Work

My good friend Eduardo García Aguilar scolded me the other day for not having posted anything for a long while on this humble blog, and I have to plead guilty as charged. I've been concentrating on my sabbatical projects (designing a course on the concept of freedom for my college's philosophy department, doing Latin in French, working on a novel), but also working. And I mean work in the purest sense: physical labor. The last couple weeks in particular I have been a chalán, a helper, to a construction crew that has been building a big new water cistern for Casa Tobalá. My contribution has been of the simplest kind--shoveling buckets of sand and gravel for mixing concrete, carrying cement blocks to the mason, holding boards while the molds get pounded into place. Mauro, Marcos and Jaime--the real workers who have such talent and skill--have been good-humored about all my questions about why they're doing what they're doing or showing me again and again how to hoist an 80-pound bucket of wet cement onto my shoulder. The first day I went to help, Mauro handed me a shovel and said, "Just tell me when you're tired." Hell, that was five minutes after I started and I've managed to keep my mouth shut.
That's the thing about work: just because you're tired doesn't mean you stop, just because you're tired doesn't mean that the work is over. As a college teacher the thing I find most frustrating in students is, let's be honest, their endemic laziness. Always an excuse not to have assignments done or for not coming to class. US students (well, our nation as a whole) take for granted the opportunities afforded them, like the very fact of being able to go to college or having computer labs and libraries available. Here in Oaxaca when students don't get into the university they stage demonstrations, they block streets and highways. They never say they're too tired.

The Triumphant Voyage book award finalist

ALIFORM PUBLISHING
www.aliformgroup.com aliformgroup@gmail.com

Aliform Publishing is pleased to announce that The Triumphant Voyage, by Colombian novelist Eduardo García Aguilar and translated from the Spanish by Jay Miskowiec, has been named a finalist in the translation category of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. The winner will be announced at Book Expo America in New York on May 25. The Triumphant Voyage was the recipient of the Premio Nacional de Traducción Literaria awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia.

The Triumphant Voyage relates the adventures of the fictional poet Arnaldo Farilla Utrillo as he journeys around the world during the first half of the twentieth century, coming in contact with many of the great writers and artists of the age. As the esteemed translator Gregory Rabassa writes, “The best way to get into literature is to live it. This is precisely what Eduardo García Aguilar lets us do with this peripatetic novel, so much in the spirit of Cortázar, Bolaño and Eça de Queirós, as he leads us through the ways and means of what we have come to call modernism.”

Miskowiec is the translation editor of Aliform Publishing, which specializes in Latin American and world literature. His other translations of García Aguilar include the collection of short stories Luminous Cities, the critical examination of globalism Mexico Madness: Manifesto for a Disenchanted Generation, and the novel Boulevard of Heroes, with an introduction by Gregory Rabassa.

Yankee Invasion (Scarletta Press, 2009), by Mexican author Ignacio Solares and translated by Timothy G. Compton, was edited by Miskowiec and is also a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s translation award this year.

EL VIAJE TRIUNFAL DE GARCÍA AGUILAR FINALISTA EN PREMIO A MEJOR
TRADUCCIÓN EXTRANJERA DE FICCIÓN EN USA
La novella The Triumphant Voyage/ El viaje triunfal del colombiano Eduardo García Aguilar quedó entre las seis obras finalistas que optan al premio a la major traducción extranjera de ficción en Estados Unidos en 2010 de la revista ForeWord, cuyos premios (Book of the Year Awards) se entregarán en la Book Expo America de Nueva York el próximo 25 de mayo. La obra de García Aguilar, que relata de forma picaresca la vuelta al mundo de un viajero colombiano en la primera mitad del siglo XX hasta el inicio de La Violencia en su país, fue traducida por Jay Miskowiec,
quien obtuvo en 2008 el I Premio Nacional de Traducción Literaria del Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia y fue publicada en 2009 por la editorial Aliform.
Los ganadores en esta y otras categorías de los Book of the Year Awards serán escogidos por un jurado nacional de bibliotecarios y libreros estadounidenses y los premios se anunciarán en un acto especial en la BookExpo America en Nueva York, el próximo 25 de mayo. Los Book of the Year Awards de la revista Foreword son otorgados para destacar libros notables de editores independientes de Estados Unidos
en varios géneros y contribuir a su difusión y publicidad.
García Aguilar, quien reside en París, nació el 7 de septiembre de 1953 en Manizales (Colombia) y ha publicado las novelas Tierra de Leones, Bulevar de los Héroes, El Viaje Triunfal y Tequila Coxis, el
libro de relatos Urbes Luminosas, los poemarios Llanto de la Espada y Animal sin tiempo y el ensayo Delirio de San Cristobal. Manifiesto Para una Generación Desencantada, en su mayoría publicados en México y traducidos al inglés y publicados por Aliform. La primera novela de Garcia Aguilar traducida al inglés por Jay Miskowiec fue Boulevard of Heroes, publicada por Latin American Literary Review Press, con prólogo de Gregory Rabassa.

