translation
(I have translated 16 books), I hope, will be the apex of my literary life—I am
grateful to be bringing this exceptional novel to new audiences and hopefully,
it will spurn a reassessment of the work of Guatemala’s only Nobel Prize in
Literature.
About the Author:
David Unger was born in Guatemala City in 1950 and now lives
in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Price of Escape (Akashic Books,
2011), Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha,
ni limonada (F & G Editores, Guatemala, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010) and
Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, Plaza y Janes (Mexico,
2004), Locus Press (Taiwan, 2007). He has translated sixteen books into
English, including works by Nicanor Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara
Jacobs, Mario Benedetti and Rigoberta Menchu. He is considered one of
Guatemala’s major living writers even though he writes exclusively in English.
Obituary: Joaquín Salvador Lavado, Author of “Mafalda”
“Quino died. All good people in the country and the world will mourn him,” Daniel Divinsky,
“We came for the vaccination against despotism, please,″ Mafalda
“I draw because I speak badly,” Joaquín Salvador Lavado,
Joaquín Salvador Lavado, an Argentine cartoonist who was the creator of the socially aware comic strip Mafalda has died aged 88.
Mafalda was read and loved not only throughout Latin America but in Europe and beyond. The Italian writer Umberto Eco introduced Europe to Mafalda. Lavado and his creation Mafalda was one of the most international cartoonists in Spanish. Mafalda was translated into 27 languages a feat that only Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Ernesto Sabato all Argentine authors achieved. Mafalda has a loyal following in Finland.
Mafalda″ was first published in 1964. The Argentine had a cult following throughout his career. “Quino” was a thorn in the Argentine ruling elites side, and it was through Mafalda that he attacked them with a large dose of acerbic humour.
In an interview, he said “I do not think my cartoons are the sort that makes people laugh their heads off. I tend to use a scalpel rather than tickle the ribs. I don’t go out of my way to be humorous; it’s just something that comes out of me. I’d like to be funnier, but as you get older, you become less amusing and more incisive.”[1]
Mafalda, who was only six years old, but had more political nous and wisdom than most adults. This knowledge led her to ponder the world’s problems. Her parents never really understood her. Mafalda, although from a middle-class Buenos Aires family had a keen sense that the world was full of injustice and had an eye for social and political hypocrisies and a mordant sense of humour.
The comic strip has been compared to Peanuts and Blondie, but none of these carried the political or social commentary found in Mafalda.
Through Mafalda Quino “said things that could not be said”. Mafalda was published and read during the time Argentina was under a military dictatorship the 1970s and 1980s. Although Mafalda’s social analysis was originally directed against the military junta, Mafalda has a pearl of deep wisdom that still resonates today. Lavado said “She is a girl who tries to solve the dilemma of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this world,”
The comic strip only ran for six years. Lavado said he did not miss the character when it ended saying “Even though the books continue to sell very well and people ask me for more, I think that I made the right decision when I stopped doing Mafalda, and I don’t miss her at all,″ he said.
He did relent a few times she was brought back in 1973 to promote as one writer puts it “humanitarian projects (mostly UNICEF), and focused on illustrated albums like Quinoterapia (Quinotherapy), where he broke down in comic book format the structural and personal elements that allowed inequality to persist all over the world, either with ad-absurdum of liberal concepts or by leaning into surrealist imagery — like the police shooting down protestors with Valium”.
As Lavado said in one of Mafalda cartoons shows an adult standing with Mafalda as she points to the rotating globe with a map of the world on a desk. “You’re leaving? And this? Who’s going to fix this?″. The same could be said of Lavado now that he has gone who is going to fix the world.
[1] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000120188
The Orange Hare
By Arturo Monterroso
“I am taking it!” she said with a loud voice. I looked up. She was a bit over seventy, and he was clearly closer into falling the eighty-something abyss. He walked stooping over his three-legged cane and took a breath after telling off his wife. She was the first to raise her voice, as she was holding a stuffed rabbit tight against her bosom. The woman had resisted her husband’s reprimand, digging her heels into an attitude that I perceived as defiant because she had responded immediately.
“I am taking it,” she said again in a lower yet firm voice making a pout. She was petite, still holding some echoes of sweetness deep in her eyes. “No,” he said with a slight quiver in his voice, “I am not willing to pay a fortune for a stuffed animal that your granddaughter will not even like.” “Our granddaughter,” she quickly corrected him; “for our granddaughter who will be delighted with this bunny.” “Yes,” he replied, “a horrendous and extremely expensive, odd-coloured rabbit. Have you ever seen an orange rabbit before?” “It’s a stuffed bunny, Heriberto, it’s not a real rabbit; it’s a toy,” she explained to him. “Uh-huh,” he replied, “and surely that justifies why we must pay for it as much as our electricity bill.”
