Ovid in Cabimbú
In a distant, ruined and today nearly forgotten country where people said there’d once been a paradise, the poet laureate, famous for his Elegy on the Death of the Last Horse, refused to prostrate himself at the feet of the tyrant, and as expected of the despicable charmer, the distinguished bard was exiled to a gloomy plateau in the western mountain ranges. At first, defeated, he thought he’d never endure such solitude and the intense cold that soaked into his bones. And yet, sooner than later he adapted to the difficulties and penuries of that type of life. Twenty years later, when the tyrant was assassinated in an uprising by one of his henchmen and dragged through the streets like a dog, a committee from the new regime presented itself at the poet’s premises with the purpose of offering him a return home, to the prerogatives of which he had been stripped and all the honors he deserved. The poet refused to receive them because there in that remote place among the rocky peaks, goats and fog he had found, at last, some peace and calm.
*
Ovidio en Cabimbú
En un lejano, destartalado y hoy casi olvidado país donde se decía que antaño había estado el paraíso, el poeta laureado, famoso por su Elegía a la muerte del último caballo, se negó a prosternarse a los pies del tirano, y como era de esperar del infame marrullero, el insigne vate fue desterrado a un páramo lóbrego en la cordillera occidental. Al principio, abatido, pensaba que no podría soportar semejante soledad y el intenso frío que calaba los huesos. Sin embargo, más temprano que tarde se adaptó a las incomodidades y penurias de aquella forma de vida. Veinte años después, cuando el tirano fue asesinado en una revuelta por uno de sus espalderos y arrastrado por las calles al igual que un perro, una comitiva del nuevo régimen se presentó en los predios del poeta con el propósito de ofrecerle la vuelta a casa, las prerrogativas de las que había sido despojado y todos los honores que se merecía. El poeta se negó a recibirlos pues en aquel apartado lugar entre farallones, cabras y nieblas había encontrado, al fin, sosiego y paz.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 23 February 2020 }
Showing posts with label Ednodio Quintero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ednodio Quintero. Show all posts
9.01.2019
A Victoria de Stefano / Ednodio Quintero
To Victoria de Stefano
[Photo: Vasco Szinetar]
Reading Victoria de Stefano is a privilege, an aesthetic experience, a delight for the senses. Ever since I discovered her opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), I haven’t stopped frequenting the pages of our writer like a swimmer who heads into deeper waters. And if I had to find a couple adjectives to define Victoria’s writing, density and intensity would work. Her prose, referring to just one aspect of the qualities of a unique, original work that flies high, possesses a frenetic rhythm and an astonishing conceptual wealth, possesses allure, fluidity, linguistic complexities and allows itself to be read with the joy we tend to feel when revisiting classics.
Victoria de Stefano is born in 1940 in Rimini, Italy, and her mother tongue is obviously Italian. Thrown into exile at the end of the war, she lands in Caracas at age six and according to her own testimony she “forgets” her first tongue and acquires the sweet and melodic speech of caraqueños. Ever since she was a girl she writes in Spanish, a “borrowed” language.
In Idea of Prose, Giorgio Agamben, citing Paul Celan when he affirms, “Truth can only be spoken in the mother tongue,” proposes a fascinating topic regarding the acquisition and use of language, particularly in cases of bilingualism. Following Celan, my hypothesis is that Victoria conserves in some place of her memory the sonority and enchantment of her mother tongue, and this in turn flowers joyously for our delight in her writing’s splendor.
*
A Victoria de Stefano
Leer a Victoria de Stefano es un privilegio, una experiencia estética, un goce de los sentidos. Desde que descubrí su opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), no he dejado de frecuentar las páginas de nuestra escritora como un nadador que se adentra en aguas profundas. Pues si hubiera que buscar un adjetivo, o dos, para definir la escritura de Victoria, nos bastaría con densidad e intensidad. Su prosa, para referirnos apenas a un aspecto de las cualidades de una escritura única, original y de alto vuelo, posee un ritmo trepidante y una asombrosa riqueza conceptual, posee hechizo, fluidez, complejidades lingüísticas y se deja leer con la alegría con que solemos revisitar a los clásicos.
Victoria de Stefano nace en 1940 en Rímini, Italia, y su lengua materna es obviamente el italiano. Aventada al exilio luego del final de la guerra, a los seis años recala en Caracas y según su propio testimonio “olvida” su lengua originaria y adquiere el dulce y melodioso hablar de los caraqueños. Desde niña escribe en español, un idioma “prestado”.
En Idea de la prosa, Giorgio Agamben, citando a Paul Celan cuando afirma “Solo en la lengua materna puede decirse la verdad”, plantea un tema fascinante acerca de la adquisición y uso del lenguaje, en particular en los casos de bilingüismo. Siguiendo a Celan, mi hipótesis es que Victoria conserva en algún lugar de su memoria la sonoridad y el encanto de su lengua materna, y esta para nuestro deleite aflora gozosa en el esplendor de su escritura.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1 September 2019 }
Reading Victoria de Stefano is a privilege, an aesthetic experience, a delight for the senses. Ever since I discovered her opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), I haven’t stopped frequenting the pages of our writer like a swimmer who heads into deeper waters. And if I had to find a couple adjectives to define Victoria’s writing, density and intensity would work. Her prose, referring to just one aspect of the qualities of a unique, original work that flies high, possesses a frenetic rhythm and an astonishing conceptual wealth, possesses allure, fluidity, linguistic complexities and allows itself to be read with the joy we tend to feel when revisiting classics.
Victoria de Stefano is born in 1940 in Rimini, Italy, and her mother tongue is obviously Italian. Thrown into exile at the end of the war, she lands in Caracas at age six and according to her own testimony she “forgets” her first tongue and acquires the sweet and melodic speech of caraqueños. Ever since she was a girl she writes in Spanish, a “borrowed” language.
In Idea of Prose, Giorgio Agamben, citing Paul Celan when he affirms, “Truth can only be spoken in the mother tongue,” proposes a fascinating topic regarding the acquisition and use of language, particularly in cases of bilingualism. Following Celan, my hypothesis is that Victoria conserves in some place of her memory the sonority and enchantment of her mother tongue, and this in turn flowers joyously for our delight in her writing’s splendor.
*
A Victoria de Stefano
Leer a Victoria de Stefano es un privilegio, una experiencia estética, un goce de los sentidos. Desde que descubrí su opera magna, Historias de la marcha a pie (1997), no he dejado de frecuentar las páginas de nuestra escritora como un nadador que se adentra en aguas profundas. Pues si hubiera que buscar un adjetivo, o dos, para definir la escritura de Victoria, nos bastaría con densidad e intensidad. Su prosa, para referirnos apenas a un aspecto de las cualidades de una escritura única, original y de alto vuelo, posee un ritmo trepidante y una asombrosa riqueza conceptual, posee hechizo, fluidez, complejidades lingüísticas y se deja leer con la alegría con que solemos revisitar a los clásicos.
Victoria de Stefano nace en 1940 en Rímini, Italia, y su lengua materna es obviamente el italiano. Aventada al exilio luego del final de la guerra, a los seis años recala en Caracas y según su propio testimonio “olvida” su lengua originaria y adquiere el dulce y melodioso hablar de los caraqueños. Desde niña escribe en español, un idioma “prestado”.
En Idea de la prosa, Giorgio Agamben, citando a Paul Celan cuando afirma “Solo en la lengua materna puede decirse la verdad”, plantea un tema fascinante acerca de la adquisición y uso del lenguaje, en particular en los casos de bilingüismo. Siguiendo a Celan, mi hipótesis es que Victoria conserva en algún lugar de su memoria la sonoridad y el encanto de su lengua materna, y esta para nuestro deleite aflora gozosa en el esplendor de su escritura.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1 September 2019 }
6.17.2019
En la oscurana / Ednodio Quintero
In the Gloom
By candlelight, as if we were devotees of Saint Gaston Bachelard, my beloved Rosbelis and I sit down to share our cold frugal dinner: chopped potatoes, onions and tomatoes, canned sardines and picante sauce from Trujillo (we have no electricity or gas, and we still resist the idea of making a bonfire out of the library panels on the balcony terrace). While we savor our exquisite meal, out there in the immediate shadows that settle over the city, you can hear something like the roar of tin pan drums followed by shouts of cheering and rage that bring to mind so-and-so’s mother. Later on, at the edge of midnight, we read aloud to each other under the covers. I read a few pages from Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, and Rosbelis reads “The Storyteller” from the book Illuminations by Walter Benjamin. We end up falling asleep knowing the sun will rise tomorrow, and nothing and no one will ever take the light that comes from high up in the sky away from us.
*
En la oscurana
A la llama de una vela, como si fuéramos devotos de san Gaston Bachelard, mi amada Rosbelis y yo nos sentamos a compartir nuestra frugal cena fría: papas, cebollas y tomates picados, sardina en lata y picante trujillano (carecemos de electricidad y gas, y todavía nos resistimos a la idea de hacer una fogata con las tablas de la biblioteca en la terraza del balcón). Mientras saboreamos nuestro exquisito manjar, allá afuera, en la tiniebla inmediata que se cierne sobre la ciudad, se escucha el resonar como de tambores de hojalata seguido de gritos de júbilo y rabia que le recuerdan la mamá a un fulano de tal. Más tarde, al filo de la medianoche, metidos entre las cobijas intercambiamos lecturas en voz alta. Yo leo unas páginas de Biografías imaginarias de Marcel Schowb, y Rosbelis lee “El narrador” del libro Iluminaciones de Walter Benjamin. Al fin nos quedamos dormidos sabiendo que mañana saldrá el sol, y esa luz que viene del alto cielo nada ni nadie nos la arrebatará.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 June 2019 }
By candlelight, as if we were devotees of Saint Gaston Bachelard, my beloved Rosbelis and I sit down to share our cold frugal dinner: chopped potatoes, onions and tomatoes, canned sardines and picante sauce from Trujillo (we have no electricity or gas, and we still resist the idea of making a bonfire out of the library panels on the balcony terrace). While we savor our exquisite meal, out there in the immediate shadows that settle over the city, you can hear something like the roar of tin pan drums followed by shouts of cheering and rage that bring to mind so-and-so’s mother. Later on, at the edge of midnight, we read aloud to each other under the covers. I read a few pages from Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, and Rosbelis reads “The Storyteller” from the book Illuminations by Walter Benjamin. We end up falling asleep knowing the sun will rise tomorrow, and nothing and no one will ever take the light that comes from high up in the sky away from us.
*
En la oscurana
A la llama de una vela, como si fuéramos devotos de san Gaston Bachelard, mi amada Rosbelis y yo nos sentamos a compartir nuestra frugal cena fría: papas, cebollas y tomates picados, sardina en lata y picante trujillano (carecemos de electricidad y gas, y todavía nos resistimos a la idea de hacer una fogata con las tablas de la biblioteca en la terraza del balcón). Mientras saboreamos nuestro exquisito manjar, allá afuera, en la tiniebla inmediata que se cierne sobre la ciudad, se escucha el resonar como de tambores de hojalata seguido de gritos de júbilo y rabia que le recuerdan la mamá a un fulano de tal. Más tarde, al filo de la medianoche, metidos entre las cobijas intercambiamos lecturas en voz alta. Yo leo unas páginas de Biografías imaginarias de Marcel Schowb, y Rosbelis lee “El narrador” del libro Iluminaciones de Walter Benjamin. Al fin nos quedamos dormidos sabiendo que mañana saldrá el sol, y esa luz que viene del alto cielo nada ni nadie nos la arrebatará.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 June 2019 }
7.26.2017
Ednodio Quintero, Venezuela / Enrique Vila-Matas
Ednodio Quintero, Venezuela
[Ednodio Quintero & Enrique Vila-Matas, Madrid, 2017, via @ednodio]
There will be no Rómulo Gallegos Prize this year, which for many people is further proof of the destruction of the public sector that manages art and culture in Venezuela. “Institutions have been de-naturalized, the museums, the libraries, they are no longer what they were,” points out Antonio López Ortega, Venezuelan novelist, essayist and well-known cultural consultant, for whom the most surprising thing about all this is that, despite all the problems in recent years, the quality of creation in Venezuela remains intact. His words immediately reminded me of Ednodio Quintero, born in 1947 in the state of Trujillo near the beautiful Andean city of Mérida. This great novelist has built a literary world charged with its own dense, marvelously invented reality whose point of departure has always been the imagination of the village elevated to its fullest potential; I still remember the pleasant and strong impression I had in 1991 of his first novel, La danza del jaguar.
