Posts featuring Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Thread, A Loom, A Skein: Rita M. Palacios on Maya Ts’íib as a Departure from Literature

January 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Ts’íib radically departs from notions of literature because the written word is not the be-all and end-all of society and culture.

Guatemalan scholar Rita M. Palacios’ body of work reexamines the hegemonies that mediate literary, cultural, and knowledge production, particularly in Maya oral storytelling, literature, and material culture. In the book she co-authored with Asymptote’s former editor-at-large for Mexico, Paul M. Worley, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), they argued for a decentering from the Euro-American critical vocabulary of literary theory and arts criticism through the lens of ts’íib—”an understanding of Maya artistic and cultural production that includes and exceeds the written word.” Drawing from Maya artists and authors such as Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Waldemar Noh Tzec, and Humberto Ak’abal, whose œuvre range from murals to textiles, from cha’anil (‘performatic’) to ceramics, from monuments to poetry, Palacios and Worley make the case for the ts’íib as one of the various Indigenous-centric departures from and unlearnings of our colonial worldviews on literary production and knowledge systems.  

In this interview, I conversed with Dr. Palacios on ts’íib as a form of autohistorical knowledge production that is beyond the Western imaginary, the Maya and non-Ladino writers and writings within Guatemalan and Central American literatures, and the rightful refusals against translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a conversation on Mexican and Guatemalan literatures with Paul M. Worley, you said

[T]he many challenges (structural racism, censorship, a lack of government funding, to name a few) that writers in countries in the Majority World face directly impact how and what is written, how it’s published, and who it reaches, and so we, readers and critics, would do well to pay attention.

Can you speak more about these gaps and dissimilarities in terms of knowledge production, especially in literature, in the Global Majority versus the North Atlantic?

Rita M. Palacios (RMP): Given the way Western political and economic powers have shaped our world, the anglophone North Atlantic enjoys a certain monopoly over the manner in which we think and write about each other, privileging certain modes of artistic production over others, as well as creators, reading publics, and even the critics. This is not to say that we are helpless or that we are wholly bound by a system that privileges and rewards those who uphold it. It does mean that things are much more challenging for those who live, think, and create outside those parameters.

Generally, when it comes to literature, that which is written, packaged, and sold by the millions is not a literature that aims to represent us all, but a literature that affirms the places (real and imagined) we already occupy and the systems built around them so that we continue to inhabit these spaces, sustaining those big great powers. Despite the challenges their authors face, the literatures of the Global Majority are rich, diverse, and challenging; they are multilingual, multivocal, and multiversal. Rarely are these literatures sold in the same manner as blockbuster novels because of the threat they pose. And these authors recognize the danger of being subsumed into “national” or canonical literatures, as is the case with Mikel Ruíz (Tsotsil) who notes the tokenization of Indigenous literatures in Mexico (2019). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 15, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, José García Escobar, and Marina García Pardavila

The latest from Central America, Spain, and China!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us around the world for the latest of literary news! From a brilliant cast of Central American authors at Madrid’s upcoming literary festival, to an inside glimpse into Spain’s translation residencies, to a thought-provoking workshop at China’s aBC Art Book Fair, read on to learn more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Central America

Central America’s brightest stars are about to come together yet again!

On September 18, the latest edition of the region’s most celebrated literary festival, Centro América Cuenta, will kick off in Madrid, Spain!

This time, Centro América Cuenta will gather regional talents such as Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez (Guatemala), Cindy Regidor (Nicaragua), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), Mónica Albizúrez (Guatemala), Rodrigo Rey Rosa (Guatemala), and Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), next to Latin American and Spanish writers such as Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador) and Patricio Pron (Argentina). One high point of the festival will occur on September 18, when former president of Costa Rica, Luis Guillermo Solís, and former Guatemalan jurist living in exile, Thelma Aldana, will gather to discuss the current state of democracy in Central America.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, José García Escobar, and Nestor Gomez

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

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Collective Memory: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter: A Fiction in Review

August 21, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

An exercise in the resilience of human memory, the novel integrates a broad swath of literary and global cultural touchstones . . .

Human Matter: A Fiction by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio, University of Texas Press, 2019

As noted over the years by scholars such as Arturo Arias, Central American cultural production remains largely at the margins of academic study. As Arias points out in Taking Their Word, because popular knowledge of the region is so sparse, and because geographic ignorance (particularly in the United States) is so widespread, Central American immigrants will often identify Mexico as their country of origin, both for reasons of Latinx solidarity, and to protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. This erasure is not even a recent phenomenon: the protagonists of the 1983 film El Norte, the Guatemalan-Maya brother and sister Enrique and Rosa Xuncax, are told to tell people that they are from the heavily Indigenous state of Oaxaca, Mexico, to avoid being taken advantage of in both Mexico and the US. However, from the United Fruit Company in the early twentieth century to the practices of Canadian mining companies, and even US president Donald Trump’s facilitating, in the words of the Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman, “organized crime” in Guatemala’s 2019 presidential elections, global forces have always played, and continue to play, an outsized role in the region.

