Masthead
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Mark Jay Mirsky
CONSULTING EDITORS
Faith Sale, Martha Upton
MANAGING EDITOR
Allan Aycock
EDITORIAL READER
Victoria Chevalier
EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES
Stacie Evans, Lynwood Gentry, Patricia Gough, Joe Kelly, Catherine Jacobs, Carrie Lesh, Brendan Mee, Tom Rooney, Kryssa Schemmerling, Gabrielle Selz, Herb Tillman
COPY EDITOR
Anna Jardine
EUROPEAN EDITOR
Marianne Frisch
SPECIAL EDITOR: RIVER PLATE ISSUE
Suzanne Jill Levine
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION
Inger Johanne Grytting
COVER ART
"Tomb For a Geometrician—Vol. II" 1975, a book in stone by Gonzalo Fonseca. 0.9 x 0.34 x 0.27 mts. Tennessee Pink Marble.
Photo: Cheryl Rossum
Quotes from the Issue
“Faust thought: They will not be able to defend me. Nothing will save me.”
If you tweet out a picture #FictionVol10Nos1and2 and tag us @fictionmag, and we’ll feature your tweet right here on our website!
Fiction Volume 10, Numbers 1 & 2
Preface
To support Fiction’s dedication to Latin American writing, a tradition begun in the early seventies, when I first began contributing to the magazine, I have gathered a selection of prose from the region (and perhaps the sensibility) the British call the River Plate. Four writers are featured: Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, Argentinians (and husband and wife) whose work has consistently intrigued readers of Fiction; Leopoldo Lugones, a poet and Poesque writer from an earlier generation who had a considerable influence on Borges and his friends Bioy and Ocampo; and an ironic fantasist from the other side of the river, Uruguayan Mario Benedetti.
Bioy Casares, born in 1914, has inspired generations of Latin American readers and writers with his elegant humor and prophetic imagination. I have translated three of his novels, A Plan for Escape, Asleep in the Sun, and Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata. Bioy Casares has been curiously invisible to a wider readership, partly because of his hermetic nature, partly because he is a bel anachronisme, but mainly because he was eclipsed in his collaborations with one of the world’s all-time master story-weavers, Jorge Luis Borges. This invisibility has been countered, however, by literary prizes awarded in Latin America and Europe, not the least of which is the Premio Cervantes—the Hispanic world’s Nobel—which he received in 1990. Bioy Casares is a virtuoso of short fiction, and Diana Thorold, a fellow fan of his from Great Britain, and budding translator Kelly Washbourne join me in presenting to you his metaphysical comedies.
In her fiction Silvina Ocampo, born in 1903, consistently seeks an oblique perspective on everyday reality, mocking social and literary conventions, perceiving the fantastic and the madness of the absurd in trivial details. She is as uncompromisingly original as the stories she writes, and the hermeticism of her vision has made her an even more obscure figure than her husband. (Leopoldina’s Dream, published by Penguin in 1988, is the first volume of her stories to appear in English.) A consummate lyric poet, Ocampo has been honored more for her poetry than her fiction in her own country, but again, that work is invisible in English. Perhaps her eccentricity intervened here as well: when William Carlos Williams asked if he could translate one of her poems, she never responded, mistaking him for a Brazilian samba singer.
Ocampo, Bioy Casares, and Borges formed a subversive trio and collaborated on several literary projects together including the ground-breaking Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), which introduced several young Argentine writers to an international field of fantasy fiction. I am particularly pleased to include in this issue of Fiction an excerpt from the only novel Bioy Casares and Ocampo wrote together, a savage parody of the detective story, titled Those Who Love, Also Hate (1946).
Leopoldo Lugones, born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1874, was one of the great modernist poets of Latin America; his first model was the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío. His most important volume of verse, Lunario sentimental (Sentimental moon calendar), came out in 1909. Of this book the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal wrote: “Following Jules Laforgue’s ironic verses, which would also influence T. S. Eliot, Lugones created a totally artificial poetry, in which irony and humor did not detract from the most dazzling metaphors.” Borges and other Argentine writers were to learn much from this work, as they would from Lugones’s prose. The story included here, “Luisa Frascati,” appeared in Lugones’s only collection of fantastic short stories, Las fuerzas extrañas (The strange forces, 1906), and in a sense foreshadows the writer’s tragic suicide, at the end of a love affair with a much younger woman.