Quintero is seen more and more as an essential writer, but the recognition of his work has been slow, due to an infinity of reasons, among which we might include the cultural drift of a Venezuela isolated from the rest of the world and also the fact that he belongs to the category of what Fabían Casas, speaking of Bolaño, called “writers from before,” in other words, he belongs to the category of those who were never simply writers, but also points of connection between life and literature, lighthouses where young people cans see themselves reflected. Quintero is one of those “writers from before,” and it’s possible that, in the long run, being far away from the media spotlight was beneficial for him, because it allowed him to accede to the ideal of certain noble novelists: to become pure text, to be strictly a literature.
At the center of his most recent novel, El amor es más frío que la muerte (Candaya), there’s a moment when the narrator, the writer from before, “the stateless one,” hero of women (in the manner of Adolfo Bioy Casares, but with a Japanese influence), observes that a rock has the shape of a tomb and it reminds him of Procrustes’s bed. A bed of stone, he thinks. And he lies down face-up on the cold slab and says he feels comfortable, serene like a king in a house for all time. That intense instant of the novel could hold the absolute key to the eternal, dynastic body that Quintero’s texts enthrone in the history of literature for all time; one could say the Venezuelan is in tune with that famous outburst by Pierre Michon in Corps du roi, where we’re told the monarch has two bodies: one eternal, dynastic, that the text exalts and consecrates, and which we arbitrarily call Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett; and another mortal, functional, relative body, the rag, that moves towards carrion; who’s called, and is only called Dante, and wears a little cap he pulls down toward his flat nose; or he’s just called Joyce and wears eyeglasses, or he’s called Shakespeare and is an affable and robust rentier with an Elizabethan gorget.
{ Enrique Vila-Matas, El País, 24 July 2017 }
There will be no Rómulo Gallegos Prize this year, which for many people is further proof of the destruction of the public sector that manages art and culture in Venezuela. “Institutions have been de-naturalized, the museums, the libraries, they are no longer what they were,” points out Antonio López Ortega, Venezuelan novelist, essayist and well-known cultural consultant, for whom the most surprising thing about all this is that, despite all the problems in recent years, the quality of creation in Venezuela remains intact. His words immediately reminded me of Ednodio Quintero, born in 1947 in the state of Trujillo near the beautiful Andean city of Mérida. This great novelist has built a literary world charged with its own dense, marvelously invented reality whose point of departure has always been the imagination of the village elevated to its fullest potential; I still remember the pleasant and strong impression I had in 1991 of his first novel, La danza del jaguar.
Quintero is seen more and more as an essential writer, but the recognition of his work has been slow, due to an infinity of reasons, among which we might include the cultural drift of a Venezuela isolated from the rest of the world and also the fact that he belongs to the category of what Fabían Casas, speaking of Bolaño, called “writers from before,” in other words, he belongs to the category of those who were never simply writers, but also points of connection between life and literature, lighthouses where young people cans see themselves reflected. Quintero is one of those “writers from before,” and it’s possible that, in the long run, being far away from the media spotlight was beneficial for him, because it allowed him to accede to the ideal of certain noble novelists: to become pure text, to be strictly a literature.
At the center of his most recent novel, El amor es más frío que la muerte (Candaya), there’s a moment when the narrator, the writer from before, “the stateless one,” hero of women (in the manner of Adolfo Bioy Casares, but with a Japanese influence), observes that a rock has the shape of a tomb and it reminds him of Procrustes’s bed. A bed of stone, he thinks. And he lies down face-up on the cold slab and says he feels comfortable, serene like a king in a house for all time. That intense instant of the novel could hold the absolute key to the eternal, dynastic body that Quintero’s texts enthrone in the history of literature for all time; one could say the Venezuelan is in tune with that famous outburst by Pierre Michon in Corps du roi, where we’re told the monarch has two bodies: one eternal, dynastic, that the text exalts and consecrates, and which we arbitrarily call Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett; and another mortal, functional, relative body, the rag, that moves towards carrion; who’s called, and is only called Dante, and wears a little cap he pulls down toward his flat nose; or he’s just called Joyce and wears eyeglasses, or he’s called Shakespeare and is an affable and robust rentier with an Elizabethan gorget.
{ Enrique Vila-Matas, El País, 24 July 2017 }
6.26.2016
Owner of a Lonely Heart / Ednodio Quintero
Owner of a Lonely Heart
—a song by Yes—
They jumped me on the corner, and before I could react they were already taking me away, almost dragging me by the armpits. The attackers were two strong individuals, armed to the teeth, dark sunglasses, keepers of the law. We climbed the steps to the Palace of Justice, an iron mass of concrete and mirrored windows, ninety stories high, the tallest building in the city. I knew there wouldn’t be a trial nor any right to defense: they’d execute me with a shot to the head, in an airless room. A clamoring multitude was waiting in the reception room, they were celebrating a carnavalesque ritual and fighting over the belongings of a beggar who thought he was a king. I took a chance during a moment of confusion and escaped. I got into an express elevator that was heading to the top floor, ninety seconds is all it took. I ran towards the terrace, from where I could see the cursed city from a steep height. I was the owner of a lonely, frozen heart, my heart. I took a running start and threw myself into the void, heading south. I’ve always dreamed I was a falcon.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Combates, Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2009 }
—a song by Yes—
They jumped me on the corner, and before I could react they were already taking me away, almost dragging me by the armpits. The attackers were two strong individuals, armed to the teeth, dark sunglasses, keepers of the law. We climbed the steps to the Palace of Justice, an iron mass of concrete and mirrored windows, ninety stories high, the tallest building in the city. I knew there wouldn’t be a trial nor any right to defense: they’d execute me with a shot to the head, in an airless room. A clamoring multitude was waiting in the reception room, they were celebrating a carnavalesque ritual and fighting over the belongings of a beggar who thought he was a king. I took a chance during a moment of confusion and escaped. I got into an express elevator that was heading to the top floor, ninety seconds is all it took. I ran towards the terrace, from where I could see the cursed city from a steep height. I was the owner of a lonely, frozen heart, my heart. I took a running start and threw myself into the void, heading south. I’ve always dreamed I was a falcon.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Combates, Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2009 }
4.26.2014
Cacería / Ednodio Quintero
Hunt
He remains stretched out on his back, on the narrow wooden bed. With his eyes barely open he searches the strange lines on the ceiling for the beginning of a path that might lead him away from his pursuer. For nights on end he’s endured the harassment, crossing plains full of venomous weeds, wading through rivers of crushed glass, crossing bridges as fragile as crackers. When the pursuer is about to reach him, when he feels him so that close his breath burns the nape of his neck, he thrashes around in bed like a rooster slashed with a spur to his heart. This is when the pursuer stops and leans against a tree to rest, patiently waiting for the victim to close his eyes so he can resume the hunt.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }
He remains stretched out on his back, on the narrow wooden bed. With his eyes barely open he searches the strange lines on the ceiling for the beginning of a path that might lead him away from his pursuer. For nights on end he’s endured the harassment, crossing plains full of venomous weeds, wading through rivers of crushed glass, crossing bridges as fragile as crackers. When the pursuer is about to reach him, when he feels him so that close his breath burns the nape of his neck, he thrashes around in bed like a rooster slashed with a spur to his heart. This is when the pursuer stops and leans against a tree to rest, patiently waiting for the victim to close his eyes so he can resume the hunt.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }
4.15.2014
Tatuaje / Ednodio Quintero
Tattoo
When her fiancé came back from the sea, they got married. On his trip to the eastern islands the husband had carefully learned the art of the tattoo. On the very night of the wedding, and to his wife’s surprise, he put his abilities to use: armed with needles, Chinese ink and food coloring he drew on the woman’s belly a beautiful, enigmatic and sharpened dagger.
The couple’s happiness was intense, and as usually happens in these cases: brief. A strange illness revived in the man’s body, contracted on the muddy islands of the East. And one afternoon, facing the sea, the sailor began the longed-for trip to eternity.
In the solitude of her room, the woman let loose her wails, and occasionally, as though finding some consolation there, she would caress her belly adorned with the precious dagger.
The pain was intense, and also brief. The other one, a terra firma man, started to circle her. She, at first elusive and cautious, eventually gave ground. They agreed on a date; and on the set night she waited for him naked in the room’s darkness. And in the clamor of combat, the lover, strong and impetuous, fell dead on her, cut through by the dagger.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }
When her fiancé came back from the sea, they got married. On his trip to the eastern islands the husband had carefully learned the art of the tattoo. On the very night of the wedding, and to his wife’s surprise, he put his abilities to use: armed with needles, Chinese ink and food coloring he drew on the woman’s belly a beautiful, enigmatic and sharpened dagger.
The couple’s happiness was intense, and as usually happens in these cases: brief. A strange illness revived in the man’s body, contracted on the muddy islands of the East. And one afternoon, facing the sea, the sailor began the longed-for trip to eternity.
In the solitude of her room, the woman let loose her wails, and occasionally, as though finding some consolation there, she would caress her belly adorned with the precious dagger.
The pain was intense, and also brief. The other one, a terra firma man, started to circle her. She, at first elusive and cautious, eventually gave ground. They agreed on a date; and on the set night she waited for him naked in the room’s darkness. And in the clamor of combat, the lover, strong and impetuous, fell dead on her, cut through by the dagger.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }
1.14.2014
Ednodio Quintero, literatura resistente en estado puro / Flor Gragera de León
Ednodio Quintero, Resistant Literature in Its Pure State
The writer Ednodio Quintero. / Carmen Secanella
Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo state, Venezuela, 1947) has been on vacation for a few days in a wild place in the high peaks of the Venezuelan Andes. The same one that saw him born when there was no electricity or cars, “a zone with a Medieval imaginary and customs” for which he feels grateful. There is a curious relationship between the author, who occupies a place among the greats in the literature of his country, and geography. His father had a political position as a registrar that forced his entire family to continuously move around, and Quintero’s first memories are tied to a type of chronology of places. Afterwards, other memories have come linked to the great cities such Mexico D.F., Paris and Tokyo, all of which he confesses to admire.
But critics describe the austere and hallucinatory landscape of his childhood as being inseparable from the cadence and register of his very personal voice. Despite that deep connection to the land, some miss the target by mistakenly trying to find biographical references in Quintero’s literature. Or subjectivities. Or classifications. He has cultivated all types of work: novels, essays, movie scripts and those tales of disconcerting borders whose second compilation has now been published by Barcelona’s Editorial Candaya in Ceremonies, after the first one titled Combates (1995-2000). The stories in the latest volume were written during the twenty year period between 1974 and 1994 and they represent that purely literary universe to which he has aspired. He doesn’t play down his effort or laziness along the way. “It’s hard for me to be a realist author. I put dreams, reality, personal experience in a blender... It’s a gift that some God has given me, even though I’m polytheistic...,” he says on the phone from Venezuela’s Mérida, where he now lives. It’s a matter of “the imagination at the service of nothing, literature in its most pure and savage state.”