Reading novels

I'm on sabbatical this year and one of the advantages is the opportunity of reading what I want to, not what I have to (well, there is some of that, too, to complete my sabbatical project). But what's become interesting is not only what I read, but how--the luxury of reading for hours, even days, at a time. It's not the same experience at all to read a half hour here or there, or before going to sleep or sitting on the bus between stops. Things like narrative structure and most importantly style only truly come across once the reader is literally sumberged in the text. I just finished 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (my vote for best world writer born in the second half of the 20th), a thousand-page journey through the violence and corruption of modern Mexico that I finished in 3 days. It's a "page-turner," and the relentless way the author catalogues the murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez (especially pertinent now that the state attorney general whose office proved so apathetic in the investigations has just been named the nation's attorney general) has to be read in a relentless way as well--you can't turn away from what's happening.
[Recommended reading by Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives]
I also read one of the most remarkable works of contemporary US fiction, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, another phonebook-sized novel (with 100 pages of footnotes in tiny font) I read in a short time (about 3 weeks, which must be some kind of world record for that book). Reading is always a kind of "reader response":there is either a connection or not, and that connection is ultimately physical, sensatory, sensual. This book is truly a work of (tortured) genius, so many voices, so many layered trains of narration, so many interruptions, lapses, hollow spaces, empty discourses..it's not hard to understand how a person who wrote such a work could have committed suicide. What a loss for literature, but what gifts left behind.
I've just started a book by my favorite contemporary US writer, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree. Heir to William Faulker (and by extension Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Joseph Conrad, McCarthy writes the lushest descriptions imaginable, even when that lushness comes from broken glass and rusty metal. Thanks to my beloved sister-in-law Blanca Cue for lending me this work, and so many others.
And as I start this blog (something I never could have imagined doing a year ago, Luddite that I am; but it is this Thoreau-like solitude up here in Casa Tobala in the mountains of southeastern Oaxaca, the Sierra Juarez, that allows for all the time for reflection), I wish to thank a few people who have led me down this path: first of all my father John Miskowiec, the most prolific reader I've ever known, who from the time I was a kid taught me the wonders not only of literature but of books themselves, those precious objects one may hold; Eduardo García Aguilar, my friend and mentor for half my life, and one of Latin America's great writers, who taught me how much literature is a living thing, that it is made from life itself, and has allowed me to translate his work, including The Triumphant Voyage, Mexico Madness, Luminous Cities, and Boulevard of Heroes; Carlos López, director of the independent publishing company Praxis in Mexico, whose generosity has in many ways made possible Aliform Publishing; Gregory Rabassa, professor emeritus, who did as much as anyone to bring modern Latin American literature to a US audience, my dissertation supervisor who became my friend and colleague as I've published to date four of the maestro's translations. And finally to the person who has fed my creativity through all our years together, Lourdes Cué, artista extraordinaria.

CHECK OUT:
http://www.aliformgroup.com/ for the best in contemporary Latin American and world literature in translation
http://www.lourdescue.com/ to see this Mexican installation artist's website