Uvijek postoje monumentalni neprevedeni meksički pisci. "Barokni i tragikomični". Daniel Sada je stigao lani i umrijeti a da mi nikad i ne čujemo za njega.
"Daniel Sada and I have spent many afternoons together in cafés in La Condesa, Mexico City’s bohemian neighborhood. Of all the Mexican writers of my generation, Sada is the one I most admire, for his highly rigorous technique, the unequaled density of his prose, his steel-solid aesthetic sensibility. We always talk about literature, sharing ideas about our own projects and discussing what’s happening in Mexican writing, with numerous tangents into world literature. As can be seen from this, our most recent conversation, Sada has a clear pedagogical mission. He is able to hold in his mind radically different models, alongside the most refined metric forms in the Spanish language, which he utilizes with the familiarity of a daily visitor. Everything that blossoms most wildly in his work entails a level of difficulty that seems at times insurmountable for the common reader—but that reader, in any case, is not the one he has in mind. Many critics note his kinship with Juan Rulfo: the world he sketches, the violence running through it, the irascibility of his characters, but even that does not adequately explain the weight and cardinal importance of his work in contemporary Mexican letters. His principal text, Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems to be a lie, the truth is never known), from 1999, invariably arouses a certain distress in his readers’ hearts: its 700-page length, its unique stylistic mixture of colloquialism and elegant language, its internal rhythm (about which I’ve asked him and on which he expands here); and a healthy distress, that of greatness, which I hope readers of BOMB will experience, and about which I’ve attempted to spark him to talk.
José Manuel Prieto The first time I heard about Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe
(Because it seems to be a lie, the truth is never known), I learned
about its internal rhythm, its infamous octosyllabic meter. Can you
explain that a bit for readers? What effect are you seeking there?
Daniel Sada It is in no way a desire to be
flashy or overly elaborate that leads me to use octosyllables,
hendecasyllables, alexandrines, decasyllables or heptasyllables. I have a
deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most elemental constructions of
these metric forms, so characteristic of Spanish. In my primary school
in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera, a rural schoolteacher who was
an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age (a type that no longer exists)
taught us these phonetic techniques with one goal in mind: that we might
fine-tune our ears in order to appreciate the expressive delicacy and
virulence of our language. In fact, to be honest, it’s more difficult
for me to write free prose, because I don’t have any technical
(phonetic) resources on hand that might provide some support. Now, in
the most recent novels I’ve written, Luces artificiales (Artificial lights) and Ritmo delta (Delta rhythm), and in an as-yet-unpublished novella titled La duración de los empeños simples
(The Duration of simple endeavors), I’ve let go of meter, and for that
very reason I’ve had to work much harder to write them. I should also
say that for many years I buried myself in the study of Spanish
rhetoric, partly in order to destroy and then rebuild, in a different
way, the internal logic of the Spanish language (to rid it of aridity
and give it more expressive color). The result, over the years, is not
definitive. The process of transfiguration continues to expand, and
that’s one of the reasons I keep on writing. I have plans for literary
projects that, according to my calculations, will take up the next 20
years of my life. This whole agenda depends more on my health than on
the health of my ideas.
JMP But doesn’t it seem a bit unusual to
you that a prose writer would rely on meter? Do you know of any similar
instances in Spanish or in any other language? How do your readers
react? Do they even perceive it? How does it aid in the reading of these
books?
DS Of course the use of meter by a prose
writer is unusual, especially in the literature of our time. With regard
to that, I must emphasize my classical education. I read Dante’s Divine Comedy,
in hendecasyllabic lines, in the Argentinean writer Bartolomé Mitre’s
translation, direct from the Tuscan to the Spanish, and also the Poema de mío cid (Poem of my cid) and La Araucana. These three works, in addition to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid,
have all the characteristics of novelized histories, with characters,
plots and subplots branching out in a form that moves beyond the most
simple and unequivocal aspects of a linear projection with a
chronological movement. To all this I should add that the works are
written in verse, and I wanted to attempt something similar. My novel Albedrio
(Free will) is written in octosyllables, and some of my short stories
are written in decasyllables, hendecasyllables and alexandrines. In my
novel Because It Seems To Be a Lie the Truth Is Never Known,
I utilized all the meters I know of in Spanish. However, the problem
that presented itself in the context of this whole range of constraints
is that the reader might never develop empathy, might become confused if
she or he does not have a basic knowledge of the rhythms of our tongue.