The thin-bodied man was wearing a flat cap sunk down just above his eyebrows. “Well, as you wish,” she said, “you win,” and left the toy on the table from where she had taken it. Until that moment I wasn’t aware that the bookstore sold stuffed animals, and it was not precisely found in the children’s section. He made a gesture of complaisance, one made by those who think they are right. “Let’s go!” commanded to his wife (they clearly were married), “it is getting late.” “Late for what?” she asked somewhat angry. “You always think it’s late!” “Let’s go,” he said, trying to show composure. “All right!” she said loudly. “You are the boss! It’s always the same! You are the boss!” And then I lost sight of them.
I went back to reading the first page of Cartas portuguesas (this was the reason that had brought me to the bookstore’s coffee shop), but a scream got my attention and made me to look up over the book. “No!” exclaimed the old man, trying to lift the three-legged cane, clearly meaning to threaten her. The lady was holding the rabbit again and the husband was blocking her way. “No!” he repeated once again, “it’s already decided! Put that rabbit back in its place!” She looked around as her eyes were met by the few people in the cafe, and left the rabbit back on the table. Then she appeared annoyed, rolled her eyes up (maybe asking to some divinity for help in the bookstore’s ceiling), walked a couple of tired steps and reached for the man’s arm who seemed satisfied. Finally, her wife had come to her senses.
When they had disappeared among the shelves, surely on their way to the door which would definitively settle their disagreement, I went back to the Cartas de la monja portuguesa, a title in Spanish of the book that collects five letters written by sister Mariana Alcoforado, a nun who had been seduced by a count. As I pondered on the kinky circumstances and the image of the woman writing love letters under the dim candlelight of her lonely cell, I saw the woman passing in front of me who, once more, had the stuffed rabbit in her hands. I stopped thinking about the nun and paid new attention to the drama of the rabbit that, looking closer, it wasn’t a rabbit but a lanky, long-eared hare, the color of oranges; of orange oranges ¾because of course there are green and yellow oranges¾ and of a hue similar to the skin of ginger. It had a long and funny face; the hare, not the lady who, ensconced in the self-help section, was nervously and fondly squeezing the stuffed animal. Her granddaughter would surely like it. What would an old fogey know about what a little girl likes?
I asked for the check, paid the coffee, closed the book, and put it back on the self. Anyhow, the famous letters were not written by the nun, but by a Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues, who had been ambassador of France in Constantinople. And that small detail spoiled the erotic taste of reading the book. Besides, with all this drama of the old couple and the orange hare I had lost my concentration. I even stopped for a moment to look at a volume on sale of the complete works of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, to whom probably I am never going to read, and then continued my way out to the door. I was about to step out when I heard the woman’s voice again who, at the checkout counter, was calling to her husband while her finger was pointing at a little paper next to the hare.
Indeed, the husband’s credit card had gone through the small payment device and the man had to sign the little paper. I would never know how she had convinced him, but it was obvious that the women had won the battle. I browsed through the last illustrated edition of Vida y muerte de la pequeña Caperucita Roja (Una tragedia), by the German writer Ludwig Tieck, pretending I wasn’t interested in learning how things would unravel. I waited to see how the drama of the hare would end and, opposite to what I thought, it wasn’t a big deal after all: the old man signed the paper, took his card, and put it away in his wallet. Then he offered his arm to his wife and left the bookstore nonchalantly. She was carrying a plastic bag with her much-coveted possession: the orange hare. I stayed a little bit longer in the bookstore waiting for them to walk ahead.
I caught up with them just as they were about to go down the escalator, but the couple was blocking the way because they were arguing about who would go first. It was hard to say if his three-legged cane was the reason or the bag the lady was holding which seemed impossible, or maybe it was just uncomfortable, to ride the escalator at the same time. “Heriberto,” she would say still holding his arm, “let’s wait for Gerardo to help you go down.” “Who is Gerardo?” asked the old man annoyed and with an inquisitive look. “He is your lifelong chauffeur, of course. Who else?” she replied. He seemed to ponder deeply and then asked with a frown: “Should we return it?” She replied evidently eager to pick up a fight: “Who? Gerardo?” “That rabbit, the old man answered, pointing at the plastic bag. “It’s too expensive, you know that at our age we should be saving.” “Oh, Heriberto!” she exclaimed, “shut up! I will leave you here until Gerardo comes and help you down. I am sick of you!” “I don’t need any such Gerardo to go down this simple escalator,” said the old man. “I can do it by myself.” She turned around only to realize that there was already a line of people waiting for them to end their squabble. At last, she finally let go of her husband’s arm so that he could go first on the escalator.
