Posts filed under 'Guatemalan Civil War'

“Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción

October 12, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The trick is knowing what not to say, then being able to honor the decision to leave it unsaid.

By 2004, Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon had published three books: one about the life and death of Guatemalan painter Carlos Valenti; one about Miguel de Cervantes; one about how writers become writers. Four years later, he released a book of short stories called El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer, Editorial Pre-Textos), which inaugurated a new era for him as a writer. The book became an earthquake, and its ripples can still be felt today—nearly ten books later. Its stories went on to expand into novels, their themes and ideas forming a continual thread through the author’s prolific oeuvre, acknowledging the truth that stories, just like life, must be built on what came before. Canción, his latest book to be translated into English (Bellevue Press), borrows characters, plot lines, and entire sections from Signor Hoffman and Mañana nunca lo hablamos, books he published seven and eleven years ago respectively.

Because of this continuity and rehashing of stories, Eduardo’s body of work has often been referred to as a novela en marcha—an ongoing novel. It’s important to note that all of these stories share the same narrator: a Guatemalan author, former engineer, and chain-smoker named Eduardo Halfon, who shares many of the same experiences of real-life Eduardo. It seems all part of an intricate plan—though it’s everything but. Doubt, silence, contradiction, el no sé—not knowing— improvisation, and uncertainty: those are the many hands that pile one on top of another “to dominate” Eduardo’s writing.

In Canción, out last month and masterfully translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, Eduardo tells the story of his Lebanese grandfather, also named Eduardo Halfon, and the time the Guatemalan guerrillas kidnapped him in 1967. In this impactful and luminous novel, we read about the Guatemalan Civil War—its violence, fear, and, again, the uncertainty. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the actual kidnapping. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the time Eduardo’s grandfather was in captivity. Because that’s also part of Halfon’s remarkable style: silence, mystery, darkness.

Recently I spoke with Eduardo about all of that. About Canción, about his novela en marcha, about some of his most memorable characters. We talked about writing in the dark. About the engineering behind a story. We talked about what’s real and the truth. About memory, childhood, silences, and, again—and as always—about not knowing and how important it’s for him to blur the lines between himself and his narrator. We talked, we exchanged emails, voice notes, and messages, and he replied from Guatemala City, Mexico City, Spain, and Germany. As anticipated, after reading Canción and yet again talking to Eduardo about his book, I have more questions than answers.

José García Escobar (JGE): With Canción, it’s the first time I’ve seen you address Guatemalan history so thoroughly in a book. Naturally, you had to mention some events and people because they were relevant to your grandfather’s kidnapping; others, however, seem to be part of the story’s background (Jacobo Árbenz, the 1954 CIA-backed coup, the rise of the guerrilla movement in the 1960s, Julio Ramírez Arteaga). How did that weaving come to be—between foregrounding or backgrounding history?

Eduardo Halfon (EH): When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history has to 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 placing. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

September 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Rachel Stanyon

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member. 

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

READ MORE…

Luis de Lión: Unearthing the Lost Poems of a Disappeared Poet

July 2, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by José García Escobar

Luis de Lión is the desaparecido number 135. Luis de Lión was questioned and tortured for twenty-two days. He had diabetes.

Though every human tragedy has its witnesses, too often those who speak the truth about them are forcefully silenced, whether by censorship, imprisonment, or murder. During the brutal Guatemalan Civil War, the violence and repression inflicted on the populace was felt heavily in the national literature, which saw many great writers suffer in its wake. In this essay, José García Escobar reports on one of the disappeared, the prolific poet Luis de Lión, and his daughter’s poignant search for her father’s lost texts.

Mayarí de León, the daughter of the Guatemalan writer, poet, and teacher Luis de Lión, was seven years old when her father was kidnapped for the first time, in June of 1973. He was kept in prison for eight days.

“When he was released, many of his friends came over,” Mayarí tells me over the phone. “We were living at my aunt’s house in Zone 1, and they came and talked to him.” She also remembers that Ana María Rodas, poet and friend of Luis’s, was there. “She cut a carnation and put it in my hair,” she says.

Mayarí doesn’t remember much else—quietness. Solemnity. Downcast eyes. She was too young and didn’t get to hear the grown-ups’ conversation, and probably wouldn’t even have been able to record more than a phrase in her memory. But she understood what was going on: men had captured her papá. Mayarí claims that from that moment on, she had nightmares. Dreams of ravines filled with dead bodies woke her in the middle of the night.

In 1973, thirteen years into the Guatemalan Civil War, the government and Guatemalan Army often targeted intellectuals and dissidents. Other writers such as Otto René Castillo and Roberto Obregón had been killed already, and many would follow, including Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and José María López Valdizón. Then, the thirty-four-year-old Luis was an upcoming literary talent, a prime example of how Guatemalan writers, despite the lack of access to publishers or editors, continued to produce work of high quality. Luis himself, by 1973, had published two short story collections, and his novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá had received second place in Quetzaltenango’s Juegos Florales in 1972—the first place having been declared void.

“My hands started sweating too,” Mayarí says. “Whenever I’m nervous or excited, whenever I’m taken by extreme emotion, my hands sweat. This started after my father’s first kidnapping.”

Eight days after Luis was taken into custody by the Policía Nacional, he was released. Thanks to the intervention of the Universidad de San Carlos’ student’s association, he was allowed to walk out; Luis had been kidnapped alongside the association’s general secretary. “He came out all bruised and thin,” Mayarí says. “But I know that this first detention confirmed his ideology and social calling.”

Mayarí claims that her father never told her of his days in detention, but she has come to know of Luis’s struggle through his unpublished poems and stories, collected over a search lasting for the last fifteen years. From it stems Luis’s latest publication El papel de la belleza—The Role of Beauty: an anthology of his poetry, which spans from 1972 to the very last poem he wrote before his second kidnapping in 1984. El papel de la belleza, in true de Lión style, shows many of his typical concerns and interests, his militancy and ideology, his attention to social issues and indigenous struggles, his care for the quotidian, his devastating and scenic use of language: minimalistic, casual, relaxed, always elegant. READ MORE…