“I remember a dream I had when I was four years old. A demon was chasing me and I found myself escaping; hidden in a cloud I took off flying,” he recalls. In an almost casual manner, the author directly highlights a great pursuit in his life: freedom. “It’s the value I defend the most,” he clarifies. Quintero mocks the vanity of artists, those who depend on their ego, which is something that makes him “laugh,” as well as the servitude that comes with certain “leonine contracts” from publishing houses that demand periodical publications. In order to publish El hijo de Gengis Khan (Seix Barral, 2013), a successful novel in Venezuela, he had to wander around for six years to various publishing houses and even then, he declares without resentment that he’s “like a 19th century writer.” “Today there’s an anxiety for fame. My good friend César Aira ironically recommends that in those cases you should publish first and write later...”
Nor does he seem to wear a watch on his wrist. He went for ten years without writing and he explains how he took advantage of that time to “read the classics” and to fill himself up “with lots of music.” “It’s hard for me to see myself as a writer and I don’t have the discipline... like that of a functionary. I write in bursts.” While he sarcastically assures me that people scold him because he spends his money or because he gives it away too quickly, at the same time he says he’s frightened by another, very different loss, his reason. “I fear mental deterioration.” And he adds, clarifying the fact that he’s joking: “I might commit suicide if I get Alzheimer’s, if I can remember where I put the gun...”
For this lifelong voracious reader, among whose memorable readings he treasures Don Quixote which he went through “almost in one sitting,” movies have been another great love and an important influence on his writing: “My fiction works through images, I like Westerns a lot....” One of them actually serves to illustrate the point: Ednodio Quintero says he goes into places and functions “like a scanner” of everything that enters through his eyes. Sight is the star among his senses.
The author’s short stories speak of a vital struggle sustained by heroes whose resistance is narrated from an insurmountable interior and through the first person “which provides much more verisimilitude and is much stronger.” If the topic of the strength and the struggle that carve his literature is addressed, Quintero supports himself with a religion he’s made to fit his measure: “Being alive is a miracle... Existence is given to us for a brief time not so much for our enjoyment but rather for learning.”
And he makes it understood without any qualms about the modesty of his response that if he considers himself a survivor it’s also because of the Venezuela he inhabits. “We’re still here, we won’t give up.” He was told that his book El arquero dormido. Cinco novelas en miniatura (Alfaguara) “had been a premonition of what happened afterwards, the strange experiments of 21st century socialism, out of step with the times.” He repeats the words that point to a resistance so as to shore up strength against that “hesitancy” about discussing the topic of Venezuela after Hugo Chávez, “because dirty laundry should be done at home.” “We’re navigating in a strange experiment here that could wander off into something dangerous.” One of the examples he offers as to how the people who think like him keep themselves afloat is the emergence of independent publishing houses that have established their own circuit in his country or the activity that goes on in social media.
“The European viewpoint seems strange to me, very complacent for some reason (towards the Government of Venezuela) because there’s an anti American sentiment you can see in the press....” “They would have to experience the reality here.” Quintero mentions “the unhinged economy, the inflation,” the practical muzzle placed on the mouths of those who disagree, not because they’re prohibited from expressing their opinions —“there’s no persecution like in dictatorships”— but because the official media have appropriated everything.
“I’m not very hopeful that there’ll be any changes soon but people have been waking up little by little.”
{ Flor Gragera de León, El País, 14 January 2014 }
Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo state, Venezuela, 1947) has been on vacation for a few days in a wild place in the high peaks of the Venezuelan Andes. The same one that saw him born when there was no electricity or cars, “a zone with a Medieval imaginary and customs” for which he feels grateful. There is a curious relationship between the author, who occupies a place among the greats in the literature of his country, and geography. His father had a political position as a registrar that forced his entire family to continuously move around, and Quintero’s first memories are tied to a type of chronology of places. Afterwards, other memories have come linked to the great cities such Mexico D.F., Paris and Tokyo, all of which he confesses to admire.
But critics describe the austere and hallucinatory landscape of his childhood as being inseparable from the cadence and register of his very personal voice. Despite that deep connection to the land, some miss the target by mistakenly trying to find biographical references in Quintero’s literature. Or subjectivities. Or classifications. He has cultivated all types of work: novels, essays, movie scripts and those tales of disconcerting borders whose second compilation has now been published by Barcelona’s Editorial Candaya in Ceremonies, after the first one titled Combates (1995-2000). The stories in the latest volume were written during the twenty year period between 1974 and 1994 and they represent that purely literary universe to which he has aspired. He doesn’t play down his effort or laziness along the way. “It’s hard for me to be a realist author. I put dreams, reality, personal experience in a blender... It’s a gift that some God has given me, even though I’m polytheistic...,” he says on the phone from Venezuela’s Mérida, where he now lives. It’s a matter of “the imagination at the service of nothing, literature in its most pure and savage state.”
“I remember a dream I had when I was four years old. A demon was chasing me and I found myself escaping; hidden in a cloud I took off flying,” he recalls. In an almost casual manner, the author directly highlights a great pursuit in his life: freedom. “It’s the value I defend the most,” he clarifies. Quintero mocks the vanity of artists, those who depend on their ego, which is something that makes him “laugh,” as well as the servitude that comes with certain “leonine contracts” from publishing houses that demand periodical publications. In order to publish El hijo de Gengis Khan (Seix Barral, 2013), a successful novel in Venezuela, he had to wander around for six years to various publishing houses and even then, he declares without resentment that he’s “like a 19th century writer.” “Today there’s an anxiety for fame. My good friend César Aira ironically recommends that in those cases you should publish first and write later...”
Nor does he seem to wear a watch on his wrist. He went for ten years without writing and he explains how he took advantage of that time to “read the classics” and to fill himself up “with lots of music.” “It’s hard for me to see myself as a writer and I don’t have the discipline... like that of a functionary. I write in bursts.” While he sarcastically assures me that people scold him because he spends his money or because he gives it away too quickly, at the same time he says he’s frightened by another, very different loss, his reason. “I fear mental deterioration.” And he adds, clarifying the fact that he’s joking: “I might commit suicide if I get Alzheimer’s, if I can remember where I put the gun...”
For this lifelong voracious reader, among whose memorable readings he treasures Don Quixote which he went through “almost in one sitting,” movies have been another great love and an important influence on his writing: “My fiction works through images, I like Westerns a lot....” One of them actually serves to illustrate the point: Ednodio Quintero says he goes into places and functions “like a scanner” of everything that enters through his eyes. Sight is the star among his senses.
The author’s short stories speak of a vital struggle sustained by heroes whose resistance is narrated from an insurmountable interior and through the first person “which provides much more verisimilitude and is much stronger.” If the topic of the strength and the struggle that carve his literature is addressed, Quintero supports himself with a religion he’s made to fit his measure: “Being alive is a miracle... Existence is given to us for a brief time not so much for our enjoyment but rather for learning.”
And he makes it understood without any qualms about the modesty of his response that if he considers himself a survivor it’s also because of the Venezuela he inhabits. “We’re still here, we won’t give up.” He was told that his book El arquero dormido. Cinco novelas en miniatura (Alfaguara) “had been a premonition of what happened afterwards, the strange experiments of 21st century socialism, out of step with the times.” He repeats the words that point to a resistance so as to shore up strength against that “hesitancy” about discussing the topic of Venezuela after Hugo Chávez, “because dirty laundry should be done at home.” “We’re navigating in a strange experiment here that could wander off into something dangerous.” One of the examples he offers as to how the people who think like him keep themselves afloat is the emergence of independent publishing houses that have established their own circuit in his country or the activity that goes on in social media.
“The European viewpoint seems strange to me, very complacent for some reason (towards the Government of Venezuela) because there’s an anti American sentiment you can see in the press....” “They would have to experience the reality here.” Quintero mentions “the unhinged economy, the inflation,” the practical muzzle placed on the mouths of those who disagree, not because they’re prohibited from expressing their opinions —“there’s no persecution like in dictatorships”— but because the official media have appropriated everything.
“I’m not very hopeful that there’ll be any changes soon but people have been waking up little by little.”
{ Flor Gragera de León, El País, 14 January 2014 }
11.21.2013
Ednodio Quintero: “Ahora escribo sabiendo que no tiene importancia” / Pablo Bujalance
Ednodio Quintero: “Now I write knowing that it’s not important”
The publishing house Candaya continues with the publication of works by the Venezuelan writer with Ceremonias, a selection of his short stories that first appeared between 1974 and 1993.
A polite Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo state, Venezuela, 1947) answers the phone sitting in a plaza. The Spanish weather is too cold form him this time of year, but he exposes himself to the elements, despite having lost his voice, with Seneca-like stoicism. The writer has once again crossed the pond to present Ceremonias, a volume that gathers a selection of his short stories published between 1974 and 1993 (and which follows Combates, published in 2009 with a representation of his subsequent production of stories) with which the publishing house Candaya maintains its struggle against all odds to publish his work here in Spain. Ednodio Quintero is one of the most brilliant, surprising, rich and admirable writers of the Spanish language. His mastery has already been widely recognized in Venezuela and in much of Latin America, as well as France and other European territories. Spain still has quite a few debts to pay in regards to his work. If it’s up to us, this will change.
What’s left of the Ednodio Quintero who wrote the stories included in Ceremonias?
Nearly nothing. Keep in mind it includes stories that were written 44 years ago. And yet, I have to say that when I reread them now for this edition I was pleasantly surprised. The person who wrote them did it very well, and I’m happy to verify that he’s once again signing his books. I selected 45 stories from out of more than 70, with very personal criteria. And I’m satisfied.
The influence of Borges is more notorious than I’d perceived in Combates. Do you end up letting go of your teachers as time passes?
Yes, it’s true that Borges is very present in those stories. But Cortázar is there even more. One of the stories,“El paraíso perdido,” could be considered a rewriting of “The Island at Noon.” I realized that when I had already finished it, but I didn’t give it too much importance. You learn how to write the same way you learn how to speak, imitating your parents. Though later you might commit a necessary parricide. That’s what happened to me with Borges.
Pierre Michon was asked once who his literary father was and he responded Faulkner. When they replied that his writing has nothing to do with Faulkner, he answered: “That’s precisely why. He’s my father, and I don’t want to be like him.”
Yes. I could say the same thing about Kafka. Though he wouldn’t exactly be a father for me. Maybe a godfather, or a distant uncle who’s around. What happens is that after a certain age one thinks less about possible new influences. It ends up being harder to find a surprising read.
I remember in a previous interview we spoke about Becket, whom you met in paris, and when I read Ceremonias I found this direct quotation from the Irish writer: “Custom is the habit that chains the dog to his vomit.”
Beckett I do still have very present. Always. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about another phrase of his, which is fundamental for me: “When I wrote Molloy, and everything that came after that, everything I wrote was nonsense.” Each day I think more and more like that. Now I write knowing that it’s not important at all.
Is it perhaps a symptom of maturity? The first one to realize that was Socrates.
No, it has more to do with freedom. I’m still not sure what I’ll leave as an epitaph, but I really like the one Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, whom by the way I need to visit: “I don’t believe anything. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m free.” That’s what it’s about. Right now I’m sitting in a plaza, talking with a friend, it’s a little cold but I feel good. And that’s what matters. Literature occupies the second or first place in my scale of interests.
Has the label of the Boom weighed on Latin American writers of your generation, particularly for those who avoided it?
It’s never weighed on me. In fact, I continue to read the writers of the Boom. Maybe we’d have to think relatively about the importance it all had. Onetti, for example, was known in Spain not because of the Boom, but because he settled there and was very well received. They even gave him the Cervantes Prize, but before he came he practically didn’t exist, even though he’d already written his most well-known works. The Boom also contributed to the publication of other writers like Alejo Carpentier, but it was mostly a phenomenon associated with others from its era like the May of 1968, and just like that phenomenon it wasn’t able to sustain itself, no matter how many people imitated it long afterwards. But for a writer who has his own well-defined vocation, those things shouldn’t have much of an effect. Remember the case of Nestor Sánchez, the fabulous Argentine writer. Julio Cortázar intervened so that his work was published in France and four of his books were translated into French. But none of that was of any use: Nestor Sánchez died and today he continues to be unknown both in France and Spain.
Your short stories move between the most violent cruelty and the most moving tenderness. Have you reached a conclusion about what devil the human might be?
