I’ve been searching for Ribeyro in our Balkan libraries. Just a few stories translated for some literary journals and/or included in anthologies of Latin American literature. I am a bit surprised since Yugoslavia had a great culture of translation. Translating a translation was not an unusual thing. No translators from Icelandic? No problem. Here’s Independent People in German. Translate it. Chinese? No? Here’s a collection of Chinese stories in Russian. Problem solved. Such hunger for the world!
Anyway, no Ribeyro.
The Word of the Speechless is a great collection. Those early stories (Tracks, Doubled) reminded me of Paul Auster and I wondered if he had read Ribeyro. Strange and bizarre happenings, uncertainty, shadows, ghosts? spirits?, unexpected twists (which, after two or three similar stories one learns to expect)…
Good stories, but I liked some other better. At the Foot of the Cliff, for example.
We are like the higuerilla, the wild castor bean plant that germinates and spreads in the steepest and least hospitable places. Look how it grows out of the sand, along riverbanks, in vacant lots, in garbage dumps. It doesn’t ask anyone for any favors, just a tiny bit of space to survive. It never gets any respite, not from the sun or the salt from the sea winds, and men and tractors trample it, but the higuerilla keeps growing, propagating, feeding off rocks and garbage. That’s why I say that we are like the higuerilla; we poor folks. Wherever a man from the coast finds a higuerilla, that’s where he builds his house, because he knows that he, too, will be able to live there.
A story about the harshness of life, the injustices of the system which favors profit above human lives, about loss, about sea… There’s another story featuring the sea –Out at Sea- which I also loved. Intense, a thriller really. One is constantly kept on the edge, hoping, waiting, in spite of knowing, like the main character himself, that no other resolution besides the one we’re all fearing is possible.
There’s a fragment from At the Foot.. I long pondered upon:
I say summer because we have to name things. In these parts all the months are the same: during some periods, there might be more fog, during others, the sun is hotter. But, deep down, it’s all the same. They say we live in eternal springtime. For me, the seasons aren’t in the sun or in the rains but rather in the birds who pass overhead or the fish who leave or return. During some periods it’s harder to live, that’s all.
I thought about names – how they often are inadequate because they’ve been imposed upon things, people. Also, I came across an old wish of mine – to read more about these places where there are no seasons, where conditions of life are notably different from mine. I remembered reading Chinghiz Aitmatov – the stories set in Kyrgyzstan’s steppes… What a strong sense of place I was left with!
Silvio in El Rosedal was delicious. There’s a bit of Borges in it – a labyrinth, trying to find the true meaning of a word (res, or is it ser?), trying to decipher its message, find the meaning of life. These passages I won’t quote; they are long and better left to enjoy in their assigned habitat. But I want to quote some other ones…
Here’s Ribeyro revealing petty motives behind our actions and choices:
His dream was to return to Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, buy a farm, show his paesanos that he had made a lot of money in America, and die in his native land respected by the locals and above all envied by his cousin, Luigi Cellini, who as a child had punched him in the nose and broken it, as well as stolen one of his girlfriends, but who had never set foot outside that alpine terrain, nor owned more than ten cows.
A bit of Jane Austen á la Peru:
If summer was the season for masculine escapades, winter was the empire of women. [..] These mountain-dwelling families were tireless, and each always had a batch of women in reserve, whom they opportunistically placed into circulation for their ambiguous purpose.
There’s a lot of humor in these stories which I, for some reason, didn’t expect. (An amusing simile: The property fell upon Silvio like an elephant from a fifth-story window.)
It’s worth noting that, among other things, I learned that Nabokov called Freud “the quack from Vienna”.
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LA PALABRA DEL MUDO
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY KATHERINE SILVER
Self-criticism from the Spanish edition:
Al escribir mis cuentos en la pobreza o en la bonanza, en unas horas o en años de correcciones, en mi país o fuera de él, sólo he querido que ellos entretengan, enseñen o conmuevan. Y he querido, también, proporcionarme un placer: pues escribir, después de todo, no es otra cosa que inventar un autor a la medida de nuestro gusto.
Por otro lado, no advierto entre mis primeros y últimos relatos alguna evolución apreciable. Ello no me inquieta. Podría citar el caso de numerosos artistas que han hecho, aproximadamente, durante toda su vida la misma cosa. Veinte años en la vida de un autor puede ser mucho, pero en la historia de un género no es nada. Sé que hay y que habrá muchas formas diferentes de escribir cuentos. Yo trabajo alegre y concienzudamente dentro de mis medios y posibilidades. Nunca he tenido las pretensiones de ser un pionero o un innovador. Yo recojo las enseñanzas de los viejos; y creo en los límites de lo que va desapareciendo. Vanguardia y retaguardia no tienen para mí ningún sentido. Lo importante es ser fiel a mis impulsos y transmitir, simplemente, el rumor de la vida.
Por último, mi obra cuentística está agrupada bajo el rubro de La palabra del mudo. ¿Por qué este título? Porque en la mayoría de mis cuentos se expresan aquellos que en la vida están privados de la palabra. Los marginados, los olvidados, los condenados a una existencia sin sintonía y sin voz. Yo les he restituido este hálito negado y les he permitido modular sus anhelos, sus arrebatos y sus angustias.
P.S. Some other stories to come back to: The solution, Nuit caprense cirius illuminata, Nothing to be Done, Monsieur Baruch.
P.P.S. I’ve just discovered Prosas apátridas, a collection of short texts about different subject, written mostly during the years he lived in Paris:
¿Qué son estas Prosas apátridas? ¿Son apuntes sueltos, páginas de un diario íntimo, una filosofía de bolsillo? Posiblemente son todo eso y más; pero sobre todo son un autorretrato espiritual, la esencia que una experiencia literaria filtra de su fidelidad a la vida. Varios motivos centrales evitan la dispersión de la miscelánea. Estos motivos son: la literatura, el sexo, los hijos y la vida doméstica, la vejez y la muerte, la historia, la calle como espectáculo y la ventana como observatorio de la existencia.
Sounds too juicy to leave for later!