Amalia Gladhart
Photo by Sarah Grew
Bio
Amalia Gladhart is a translator and professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. She has written widely on contemporary Latin American literature and performance. Her translations include The Potbellied Virgin and Beyond the Islands, both by Alicia Yánez Cossío; and Trafalgar, by Angélica Gorodischer. Her collection of prose poems, Detours, was published by Burnside Review Press. Her short fiction appears in Saranac Review, The Fantasist, Atticus Review, Eleven Eleven, and elsewhere.
The practice of translation is both joyful and laborious; at its most rewarding, I find it a kind of difficult play. My aim in this and in previous projects has been to make available in English a wider range of the highly varied literature that falls under the umbrella, “Latin American,” including the voices of more women from the region. Tumba de jaguares is a novel in three linked parts, each attributed to a different, fictional novelist. Among Angélica Gorodischer’s many novels, it is the one that most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the military dictatorship of 1976-83. Yet while there are links to an Argentine reality, the where of the novel is a more ambiguous literary geography. Gorodsicher’s novel is at once an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, silence, and loss. The novel plays with the repetitive possibilities of words and images, of sounds and phrases, and raises questions about representation and writing, about whether art can offer refuge or resolution, and about the extent to which a writer’s authority must derive from experience rather than imagination.
An NEA Fellowship offers the time to delve into the novel’s puzzles, to address those silences, play with the sounds. It is a welcome opportunity for continued collaboration with a writer whose work I deeply admire and whose company I thoroughly enjoy. I was contacted by one potential publisher soon after the award was announced, which I take as a measure of the awards’ importance in bringing visibility to an array of translation projects. I am deeply grateful for the time to devote myself to this project, and for the encouragement the award represents, both from the NEA and from other translators.
"Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal from Jaguars' Tomb
[translated from the Spanish]
I dreamt I was in heaven. Not Heaven, paradise of fortunate souls. In the heavens, that sky blue—what? elytron?—that officially covers everything, covers religions promising eternal happiness as much as wretched poems, clumsily rhymed. In the heavens, up there above where, a poor imitation, a mirror of our own, there’s another city. Standing on dense clouds, hard as bitumen, compact, immobile as stone angels, clouds sprawled like sacks of corn, I felt no fear that I might fall and fall and smash against the ground. I think it fair to say I felt nothing. Indifference, maybe; or something still more disagreeable, like boredom. Poor heavens, to harbor this ill-humored man, even if it was but to show him the other side of the clouds, just for a moment. So much, so little, so miserly—I thought I should give something in exchange, that I was expected to give something, but what? What more can I give after giving what I gave, what they tore from me? I only know how to write, but words are little if it’s payment—although it could also be a debt—if it’s a matter of payment, of price. Or maybe I could sing, recount in a reverse accounting all the anguish and we’re back to the matter of the words. Poor heavens.
Lying on a high cloud bed, I looked around and saw the city. Not the city down below, the city in the clouds. It was a city, it could have been any of them, or none, it made no difference; a city, yes, that’s what it was, one of the largest. It was enormous, flooded with skyscrapers as if that were a way to defend it, to make it appear (or even be) invulnerable, and it was. I turned on my side so as to see it better and then I saw it the way it had to be seen: static, deserted, all white, the buildings perforated by tiny windows. I didn’t see gardens, or monuments or balconies or inhabitants or libraries or streets or bars or schools; only the city, the buildings that were the city; and the more I looked, the more solid and unfortunate it seemed. I thought it must be infinite, because one always returns to that which is probably infinite, desolate before the mystery and sheltered by its grandeur. That’s what gave it the contagious air of distress. Or maybe, it occurred to me on waking—because even as I was confirming my uneasiness, I woke up—maybe it had been built by the misfortune of a dying people who, knowing they were dying, left a monument. In the heavens, not in Heaven.
Up there, perhaps, there would be no storms and the sun would always be shining on the high towers, perforated and still.
No storms. Not sandstorms nor rainstorms nor snowstorms; storms like the ones I imagine on the riverbank at La Preciada, beyond the big curve, the whole place exposed to the west winds that carry dust and sand, and little men running to cover the canoes and tie up the animals; storms that form in five minutes and last at most an hour, an hour and a half, unless they let loose in the middle of the night, crossing the darkness to clear up in the morning over sleeplessness and mud.
But that is not—no, no, it isn’t—that is not the best way to start to tell the story, so as to tell, first of all, about what happened or should have happened.
About Angélica Gorodischer
The author of 30 novels, short story collections, and essays, Angélica Gorodischer (b. 1928) is known for her science fiction, fantasy, crime, and feminist writing. She is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement previously won by such writers as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen King. Published in 2005, Jaguars' Tomb is a 218-page novel of three distinct parts that addresses the difficulty of representing absence, including those absences left by the abductions and disappearances that occurred during the military dictatorship in Argentina's "Dirty War" of 1976-83. Each of the sections repeats images from the others and circles a central space that, though it serves different functions in each section, always has a sense of loss at its center.