That’s a difficult question. What I try to do is make consciousness speak, to leave in writing a register of a determined experience of life, which is my own. In my work you’ll find people I’ve known, the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen.
And don’t you worry what your consciousness might say?
No, because I want to leave registered whatever I might say without any type of censorship. My idea of consciousness is different from that of St. Augustine, it’s more rational, it doesn’t worry about transcendence. I merely have a clear notion in this life.
You’ve published short stories and novels. Do you feel more indebted to one genre more than the other?
I stopped writing short stories in 1998. But I’ve continued writing novels since then. The last one was published this year. Now, however, I’m writing a piece of fiction that looks somewhat like a novel, but doesn’t quite manage to be one. I’m trying to overcome genres, to write without the work having to necessarily be tied to a label. What happens, of course, is that it’s always easier to write something under a given label. That simplifies things a great deal. Regardless, I don’t know how to write poetry.
And yet, is being a novelist your best way of being a poet?
I hope so.
How do you like the e-book and the new digital reading formats?
The tendency towards the generalized use of technology is inevitable. You can’t go against that. I don’t know how long the paper book will last, but the fact is that technology allows us to enjoy more freedom for writing, so it’s useless to try and impose a limit to that freedom. I read quite a bit of things that aren’t literature on the screen and for literature I prefer paper, undoubtedly, but I’m not orthodox about it. When I’m traveling with my luggage full of books and I see someone with their little screen I understand it perfectly, of course.
By the way, why are customs agents so suspicious in airports about a suitcase full of books?
There’s an explanation: the books have a form that’s too compact. They're suspicious. And besides, there are many illiterate people.
After Ceremonias, which of your books would you like to see published in Spain?
I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that I’ll continue with Candaya. The work they do seems to me to be quite an achievement, and of high quality. I don’t even have an agent, so everything comes out with them in a very natural manner. As for the rest, my task consists of writing. I don’t plan on conquering the Spanish market, nor the Chinese one. I just want to die with my boots on.
{ Pablo Bujalance, Málaga Hoy, 15 November 2013 }
The publishing house Candaya continues with the publication of works by the Venezuelan writer with Ceremonias, a selection of his short stories that first appeared between 1974 and 1993.
A polite Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo state, Venezuela, 1947) answers the phone sitting in a plaza. The Spanish weather is too cold form him this time of year, but he exposes himself to the elements, despite having lost his voice, with Seneca-like stoicism. The writer has once again crossed the pond to present Ceremonias, a volume that gathers a selection of his short stories published between 1974 and 1993 (and which follows Combates, published in 2009 with a representation of his subsequent production of stories) with which the publishing house Candaya maintains its struggle against all odds to publish his work here in Spain. Ednodio Quintero is one of the most brilliant, surprising, rich and admirable writers of the Spanish language. His mastery has already been widely recognized in Venezuela and in much of Latin America, as well as France and other European territories. Spain still has quite a few debts to pay in regards to his work. If it’s up to us, this will change.
What’s left of the Ednodio Quintero who wrote the stories included in Ceremonias?
Nearly nothing. Keep in mind it includes stories that were written 44 years ago. And yet, I have to say that when I reread them now for this edition I was pleasantly surprised. The person who wrote them did it very well, and I’m happy to verify that he’s once again signing his books. I selected 45 stories from out of more than 70, with very personal criteria. And I’m satisfied.
The influence of Borges is more notorious than I’d perceived in Combates. Do you end up letting go of your teachers as time passes?
Yes, it’s true that Borges is very present in those stories. But Cortázar is there even more. One of the stories,“El paraíso perdido,” could be considered a rewriting of “The Island at Noon.” I realized that when I had already finished it, but I didn’t give it too much importance. You learn how to write the same way you learn how to speak, imitating your parents. Though later you might commit a necessary parricide. That’s what happened to me with Borges.
Pierre Michon was asked once who his literary father was and he responded Faulkner. When they replied that his writing has nothing to do with Faulkner, he answered: “That’s precisely why. He’s my father, and I don’t want to be like him.”
Yes. I could say the same thing about Kafka. Though he wouldn’t exactly be a father for me. Maybe a godfather, or a distant uncle who’s around. What happens is that after a certain age one thinks less about possible new influences. It ends up being harder to find a surprising read.
I remember in a previous interview we spoke about Becket, whom you met in paris, and when I read Ceremonias I found this direct quotation from the Irish writer: “Custom is the habit that chains the dog to his vomit.”
Beckett I do still have very present. Always. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about another phrase of his, which is fundamental for me: “When I wrote Molloy, and everything that came after that, everything I wrote was nonsense.” Each day I think more and more like that. Now I write knowing that it’s not important at all.
Is it perhaps a symptom of maturity? The first one to realize that was Socrates.
No, it has more to do with freedom. I’m still not sure what I’ll leave as an epitaph, but I really like the one Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, whom by the way I need to visit: “I don’t believe anything. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m free.” That’s what it’s about. Right now I’m sitting in a plaza, talking with a friend, it’s a little cold but I feel good. And that’s what matters. Literature occupies the second or first place in my scale of interests.
Has the label of the Boom weighed on Latin American writers of your generation, particularly for those who avoided it?
It’s never weighed on me. In fact, I continue to read the writers of the Boom. Maybe we’d have to think relatively about the importance it all had. Onetti, for example, was known in Spain not because of the Boom, but because he settled there and was very well received. They even gave him the Cervantes Prize, but before he came he practically didn’t exist, even though he’d already written his most well-known works. The Boom also contributed to the publication of other writers like Alejo Carpentier, but it was mostly a phenomenon associated with others from its era like the May of 1968, and just like that phenomenon it wasn’t able to sustain itself, no matter how many people imitated it long afterwards. But for a writer who has his own well-defined vocation, those things shouldn’t have much of an effect. Remember the case of Nestor Sánchez, the fabulous Argentine writer. Julio Cortázar intervened so that his work was published in France and four of his books were translated into French. But none of that was of any use: Nestor Sánchez died and today he continues to be unknown both in France and Spain.
Your short stories move between the most violent cruelty and the most moving tenderness. Have you reached a conclusion about what devil the human might be?
That’s a difficult question. What I try to do is make consciousness speak, to leave in writing a register of a determined experience of life, which is my own. In my work you’ll find people I’ve known, the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen.
And don’t you worry what your consciousness might say?
No, because I want to leave registered whatever I might say without any type of censorship. My idea of consciousness is different from that of St. Augustine, it’s more rational, it doesn’t worry about transcendence. I merely have a clear notion in this life.
You’ve published short stories and novels. Do you feel more indebted to one genre more than the other?
I stopped writing short stories in 1998. But I’ve continued writing novels since then. The last one was published this year. Now, however, I’m writing a piece of fiction that looks somewhat like a novel, but doesn’t quite manage to be one. I’m trying to overcome genres, to write without the work having to necessarily be tied to a label. What happens, of course, is that it’s always easier to write something under a given label. That simplifies things a great deal. Regardless, I don’t know how to write poetry.
And yet, is being a novelist your best way of being a poet?
I hope so.
How do you like the e-book and the new digital reading formats?
The tendency towards the generalized use of technology is inevitable. You can’t go against that. I don’t know how long the paper book will last, but the fact is that technology allows us to enjoy more freedom for writing, so it’s useless to try and impose a limit to that freedom. I read quite a bit of things that aren’t literature on the screen and for literature I prefer paper, undoubtedly, but I’m not orthodox about it. When I’m traveling with my luggage full of books and I see someone with their little screen I understand it perfectly, of course.
By the way, why are customs agents so suspicious in airports about a suitcase full of books?
There’s an explanation: the books have a form that’s too compact. They're suspicious. And besides, there are many illiterate people.
After Ceremonias, which of your books would you like to see published in Spain?
I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that I’ll continue with Candaya. The work they do seems to me to be quite an achievement, and of high quality. I don’t even have an agent, so everything comes out with them in a very natural manner. As for the rest, my task consists of writing. I don’t plan on conquering the Spanish market, nor the Chinese one. I just want to die with my boots on.
{ Pablo Bujalance, Málaga Hoy, 15 November 2013 }
2.23.2010
El hombre que regala historias / Carles Geli
The Man Who Gives Away Stories
The collected short stories of the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero, creator of a world with its own mythology, confirm him as one of Latin America’s most imaginative authors.
[Photo: Carmen Secanella for El País]
“A tightrope walker performs in a town; everyone shows up because they know that, given the suicidal difficulty, the trapeze artist will fall sooner or later. A young man shows up one day, and another and another and another to see him and nothing ever happens; there are dangers, frights, but nothing; one single time, for reasons beyond his control, and he can’t make it; the tightrope walker actually falls. It's a gift for you: you write it, but you should make it very clear that it was the man who went every day who kept the tightrope walker from falling.” It’s not every day someone gives away a story... to be written, but this is the generosity displayed by the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo, 1947). He can allow himself to give away such expensive ideas considering Combates (Candaya), the first volume of his complete short stories that gathers his most recent production of shorter fiction, ranging from 1995 to 2000: an abundance of stories in a hard landscape that marks a world that is slightly distressing, almost mythological, with warriors and characters with strange codes of conduct, susceptible to metamorphosis and anthropomorphism, about whom we know just the right amount thanks to a language that is as precise as it is brief.
That unsettling point of fantasy is distilled by Quintero himself, with polished skin and slightly slanted eyes –“I consider myself mestizo, but I’m only 16% Indian, I calculated it”– who was destined, according to the highest social aspiration in those latitudes, to be a rural telegrapher and today is one of his country’s most potent voices. “I was born in a village of 500 souls, removed from everything and which you reached on horseback; there was no electricity or anything and the imaginary was nearly medieval, from the 16th century, from when the Spanish explorers arrived.”
The rural geography was curious: “The poorer you were, the higher you went up the mountain,” he formulates. In his case, he arrived at 2,600 meters in a little town called Visún. “I read before I began to speak, more than anything because I was quiet; later on I had an adolescent crisis but my parents thought I was going crazy; I would say to myself: “I don’t know what I am but I’m different from everyone else.” And they took me to the countryside for a change in climate.” The punishment was the house of a relative with a remarkable library which translated into reading Faulkner at age 15 and “an intense contact with nature, the world of plants and, above all, with minerals.” And maybe because of that, the boy who wanted to be a civil engineer –”those who build bridges and roads”– ended up by mistake –”I really made a mistake with my major in college”– as a forest engineer, which allowed him to travel through nearly all the forests of the Amazon and the Ivory Coast, which can be glimpsed as settings in, among others, his first and highly praised novel, La danza del jaguar (1991).
If it partly explains a geography, does that childhood also explain certain characters? “If there is an element of mythology, it’s Greek, but my mythologies are invented, they're rituals or totally imagined things or ones that seem to be; imagination is the basic premise of writing; I don’t have anything against realism, but my thing is imagination at the service of nothingness.” And in that vein he cites above all Kafka (“The Metamorphosis gave me nightmares”), Borges and Cortázar, influences that disappeared starting with the short stories in El corazón ajeno (2000). An arduous task. “Writing grinds everything down: a writer, in his early phase, is always an imitation of another preceding author or of his parents until he finds a world, a voice...” This is why some have said of Quintero that he is a unpunished explorer: “Language is an instrument everyone neglects; the writer must answer not to the market but to Cervantes and to the tongue itself, to help create a language, with its own lexicon and particular forms of construction...” A style? “No, what I mean goes further... And then, to die; my Faustian bargain would be that one.”
Those stories that seem like dreams (“many of them come from there, like the story “Caza:” I remember them when I wake up; other times I daydream and can only react by making myself crack the toes of my feet”) are populated by warriors with strange codes of behavior, physically or mentally wounded. Almost an army by the end. “I detest violence; I don’t get into arguments and I don’t carry even a nail clipper, but existence is a war; good and evil; in sum, existence is an evil battle to fight.” And they also fall quite often, whether in external holes or in the deeper ones within themselves, as the story “La caída” makes explicit. “I’m an amniotic rider: when she was pregnant, my mother fell off the horse and I remember that I grabbed onto the umbilical chord like a monkey on a vine: that image has followed me for a long time.”
