Home // November.28.2016 // Michael Healy interviews Mario Murgia and Flaminia Ocampo
OF INTERESTS, INFLUENCES, AND INCONTROVERTIBILITY:
a conversation with the editors of The Battersea Review's Spanish issue
[NB: In what tradition do we place The Battersea Review? Out of what community does it spring? Forty years ago, we might have situated the journal centrally in the category of "Anglo-American letters." However, given the intervention of information technology (which enables easier communication and relations), and the increasingly international scope of personalities and points-of-origin represented by the authors in any given issue, we see the shortcomings of such a label. Call it instead a journal based in North America, with affiliations across the globe, and a cosmopolitan sensibility-an exquisite mingling of streams.
However you label it, the Battersea is, in the views of this editor, a critical organ of significant and rising importance. The latest issue is devoted to the literature of Spanish-speaking lands, a definition which has its own shortcomings (for more on that, read below). On the occasion of the launch of The Spanish Issue, I asked Michael Healy, a doctoral candidate at CUNY specializing in Spanish literature, to chat with issue editors Mario Murgia (Mexico City) and Flaminia Ocampo (Brooklyn, originally Buenos Aires). Their conversation, taking place in October and November 2016, ranged widely over questions of influence, critical principles, literary history, and the contemporary writing scene. The published version appearing here is based on edited and re-arranged from voice and text transcripts, for clarity and flow. - ZB]
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Michael Healy: Flaminia, Mario, greetings! Let's get right into it. Your new issue of The Battersea Review is organized around the theme of the Spanish language, though as I understand it, really you're looking at the regions of the world where Spanish is an important or dominant language. Language then is displaced by place as your organizing principle.
Perhaps we could begin by understanding the role of place in your work, Mario. In your case, that would be the metropolis, Mexico City. Do you feel a pressure on you to write as a citizen of CDMX, or to find a form possibly commensurate with your and others' experience of it?
Mario Murgia: I was born in Mexico City and have lived here for most of my adult life. So, whenever I write a text, whether it be in prose or verse, it inhabits Mexico City from the moment it's penned down, or from the very instant it's thought of. Similarly, Mexico City imbues, or actually floods, my writing, even from the moment I think of a line in a poem or a sentence in an essay. When I speak-and therefore when I write-I am very much a chilango, even if I write or speak in English, I suppose. I cannot get away from that, and whenever I read, I do it through the eyes of a chilango who has had the privilege to witness the fact that no other city in the world quite resembles Mexico City. Not even in Mexico as a country.
My fellow countrymen might as well accuse me of being sickeningly clichéd, but this city actually functions in spite of its disgruntled, amorphous self, which is not only flabbergasting but virtually impossible anywhere else, at least in the Western world. I certainly don't feel a pressure to write as a citizen of this quintessentially postmodern, voracious, megalopolis. Rather, it is an inescapable circumstance. though not altogether undesirable.
Healy: Does it work in the other direction, that is, do the circumstances of other cultures impinge upon Mexican literature, or Latin American literature more broadly? Let me ask it this way. How you perceive a potential cross-pollination between European literature-as embodied most obviously in this issue of the Battersea by references to and attention paid to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, and Milton-and Mexican or Latin American literature?
Murgia: As you know, 2016 is both a Shakespearean and a Cervantean year, and the Bard has certainly received more attention in this country than Cervantes has. Or at least that's what the general public can perceive. I would say that Anglophone literature has traditionally been very well received in Mexico and Latin America. The reasons for this may be manifold, but whatever their nature, the presence of both English and American literature, at least in this country, can be sensed very strongly. A few examples will suffice.
Shakespeare is well known, for instance, even if not necessarily textually. His plays, whenever they are staged, often prove to be quite popular.
One cannot overstate the importance of the close poetical relationship between, say, William Carlos Williams and, once again, Octavio Paz. Or the decisive influence that Eliot exerted on José Gorostiza, a peculiar literary phenomenon that has been documented on a number of occasions. More and more young writers resort to English-speaking poets and prose writers when it comes to developing their own practice-I can mention Poe or Ashbery off the top of my head.
