A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
young readers just recently, the anthology gathers the work of some of the best writers in the Spanish language of the second half of the twentieth century. The youngest writer included, Evelio Rosero, was born in 1958. The premise is that the younger the writer, the more difficult it is to think that they have already written their best pages. If the anthology is to comply with a function of being a historical document, at least the bulk of the writers should be able to choose something that might be considered the best writing of their entire career.
Each writer constitutes a chapter of their own, which is divided into three parts. The first part, titled “The Torture of Doctor Johnson” subjects the writer to the pain of selection alluded to earlier in this introduction by Dos Passos and Tarkington. Dr. Johnson wrote that “The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.” So here it becomes even more torturous when it is the writer who must speak the truth about themselves and their own work. A few of the writers found it particularly troubling; Eduardo Mendoza, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Hebe Uhart, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, but they were all good sports in the end, so much the better for us.
The second section is titled “In Conversation with the Dead,” which comes from Quevedo’s celebrated sonnet: Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos / con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos / vivo en conversación con los difuntos / y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos. This section gives us the opportunity to know more about the influences, the traditions of each author, about the departed friends—writers, thinkers, poets, philosophers—who have marked or impacted their work or whom they have read and reread and “converse” with creatively.
The third section is a coda meant to bring out some of the peculiarities of each writer’s work and intentions since, as Katherine Anne Porter mentioned in the English version of the anthology: “an author’s choice of his own work must always be decided by such private knowledge of the margin between intention and the accomplished fact.” Here I nudge a little, ask a few more pesky questions to round out the information provided in the first and second sections.
Reading the series of presentations followed by the selections themselves, together in one volume, provides an interesting mirror to the events that shaped the authors’ lives and how their writing was particularly affected, and consequently, the larger context of literature in the language. Blending the writers not by country but by chronology offers a sense of the march of literature on both continents, and follows the ebb and flow of the wider events both political and literary, the cultural traffic moving back and forth from each side of the Atlantic, the exiles and diasporas resulting from a century of turbulence. One can clearly see the devastating effects of the Franco regime, writers who had to exile or publish in other countries or self-censor, or who limited themselves to realism as the best means for denouncing the state of affairs at the time. Paris looms as more than a mere legend, here it is virtually a protagonist, a literary motherland for the lost tribe: the hub first for the Spanish writers seeking an atmosphere in which they could write, but also a city of refuge for Latin American writers fleeing instability or martial law during the ’70s. William Faulkner looms large as, to quote Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” García Márquez invoked him as “maestro” when he received the Nobel Prize and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that “Without the influence of Faulkner, Latin America would not have had the modern novel. The best writers read him and, like Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo, Cortázar and Carpentier, Sabato and Roa Bastos, García Márquez and Onetti, knew how to take advantage of his teachings, like Faulkner himself took advantage of the technical mastery of James Joyce and the subtleties of Henry James, among others, to build his splendid narrative saga.” He is one of the departed friends most cited, also by Ramón Pinilla, whose Getxo, an imaginary microcosm, can be seen as a Basque version of Yoknapatawpha.
Most of the conversations were done in person and I have very fond memories of the afternoon spent with Javier Marías in his home in Madrid, taking down books from the shelves of his library, looking up translations of Nabokov and searching for the origin of his “luna pulposa”; and of Antonio Muñoz Molina in a coffee shop on a very hot August afternoon, also in Madrid, talking about memory and literature and Mágina, how time in the south of Spain jumped a century in the year after Franco died. And the animated conversation with Ana María Matute in her home in Barcelona where we spoke about Medieval literature, Arthurian lore, the limits of realism, and the difficulties of having been an intelligent woman at a time when nice girls didn’t go to college. Cristina Fernández Cubas, who met with me in one of her favorite spots in the Eixample, was a sparkling conversationalist, entertaining with delightful turns of phrase and a passionate defense of the short story, and Enrique Vila-Matas whose literary playfulness on the page is but a manifestation of the erudite writer. I strolled the Ramblas with Juan Goytisolo to buy a newspaper after spending some time chatting in the salon of Hotel Oriente, and had drinks with Carlos Fuentes in the Hotel Majestic, who spoke using his flawless English to honor the original anthology and his father’s library. I spent an afternoon with Juan Marsé in his home remembering the original “Teresa in Paris” and wild Monte Carmelo back in the day, with Esther Tusquets talking about Virginia Woolf, shared 5 o’clock champagne (on more than one occasion) and secret milongas with Edgardo Cozarinsky, enjoyed a bookstore café with Abilio Estévez who recreated the nostalgia of his pre-exile times in Cuba, delighted in the cultivated exchanges at dinner and lunch with Jorge Edwards in Madrid and Mallorca, in tequilas and taxis with Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Mexico. There were many long and repeated conversations by telephone with Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio who started out gruff and imposing but who grew more and more endearing with every conversation. Ramiro Pinilla’s delightful humbleness before his own monumental achievement and impressive command of American literature, and the list goes on.
As in Burnett’s anthology in which Hemingway sent a note from Cuba asking to include the story A Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber instead of others that had been until then the fodder of all school children, so A Thousand Forests in One Acorn has had some interesting surprise responses. For example, Mario Vargas Llosa chose a fragment of The Way to Paradise (El paraíso en la otra esquina) instead of Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral) or The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) as I or many others might have expected. Carlos Fuentes decided upon a fragment of Terra Nostra instead of something from his highly celebrated The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz) or beloved Aura. Or the discovery that Vila Matas has a story in Explorers of the Abyss (Exploradores del abismo) that he considers to be highly representative of his deepest literary obsessions.
Four years of work and many hands went into this project. It has been a literary adventure to be sure and there are myriad interesting conclusions that can be drawn, and I suspect more than one occult map of the forest to be revealed for the discerning reader. But I will leave that to each individual to decipher according to his own secret experiences, to find the thousand forests in his own acorn. This is not meant to be a curated experience, but one of discovery and even self-discovery. The objective is to provide a direct connection between the reader and some of the writers who have left a mark on the history of literature in the Spanish language, who have played an essential role in painting with words and years of trade its many moods, its various colors, its diverse aspects, its rich landscape, its history, and tradition.
It would make me very pleased if some day far into the future, someone would donate a copy of this anthology to a local library, and perhaps thereby allow it to fall by chance into the hands of a reader who finds in it a pathway into the nodding forest of letters. My wish is that she enjoy this reading adventure through Spanish language literature at the hands of its writers and recognize that she has been touched by a project whose idea goes all the way back to New York in 1942 when T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein couldn’t send their contributions for the U-boats.
Happy reading!
Valerie Miles
Barcelona, Spain
May 17, 2012
AN