But Quintero’s characters never give up not even in the worst situations (“In my e-mails I even use the signature: “We don’t give up; there’s only one life.”), they talk to themselves a lot, in first person, and even with their alter ego: “I’ve reached the conclusion that that voice is the result of the solitary manner in which I’ve lived; if I have problems, I still talk to myself out loud; I travel in an autarchic manner.” And could it be they suffer from a type of blindness? “The human eye is constructed to see certain things, it’s not prepared to see everything within reality, like the energies that surround us.” And he says that reflection leads him to consider the story “El hombre caja,” where the character decides to live inside a box from which he watches the world only through a small crack made so he can see. The story belongs to the Japanese writer Kobe Abe, who Quintero cites, along with Banana Yoshimoto, like the good Japanese specialist that he is and after having lived in that country for a year: “Japanese culture is in tune with my way of being: respect for the other, tranquility; they say they’re extravagant and that’s the result of their freedom.” And what does he think of the Haruki Murakami effect? “It’s explained a great deal by his blend of the American and the Japanese and there’s also the connection on the shamanic side.”
Quintero is an established voice –La muerte viaja a caballo (1974); Mariana y los comanches (2004)...- of a Venezuelan literature that, seen from the outside, only produced Rómulo Gallegos or Arturo Uslar Pietri and that during the Latin American Boom barely gave us a glimpse of Guillermo Meneses and Adriano González León. “My theory is that, just like we do with petroleum, we think of ourselves as a country that’s self-sufficient in almost everything; it’s a very 20th century phenomenon; it’s also true that we haven’t had an exile and we’ve definitely had a correct editorial industry,” he points out. But their literary neighbors don’t mention them when they visit Spain. “That’s because of Latin America’s process of sociocultural balkanization,” he responds and adds two indispensable names: Rafael Cadenas in poetry and Victoria de Stefano in fiction. And the influence of a politician like Hugo Chávez in Venezuelan culture? “90% of Venezuelan intellectuals are not with him, but he’s a very skilled ignoramus: the State-owned bookstores are very affordable, for instance, but he equalizes by means of the lowest denominator: the foreigners who arrive, for example, are Bolivians and schools impose a notable ideological orientation.”
He says he has lost energy when writing, but not when reading, to which he has dedicated “14-hour sessions;” maybe that explains why he can cite Bernardo Atxaga, Enrique Vila-Matas or Ignacio Martínez Pisón. And that’s why no one better than him to define the short story, with a few notes he takes out of his small notebook, as if it were a formula: “Geometrical narrative object –its mechanism should respond to a sphere–, precise –without residue or stupidities– and precious –with a very careful language.” He has to go. One apologizes in case he has been delayed excessively. “Don’t worry; I never arrive late: something always happens to make me be there on time no matter how much I might not want to.” Could he be giving away another story?
{ Carles Geli, Babelia, El País, 9 January 2010 }
The collected short stories of the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero, creator of a world with its own mythology, confirm him as one of Latin America’s most imaginative authors.
[Photo: Carmen Secanella for El País]“A tightrope walker performs in a town; everyone shows up because they know that, given the suicidal difficulty, the trapeze artist will fall sooner or later. A young man shows up one day, and another and another and another to see him and nothing ever happens; there are dangers, frights, but nothing; one single time, for reasons beyond his control, and he can’t make it; the tightrope walker actually falls. It's a gift for you: you write it, but you should make it very clear that it was the man who went every day who kept the tightrope walker from falling.” It’s not every day someone gives away a story... to be written, but this is the generosity displayed by the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo, 1947). He can allow himself to give away such expensive ideas considering Combates (Candaya), the first volume of his complete short stories that gathers his most recent production of shorter fiction, ranging from 1995 to 2000: an abundance of stories in a hard landscape that marks a world that is slightly distressing, almost mythological, with warriors and characters with strange codes of conduct, susceptible to metamorphosis and anthropomorphism, about whom we know just the right amount thanks to a language that is as precise as it is brief.
That unsettling point of fantasy is distilled by Quintero himself, with polished skin and slightly slanted eyes –“I consider myself mestizo, but I’m only 16% Indian, I calculated it”– who was destined, according to the highest social aspiration in those latitudes, to be a rural telegrapher and today is one of his country’s most potent voices. “I was born in a village of 500 souls, removed from everything and which you reached on horseback; there was no electricity or anything and the imaginary was nearly medieval, from the 16th century, from when the Spanish explorers arrived.”
The rural geography was curious: “The poorer you were, the higher you went up the mountain,” he formulates. In his case, he arrived at 2,600 meters in a little town called Visún. “I read before I began to speak, more than anything because I was quiet; later on I had an adolescent crisis but my parents thought I was going crazy; I would say to myself: “I don’t know what I am but I’m different from everyone else.” And they took me to the countryside for a change in climate.” The punishment was the house of a relative with a remarkable library which translated into reading Faulkner at age 15 and “an intense contact with nature, the world of plants and, above all, with minerals.” And maybe because of that, the boy who wanted to be a civil engineer –”those who build bridges and roads”– ended up by mistake –”I really made a mistake with my major in college”– as a forest engineer, which allowed him to travel through nearly all the forests of the Amazon and the Ivory Coast, which can be glimpsed as settings in, among others, his first and highly praised novel, La danza del jaguar (1991).
If it partly explains a geography, does that childhood also explain certain characters? “If there is an element of mythology, it’s Greek, but my mythologies are invented, they're rituals or totally imagined things or ones that seem to be; imagination is the basic premise of writing; I don’t have anything against realism, but my thing is imagination at the service of nothingness.” And in that vein he cites above all Kafka (“The Metamorphosis gave me nightmares”), Borges and Cortázar, influences that disappeared starting with the short stories in El corazón ajeno (2000). An arduous task. “Writing grinds everything down: a writer, in his early phase, is always an imitation of another preceding author or of his parents until he finds a world, a voice...” This is why some have said of Quintero that he is a unpunished explorer: “Language is an instrument everyone neglects; the writer must answer not to the market but to Cervantes and to the tongue itself, to help create a language, with its own lexicon and particular forms of construction...” A style? “No, what I mean goes further... And then, to die; my Faustian bargain would be that one.”
Those stories that seem like dreams (“many of them come from there, like the story “Caza:” I remember them when I wake up; other times I daydream and can only react by making myself crack the toes of my feet”) are populated by warriors with strange codes of behavior, physically or mentally wounded. Almost an army by the end. “I detest violence; I don’t get into arguments and I don’t carry even a nail clipper, but existence is a war; good and evil; in sum, existence is an evil battle to fight.” And they also fall quite often, whether in external holes or in the deeper ones within themselves, as the story “La caída” makes explicit. “I’m an amniotic rider: when she was pregnant, my mother fell off the horse and I remember that I grabbed onto the umbilical chord like a monkey on a vine: that image has followed me for a long time.”
But Quintero’s characters never give up not even in the worst situations (“In my e-mails I even use the signature: “We don’t give up; there’s only one life.”), they talk to themselves a lot, in first person, and even with their alter ego: “I’ve reached the conclusion that that voice is the result of the solitary manner in which I’ve lived; if I have problems, I still talk to myself out loud; I travel in an autarchic manner.” And could it be they suffer from a type of blindness? “The human eye is constructed to see certain things, it’s not prepared to see everything within reality, like the energies that surround us.” And he says that reflection leads him to consider the story “El hombre caja,” where the character decides to live inside a box from which he watches the world only through a small crack made so he can see. The story belongs to the Japanese writer Kobe Abe, who Quintero cites, along with Banana Yoshimoto, like the good Japanese specialist that he is and after having lived in that country for a year: “Japanese culture is in tune with my way of being: respect for the other, tranquility; they say they’re extravagant and that’s the result of their freedom.” And what does he think of the Haruki Murakami effect? “It’s explained a great deal by his blend of the American and the Japanese and there’s also the connection on the shamanic side.”
Quintero is an established voice –La muerte viaja a caballo (1974); Mariana y los comanches (2004)...- of a Venezuelan literature that, seen from the outside, only produced Rómulo Gallegos or Arturo Uslar Pietri and that during the Latin American Boom barely gave us a glimpse of Guillermo Meneses and Adriano González León. “My theory is that, just like we do with petroleum, we think of ourselves as a country that’s self-sufficient in almost everything; it’s a very 20th century phenomenon; it’s also true that we haven’t had an exile and we’ve definitely had a correct editorial industry,” he points out. But their literary neighbors don’t mention them when they visit Spain. “That’s because of Latin America’s process of sociocultural balkanization,” he responds and adds two indispensable names: Rafael Cadenas in poetry and Victoria de Stefano in fiction. And the influence of a politician like Hugo Chávez in Venezuelan culture? “90% of Venezuelan intellectuals are not with him, but he’s a very skilled ignoramus: the State-owned bookstores are very affordable, for instance, but he equalizes by means of the lowest denominator: the foreigners who arrive, for example, are Bolivians and schools impose a notable ideological orientation.”
He says he has lost energy when writing, but not when reading, to which he has dedicated “14-hour sessions;” maybe that explains why he can cite Bernardo Atxaga, Enrique Vila-Matas or Ignacio Martínez Pisón. And that’s why no one better than him to define the short story, with a few notes he takes out of his small notebook, as if it were a formula: “Geometrical narrative object –its mechanism should respond to a sphere–, precise –without residue or stupidities– and precious –with a very careful language.” He has to go. One apologizes in case he has been delayed excessively. “Don’t worry; I never arrive late: something always happens to make me be there on time no matter how much I might not want to.” Could he be giving away another story?
{ Carles Geli, Babelia, El País, 9 January 2010 }
2.20.2010
Atrapar el sol / Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga
Catch the Sun
Combates (1995-2000) is the first volume with which the publishing house Candaya began the publication of the complete short stories of Ednodio Quintero (1947). The rest of Quintero’s short fiction will be collected in the book Ceremonias (1974-1994). Combates gathers the short stories of this Venezuelan writer’s maturity.
On my first night in Mérida, I dream that I wander the mountain on horseback, as though I were a character in a short story by Ednodio Quintero. I descend from the plateau that was a legend he narrated. I descend amid the high mountain sides, as if returning through the years I’ve known him and read his work. On the summit of El Águila’s peak stands the Plaza de Madrid, where I found him as though he had lived in all the cities and all the books. He gave me a copy of his novel La danza del jaguar, and since then I’ve traveled in that dance.
There are writers with no world, architects of their inventions. There are others who spread out over hills of pages, dreams and people, unfinished demons, inhabitants of an internal country that can only belong to the person who governs or is governed by it. This is the case with Ednodio Quintero. His literature is unique.
Let’s look at Combates, the first volume of his complete short stories fortuitously published by Candaya, that gathers texts written between 1995 and 2000, divided into three sections, the first two from previously published books: “El combate,” “El corazón ajeno,” and “Últimas historias.”
From the first story, we are surprised by the poetic prose that displays an updating of Symbolism for the 21st century, a narrative development of the findings of Ramos Sucre and Poe, a gallery toward the purest of literary molds, where consciousness and dreams merge. The stories in this first section seem to be connected to the telluric unconscious of existence, as though the writer’s hand transforms what is dreamed into nature or, by force of imagination and originality, a mythical territory comes alive in a primeval space, but one populated in an ultramodern manner. It’s as though one were to simultaneously read Kafka, Rulfo, Ray Bradbury and Poe’s metaphysical stories under a fabulist illumination that mixes the light from all of them but belongs only to Ednodio Quintero.
Mythical themes are revised, each one with its turn of the screw: birth, combat –and this one is a constant, the fight against something or someone external that is also an internal enemy–, the Luciferian and Miltonian fall, the Orphic descent to the infernos, with a vision that, approaching fantasy literature, also touches the naturalness with which the Greeks imposed the presence of their phantasmagoria. He comes close to it but he isn’t quite fantasy literature. Rather, his work resembles the allegorical vision of Melville or Kafka. The perspective is always contemporary, mature in its use of techniques by which the reader passes through buildings of the highest originality and beauty, as though in a late model sports car.
This technical ease also affects the structure of the stories in this volume that, thanks to their ingenious turns, manage to annul the difference between what’s dreamed and what’s lived, between unconscious fears and reality’s brutal actions: don’t miss “La casa” or, from the second section, “El corazón ajeno,” “El otro tigre,” or “Un rostro en la penumbra,” that, within the atmosphere of a Maupassant story, creates a version of the theme of otherness from a well-known story by Borges. But Borges hadn’t read Murakami nor had he learned the diagonal manner of receiving that other side of the fantastical and the disturbance that’s born in the shadow of hidden I’s, one never knows where, in some unconscious that belongs to all of us.
As if new. Ednodio Quintero has the gift of pure creators. When one reads “El sur,” the first story in the second section, one regains the enthusiasm of reading Jack London, Stevenson or, more recently, Guimarães Rosa, nonetheless receiving a type of magic that belongs only to the author of Combates. The structures of his stories flow while shuffling past, present and future, merged into a single time, the literary, where we can remain stable and surprised as we continue reading. Two affirmations by the narrator of “El corazón es ajeno” give us two important clues about Ednodio Quintero’s art: “A story, when presented to us as such, is always accompanied by a second intention like the bird and its shadow. Most of the time it’s unknown to the author.”
“A worthwhile story should contain within itself, in the manner of a paper kamikaze, the seed of its own destruction.”
These two lessons are found throughout the book up to its “Últimas historias.” These final stories seem to me to contain and conclude the range of the previous skills and themes.
“Ojos de serpiente” offers a version of the structure of “El otro tigre,” based on otherness and violence.
The intense eroticism that inundates the entire universe of his fiction is concentrated in “La hora del Ángelus,” whose voice reminds me of a Marqués de Bradomín with a high-precision clock.
“Una pelea con el demonio” unveils the crowd of the unconscious, making it stand up naturally in the form of plot and character.
The last story, “Owner of a lonely heart,” is linked by means of its poetic prose and its oneiric transcription to this book’s first dream, “Sobreviviendo” (a Kurosawa dream according to Gregory Zambrano; facing the dream produced by a Yes song).
However, I want to conclude with the penultimate story, “Un rayo de sol,” which was wisely removed from his novel Mariana y los comanches, because of its unique importance.
Ednodio Quintero once told me this book would gather his final short stories forever.
Were that the case, “Un rayo de sol” would be a testament, a secret passed down in the form and light of a spot of sun fixed on the floor, which a child’s hand tries to catch. The spot floats above the surface of the skin, never beneath it, a fugitive once again, a few centimeters away, as the hours pass. Space is sharp and time is slow. Life is evident and inexplicable, just like that disc of sun over the ground. The child’s hand tries to cover it, catch it. But he will never be able to in the story. He’ll have to wait for an adult hand, spent in many battles, that will decide to reinvent that instant by means of words capable of creating and bringing back reality itself. Only literature, a great literature like Ednodio Quintero’s, is able to trap the blurry disc of the sun floating over the floor.
{ Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 20 February 2010 }
Combates (1995-2000) is the first volume with which the publishing house Candaya began the publication of the complete short stories of Ednodio Quintero (1947). The rest of Quintero’s short fiction will be collected in the book Ceremonias (1974-1994). Combates gathers the short stories of this Venezuelan writer’s maturity.
On my first night in Mérida, I dream that I wander the mountain on horseback, as though I were a character in a short story by Ednodio Quintero. I descend from the plateau that was a legend he narrated. I descend amid the high mountain sides, as if returning through the years I’ve known him and read his work. On the summit of El Águila’s peak stands the Plaza de Madrid, where I found him as though he had lived in all the cities and all the books. He gave me a copy of his novel La danza del jaguar, and since then I’ve traveled in that dance.
There are writers with no world, architects of their inventions. There are others who spread out over hills of pages, dreams and people, unfinished demons, inhabitants of an internal country that can only belong to the person who governs or is governed by it. This is the case with Ednodio Quintero. His literature is unique.
Let’s look at Combates, the first volume of his complete short stories fortuitously published by Candaya, that gathers texts written between 1995 and 2000, divided into three sections, the first two from previously published books: “El combate,” “El corazón ajeno,” and “Últimas historias.”
From the first story, we are surprised by the poetic prose that displays an updating of Symbolism for the 21st century, a narrative development of the findings of Ramos Sucre and Poe, a gallery toward the purest of literary molds, where consciousness and dreams merge. The stories in this first section seem to be connected to the telluric unconscious of existence, as though the writer’s hand transforms what is dreamed into nature or, by force of imagination and originality, a mythical territory comes alive in a primeval space, but one populated in an ultramodern manner. It’s as though one were to simultaneously read Kafka, Rulfo, Ray Bradbury and Poe’s metaphysical stories under a fabulist illumination that mixes the light from all of them but belongs only to Ednodio Quintero.
Mythical themes are revised, each one with its turn of the screw: birth, combat –and this one is a constant, the fight against something or someone external that is also an internal enemy–, the Luciferian and Miltonian fall, the Orphic descent to the infernos, with a vision that, approaching fantasy literature, also touches the naturalness with which the Greeks imposed the presence of their phantasmagoria. He comes close to it but he isn’t quite fantasy literature. Rather, his work resembles the allegorical vision of Melville or Kafka. The perspective is always contemporary, mature in its use of techniques by which the reader passes through buildings of the highest originality and beauty, as though in a late model sports car.
This technical ease also affects the structure of the stories in this volume that, thanks to their ingenious turns, manage to annul the difference between what’s dreamed and what’s lived, between unconscious fears and reality’s brutal actions: don’t miss “La casa” or, from the second section, “El corazón ajeno,” “El otro tigre,” or “Un rostro en la penumbra,” that, within the atmosphere of a Maupassant story, creates a version of the theme of otherness from a well-known story by Borges. But Borges hadn’t read Murakami nor had he learned the diagonal manner of receiving that other side of the fantastical and the disturbance that’s born in the shadow of hidden I’s, one never knows where, in some unconscious that belongs to all of us.
As if new. Ednodio Quintero has the gift of pure creators. When one reads “El sur,” the first story in the second section, one regains the enthusiasm of reading Jack London, Stevenson or, more recently, Guimarães Rosa, nonetheless receiving a type of magic that belongs only to the author of Combates. The structures of his stories flow while shuffling past, present and future, merged into a single time, the literary, where we can remain stable and surprised as we continue reading. Two affirmations by the narrator of “El corazón es ajeno” give us two important clues about Ednodio Quintero’s art: “A story, when presented to us as such, is always accompanied by a second intention like the bird and its shadow. Most of the time it’s unknown to the author.”
“A worthwhile story should contain within itself, in the manner of a paper kamikaze, the seed of its own destruction.”
These two lessons are found throughout the book up to its “Últimas historias.” These final stories seem to me to contain and conclude the range of the previous skills and themes.
“Ojos de serpiente” offers a version of the structure of “El otro tigre,” based on otherness and violence.
The intense eroticism that inundates the entire universe of his fiction is concentrated in “La hora del Ángelus,” whose voice reminds me of a Marqués de Bradomín with a high-precision clock.
“Una pelea con el demonio” unveils the crowd of the unconscious, making it stand up naturally in the form of plot and character.
The last story, “Owner of a lonely heart,” is linked by means of its poetic prose and its oneiric transcription to this book’s first dream, “Sobreviviendo” (a Kurosawa dream according to Gregory Zambrano; facing the dream produced by a Yes song).
However, I want to conclude with the penultimate story, “Un rayo de sol,” which was wisely removed from his novel Mariana y los comanches, because of its unique importance.
Ednodio Quintero once told me this book would gather his final short stories forever.
Were that the case, “Un rayo de sol” would be a testament, a secret passed down in the form and light of a spot of sun fixed on the floor, which a child’s hand tries to catch. The spot floats above the surface of the skin, never beneath it, a fugitive once again, a few centimeters away, as the hours pass. Space is sharp and time is slow. Life is evident and inexplicable, just like that disc of sun over the ground. The child’s hand tries to cover it, catch it. But he will never be able to in the story. He’ll have to wait for an adult hand, spent in many battles, that will decide to reinvent that instant by means of words capable of creating and bringing back reality itself. Only literature, a great literature like Ednodio Quintero’s, is able to trap the blurry disc of the sun floating over the floor.
{ Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 20 February 2010 }
9.05.2009
Doctor Vila-Matas / Ednodio Quintero
Doctor Vila-Matas
No one doubts anymore that Enrique Vila-Matas is the living –and active– writer in his country, Spain, with the greatest international projection and one of the most original of the Spanish language. It would be enough to read the novel-essay Bartleby y compañía, that prodigy of inventiveness and imagination, to confirm there is no exaggeration in that hypothesis. So far this century, the prestige of Vila-Matas has surged until reaching that place reserved for the great, as well as being a rare case of a cult writer who sustains a high level of sales and nearly unanimous acceptance from critics in the thirty languages into which he has already been translated.
Few know that Enrique Vila-Matas maintains close ties with Venezuela, and in particular with the city of Mérida. Our author’s first incursion in the equinoctial regions of the New World, under the guidance of Sergio Pitol and Juan Villoro, in search of the oxygen that was scarce in his native peninsula, was to Mexico Tenochtitlán at the beginning of the nineties during the previous century.
Then in 93 we see him strolling with his figure of a Catalonian dandy through the hallways and salons of the Mérida hotel where the II Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas was being held. On that memorable occasion he coincided with Pitol and Villoro, César Aira, Jesús Díaz, R. H. Moreno Durán, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Sergio Chejfec, Pepe Barroeta, Salvador Garmendia and many others, establishing with some of them affectionate ties that still persist today. As an opening, Vila-Matas read at the Bienal a curious and original essay: “Recuerdos inventados” [Invented Memories], that in itself constitutes, beyond being a stupendous ars poetica for fiction, the enunciation of an aesthetic and of a writing project to which the author has remained faithful to this day. In the realm of the intimate and the personal, Enrique remained attached to the city in the mountains.
In August of 2001, Enrique Vila-Matas traveled to Caracas to receive the coveted Premio de Novela Rómulo Gallegos in its XII edition, which he was awarded because of his novel El viaje vertical. He stayed in Caracas for three days and then, in the company of Paula de Parma, he went to Mérida. In the tranquil Andean city, the recent prizewinner who was starting to savor the fruits of a success that was moreover well-deserved, found peace and calm. For twenty days he became a citizen of the city of students and he was recognized and greeted in plazas, cafés, parks and markets. Some identified him with the friendly name of Rómulo. “There goes the Rómulo,” they’d say when they saw him walk by. Enrique traveled throughout the mountainous region on a Homeric mule following the trail of the great artist of the Páramo region Juan Félix Sánchez, he ran like a teenager along a hill in Valle Grande, visited the Museo del Café in Tovar, learned the names of towns he’ll never forget: Mucujepe, Mucurubá, Tabay, Mucuchíes, Cacute, Escurufiní, Jají. And in a hotel more than 3,000 meters above sea level, a hotel amidst the clouds, with a tower that’s a perfect replica of the one in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he suffered nightmares in which Belgian nurses in baby doll dresses appeared milking docile llamas imported from Peru.
It’s not so strange then that when invoking this second incursion in the city of his loves, Vila-Matas uses the word happiness without any prejudice.
Eight years later, invited by the VIII Bienal of Mérida, Enrique Vila-Matas returns to the city where, in one of his evening walks, followed by the elegant shadow and wearing a Fernando Pessoa hat, he discovered the authentic “Aleph” of Jorge Luis Borges on a corner of Avenida Tres.