The poetry of Janet Frame-a New Zealander!-has recently been rendered into Spanish by a group of accomplished Mexican women writers/translators.
On a slightly different note, over the past month or so, the Mexican press has been teeming with comments on Bob Dylan as an awardee of the Nobel Prize in Literature-very sound reasons have been given either for or against the decision. Milton is a horse of a different colour, however. Comparatively speaking, very few people are aware of his relevance. I'd like to think that my little contributions in terms of Miltonic translation-Comus, Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates-will help spread some knowledge of his writings. The whole of Paradise Lost, on the other hand, was translated in Argentina only a couple of years ago.
Healy: Well, could you comment on the contemporary translation scene? What do you perceive to be the relationship between Spain and Latin America as far as translation these days?
Flaminia Ocampo: Oh, may I jump in? This is my view. Many translations produced in Spain these days can be quite difficult to read if one grew up learning and speaking Latin American varieties of Spanish. I'm thinking of the translation of Karl Ove Knausgård specifically, into a very contemporary version of Iberian Spanish.
Now, I enjoy reading translations. I enjoy translations to English of contemporary French works because one's image of the writer often changes significantly. Some of the translations coming out of Spain I find quite shameful, frankly. It's not at all a Spanish with which a Latin American would feel comfortable.
Healy: So you think the Spanish, much like the French with their Académie, are still very conservative about their control of their language even today?
Ocampo: Yes, and I think conversely the language in the US has been made richer, because you do not have these authorities saying that you can or can't write this or that. The academies in France and Spain are very much the police of language, to the detriment of speech and literature.
Healy: We talked about Mario's roots in Mexico City, so let's ask you, Flaminia. What has been the influence of place on your work? What role has Buenos Aires played in your fiction?
Ocampo: Well, the most recent novel I've finished, though not yet published, is very much in Buenos Aires. Many of the sad stories I write happen in Argentina.
I wasn't very lucky in my experience in Argentina. I arrived when I was around twelve years old; I wasn't born there. And the years that I spent in Argentina were really a bad time. I arrived when the political violence was starting. For many, many years, I couldn't take out of my mind the images of all that. They stayed with me for years, but now of course they're long past. But that last novel is very much in Buenos Aires and at that time in history.
I arrived in Argentina in 1969 and I left for the first time in 1980, but then went back in '83, when democracy began again after many years of a dark time. I wasn't there very long before I left again and never went back to live. I go back a lot and have many friends there. But I think something very dark stayed with me and I could never forget about it, in a way.
Healy: This recent novel you mention, is it set more in the 1970s, the time you were living there, or in the contemporary Argentina you know from visiting?
Ocampo: Both. It's set mostly in a book fair because I wanted to write about that very, very oppressive feeling that stayed with me from those years. What kind of a setting would give that feeling of being such a closed place? I thought of a book fair.
 Flaminia Ocampo. |
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Healy: So the novel has a "meta" or involuted character?
Ocampo: Yes. The title is La furia del libro.
Healy: Is that a play on words between feria, "fair", and furia, "fury"?
Ocampo: Yes, that's right.
Healy: Heh, I like that. Let's shift from your writing to your work as an editor. How do you perceive your contribution to a North American view of Latin American literature, by way of this issue of The Battersea Review?
Ocampo: I tend to assume that writers who are well known in Latin America or Spain are also well known in the United States, but this is not always true. Juan Rulfo is a good example. As Nicholas Christopher writes in his piece in the issue, after reading Pedro Páramo he discovered that very few people in his literary circle had heard about it. For those who have never heard about Pedro Páramo, reading it might be a mind-blowing experience.
I believe that Mario and I share the purpose of wishing to show the richness and the diversity of Latin American writing.
Healy: And that category includes, for your purposes, a consideration of the place of Caribbean literature within the literature of the Americas generally?
Ocampo: Honestly, this is almost too huge for me to answer. Sadly, the Anglo-Caribbean or the Spanish-Caribbean or French-Caribbean literatures have often been considered in the margins of what was the continental literature. To escape "the language of the colonizers," we have to remember also the writing in French Creole, Jamaican Patois, Belizean Kriol, Papiamento.
Healy: Just last week, Emily Temple posted a list to Literary Hub, of ten books by indigenous authors we should all be reading. I suppose she was connecting it to the Thanksgiving observance here in the US, and perhaps to Standing Rock and the crisis unfolding there. So this idea of expanding the conception of the literature of a country or region, to include the languages that exist alongside or beneath the language of the hegemonic culture, is timely.
Your Battersea issue includes an essay by Lila Zemborain on the work of Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. Not to get too theoretical, but let me ask-to what degree does someone like Vicuña represent an "indigenist" strand in this literary part of the world?
Ocampo: "Indigenismo," "indigenista", these were terms that served racist ideas. The writer José Carlos Mariátegui expressed this well in his book Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality.
There were clearly great poets who came from an indigenous heritage, like César Vallejo [Peru] or Gabriela Mistral [Chile]. And writers like Miguel Angel Asturias [Guatemala] who wrote a brilliant novel, Men of Maize, on "indigenist subjects": legends and myths of the Mayans that become history, or the other way around history that becomes legend and myth. One could go on at great length on this subject.
"It is much easier to write in the language that surrounds you in the present than to write in a language that only inhabits your past, no matter how decisive that past was." |
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Healy: Can we move from the idea of the indigene to the idea of the expat? Flaminia, as an Argentine expatriate yourself, how do you perceive the expatriate experiences of writers such as Wilcock, or even a poet like Pizarnik who seems to have been influenced profoundly by her years in Paris?
Ocampo: Wilcock had an advantage over any expatriate writer: he was a genius for languages! Born in Argentina, from a British father, he ended up being an Italian writer, and his books written in Italian have the same depth of thought and quality as the ones written in Spanish; some would say that they are better, even. He used to say that he saw Argentina itself as an immense translation, and he might have seen Europe in exactly the same way.
The majority of expatriate writers find themselves writing in a language that is not the one they are living in, and this produces a sort of schism that can be fruitful or paralyzing. It is much easier to write in the language that surrounds you in the present than to write in a language that only inhabits your past, no matter how decisive that past was.
Healy: Living in New York, do you feel alienated from North American culture, or from the culture of the United States specifically?
Ocampo: I don't feel at home anywhere. When I'm in Argentina, I feel alienated from the culture there as well. The culture that was closest to me for many years-because I spent many years there as a child. and because French was my first language in a way-is France, but even when I go there now, I'm looking at it from a certain distance. So no, I don't feel that I can see any culture from the center of it. I will always be looking at it from a certain distance or from the outside. Even if the United States is the country where I've spent the most years of my life.
Healy: Mario mentioned Octavio Paz earlier, who has been a great looming presence in Latin American literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Has he had any influence on your work?
Ocampo: During my teenage years I read his essays and his poetry. He was a very important influence on me when I was young and he was still alive, but I'm not so sure about now. I have a memory of seeing Octavio Paz with his first wife, Elena Garro, in Rome from my childhood because he was a friend of the family. Sometimes they went out together. At that time he was a diplomat in Paris. My mother used to always talk about his writing and his poetry and his wife, who also a writer, a good writer, though my mother had many anecdotes about her being a very eccentric person.
 Mario Murgia. |
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Healy: Mario, same question, or similar question. To what degree do you still feel the spectre of Octavio Paz in Mexican literature, and more specifically in literature that addresses the reality of Mexico City?