In some fundamental way, anyone might conceive of all of this as just
so much pedantry, but I begin from the idea that my work will be read by
ideal readers, who are connoisseurs and lovers of meter rather than
simply arrogant exegetes. The end point of this audacity can only be
reached via our own passions: you either take it or leave it, and that’s
that. Readers love me or hate me; there is no gray area. Now, in Artificial Lights and Delta Rhythm,
I have abandoned meter, not because these are urban novels, but because
I want to discover how I might function without so many restrictions.
Some readers thank me for it, while others reprimand me for having
abandoned my perhaps unmistakable literary stamp. And as for me, I can
only say that I will write exactly what I want to write.
JMP Can you talk a bit about the genesis and history of Because It Seems To Be A Lie?
DS When I wrote that book I was immersed
in nineteenth-century novels, and I realized that most of them
incorporated an entire gallery of characters: Dickens’s Oliver Twist has 67 characters; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
has 27 female characters, including the protagonist—a marvelous diorama
of temperaments that perhaps comprise all that women have been and will
be; in War and Peace there are 109 characters, and none of
them is incidental, but rather each has a direct effect on the plot. In
terms of what we might call the marrow of Balzac’s A Human Comedy, with the trilogy formed of the novels Lost Illusions, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans and Old Goriot,
it’s possible to enumerate 234 characters. Novelistic ventures of this
caliber impressed and informed me: in them it was necessary to touch on
every social stratus, and in turn I required myself to conceive of a
story with 90 characters, with bifurcations and reflections that might
extrapolate narrative time and overflow my imagination, which is
always—and this is for certain—circumscribed by the most evident
parameters of reality. I wanted to see the novel as a totalizing
venture.
JMP What is your relationship with
so-called border literature? Do you believe that such a literature
exists, and if so, do you see yourself within that framework? An
offshoot of this question, seen from a U.S. perspective, is to imagine
the relationship with literature that is constructed in the south of the
United States. I’m thinking, for example, of Cormac McCarthy.
DS I am exceedingly irritated by the
fragmentation of literature: that a writer might self-identify as
“detective,” “fantasy,” “romantic” or “minimalist” is reason enough for
me to stop reading her or him. I like it when literature surprises me as
I move farther into a story’s dramatic density. If know in advance
that the book in question is a “thriller” or a work of “science fiction”
or whatever naming device might help me to sight the path I will
traverse, then I’d prefer not to traverse anything, not to read
anything. Likewise with so-called border literature. I believe that a
reader who is truly passionate about literature is not interested in any
kind of classification. It may be that this whole mess of adjectives
thrown together any which way only works for didactic ends; perhaps in
that context the infinite number of conceptual demarcations might be
justified, but for me as a reader or as a writer, they don’t work at
all. I could give a fig about the future of border literature.
JMP I understand perfectly what you’re
saying, and the irritations of such narrow demarcations. But it’s a
question, in some of your stories, in some of your books, of narratives
that take place in rural settings, with a certain very palpable and
quotidian presence of violence. Perhaps you might add something more. Artificial Lights
is a very urban story. Has making this change signified a certain
challenge for you? Does your abandonment of meter have something to do
with the abandonment of that particular landscape?
DS My abandonment of meter is partial. I
now put my faith in cadences, rather than withdrawing from any type of
rhythmic emphasis. I confess, a propos of that, that I could never write
outside what my ear can’t even conceive as a modulation.