Despite its apparently marginal status, the region has made a number of enduring contributions to world literature. Foremost among them is one of the fathers of Latin American modernism, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, not to mention one of the most important works of Indigenous literature in the Americas, the K’iche’ Maya Popol Wuj. Outside of these points of reference, however, much of the region’s vast, rich literature remains untranslated, which makes Eduardo Aparicio’s translation of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano as Human Matter all the more important.

Rey Rosa, perhaps Guatemala’s most important living novelist, has had an eclectic literary trajectory. Having gone to New York in the early 1980s, he eventually became the protégé of the US-expatriate author Paul Bowles, spending a good deal of time with the author in his adopted home of Tangier, Morocco, and even becoming executor of Bowles’s literary estate upon the author’s death in 1999. Tellingly, one of Rey Rosa’s previously translated novels, the magnificent The African Shore, deals with the intersection of tourism, privilege, and migration in the border zone not between Guatemala and the US, or even between Guatemala and México, but between Morocco and Spain.

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“From a madhouse to a monastery”: Twenty-Five Years of Guatemala’s Magna Terra Editores

August 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

We turned into a McDonald’s of books . . . It was madness!

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Guatemala’s longest-lasting publishing house, Magna Terra Editores. Founded in November 1994 by poet and novelist Gerardo Guinea—and now run by him and his son Paolo—Magna Terra has published more than two thousand books and has propelled the careers of writers across three generations. As the press nears its bodas de plata, early this month I sat down with the two editors to talk about Magna Terra’s beginnings, the press’s many houses, and transitioning from a hectic McPress to a much more Zen indie house that boasts some of the best books produced in the country. Its author list is undoubtedly proof of this.

—José García Escobar

In the early 1990s, when Magna Terra was nothing more than a dream, its founder, Gerardo Guinea, and his family were exiled to Mexico City by the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). He was one of many. Other famed Guatemalan writers, such as Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Raúl Leiva, also chose to live abroad given the local political climate. After all, the government often persecuted writers. Otto René Castillo, Luis de Lión, and Alaíde Foppa are just a few of the many intellectuals the government and army killed during the war. While in Mexico, Gerardo had the chance to visit and become familiar with local publishing houses. He met with Joaquín Diez-Canedo of Joaquín Mortiz Editorial, now part of Grupo Planeta, and Carlos López of Editorial Praxis. As he watched the editors working, the books piling up on the shelves enthralled him. He wondered, as the talks of peace in Guatemala became more frequent, if he could create something similar at home. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 17, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Layla Benitez-James

From literary festivals to prize winners, this is the week in world literature.

This week, dispatches from Spain and Central America witness the rise of Spanish-language writers and events that support and promote the literatures of up-and-comers alongside established stars of the field. To celebrate the community of world literature is a necessary joy, and our editors are here with the revelry. 

Layla Benitez-James, Podcast Editor, reporting from Spain  

It was time for big celebrations in a tiny, trilingual bookshop located in the centre of Madrid on the night of May 10. Francesca Reece had been named winner of the second ever Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, and ten other writers were being honoured alongside her in the publication of Eleven Stories 2019, the shortlist for the competition which follows after the sold out original Eleven Stories from their inaugural 2018 contest.

The event celebrated the launch of the mini collection with readings from ten of the eleven shortlisted authors. The project is an international prize based out of the bookshop Desperate Literature in Madrid, but with partners in London, Paris, and New York, it has drastically evolved over just its first year. After feedback from the inaugural winner and shortlist, the founders decided to add a one week stay as the artist-in-residence at the Civitella Ranieri in Italy, and a consultation with a New York literary agent who works for Foundry Literary + Media. With the aim of giving as much support to emerging and non-traditional writers as possible, they sought to develop additional assistance alongside a cash prize and are looking to continue this line of development for next year’s iteration. This year they partnered with five literary journals: 3:AM, Structo Magazine, Helter Skelter, The London Magazine, and The Second Shelf (women only), who will publish stories from the shortlist throughout the year. They also added a collaboration with the Casa Ana in Andalucia, who selected Jay G Ying from the shortlist for another residency.

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Philosophical Thriller: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Chaos: A Fable in Review

May 15, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Alice Horne

Chaos might have the pace of a thriller, but it has the timely relevance and pointed insight of many a great novel.

Chaos: A Fable by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, AmazonCrossing, 2019.

