Tom Smithson Dead in His Garret

Abstract

November–December 2013 • 15 PC: What are the stages of the eternal Mexico you mention : indigenous, colonial Spanish, followed by what? AE: Modern Mexico, I suppose, the one of the War of Independence and the revolution, the industrialized Mexico, the democratic Mexico—something like that. But I must stress that this is not what I believe, it’s an ideological discourse that is embedded in the school system, and one that dominates the self-perception of Mexicans. PC: Dalkey Archive Press has just brought out the English version of your novel Hypothermia in a translation by Brendan Riley. AE: It’s my first book to appear in English, and particularly important to me because it helped me make the most difficult step for someone who writes in Spanish: from being a Mexican writer to becoming a Latin American writer. PC: Why is that a difficult step? AE: It’s the book in which I learned to write with absolute freedom. I was thirty-three—Dante’s age when he descended into the inferno—and I took Dante’s example seriously: I am in the middle of the road of life, a Hispanic who now lives in the United States, and this is how things look behind me and ahead of me. Hypothermia is my most personal book—it is frank and personal, though not autobiographical —and curiously it is my one book that speaks to the widest readership in the Spanish-speaking world. It is read all over Latin America, and not just in Mexico and Spain. Hypothermia put my work in the perspective in which Latin American writing, in opposition to national writing, is discussed. August 2013 Peter Constantine’s recent translations include The Essential Writings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Voltaire. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories, by Thomas Mann, and a National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. Tom Smithson Dead in His Garret José Manuel Cardona to Carlos Germán Belli You left through the smoke spirals of your famished fingers. You arose above the burning tide of Long Island perhaps to better dream from the depth of your equestrian eyelids of tasty morsels that your hungry clown palate could only imagine. It is false to say you died, that they vomited you forever as if a useless thing. Your sleep must be as light as the plumage of the California whores as graceful as one of those Manhattan elevators. They fear seeing you wake at some unearthly hour to go toward Wall Street and tell the sausage makers that it is beautiful to dictate commercial letters to the blond typists, but even more beautiful to wander the banks of the Hudson. Like that January day, that sunrise of young lips and sheer breasts when you directed your dreams toward the pastry shop, so astonished, so deeply surprised to discover God amidst the cream tarts and feel his weight on your stomach’s livid walls. Now only a flutter of ashes remains, and your name voiced by the newspaper boy. Translation from the Spanish By Hélène Cardona Editorial note: From El bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell Insular d’Eivissa, 2007). José Manuel Cardona (b. 1928) is a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (1953) and Poemas a Circe (1959). He was co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications. He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca. The Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He is an attorney and holds PhDs in literature and humanities. He worked for the UN most of his life. Hélène Cardona is the author of Dreaming My Animal Selves and The Astonished Universe. She holds an MA from the Sorbonne and has taught at Hamilton College and LMU, translated for the NEA and the Canadian Embassy, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. ...