Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries by Robert Bonazzi

Abstract

the Boom, and Katharina Einert’s fine study of how the novel defined Latin America for German readers stand out in the third cluster. The final and most expansive part centers on contemporary issues and includes the most thought-provoking articles, mainly those dealing with literary links between Latin America and India (Maurya and Ortiz Wallner) and Benjamin Loy’s valiant rereading of Bolaño and world literature. The book’s opening and closing pieces on transatlantic paradigms and “polylogic” philology are cursory and unpersuasive in their messianism. Latin American artists have posited that their contemporaneity has to be different since the early 1940s, when Joaquín Torres García explained the South as the new North and source of creative energy and fresh ideas. The world literature of this and other current studies does not deal unswervingly with such views, often for purely academic politics. Perhaps a volume on the incidence of “minor/small” authors or works in world literature could be part of the University of Cologne symposia on which this book is based. América Latina y la literatura mundial is a substantial and very revealing contribution to an unfinished conversation from which anglophone experts will certainly learn. Will H. Corral San Francisco Robert Bonazzi. Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries. San Antonio, Texas. Wings Press. 2015. 290 pages. Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries offers an in-depth look at the literature of international authors whose writings are “transformational art . . . capable of changing the world.” Author and critic Robert Bonazzi has chosen poets who have encountered diverse situations in life (political , social, cultural, etc.) and that have written about these issues from a marginal state, thus creating powerful works of literature that have “crossed real and stylistic borders.” The writers who form the collection of Outside the Margins could be considered migrants or emigrants who move within or outside their geographical boundaries, always reimagining new realities and spaces through their literature. An independent translator, Bonazzi presents to an English-language audience the literary works of such world-renowned writers as Octavio Paz and César Vallejo, as well as Aziz Shihab and Vassar Miller because of their aesthetic and intellectual literary value. Bonazzi, an avid reader of world literature, has himself crossed borders of thought and consciousness because he calls the writers here “the most astonishing in the world.” His analytical commentaries are brief readings of what he calls a “fraternal dialogue” with truthful poetry, a poetry that challenges the reader through techniques of experimentation and the complex use of language. One of the multiple virtues of the anthology is that it brings attention to the literature of the borderlands in the Anuradha Vaidya A Rag Doll after My Heart Trans. Shruti Nargundkar Zubaan Appearing for the first time in English, this free-verse novella about a complex mother-daughter relationship between a woman and the rag doll she makes was first published in Marathi in 1966. Its unconventional form—combining evocatively simple black-and-white illustrations with narrative poetry filled with neologisms and frequent enjambment—creates a compelling story that positions life as a game and questions our autonomy and free will. Union Ed. Alvin Pang & Ravi Shankar Ethos Books & Drunken Boat In this expansive collection, two seemingly unconnected literary worlds combine to create harmony between fifteen years of literature from the eclectic New York publication Drunken Boat and fifty years of Singaporean literature marking the country’s independence. Connections are found among poems, short prose works, excerpts from longer works, and freeform , experimental works such as a multiple-choice test in reflecting on the state of Singapore and America and their various links as well as the idea of union itself. Nota Bene WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 107 108 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 US Southwest, a literature that “negotiates between Anglo society and the Mexican community” in search of its own identity. A key component of this type of literature is that it bridges frontiers because writers and readers are continuously crossing over political, social, and cultural boundaries in search of a community of their own. Bonazzi comments that in “these narratives of otherness, we begin to hear the emerging chorus of genuine diversity.” Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries...