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By Graciela Mochkofsky
The novel of Asturias tells the story of an anonymous country ruled through a type of name.
A drum hits where the nose is not blown, tracing wands in the wind academy, it is a drum. ArrayArray top, is not a drum; it’s a handkerchief banging on a door and the hand banging on a copper aldaba!The blows penetrate like drills, piercing the intestinal silence of the space on all sides. ArrayArray to hitArrayArrayArray to hitArrayArrayArray to hitArrayArrayArrayArray homemade drum. Each space has its own aldaba to call its population and when it is closed they delight in death. and the walls echo back and forth: “Another blow!What an ooopen!”” Hit back!Goooand the ashes are stirred, unable to move the cat, the lookout, with a slight shudder commands behind the bars of the fence, and the roses are agitated, innocent victims of the inflexibility of the thorns, and the mirrors speak alive like a medium snatched through the souls of the dead furniture: “Toc!Gooo opens!”
Asturias seemed doomed to success. But Latin American dreams tend to soar and collapse as temporarily as the continent’s raw materials. A drop in the value of coffee exacerbated Guatemala’s economic crisis, making, Martin writes, “impossible for middle-class Guatemalans to help themselves abroad,” and forcing Asturias to make an unfortunate return home in 1933. At the time, the country was ruled by some other dictator, Jorge Ubico, who remained in force for more than a decade. Trapped in Guatemala, Asturias did not publish any of his works. this period, adding “Mr. President”, which, although based on Estrada Cabrera, may have read without problems as a reference to Ubico.
It was only after World War II, and after Asturias published a Mexican edition of the novel without warning, in 1946, and moved to Argentina the following year, that he controlled the book’s publicity. to foreign fame. Recognition, however, did not equate to understanding: appearing in an absolutely different context from that in which it had been created, “Mr. President” was hailed not as an ordinary literary achievement but as a “committed” (Sartrian term then in vogue). . Array ) communicate about Latin American injustice. Asturias himself contributed to this reading of his painting through the publication of 3 novels, called “Trilogy of the banana” – “Strong Wind” (1950), “The Green Pope” (1954) and “The eyes of the buried” (1960) – about the disastrous role of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. When Argentina came under the rule of the army in 1962, Asturias was forced to move again, this time to Italy. In 1966 he received the Lenin Peace Prize for the “Banana Trilogy”, and won the Nobel Prize the following year when the Latin American boom was in full swing.
The Boom was an era spanning nearly two decades, the 1960s and 1970s, during which an organization of relatively young writers produced incredibly avant-garde and influential work. Cortazar; Vargas Llosa; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Colombia; and Carlos Fuentes, from Mexico, are its best-known writers, although there have been many others. Asturias was its herbal predecessor. To begin with, he is credited with having invented, specifically in “Legends of Guatemala” and “Men of Corn”, Latin American Magical Realism -a genre widely known with the Boom, due to García Márquez’s leading role in it- that is, as a form to portray the region’s sense of the absurd in the face of its reality. Martín, who is the author of an outstanding biography of García Márquez (and is carrying out a biography of Vargas Llosa), asks “Mr. President” in his prologue: “What is magical realism, if not a solution for writing novels about hybrids ?” Societies in which a dominant culture of European origin is juxtaposed in multiple tactics with one or more cultures, in many cases “pre-modern”? He concludes: “It was not Gabriel García Márquez who invented magical realism, it was Miguel Ángel Asturias. ” Guatemalans are a mestizo culture, we live between two cultures,” Lucrecia Méndez de Penedo, a Guatemalan academic and literary critic who is a member of the Guatemalan Academy of Language, told me. “Asturias lived in a rural indigenous territory as a child. this identity, which has been called a “split identity. “
“El Señor Presidente,” meanwhile, is widely regarded as the first novel by a Latin American dictator. (Some literary historians also cite “Tirano Banderas,” a 1926 novel about the disappearance of a dictator in a fictional Latin American country, through the Spanish Ramón del Valle-Inclán. ) The genre is necessarily Latin American and is explored in a number of works through Boom authors, such as “El Recurso del Método” (1974) through Carpentier, translated into English as “Razones de Estado”. , “Yo, el Supremo” (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos, “El Otoño del Patriarca” (1975) and “La Fiesta del Chivo” by Vargas Llosa (2000).
