Frontera
by
Carmen Herrera Castro
by
Carmen Herrera Castro
Ventanas:
Many years ago, I was privileged to have an interview with the late Eduardo Galeano at his home in Montevideo. It was shortly after he returned to Uruguay after having to exile himself in Spain to escape the long arm of the Generales during the time of Argentina's Dirty War and Uruguay's corresponding dictatorship. He was exhausted still, on death watch as a friend was dying, but greeted me with his characteristic grace. Among the many things we spoke about, he introduced me to the idea of "ventanas"--windows, a device he had used since his trilogy, Memorias del Fuego which mixed both historical fact and fantasy. Some might call his accumulated short pieces, "flash fiction," but I think that misses the point. What his brief visions allowed the reader was the sense of being the fly on the wall as El Colón was getting a haircut, the eavesdropper of La Malinche and Cortez' fumbling attempts at lovemaking (if indeed, they did), the spy peering through the window, able to gather gossip, the secrets in the room beyond. Now, Herrera's pieces are no one's imitations, but they open a window and afford us a view, if not always adhering strictly to fact, a blend of the real and the authentic, the outrageous, even, in that most interesting of places, the frontier, the borderland.
Many years ago, I was privileged to have an interview with the late Eduardo Galeano at his home in Montevideo. It was shortly after he returned to Uruguay after having to exile himself in Spain to escape the long arm of the Generales during the time of Argentina's Dirty War and Uruguay's corresponding dictatorship. He was exhausted still, on death watch as a friend was dying, but greeted me with his characteristic grace. Among the many things we spoke about, he introduced me to the idea of "ventanas"--windows, a device he had used since his trilogy, Memorias del Fuego which mixed both historical fact and fantasy. Some might call his accumulated short pieces, "flash fiction," but I think that misses the point. What his brief visions allowed the reader was the sense of being the fly on the wall as El Colón was getting a haircut, the eavesdropper of La Malinche and Cortez' fumbling attempts at lovemaking (if indeed, they did), the spy peering through the window, able to gather gossip, the secrets in the room beyond. Now, Herrera's pieces are no one's imitations, but they open a window and afford us a view, if not always adhering strictly to fact, a blend of the real and the authentic, the outrageous, even, in that most interesting of places, the frontier, the borderland.
Old Map: Huelva and Ayamonte, lower left |
On the Translation: Long ago last year, looking for a book at my favorite bookstore cafe in Sevilla, improbably named El Gato en Bicicleta (Cat on a Bicycle,) I found a little book with a mosaic-like blue cover entitled, Frontera, by Carmen Herrera Castro. The very first page of the text immediately leapt up at me: Spanish, Portuguese, a créolité, if you will, of languages and behaviors, a play on the whole notion of boundaries, borders, frontiers. Not austere, fixed fences with razor wire or the foreboding architecture of bigotry, so longed for by some populist leaders.
No, the borderlands are certainly where interesting things happen. Where linguistic code switching is the norm, where rules are loose, booze and sex are easier to acquire on this side not that (or vice versa). Where history gets fuzzy-- |
El Colón left from Huelva, on the Spanish side, to initiate the often horrendous confrontations, confabulations and mixings on the other side of the Atlantic. Where, blank on the map above, the Algarve, the Portuguese side represents its own cultural mix of Carthaginian, Roman, Moor, and so on.
The Guadiana River, long a smugglers' route, separates Spain from Portugal and has been celebrated in verse and song from the time of the troubadours. Even Lord Byron, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto I, XXXIV) felt it worth waxing over the river:
The Guadiana River, long a smugglers' route, separates Spain from Portugal and has been celebrated in verse and song from the time of the troubadours. Even Lord Byron, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto I, XXXIV) felt it worth waxing over the river:
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But ere the mingling bounds have far been passed,
Dark Guadiana rolls his power along In sullen billows, murmuring and vast, So noted ancient roundelays among. Whilome upon his banks did legions throng Of Moor and Knight, in mailéd splendour drest: Here ceased the swift their race, here sunk the strong; The Paynim turban and the Christian crest Mixed on the bleeding stream, by floating hosts oppressed. |
Thanks to our favorite memorialist, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, whom I have dubbed "Señor Polyglottus" for his multiplicity of languages and skills thereof, some of the commentary here and that verse, we have together taken on a beginning translation of an excerpt of this precious little book, to be serialized in two parts. The challenges were multiple, as Huelva and it's nearby Ayamonte (plunked right at the Spanish-Portuguese border) both have distinctive inflections of Spanish—call it "argot," a "dialect," a creolization; linguists would be more edifyingly precise. Portuguese invades the Spanish, Portuguese returns the favor. And those are far from the only invasions.
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-BGM with CS-L
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