Mario Benedetti, who was born in 1920, is one of Uruguay’s most successful writers; he now lives in Cuba. A satirist whose stories often approach with absurdist humor the more oppressive aspects of society, such as machismo and bureaucracy, Benedetti is perhaps best known in the United States for his novel The Truce (Harper & Row, 1969), which presents a frustrated quest for values in contemporary life.
Suzanne Jill Levine
Guest Editor
Contents
Kelly Cherry
Robert Poole
Joyce Carol Oates
Kirk Nesset
Corinne Demas Bliss
Uri Nissan Gnessin
Philip Graham
Irvin Faust
Emily Hammond
Ellen E. Behrens
Avraham Reisen
Amy Herrick
Jane Brox
Akhil Sharma
Abert J. Guerard
Mary Anne Koehlera
RIVER PLATE SECTION
Suzanne Jill Levine
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Silvina Ocampo and
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Silvina Ocampo
Leopoldo Lugones
Mario Benedetti
How It Goes
Mobile
Letter, Lover
When the Earthquake Came
Luba by Night
Finally
Another Planet
Let Me Off Uptown
My Marilyn
The Way It Comes Back to Me
A Drama over Five Potatoes
Too Late
First Luck
In Season
The Train
The Blue Notebook of Charles Stanfield: 1922
Leave-taking
Preface
Digging Your Own Grave
About the Shape of the World
Faust on the Threshold of Destiny
Those Who Love, Also Hate
The Black Grocery
The Notebook
A Secret Life
Creation (An Autobiographical Study
The Estate
Us
Luisa Frascati
From: Springtime with a Broken Corner
The Expression
The Fireman
Special Thanks
• Seymour Simckes translated Finally from the Hebrew.
• Curt Leviant translated A Drama over Five Potatoes and Too Late from the Yiddish.
• Suzanne Jill Levine translated About the Shape of the World, A Secret Life, Creation (An Autobiographical Study, from the Spanish.
• Kelly Washbourne translated Faust on the Threshold of Destiny, Luisa Frascati, and The Expression, and The Fireman from the Spanish with Suzanne Jill Levine.
• Diana Thorold translated Those Who Love and Also Hate from the Spanish.
• Judith de Mesa translated The Black Grocery, The Notebook, The Estate, and Us from the Spanish.
• Hardie St. Martin translated From: Springtime with a Broken Corner from the Spanish.
Brief Excerpts from the Issue
ELLEN E. BEHRENS, an assistant editor for Mid-American Review and a recent graduate of the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University, has had short stories, articles, and poems published in various periodicals. She is currently complete a novel.
CORINNE DEMAS BLISS is the author of a novel, The Same River Twice (Atheneum), and a collection of short stories, Daffodils of the Death of Love (University of Missouri Press). Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, McCall’s, Mademoiselle, Ploughshares, Redbook, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
JANE BROX lives in Dracut, Massachusetts, where she works on her family’s vegetable farm. She has poems forthcoming in The Hudson Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
KELLY CHERRY’s most recent book of fiction, a novel in stories titled My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers, was published in Algonquin Books in 1990. She has published four other novels and three books of poems, most recently Natural Theology (Louisiana State University Press, 1988. In 1989 she received the first Fellowship of Southern Writers Poetry Award, “in recognition of a distinguished body of work.” Louisiana State University Press will publish her first book of nonfiction in 1991.
IRVIN FAUST is a graduate of City College of New York and has a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College. He is the author of six novels, among them The Steagle and Willy Remembers, and two short story collections, Roar Lion Roar and The Year of the Hot Jock. Most recently he was published in an anthology of Jewish-American fiction in Italy.
URI NISSAN GNESSIN (1881 – 1913) was born in the Ukraine and wandered through Europe and to Eretz Israel (Palestine) before returning to Russia. One of the first to introduce devices of modern fiction into Hebrew literature, Gnessin wrote about the dilemma of the Jew detached from Eastern European roots, trying to live as a cosmopolitan citizen of the twentieth century.