For all these explanations, says Martín, “El Señor Presidente” is “an archetypal Latin American novel,” and its first lines “are the first lines of the Boom. ” And yet, many authors of the Boom, beginning with García Márquez, have described Asturian painting as archaic and have denied that it had any influence on his writing. Asturias did not weigh in on the issues when, in an interview, he accepted the suggestion that García Márquez, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” had been heavily influenced by Balzac’s “The Search for the Absolute,” a comment for which he was widely denounced. He has also been accused of political expediency for serving as Guatemalan ambassador to France from 1966 to 1970 under President Julio Méndez Montenegro, who was democratically elected but ended up leading a repressive government. (Asturias’ idea that the government presented a chance to save democracy in Guatemala, and he had consulted exiled President Jacobo Árbenz about remaining in office). the Boom saw itself as belonging to a totally new, unprecedented movement. Asturias died in Spain, in 1974, and was largely forgotten. According to Ramírez and Méndez de Penedo, her paintings are more commonly read in Guatemala today only because reading is recommended in high school.
“El Señor Presidente” never had much luck in this country. It was first introduced to English-speaking audiences in 1962, as “The President”, in a translation by Frances Partridge, an English publisher associated with the Bloomsbury Group. David Unger, who is a novelist, poet and translator, and directs the editorial certification program at City College, told me that Partridge’s edition is ‘full of anglicisms’ and doesn’t sound original for the voice of Asturias. Array Francisco Goldman, a The Guatemalan-born American publisher whose paintings include the novel “Monkey Boy” and who was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, agrees. “If I didn’t forget correctly,” he said, “you’ve got the beggar yelling in Cockney East End slang, something like, ‘Wow, here come the police!’ “There was also an issue, again, of timing: Partridge’s translation came out almost twenty years after the book came out, 40 years after Asturias started writing it, and five years before she won the Nobel Prize. And her anti-imperialism would not have been highly appreciated in the United States at the time. “The original translation predates everything we know in this country about what the C. I. A. he did: the hits he was guilty of in Iran, in Guatemala, in the Dominican Republic,” Unger said.
In 2014, Unger won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize for Literature for Lifetime Achievement, Guatemala’s most important literary award. As a thank you, he adopted a new translation, hoping to give Guatemala’s top publisher some other chance of being identified. He won a translation fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts and began painting. After finishing a few chapters, his agent, Andrea Montejo, contacted John Siciliano, the editor-in-chief of Penguin. Sicilian was interested, but rights problems caused the publication of the Asturias painting to be delayed, once again, for several years.
But maybe the time will come after all. “I looked for the novel to speak to our generation and our time,” Unger said. She told me that the choice to translate the name as “Mr. President” surprised her. “‘Mr. President’ is particularly American,” he said, adding, “No one translates ‘Madame Bovary’ as ‘Mrs. Bovary. ‘(This was Penguin’s decision, Siciliano told me, “because of the extra strength it provides to the main character. “) However, Allen ventured out, when we spoke, the day before the committee’s last summer hearing on Jan. 6: “Mr. President. “It can also serve as an indictment: you Americans deserve not to think this is foreign to you.
A new wave of repressive regimes is also slowing down in Central America, especially in Guatemala, where repression of political dissent is intensifying, and in Nicaragua. Sergio Ramirez was forced to leave the country a year ago, and last September the government of President Daniel Ortega, under which Ramirez served as vice president in his first administration, after the Sandinista revolution overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza, issued an arrest warrant against him. (Ortega returned to the force in 2007, and in the years that followed, he himself has become autocratic. ) Ramirez now lives in Spain. A new batch of dictator novels is coming, he told me. These days, “We all have our ‘Mr. President. ‘”♦
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