Imagine finding yourself in an unknown country, with no understanding of how you got there and the taste of dread in your mouth, and you’ll have a good sense of how it feels to read acclaimed Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novella Chaos: A Fable. According to the publisher’s synopsis, Chaos sets out to be both a “provocative morality tale” and a “high-tech thriller,” and, indeed, it seems to land somewhere between the two: think John le Carré “espionoir” meets Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray, Chaos is Rey Rosa’s nineteenth novel (the seventh to be translated into English). It follows Mexican writer Rubirosa as he reconnects with an old friend in Morocco and, by agreeing to a seemingly simple favor, finds himself drawn into an international plot to end human suffering by bringing about a technological apocalypse. Chaos indeed.

For a novel titled Chaos, it is perhaps unsurprising that I found the reading experience itself disorientating; so much so, in fact, that as soon as I read the last line, I had to flick back to page one and read it all again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. (Fortunately, at only 197 pages, you can pretty much do so in one sitting.) Starting—mundanely enough—at a book fair in Tangier, the novella takes the reader on a breath-taking ride via the United States and Greece to Turkey. And I’m sure that, even on a second read, there were allusions and references that went far over my head.

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Jumping Between the Urban and the Rural: An Interview with Rodrigo Fuentes

March 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Characters can take on a life of their own as you write them, and that can hold a great amount of interest and suspense for me.

In late 2016, the Guatemalan publishing house SOPHOS put out Rodrigo Fuentes’s literary debut, entitled Trucha panza arriba. The book follows, sometimes closely and at other times tangentially, Don Henrik, a white landowner living in Guatemala, and the way his decisions and economic and emotional downfall affect those around him. The book includes intense dramas like “Dive”—available in Asymptote’s Winter 2019 Issue—and “Ubaldo’s Island”; vibrating suspense stories like “Whisky”; and profound character explorations like “Henrik.” And all of them are wrapped in exquisite dialogue, like “Terrace,” my favorite story. I told Rodrigo it was my favorite.

“Really?” Rodrigo said, somehow confused.

“Sí,” I told him, and said it was a tight story. “Apretada,” I said, “elegantly condensed, effective, quick as a flash.” READ MORE…

In Conversation with Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez

March 15, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

We mustn’t be allowed to be jailed by our own countries.

Last October, the Spanish publishing house Alfaguara put out Ya nadie llora por mí, the most recent novel from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramírez and sequel to his 2009 novel, El cielo llora por mí (The Sky Cries for Me). A couple of weeks later, the Spanish Ministry of Culture announced that Sergio was the winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most important literary award for Spanish-language writers. Other laureates include Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Sergio is the first Central American writer to receive this distinction. He has published around thirty books, two of which have been translated into English: Divine Punishment (McPherson & Company) and the 1998 Alfaguara Prize winning novel Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea (Curbstone Books).

Three months later, Sergio and I—his umpteenth interviewer since November—got together at a fancy hotel on the misty mountains of Guatemala City, hours before he presented Ya nadie llora por mí in SOPHOS bookstore. I imagined all the questions Sergio had answered during the past few months. What does it feel like to have won it? Where were you when you got the news? Can you give us a preview of your acceptance speech? I should ask him about his favorite Guatemalan dish, I thought, to shake things up.

Sergio is kind but equally incisive, serene, and voracious. He speaks with care and potency about Central American literature, being a writer, and Centro América Cuenta. Hosted in Nicaragua, this is the biggest literary festival of the region that seeks to strengthen Central American writers and bring them closer to the rest of Ibero-America. Sergio, with a cup of coffee in his hand, is also critical of the contaminated reality of his country. A reality from which his work often comes to life.

In Ya nadie llora por mí (Nobody cries for me anymore) inspector Dolores Morales has been discharged from the National Police, and he now works as a private investigator. He mostly handles cases about adultery for clients with no money. Then the disappearance of a millionaire’s daughter takes him out of his routine. In Sergio’s latest novel we also get to see how corruption and abuse of power underlie the revolutionary discourse of contemporary Nicaragua.

“As a citizen, I desire a different reality,” he says. “As a writer, I take advantage of it.”

Sergio is arguably the most important Central American writer today.

José García Escobar (JGE): What was it like to revisit detective Dolores Morales for your latest book? Did you have the story for Ya nadie llora por mí first, and then realized you needed Dolores to tell it? Or was it the other way around?

Sergio Ramírez (SR): I came up with the story first. I wanted to write about Nicaragua today, and for this, I needed a character like Dolores: a detective and former guerrilla. Noir fiction, or novela negra, as we call it, gives me the opportunity to look at the events I’m writing about from afar. With this distance I can add humor, irony. Also, given his background, this character helped work around that distance. Dolores is often bound by his ethic, a type of ethic he picked up from his years as a guerrillero; he uses that critical thought and critical distance for his work, but at the same time he’s always at risk of getting contaminated by that environment. He observes the situations as he would have in the past and is that moral nostalgia and critical distance that allows my character to lead the book.

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