In the interregnum, the life of Vila-Matas has been a true whirlwind, full of creativity, prizes and recognition, invitations to Chiromantic and Egyptologist conferences, Internet conversations, trips by canoe, airplane or train and cheerful appearances in the gossip newspapers. “The flirt with a certain Rita Malú they attribute to him is false,” affirms his life-long companion Paula de Parma, very seriously and trying not to laugh, shielded behind her savage detective glasses on a TV show.
Beyond the fame and the tinsel, the truth is that Vila-Matas has grown enourmously as a writer. His quick, terse and original prose has become more taut and refined like the chords of a lute played by a virtuoso musician. His most recent book, an exquisite hybrid: Dietario voluble, is one of the happiest events in recent years in our language.
Ah, and the romance of the famous writer with the mountainous city –which has extended to the entire country of Ramos Sucre and Eugenio Montejo– cannot be interrupted just like that, because from his luminous apartment in the city of Condal he welcomes visitors who bring him news from the other side of the ocean. He debates with Diómedes Cordero about the contents of Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase. He answers a phone call from a friend of his –from Mérida– who is lost in a Tokyo neighborhood. He punctually responds to the e-mails of a girl from the Universidad de Los Andes writing a dissertation poisoned by Derrida. He collaborates with a bizarre and youthful magazine in Caracas called Plátano Verde. He forges alliances with photographers, journalists, students, bloggers, writing apprentices and trapeze artists, merely because of the fact, which is more than enough for him, that the tri-color band of a country named Venezuela appears on their passports.
Who should find it strange, then, that the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida has awarded Enrique Vila-Matas, by virtue of his artistic and humanist merits, the Honoris Causa Doctorate in Literature. Tell me, who deserves it like he does?
When you see Enrique walk by on any street in Mérida or Tokyo, perhaps on the tree-lined avenue at the end of the earth –like his colleague Pasavento–, call him Doctor, Doctor Vila-Matas. You’ll see how he smiles mischievously.
Text read by Ednodio Quintero at the inauguration of the VIII Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas in Mérida on Wednesday, the 8th of July, 2009.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 5 September 2009 }
No one doubts anymore that Enrique Vila-Matas is the living –and active– writer in his country, Spain, with the greatest international projection and one of the most original of the Spanish language. It would be enough to read the novel-essay Bartleby y compañía, that prodigy of inventiveness and imagination, to confirm there is no exaggeration in that hypothesis. So far this century, the prestige of Vila-Matas has surged until reaching that place reserved for the great, as well as being a rare case of a cult writer who sustains a high level of sales and nearly unanimous acceptance from critics in the thirty languages into which he has already been translated.
Few know that Enrique Vila-Matas maintains close ties with Venezuela, and in particular with the city of Mérida. Our author’s first incursion in the equinoctial regions of the New World, under the guidance of Sergio Pitol and Juan Villoro, in search of the oxygen that was scarce in his native peninsula, was to Mexico Tenochtitlán at the beginning of the nineties during the previous century.
Then in 93 we see him strolling with his figure of a Catalonian dandy through the hallways and salons of the Mérida hotel where the II Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas was being held. On that memorable occasion he coincided with Pitol and Villoro, César Aira, Jesús Díaz, R. H. Moreno Durán, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Sergio Chejfec, Pepe Barroeta, Salvador Garmendia and many others, establishing with some of them affectionate ties that still persist today. As an opening, Vila-Matas read at the Bienal a curious and original essay: “Recuerdos inventados” [Invented Memories], that in itself constitutes, beyond being a stupendous ars poetica for fiction, the enunciation of an aesthetic and of a writing project to which the author has remained faithful to this day. In the realm of the intimate and the personal, Enrique remained attached to the city in the mountains.
In August of 2001, Enrique Vila-Matas traveled to Caracas to receive the coveted Premio de Novela Rómulo Gallegos in its XII edition, which he was awarded because of his novel El viaje vertical. He stayed in Caracas for three days and then, in the company of Paula de Parma, he went to Mérida. In the tranquil Andean city, the recent prizewinner who was starting to savor the fruits of a success that was moreover well-deserved, found peace and calm. For twenty days he became a citizen of the city of students and he was recognized and greeted in plazas, cafés, parks and markets. Some identified him with the friendly name of Rómulo. “There goes the Rómulo,” they’d say when they saw him walk by. Enrique traveled throughout the mountainous region on a Homeric mule following the trail of the great artist of the Páramo region Juan Félix Sánchez, he ran like a teenager along a hill in Valle Grande, visited the Museo del Café in Tovar, learned the names of towns he’ll never forget: Mucujepe, Mucurubá, Tabay, Mucuchíes, Cacute, Escurufiní, Jají. And in a hotel more than 3,000 meters above sea level, a hotel amidst the clouds, with a tower that’s a perfect replica of the one in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he suffered nightmares in which Belgian nurses in baby doll dresses appeared milking docile llamas imported from Peru.
It’s not so strange then that when invoking this second incursion in the city of his loves, Vila-Matas uses the word happiness without any prejudice.
Eight years later, invited by the VIII Bienal of Mérida, Enrique Vila-Matas returns to the city where, in one of his evening walks, followed by the elegant shadow and wearing a Fernando Pessoa hat, he discovered the authentic “Aleph” of Jorge Luis Borges on a corner of Avenida Tres.
In the interregnum, the life of Vila-Matas has been a true whirlwind, full of creativity, prizes and recognition, invitations to Chiromantic and Egyptologist conferences, Internet conversations, trips by canoe, airplane or train and cheerful appearances in the gossip newspapers. “The flirt with a certain Rita Malú they attribute to him is false,” affirms his life-long companion Paula de Parma, very seriously and trying not to laugh, shielded behind her savage detective glasses on a TV show.
Beyond the fame and the tinsel, the truth is that Vila-Matas has grown enourmously as a writer. His quick, terse and original prose has become more taut and refined like the chords of a lute played by a virtuoso musician. His most recent book, an exquisite hybrid: Dietario voluble, is one of the happiest events in recent years in our language.
Ah, and the romance of the famous writer with the mountainous city –which has extended to the entire country of Ramos Sucre and Eugenio Montejo– cannot be interrupted just like that, because from his luminous apartment in the city of Condal he welcomes visitors who bring him news from the other side of the ocean. He debates with Diómedes Cordero about the contents of Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase. He answers a phone call from a friend of his –from Mérida– who is lost in a Tokyo neighborhood. He punctually responds to the e-mails of a girl from the Universidad de Los Andes writing a dissertation poisoned by Derrida. He collaborates with a bizarre and youthful magazine in Caracas called Plátano Verde. He forges alliances with photographers, journalists, students, bloggers, writing apprentices and trapeze artists, merely because of the fact, which is more than enough for him, that the tri-color band of a country named Venezuela appears on their passports.
Who should find it strange, then, that the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida has awarded Enrique Vila-Matas, by virtue of his artistic and humanist merits, the Honoris Causa Doctorate in Literature. Tell me, who deserves it like he does?
When you see Enrique walk by on any street in Mérida or Tokyo, perhaps on the tree-lined avenue at the end of the earth –like his colleague Pasavento–, call him Doctor, Doctor Vila-Matas. You’ll see how he smiles mischievously.
Text read by Ednodio Quintero at the inauguration of the VIII Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas in Mérida on Wednesday, the 8th of July, 2009.
{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 5 September 2009 }
5.12.2004
La llave china
Juan Villoro
El Nacional
Domingo 09 de Mayo de 2004
Ednodio Quintero nació en Trujillo, un pueblo de la alta montaña venezolana, en una casa inclinada sobre un precipicio por el que corría un río tormentoso. La niebla fue su primera sensación del aire, y el vértigo, su estado natural. Cuando se trasladó a Mérida para estudiar ingeniería forestal, ya había transformado ese paisaje extremo en una moral que determinaría su prosa.
Como los protagonistas de Viaje al centro de la Tierra, Quintero había tomado “lecciones de abismo”. Mérida le reveló una forma más asentada de vivir en los Andes. Ahí encontró estímulos para proseguir su cacería de libros (con claro énfasis en los radicales de la imaginación, de Poe a Beckett) y ahí descubrió que la auténtica universidad estaba en los cafés. Demasiado discreto para dominar tertulias, fue confesor de turno y testigo de cargo de poetas de un día y eruditos de sabidurías dispersas que lo dotaron de una poderosa cultura oral.
No es casualidad que Mariana y los comanches tenga como sitio privilegiado de reunión un café, campamento de los pielrojas de la inteligencia que rinde tributo al tercer hábitat del autor (después del bosque y el páramo en la montaña, donde crece el tonificante y a veces alucinógeno díctamo real y el frailejón, dios amarillo).
En la inventiva Mérida, las bailarinas árabes y los mariachis mexicanos suelen ser de Colombia. Un enclave de estudiantes y gente que se asigna destinos múltiples con más facilidad que en otros sitios, como si la cordillera fomentara destinos siempre provisionales, sedentarios que son nómadas. Ednodio Quintero conoce cada planta y cada declive de ese territorio, del mismo modo en que se siente en casa en las más diversas literaturas. Su mente toca orillas inusuales a contrapelo de la norma.
Empecé a ser testigo de su manera de vivir y escribir (en su caso categorías equivalentes) a principios de los años noventa, cuando conspiraba para reunir escritores en Mérida. Su trabajo ocurría entre motines estudiantiles, gases lacrimógenos de la policía, el cierre del aeropuerto por reparaciones, los excesos nocturnos de algunos colegas en la alberca del hotel, en los que resultaba difícil distinguir un intento de suicidio de la práctica de un deporte muy extremo. Y sin embargo, en ese caos todo salía tan bien como la trucha a la Humboldt de la cena. Ednodio destacaba como el experto organizador que reunía a autores de primera fila, aún desconocidos en el grueso de América Latina: César Aira, Juan Sánchez Peláez, Enrique Vila-Matas, Sergio Pitol, José Balza, Alejandro Rossi. A esta evidente capacidad pragmática, se unía un rasgo misterioso.
El anfitrión iba de un escritor a otro para decir algo enigmático con una pronunciación no siempre descifrable, una adivinanza sacada de las sagas celtas o los primeros pobladores de los Andes, un aforismo de lumbre, un koan zen. Al tercer día, las palabras que soltaba de repente representaban un sistema, el mecanismo que nos definía. Los ojos enrojecidos del anfitrión sugerían noches en vela. Sabíamos que en ocasiones se aislaba en una cabaña de la que salía aún más delgado de tanto pensar. Un explorador curtido por viajes interiores.
Después de leer La danza del jaguar, escuchar su ponencia en torno a su ars poetica y oír sus conversaciones fragmentarias, me quedó claro que estaba ante un representante desplazado de la literatura japonesa. En sus textos el silencio y la acción interrumpida adquieren rara elocuencia; la naturaleza aparece como designio interno de los personajes –una expansión telúrica o vegetal de su destino– y el erotismo obedece a una tensa y variada geometría. Kawabata, Oé, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Abe son su tribu de elección. Sin embargo, su obra repudia el exotismo. Ajeno al pastiche y la imitación, el novelista venezolano aclimató su extremo oriente con el familiar sentido de la adivinación de quien lee las líneas de una mano. Ya antes se había servido del procedimiento para que Borges, Kafka y Schwob se aclimataran en sus regiones.
Tal vez por estar atento a un vasto campo de intereses, Quintero lee el periódico con intensidad centrífuga y encuentra noticias que sólo parecen imprimirse en su ejemplar. La ciencia, los chismes sociales, el deporte, los viajes, los obituarios, el copioso inventario de lo real, se somete ante sus ojos a una lógica de enrarecida precisión. El método experimental de Quintero: la realidad resulta insólita, no por sus fantásticos portentos, sino por la manera en que es razonada. Su argumentación depende de un rigor severo, pero tiene algo desfasado, a veces perverso, definitivamente alterno. Las piezas se ensamblan conforme a un plan provocador o aun demencial. Pocos narradores han explorado en forma tan aguda las posibilidades de la inteligencia como síntoma de la enfermedad.