Murgia: I find it interesting that you should use the word "spectre" to refer to Paz's figure. To a number of left-wing literary critics-and of course, academic feminists and those who favour Cultural Studies and other currents-Paz is indeed a spectre that deserves exorcising. Nevertheless, Paz's ghost, for better of for worse, has managed to remain current. His work, as well as his political filiations and even his personal relationships, can still create quite a stir in Mexico's cultural circles. His literary heritage, which includes the equally acclaimed and dreaded Letras Libres magazine, is a source of much intellectual and aesthetic debate, not only in academic environments, but also in public media, newspaper supplements and so on.
Paz still haunts us, and with a vengeance. These heated discussions take place both in Mexico City and the rest of the country. Far from being a local topic reserved to Mexico City as the country's main cultural hub, Paz's status as a national phenomenon is very much a widespread reality.
Coincidentally, this year we commemorate the 100th birthday of the controversial Garro, whom you mention, Flaminia. When she married Paz in 1937, the event caused all kinds of reactions, from Paz's admirers and detractors alike.
Healy: Twenty years ago, if I'd asked someone to name a Latin American author, I believe the first answer out of their mouth would have been Paz. Now, I think they might name Roberto Bolaño. What do you make of the phenomenon of his popularity?
Murgia: I get a lot of heat when I talk about Bolaño because I often say that, from my particular point of view, he is terribly overrated. The first time I read The Savage Detectives, for instance, I was left with a very strong feeling of linguistic insufficiency on Bolaño's part as a storyteller and a novelist. No Mexican I have ever met (including myself, of course) speaks, or has ever spoken, like the Mexican characters in his novels. One might as well say that no fictional character speaks like actual people, but still, I find his narrative register unpersuading. He's a very keen observer of the world, however, and his attention to detail is quite uncommon in contemporary novel-writing-in that sense he is almost Galdosian, all due distances considered. Perhaps that's why his novels are so awfully lengthy.
On the other hand, his popularity is not surprising at all. He was a literary and intellectual wanderer who could barely find his place in a world of contemporariness. A very strong sense of uncertainty, insecurity, helplessness, and even hopelessness, can be sensed in his writings, and many people find that very much alluring.
Healy: Flaminia, same question.
Ocampo: One of Bolaño's first books, By Night in Chile, I remember strongly. But I lost my enthusiasm after that. I loved how smart he was in certain ways: repeating the same story many times but told in different ways; pretending a completely fictional story was factual. Everyone is now compared with him, in a way. I don't have a strong passion for him as many people I know do.
I couldn't finish 2666, but I really enjoyed The Savage Detectives. His depiction of a certain group of poets in the 70s-I gained a real impression of that time and that group of poets. Even though it's in Mexico, it could have been in Argentina!
Healy: I'm thinking about another piece in your Battersea issue, by Gabriella Burnham, in which she's writing about the novel Near to the Wild Heart by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. She begins by recalling a moment in a Mexican bar in Brooklyn-maybe you know the place, Flaminia, living there-when she'd just come from a lecture by Lispector. She's thinking about that novel, and then she's overcome with a feeling of saudades for her family, who are elsewhere.
This brings me to asking about your view of Lispector and her effect on Latin American literature. In terms of the breadth and depth of her work ,and her role as a strong female voice, would you say she might have served, or does serve or will serve, as a model for female Latin American writers since?
"If good writing is basically good sentences, Lispector sentences are constructed in a continuous contradiction between beginning and end." |
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Ocampo: Clarice Lispector is one of those writers who are deeply original and incomparable to any other writer. Her language is hypnotic, because the way she constructs sentences is unique. Sentences in her writing are not only efficient carriers of meaning, but they reveal also the mystery inside the words and inside the combination of words. Usually we relate this to the sound that words create when put together, but it goes a little further than that. If good writing is basically good sentences, Lispector sentences are constructed in a continuous contradiction between beginning and end. She has a way to take you into what you believe will be, and to carry you somewhere else, completely unexpected, but it is not done in a linear way. Her sentences are more like a circle. For me, she should serve as a model for any writer, male, female, and from any place around the world.