JMP Talk to me a bit about your
relationship with film. How many of your books have been made into
movies? How do your books, your baroque writing style (I don’t know if
that’s an adjective you use for your own books, and incidentally I’d
like to know if you consider yourself a baroque writer), adapt to the
more linear texture of film?
DS None of the stories I’ve written has
been conceived for film. Suddenly, over time, many readers have
commented that they see cinematic scenarios in my work, and in addition,
that my dramatic texture seems to them to function excellently
on-screen. I don’t know why such a large number of filmmakers and
passionate fans of film have appeared in my life. I had to get used to
hearing overly elaborate justifications for dramatic compositional
methods that I found extremely strange and inapplicable to my work, and
despite that hodge-podge of excesses I simply couldn’t assimilate the
idea that one of my stories might work on the big screen, until 1996,
when Marcel Sisniega, who at that time was a young film director,
proposed to me that we shoot my novel Una de dos (One of
two). I accepted, with some skepticism. Marcel had the good judgment to
invite me to write the screenplay together with him, and after I
accepted, I set two conditions: that despite being an adaptation, the
film would preserve the spirit of the book; and that it would maintain a
consistent rhythm in which the level of intrigue would never falter. We
worked on the screenplay for over a year. There were struggles, and in
our excessive desire to achieve perfection, we wrote a number of
different treatments. We agreed on one thing: that we were not going to
make a bad movie simply to remain faithful to the book. To our surprise,
the film won a number of prizes, but it had no success at the box
office. In the years following 2002, One of Two has been
shown in art houses and on TV. It’s become a symbolic reference point
for recent Mexican filmmaking. And on the other hand, to answer another
part of your question: it’s true that I’m considered a baroque writer,
and what can I do? In the oldest meaning of the term, the baroque is the
“poorly made,” the “excessive,” the “overdecorated.” I tend toward
explorations into language, and I attempt to achieve clarity and
eloquence in the anecdotal movement of my stories. The rest is a system
of aesthetic inquiry that, in essence, should not alter the development
of characters or stories.
JMP To go a little deeper into the
baroque: what would differentiate a writer who is baroque from one who
isn’t? Within the boundaries of work in Spanish, we always talk about
writers like Alejo Carpentier or José Lezama Lima. In your last
response, you basically characterized yourself as a baroque writer. What
are the characteristics of baroque writing—a baroque approach to
reality that attracts you, or that you consider useful in order to delve
more deeply into reality and locate truths that might otherwise escape
you?
DS It’s difficult for me to call myself a
baroque writer. I would like to be a writer without adjectives, because I
know that grants me all the liberty in the world, including my tendency
to measure my prose. If Carpentier and Lezama Lima are known as baroque
writers, I don’t think that such a denomination adds to or detracts
from their literary merit. All you can say about them is that they do
not write in meter.
JMP Talk to me about your relationship with Juan Rulfo. Did you know him personally?
DS Throughout my life I’ve known many
intellectuals and very few artists. In my thinking, I place artists at a
much a higher level than intellectuals. It goes without saying that
thoughtful people interest me, but when I discover that a person is also
creative, I can say that I’m almost touching heaven. For me, knowing
Juan Rulfo has been one of the best gifts life has given me. Rulfo was
familiar with an amazing amount of literature, but he never went around
boasting about everything he had read, and therefore he was not an
intellectual. He once recommended that I shouldn’t persist in
intellectualizing everything I was experiencing, because that would end
up getting in the way of my perception. Reading is perpetual
nourishment, never a vehicle for vanity. Intellectuals, in general, are
braggarts, perhaps because they do not possess a true interior
landscape. Artists are more silent; they are observers and have,
naturally, a great capacity for astonishment. Artists are continual
absorbers, and it is perhaps only much later that they pick and choose.
These are all Rulfian concepts, and were spoken, I will confess, very
close to my ear, as if they were secrets that can only be told in low
tones.
