Latin American literatures

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.

One of the challenges in trying to describe what goes on in this story is that so much takes place in the interstitial spaces, the breach between what happens and what can be said about it – even what can be remembered.

The world lives with its distinct categorisations. Literature is placed to the left and the fantastical is to the right, but Borges made unique combinations of the two.

While more conventional writers advertise their moral delicacy in dealing with vastly disempowered characters, Melchor’s relentlessness makes that strategy look like condescension. Hewing close to her painful material – and refusing to let her narrator philosophize about it or apologize for it – Melchor reveals something distasteful in the common notion that the task of fiction is to ‘convey the humanity’ of people in extreme circumstances. Hurricane Season demands instead that we assume the humanity of its characters. Is there a better condition of entry for a novel to set its readers?

‘I do commercial translations, literary translation doesn’t pay the bills and requires a lot more work. I translate insurance forms, information leaflets for medication, instructions for prostate operations… It’s a repetitive job and in general very boring. But I think about Kafka, about how his job at an insurance office may have pushed him to immerse himself more fully in his fiction, and that gives me some consolation’ – Fabian Martinez Siccardi.

‘In this world of literary agents and commercial prizes that many times just replicate names and books that sell all right, being translated is pretty much a matter of luck: the luck of being successful or the luck of finding almost by chance the right reader in another language.’ J.M. Coetzee in conversation with Argentine writers and translators Mariana Dimópulos and Ariel Magnus.

Fifty years on, One Hundred Years of Solitude is still providing profound insight about our evolving human tale where horrors co-exist with wonders, where absurdities don’t provoke a blink.’

‘What is left is the real South, the South of this real world, where most of those present in this room were born and most of us will die.’

‘You’re meeting the FIFA of Argentine literature,’ one young Buenos Aires poet said: ‘Watch out she doesn’t sue you.’ María Kodama gave me the best part of three hours of her time, describing her life with Jorge Luis Borges and discussing his work. Her generosity and warmth were at odds with everything I’d ever read or heard about her.