Healy: Has your own writing been influenced by the real experience of women in Latin America, for example, the subject matter of your book of short stories, Other People's Phobias?
Ocampo: That first story was based on something that happened while I was living in Uruguay. The idea of a serial killer didn't really exist there until this guy started killing women.
But when I was thinking about Bolaño mixing fiction and nonfiction, I was thinking of Nazi Literature in the Americas. These characters who may not actually exist but seem completely possible. He invents these characters who seem very real and he does it all the time and does it well. This character in By Night in Chile is based on the violence in the 70s. He uses the same story in Distant Star and in Amulet.
Healy: Can I ask you to say a bit about how your aunts were involved in the creation and maintenance of the very influential journal of Latin American literature, Sur? For quite a long time, it was the peak or near the peak of intellectual achievement in Latin America, as I understand it.
Ocampo: Yes, for forty years, which for a literary magazine is really a long time.
Healy: Do you feel as if there's any comparable journal today?
Ocampo: At that level? No. It's a terrible thing to say, but Victoria Ocampo paid a lot, she paid her writers in a way that is almost nonexistent today. Maybe at a place like The New York Review of Books. I'm thinking of Roger Caillois, whom she invited to Buenos Aires in 1939. Obviously, making a living today as a writer is not really possible for most people.
Healy: True. I think it may not be possible for many people, of whatever profession, but yes-for writers, the challenges in this new economy are new and without obvious solution.
I think I need to get your collaborator back into this conversation! Mario, you wrote in a recent piece in The Critical Flame about memorability as a measure of a poem's worth. Which poets and poems in the English- and Spanish-language canons are the most memorable to you and why?
"Hardly a single day goes by that I don't conjure up at least a couple of lines from Lorca's "The Gypsy Nun," or Borges's "Golem"." |
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Murgia: I keep repeating to myself poems like Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London," Wallace Stevens's "The Snowman," and Shakespeare's sonnet 147. These all revolve around the notion of death, which to my understanding is the only poetic subject there really is. "Destino," by Rosario Castellanos is, I think, an unsung masterpiece in this respect. Call me morbid, as Morrissey once said.
Hardly a single day goes by that I don't conjure up at least a couple of lines from Lorca's "The Gypsy Nun," or Borges's "Golem." Poetry on poetry tends to be memorable to me as well. It's the ultimate kind of solipsism. In his lines Quevedo, like no one else in Spanish, knows how to bring together the two subjects, which, I insist, are just but one. Sor Juana knows what I'm talking about.
Healy: I've noticed a preoccupation in your criticism with a kind of imminence a poem has-you call it incontrovertibility at one point in that Critical Flame piece-and I'm wondering if you have any ideas about how a poet or poem comes to achieve this state or trick. The closest analogue I can think of is Harold Bloom's commentary on Walt Whitman's poetry having an inevitability about it. Of course, it wasn't inevitable, but the force of Bloom's point is that Whitman has convinced us that it was.
"Every good poem manages to fulfil its own needs, of whatever kind." |
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Murgia: When you keep returning to the same poem or the same poet, the trick, as you call it, has been done. It is essentially and initially a matter of taste, of course; but then, when one's liking or disliking of a piece becomes an explanation (or revelation) of a part of the world, then the poem has achieved both imminence and immanence. It is my belief that this process of essentialization, if you will, does not depend entirely on the reader, however. It is not simply a matter of reception, as some have called the phenomenon. I've always believed that every good poem (with multiple pinches of salt) is always a piece that manages to fulfil its own needs, of whatever kind.
One can always do a simple, if obvious, exercise to perceive or sense the wholeness of a poem-try substituting one single word from any given line. If the sense of the poem changes sensibly-and if it's a good poem, it will change, often for the worse- then there is no superfluousness in it. If this can be said of the greater part of the output of a poet, then both the reader and the poet have achieved some sort of "contract of mutual inevitability." It is a tacit agreement, but a powerful one.