JMP Tell me something about your latest novel, Delta Rhythm, and in what way it is or isn’t a continuation of what you’ve been doing up to this point. And what are you working on now?
DS Delta Rhythm is a novel
about dreams, and that particular rhythm consists of a duration of
approximately one hour, which is quite exceptional, since it’s only
possible to have a dream of that temporal dimension once or perhaps
twice a year. There are four dream rhythms (and here I’m applying solely
the physiological mechanics of oneirism), which are alpha, beta, gamma
and delta, with this last being the most prolonged and the most
saturated with different states of mind. Delta rhythm is sometimes
hurried and sometimes slow. It’s also digressive, symbolic, ambiguous
and derivative. I attempt to engage all these modes in the style and
form of my novel. I like it when the plot speeds up and then immediately
slows down; I like it to be symbolic and all the rest. It’s an attempt
to align myself with dream logic.
I’d prefer not to talk about my next novel, because I’m very
superstitious. All I’ll tell you now is that it’s a plot based in
obsessions. The novel is short and will be out in March 2006.
JMP What kind of writer do you think you are? Could you answer this by thinking through one of your books?
DS I still don’t know what kind of writer I
am. I know that I’m not famous, which allows me to continue to explore
my perception and my psyche with absolute freedom." —José Manuel Prieto
"Roberto Bolaño considered Daniel Sada to be without rival among Mexican writers of their generation. Both were born in 1953. Bolaño spent his adolescence in Mexico, and even though some of his greatest novels and stories have Mexican settings, he never set foot there again after moving to Spain in his early twenties. I imagine that Bolaño must have relied, at least to some extent, on Sada’s novels—Sada’s perfect ear and exuberant re-creation of Mexican voices, the voices of the Mexican desert north especially—while writing his own Mexican masterpieces. Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony: shouts, laughter, violent, lewd curses, sweet whispers, song.
“It was a place rarely visited, but attractive, four kilometers to the south of Sombrerete. There was a barranca whose abyss made you want to stop and contemplate it, and a cascade of crystalline water, thin and capricious.” So opens, modestly enough, Sada’s novel A la vista, published months before his death this year, on November 18. In the next sentence, Sada strikes a more characteristic note: “También había un ornato de árobles por doquier”—that ornato is a peculiar and Sada-esque word, impossible to translate, the whole phrase delicious to pronounce, though all it means, really, is that there were also a lot of trees around, and “a temperate year-round climate.” “The great thing about that place,” Sada goes on to write, “was that it was limited to the efficacy of words, as no photograph existed to give a more precise notion of the supposed marvel.” The description, the reader realizes by the end of the paragraph, is a set-up for a real estate scam. (As it turns out, there is no cascade, and no trees, only that abyss, and the climate.)
Bolaño compared Sada’s baroque writing style to Lezama Lima’s, by way of making the point that because the Cuban Lezama’s baroque reflected the crowded natural effulgence of the tropics, Sada’s baroque is a more impressive verbal invention, a baroque of the desert. It, too, came only from “the efficacy of words.” In Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it seems like a lie the truth is never known), Sada’s huge, dense masterpiece (a novel routinely referred to as Joycean, with 650 pages and 90 characters, narrated almost entirely in alexandrine, hendecasyllabic, and isosyllabic verse-prose), the desert and its sparsely populated towns teem with all the political turbulence, corruption, and violence of modern Mexico. Sada is to Juan Rulfo—author of only one, hundred-page novel, the Mexican desert ghost-town masterpiece Pedro Páramo, voted by readers of Spain’s most important newspaper, El País, as the greatest Spanish-language novel of the twentieth century—what Beckett was to Joyce, only inverted. Beckett’s minimalism was his response to Joyce unsurpassable maximalism. Sada’s maximalism was his response to Rulfo’s unsurpassable minimalism.