A fines de los años noventa, Quintero se mudó a Ciudad de México para ocupar la cátedra Simón Bolívar en la UNAM. Sus primeros días fueron dramáticos. Después de cobrar su mensualidad, fue interceptado en el oscuro vestíbulo de su edificio. Apenas alcanzó a distinguir una mano que le presionaba el cuello. Luego cayó inconsciente. En los días de zozobra que siguieron al asalto, supo que había sido víctima de una técnica conocida como la “llave china”. El novelista empezó a incluir la frase en sus conversaciones, como si buscara otro uso para ese arte marcial.
De vez en cuando, Ednodio llegaba al ruidoso despacho donde yo trabajaba en La Jornada Semanal. Nuestro envejecido edificio se inclinaba sobre Artículo 123, con tal énfasis que rebautizamos la calle como Artículo Mortis y recibimos orden de evacuación. Sin embargo, al igual que otras muchas cosas precarias de México, seguíamos ahí. Tal vez la oficina le traía a Ednodio recuerdos de su primera casa, donde aprendió a cortejar abismos. El caso es que le gustaba asistir a nuestras tertulias de colaboradores. Acorazado por el recato o el flujo de sus ideas, oía a los demás sin decir palabra. Si acaso, soltaba una versión en clave Ionesco del consabido chiste sobre un ruso, un alemán y un latinoamericano. Horas después, hablaba por teléfono a mi casa y conversaba sin freno; la timidez social era su preparación para una sorpresiva elocuencia posterior.
Sus historias participan de esa estrategia; están hechas de rodeos, planteamientos que vuelven sobre sí mismos hasta llegar al sitio donde sobreviene la revelación. La técnica no es muy distinta de la “llave china” de la que fue víctima: una paciente espera en el umbral, una fulminante presión.
Mariana y los comanches ha sido escrita en la plenitud del oficio. El infinito tema del triángulo amoroso encuentra aquí aristas novedosas. Un escritor codicia a una amada doblemente esquiva: como objeto del deseo y personaje narrativo. El protagonista revisa un manuscrito olvidado, tributario de una poética con la que ya no comulga, acaso más genuina que la que lo ha llevado al éxito. El texto convoca a una mujer real y a una mujer narrativa. ¿Es posible recuperar a una sin sacrificar a la otra? La disyuntiva entre vida y creación determina Mariana y los comanches. ¿La mujer que regresa lo hace en nombre del destino o de la ficción? De manera sugerente, la moneda adivinatoria de Quintero a veces cae en la cara de la realidad, a veces en la de la imaginación.
Mariana y los comanches indaga las posibilidades que el deseo tiene de convertirse en crimen para salvarse de sí mismo. “El infierno es la repetición”, escribe el novelista, y avanza para derrotar esa consigna. Lentamente, como en la Lolita de Nabokov, comprendemos la peculiar lección del libro: varios de sus secretos nos habían sido revelados sin que advirtiéramos su fuerza magnética; el presente sólo se descifra al ser pensado hacia atrás. Como los personajes, disponíamos de las soluciones mientras eran vividas (o leídas) ; comprenderlas tarde es, fatalmente, una repetición. Entender ese infierno significa asumirlo, seguir al autor en busca de una salida, el arriesgado rito de paso en que desemboca la trama, sacrificar el arte para que la vida prosiga, modificada, como un río que busca nuevo curso.
Tal es el pacto fáustico que propone Mariana y los comanches. Desde su alta ventana, Ednodio Quintero inventa abismos y remedios para el vértigo.
{ Juan Villoro, El Nacional, 9 Mayo 2004 }
El Nacional
Domingo 09 de Mayo de 2004
Ednodio Quintero nació en Trujillo, un pueblo de la alta montaña venezolana, en una casa inclinada sobre un precipicio por el que corría un río tormentoso. La niebla fue su primera sensación del aire, y el vértigo, su estado natural. Cuando se trasladó a Mérida para estudiar ingeniería forestal, ya había transformado ese paisaje extremo en una moral que determinaría su prosa.
Como los protagonistas de Viaje al centro de la Tierra, Quintero había tomado “lecciones de abismo”. Mérida le reveló una forma más asentada de vivir en los Andes. Ahí encontró estímulos para proseguir su cacería de libros (con claro énfasis en los radicales de la imaginación, de Poe a Beckett) y ahí descubrió que la auténtica universidad estaba en los cafés. Demasiado discreto para dominar tertulias, fue confesor de turno y testigo de cargo de poetas de un día y eruditos de sabidurías dispersas que lo dotaron de una poderosa cultura oral.
No es casualidad que Mariana y los comanches tenga como sitio privilegiado de reunión un café, campamento de los pielrojas de la inteligencia que rinde tributo al tercer hábitat del autor (después del bosque y el páramo en la montaña, donde crece el tonificante y a veces alucinógeno díctamo real y el frailejón, dios amarillo).
En la inventiva Mérida, las bailarinas árabes y los mariachis mexicanos suelen ser de Colombia. Un enclave de estudiantes y gente que se asigna destinos múltiples con más facilidad que en otros sitios, como si la cordillera fomentara destinos siempre provisionales, sedentarios que son nómadas. Ednodio Quintero conoce cada planta y cada declive de ese territorio, del mismo modo en que se siente en casa en las más diversas literaturas. Su mente toca orillas inusuales a contrapelo de la norma.
Empecé a ser testigo de su manera de vivir y escribir (en su caso categorías equivalentes) a principios de los años noventa, cuando conspiraba para reunir escritores en Mérida. Su trabajo ocurría entre motines estudiantiles, gases lacrimógenos de la policía, el cierre del aeropuerto por reparaciones, los excesos nocturnos de algunos colegas en la alberca del hotel, en los que resultaba difícil distinguir un intento de suicidio de la práctica de un deporte muy extremo. Y sin embargo, en ese caos todo salía tan bien como la trucha a la Humboldt de la cena. Ednodio destacaba como el experto organizador que reunía a autores de primera fila, aún desconocidos en el grueso de América Latina: César Aira, Juan Sánchez Peláez, Enrique Vila-Matas, Sergio Pitol, José Balza, Alejandro Rossi. A esta evidente capacidad pragmática, se unía un rasgo misterioso.
El anfitrión iba de un escritor a otro para decir algo enigmático con una pronunciación no siempre descifrable, una adivinanza sacada de las sagas celtas o los primeros pobladores de los Andes, un aforismo de lumbre, un koan zen. Al tercer día, las palabras que soltaba de repente representaban un sistema, el mecanismo que nos definía. Los ojos enrojecidos del anfitrión sugerían noches en vela. Sabíamos que en ocasiones se aislaba en una cabaña de la que salía aún más delgado de tanto pensar. Un explorador curtido por viajes interiores.
Después de leer La danza del jaguar, escuchar su ponencia en torno a su ars poetica y oír sus conversaciones fragmentarias, me quedó claro que estaba ante un representante desplazado de la literatura japonesa. En sus textos el silencio y la acción interrumpida adquieren rara elocuencia; la naturaleza aparece como designio interno de los personajes –una expansión telúrica o vegetal de su destino– y el erotismo obedece a una tensa y variada geometría. Kawabata, Oé, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Abe son su tribu de elección. Sin embargo, su obra repudia el exotismo. Ajeno al pastiche y la imitación, el novelista venezolano aclimató su extremo oriente con el familiar sentido de la adivinación de quien lee las líneas de una mano. Ya antes se había servido del procedimiento para que Borges, Kafka y Schwob se aclimataran en sus regiones.
Tal vez por estar atento a un vasto campo de intereses, Quintero lee el periódico con intensidad centrífuga y encuentra noticias que sólo parecen imprimirse en su ejemplar. La ciencia, los chismes sociales, el deporte, los viajes, los obituarios, el copioso inventario de lo real, se somete ante sus ojos a una lógica de enrarecida precisión. El método experimental de Quintero: la realidad resulta insólita, no por sus fantásticos portentos, sino por la manera en que es razonada. Su argumentación depende de un rigor severo, pero tiene algo desfasado, a veces perverso, definitivamente alterno. Las piezas se ensamblan conforme a un plan provocador o aun demencial. Pocos narradores han explorado en forma tan aguda las posibilidades de la inteligencia como síntoma de la enfermedad.
A fines de los años noventa, Quintero se mudó a Ciudad de México para ocupar la cátedra Simón Bolívar en la UNAM. Sus primeros días fueron dramáticos. Después de cobrar su mensualidad, fue interceptado en el oscuro vestíbulo de su edificio. Apenas alcanzó a distinguir una mano que le presionaba el cuello. Luego cayó inconsciente. En los días de zozobra que siguieron al asalto, supo que había sido víctima de una técnica conocida como la “llave china”. El novelista empezó a incluir la frase en sus conversaciones, como si buscara otro uso para ese arte marcial.
De vez en cuando, Ednodio llegaba al ruidoso despacho donde yo trabajaba en La Jornada Semanal. Nuestro envejecido edificio se inclinaba sobre Artículo 123, con tal énfasis que rebautizamos la calle como Artículo Mortis y recibimos orden de evacuación. Sin embargo, al igual que otras muchas cosas precarias de México, seguíamos ahí. Tal vez la oficina le traía a Ednodio recuerdos de su primera casa, donde aprendió a cortejar abismos. El caso es que le gustaba asistir a nuestras tertulias de colaboradores. Acorazado por el recato o el flujo de sus ideas, oía a los demás sin decir palabra. Si acaso, soltaba una versión en clave Ionesco del consabido chiste sobre un ruso, un alemán y un latinoamericano. Horas después, hablaba por teléfono a mi casa y conversaba sin freno; la timidez social era su preparación para una sorpresiva elocuencia posterior.
Sus historias participan de esa estrategia; están hechas de rodeos, planteamientos que vuelven sobre sí mismos hasta llegar al sitio donde sobreviene la revelación. La técnica no es muy distinta de la “llave china” de la que fue víctima: una paciente espera en el umbral, una fulminante presión.
Mariana y los comanches ha sido escrita en la plenitud del oficio. El infinito tema del triángulo amoroso encuentra aquí aristas novedosas. Un escritor codicia a una amada doblemente esquiva: como objeto del deseo y personaje narrativo. El protagonista revisa un manuscrito olvidado, tributario de una poética con la que ya no comulga, acaso más genuina que la que lo ha llevado al éxito. El texto convoca a una mujer real y a una mujer narrativa. ¿Es posible recuperar a una sin sacrificar a la otra? La disyuntiva entre vida y creación determina Mariana y los comanches. ¿La mujer que regresa lo hace en nombre del destino o de la ficción? De manera sugerente, la moneda adivinatoria de Quintero a veces cae en la cara de la realidad, a veces en la de la imaginación.
Mariana y los comanches indaga las posibilidades que el deseo tiene de convertirse en crimen para salvarse de sí mismo. “El infierno es la repetición”, escribe el novelista, y avanza para derrotar esa consigna. Lentamente, como en la Lolita de Nabokov, comprendemos la peculiar lección del libro: varios de sus secretos nos habían sido revelados sin que advirtiéramos su fuerza magnética; el presente sólo se descifra al ser pensado hacia atrás. Como los personajes, disponíamos de las soluciones mientras eran vividas (o leídas) ; comprenderlas tarde es, fatalmente, una repetición. Entender ese infierno significa asumirlo, seguir al autor en busca de una salida, el arriesgado rito de paso en que desemboca la trama, sacrificar el arte para que la vida prosiga, modificada, como un río que busca nuevo curso.
Tal es el pacto fáustico que propone Mariana y los comanches. Desde su alta ventana, Ednodio Quintero inventa abismos y remedios para el vértigo.
{ Juan Villoro, El Nacional, 9 Mayo 2004 }
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