Healy: Do you have any thoughts on the view of Latin American literature that you and Flaminia have presented to an Anglophone and/or international audience, in this issue of the Battersea?
Murgia: Flaminia and I hope that the pieces and subjects we have-painstakingly-chosen will give audiences a faint idea of the vigour in current Hispanophone literature and criticism. As I've said elsewhere, an effort of this kind is necessarily partial, to the point, nearly, of futility. Still, we hope that this modest sample will open new perspectives to those willing to explore the mesmerising territories south of the (cultural) border. Most great literary genres have been covered, which implies, we think, great variety, openness, and ideally, memorability.
Healy: Are there any young Latin American writers you specifically admire?
Murgia: I believe Jorge Volpi is a very respectable author-I've got a soft spot for unashamed erudition. There's the young Cuban-Puerto Rican-American poet and translator Jorge Rodríguez-Miralles (Everything/Nothing, 2014), to whom I owe fine, enriched English versions of my own poems. He's done some translations of Andrés García Cerdán for the issue.
I feel proud to say that some of the young (as far as I know, they're well under 30) Mexican poets and authors I like best have been my students-there's José Luis Rico (Jabalíes, 2015) and Jazmina Barrera (Foreign Body/Cuerpo extraño, 2013), both of whom, I'm sure, will become household names in Mexican and Latin American literature sometime in the future.
Healy: Flaminia, same question to you. Or let me ask you specifically-are there any younger writers whose work you especially admire?
Ocampo: Leila Guerriero, an Argentine, I find really very interesting. Selva Almada. Eugenia Almeida, are very young writers that I find interesting. I'm interested in how younger generations are going to write.
Let's see. Pedro Mairal. Rachel Kushner, her novel is The Flamethrowers. How old is she? I never look to see how young or old writers are!
Anna Quindlen. Her book is Still Life with Bread Crumbs.
Okay, the word "young" confuses me. Jhumpa Lahiri: is she young anymore?
Rachel Cusk is a British writer; I really like her, but I'm not sure if she's young anymore. Her last novel was Outline.
I confess I used to read more women than men, but I'm not sure what that says about me.
Healy: I think we all belong to the books we read, at the age that we read them, whether WE are old or young when we read them, or whether the authors that wrote them are young or old. Look-whatever the case, I've got a few new names to look up.
Thank you, Flaminia, and Mario, both of you, for taking the time to let me pick your brain. The issue looks fantastic, and I think is a genuine contribution to the conversation between Anglo-American literature-where I'd personally locate The Battersea Review's critical role-and the literary culture of Latin American and, more broadly, the Spanish-speaking world.
Ocampo: You're most welcome, and thank you!
Murgia: Yes, Michael, thank you. [end]
About the interviewees:
FLAMINIA OCAMPO's stories have appeared in Spanish as La locura de los otros (2003) and in English as Other People's Phobias (2013). Her other books include the novels Siete Vidas (2004) and Cobayos Criollos (2015), a biographical study of Victoria Ocampo, Victoria y sus amigos (2009), and two books of essays, Deseos y desconsuelo (2015), Un asesino entre nosotros: Eichmann en Buenos Aires (2016).
MARIO MURGIA is a full-time professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), He is also a poet and a literary translator from English and Italian into Spanish. His most recent translations (which he has also prologued and annotated) include Spanish versions of Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and the Ludlow Masque by John Milton. His latest book, Versos escritos en agua. La influencia de Paradise Lost en Byron, Keats y Shelley (Lines Writ in Water. The Influence of Paradise Lost on Byron, Keats, and Shelley), was published earlier this year.
Banner graphic source, top: photograph (cropped) of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City during the Festival de las Luces in 2015, taken by Adrián Cerón. Reproduced here under the terms of the creator-assigned CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Banner graphic source, bottom: photograph (cropped) of the El Ateneo Book Store in Buenos Aires, taken by Nan Palmero. Reproduced here under the terms of the creator-assigned CC BY 2.0 license.
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