PHILIP GRAHAM is a graduate of the City College of New York program in creative writing. He is the author of The Vanishings (prose poems) and most recently The Art of the Knock (short stories), and has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, and other magazines. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“The Blue Notebook of Charles Stanfield: 1922” is from ABERT J. GUERARD’s new novel The Hotel in the Jungle. He has published six other novels, among them Christine/Annette, and six books of literary criticism, the latest being The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner.
EMILY HAMMOND has recently completed a collection of stories. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Nimrod, and Prism International.
AMY HERRICK is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published stories in The Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and other journals. A past recipient of a GE Younger Writers Award, she is now at work on a novel entitled At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, to be published by HarperCollins in fall 1991.
MARY ANNE KOEHLER graduated from Princeton University and lived in Baltimore. She has published fiction in Baltimore City Lights and The Nassau Literary Review, and is now working on a novel.
CURT LEVIANT has translated from Shalom Aleichem, Chaim Grade, and other Yiddish writers. He is also the author of three novels, the latest of which is The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah (Jewish Publication Society).
SUZANNE JILL LEVINE is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, on the art of literary translation, will be published by Graywolf Press in fall 1991. Her translations of Latin American fiction include works by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy. She has twice received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for literary translation, and was awarded a PEN West translation prize in 1989 for her translation of a work by Bioy Casares, Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (Viking Penguin).
KIRK NESSET has published work in Descant, The Pacific Review, Permafrost, Seattle Review, and South Dakota Review. His book on Raymond Carver is due out next year.
JOYCE CAROL OATES’s most recent books are Because It is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Dutton) and I Lock the Door Myself (Ecco).
ROBERT POOLE has studied writing in North Carolina, Florida, and New Hampshire.
AVRAHAM REISEN (1876 - 1953) was born in Kaidanov, near Minsk, White Russia. He received a traditional Jewish education and was tutored privately in secular subjects, including Russian and German. In 1908, Reisen’s first collection of works was published. He emigrated to the United States in 1914 and spent the rest of his life in New York City. In 1991, The Overlook Press will publish the first collection of Reisen’s fiction in English.
AKHIL SHARMA has worked as a reporter for United Press International in New Delhi and written for several newspapers in Thailand and Hong Kong. Fiction is the second magazine to publish his stories.
by Silvina Ocampo & Adolfo Bioy Casares
THE CAPTAIN AMIANA! He’d been there for ten years. There were people in the world who had given him up for dead, people who had known him. Not the rest of us. We didn’t know anybody. Amiana used to keep a two-master over in Havana when he was busy hauling illegal immigrants to the United States. Poles, Syrians, Russians, Czecho-Slovaks, Germans, Armenians, Galicians, Portuguese, Jews. From all over. Amiana charged them for hundred dollars a head and then threw them overboard. Overboard, just like that. He knew the coast guard was out there somewhere watching, through gunscopes, and he couldn’t put them ashore. That happened sometimes. Then it was uncovered and Amiana had to take off. He unfurled his sails and disappeared. The papers said the coast guard had nabbed him and they published his picture. And meanwhile….
Ten years before, I mean. A crew went with him and they sailed leeward due west, and came upon the Island. There he folded his wings and never again was a bird’s cry heard on that island. The ship ran aground on the way in and he didn’t realize it was running on land until it beached in the mud, where some little branches, too green and too dry, were growing, spying like vermin, and farther on, the mangroves. The ship was stuck there to the hilt. Amiana gave orders to lower the topmasts and to cut a path inland to the bush. A path to nowhere. Everything was the same there, and there was nowhere to go. It was like cutting paths in the sea. The bush was low there, a little taller than Amiana, very thick and uniform. It wasn’t the jungle, with musical scales, with undulating terrain. It was the sea, a watery tortoise afloat on other water. To walk through that land men had to go by their inner compass, or by the stars. The men who weren’t sailors had to go out moored to a cable like divers, to be able to get back to the beached ship, their only guide. Which is why it all happened. Because the Island was not alive. It was an apparition, like the undead. One felt that beneath it something was fluttering that did not flutter, that did not have a dead life, that saw things through other eyes….