Sada was touring around Mexico with Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe when we met, about twelve years ago. Martin Solares was his editor at Tusquets Mexico and also wore a publicist’s hat. In one of those acts of crazy generosity that typify Martin, but that also seem to occur nowhere else but Mexico, he invited me along on the stretch of tour stopping in Culiacan and Mazatlan. Sada was a monumental storyteller, and I remember many of the tales he told us over those few days. One was about working, when he was younger and new to the city, as a butcher in Mexico City’s labyrinthine old downtown market. Another was about a job he had driving a minivan for a convent of nuns. Sada, unsurprisingly, was a great mimic. He told us that the novelist Salvador Elizondo once made a newspaper photographer who was taking his picture include his pet parakeet in the shot because Elizondo wanted, later, to be able to hold the newspaper up to the bird and say—Sada’s imitation of Elizondo’s nasal drawl is still vivid in my ear—“Look, perico, you’re in the newspaper.” Sada had taken a fiction workshop taught by none other than Juan Rulfo. That led to my favorite story. The agonizingly shy Rulfo had somehow been convinced to accept a great honor in China. He was to change planes in San Francisco. There he sat at the departure gate watching fellow passengers board the flight to China but decided not to join them. He just sat there and didn’t tell anybody. In Peking, the official Chinese and Mexican delegations and the press waited on the airport tarmac.
Sada
looked like a stereotypical butcher: a chunky, rugged, prematurely
balding man. He grew up in a northern Mexico desert town of a thousand
inhabitants. I used to sense in Sada—and identify with, thinking of New
York counterparts—an insecurity and discomfort around the urbane,
supremely self-confidant Mexico City literary types, all those Letras Libres
and “Crack” writers who dressed and comported themselves, as my late
wife, Aura, once remarked, “like international bankers.” Sada had a
beautiful face, with a proud forehead, a sensuous mouth, and long,
narrow eyes that used to make me think of Japanese scroll paintings of
samurai.It was devastating to watch his kidney disease slowly waste him, as if he were imprisoned in fast-forwarding time. Over the past few years, I’d been struggling with my own trauma, the death of my wife, and so I shied away from seeking him out, preferring, whenever I was in Mexico, to wait to run into him at the Pendulo bookstore café or elsewhere in our neighborhood. I always encountered the same incredibly sweet, generous man, quick with a kind word. The last time we spoke he asked me at least twice what I thought of the English title of his novel Casi Nunca, which will soon be published by Graywolf as Almost Never. I told him that I thought it was great. Sada read everything. He was full of praise for a writer from Mexico’s north, the young Yuri Herrera. And he told me that he thought Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, published by Martin Solares at Almadía press, was the best book that the wonderful Oaxaca-based independent press had produced in the past year.
Solares, a close friend of Sada’s, sent me this reminiscence and
reflection, which, with apologies, I’ve translated: “He woke every
morning well ahead of his occupations. If he was inspired, or finishing a
book, he’d jump out of bed at four-thirty in the morning and write
until sunrise before starting in on his other work. He wasn’t interested
in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could
write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing:
his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he
gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in
literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be
able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll
have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella,
after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of
his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are
among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. It took him six years to
write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving
around, but he never lost his energy or concentration … His last two
novels were completed despite his illness, in heroic conditions:
dictated to his wife, the great Adriana Jiménez, without any sacrifice
of style. Do I need to say that El lenguaje del juego, still unpublished, is extraordinary? In barely one hundred pages, just a little more than Pedro Páramo,
Sada has bequeathed us his dazzling personal explanation of Mexican
violence … Thinking it over, I realize that all his books reinforce this
conviction: literature is a voice that emerges out of the dark, and
that seeks to relate fascinating acts in a unsurpassable style … [This
voice] is obligated to search through the most antiquated Spanish along
with the speech of the streets, choose whatever works, and with that
create the story, in verses that astonish or make us smile on the
darkest of days.” - Francisco Goldman
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