He took a minute to assess the elusive step each time he wanted to place his foot on the it, but then he unexpectedly went ahead, tried to grab the bag from the woman, and lost his balance. He was unable to plant his three-legged cane on the fleeting stairs, and fell on his face. He bounced several times before landing horizontally at the foot of the escalator, looking dead. It turned out he wasn’t, because when we rushed down to help him, he was still breathing, although with some difficulty. Now without the flat cap, which had flung somewhere on the floor, I was able to recognize in the pale and scrawny countenance the face of General Túnchez, one of the greatest gunrunners of the past decades. He had become a millionaire under the shadows of power, enabling smooth way to countless containers through customs avoiding taxes. Later, he had invested in all kinds of properties and in the money laundering industry. Nobody was able to prove anything. He was forever untouchable. And that is how he had reached the age of retirement and peace. Until today. All because of a harmless orange hare.
Arturo Monterroso
Nació en Guatemala en 1948. Es escritor, editor y corrector
de estilo.
La libélula mecánica y el averiguad
This article is an English translation of a review of the book La libélula mecánica y el averiguador by the Guatemalan author Arturo Monterroso. The review is by Claudine Giovannoni.
A copy of the Spanish article can be found at https://claudinegiovannoni.com/other-authors-altri-autori/arturo-monterroso-2/la-libelula-mecanica/review-recensione/
Ten years have passed, and Isabel and Inés have grown up: do you remember the young protagonists of the novel La Mosca Dragon?Arturo Monterroso brings us back to Guatemala, still full of political strokes, bloody attacks where drug traffickers, soldiers and those who make little money, say how to run terror.This time, the protagonist is something that resembles a small insect that looks a lot like Maruca and Enriqueta’s Dragonfly in Tecpán: its code name is Rx566SL-REAPER.
There are a thousand possibilities where even the most trivial situation might be the cause of a shootout; but following the intimidation that happened that night, Antonio, father of Inés and Isabel, decides to bring his wife Nina and his daughters for some time to Gertrudis, a relative of theirs.A week after having moved to Aunt Gertrudis’ house, Antonio and his family were invited to lunch at San Lucas in the house of the engineer lquijay, and this is where the REAPER appears during a walk in the garden of the villa.
Young engineer Manuel, Inés and Isabel’s friend, will be a valuable ally in finding out how it is made and what it is, using an electronic scanning microscope.The pungent irony of the author takes shape in the conversations of the characters where the raw Guatemaltecan reality of each day (and of many other countries) is defused. On the one hand, pretences for shooting during the festivities of a thousand different Saints, on the other hand, he can ridicule those who must support foreign technology by possessing a cell phone.
Moreover, the improvised investigator Don Ramiro, well personify sarcasm when he speaks to his young helper Amadeo. A hitman commissioned Don Ramiro to find Adelaida Prado, while Inés and Isabel are as well on Adelaida’s traces.The young anthropologist Adelaida kept hidden by Maruca and Enriqueta in Tecpán in the novel of the La Mosca Dragon, returned after years of political asylum in Mexico, in fact, she was not a subversive but was only guilty of not having accepted the advances of Cifuentes Ortega. Nevertheless, why are they looking for her again?
Then, the characters are intertwined: from American Zachary
Collum, a gringo veteran, who has to leave his dog Henry in custody to someone
before leaving for the United States. The poor black dog passes from
hand-to-hand to finish with those of David Garrett (not the famous violinist),
manager of the Jaguar Nook Restaurant, which then leaves him to Antonio, who
finds himself as animal rights activist almost by accident.In the story does
not go unnoticed the D2 intrigues, the Guatemalan FBI, and the dirty chores of
General Cifuentes that eventually die and no one knows who murdered him.
However, the final remains a question, why would Rx566SL-REAPER be recovered? Moreover, who had driven it and with what purpose? Moreover, if it was Alfredo Nottembaum, Carlos Lahsen’s partner, and Luisa’s father-in-law? He had been funding the putsch in 1989… Moreover, he is portrayed in the photograph of the conservative members of the Coffee Club along with Carlos!
A novel to read by keeping the breath, written with sincerity and humour, in which true human values are reported as opposed to violence and crime.I like Monterroso’s style of naivety, as if it were his inner child to dictate words, knowing how to describe a variety of situations while maintaining a candid, though meticulous, language until the last detail.Even this novel is suitable as well for a young audience; I also recommend it for educational purposes as it (unfortunately) deals with situations that are always up to date… Everywhere on this planet!
Biography
Arturo Monterroso was born in Guatemala, 1948. He is a writer and journalist. He studied language and literature at the University of San Carlos and held a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Panamericana.In 1994 he published the short story book La ira oculta, and received the Novella Prize in 1995 for Piano Dark. This year, Editorial Norma published his novel for young people, The dragonfly. He has several novels, and some of his stories and articles have been translated into German and French.He received the Novella 1995 Award for Oscuridad del piano and the Award Brevísimos Dinosaurios 2009 del Centro Cultural de España, for Soy feliz. La libélula mecánica y el averiguador is his latest novel for young people.
La libélula mecánica y el averiguador can be purchased at
this website http://www.librerianorma.com
Editorial Norma– Ciudad de Guatemala , agosto 2016 ISBN
978-9929-42-210-0
