I have been reading a great deal of fiction in translation lately, mainly, I think, to get away from an American perspective. The exception, of course, being these two pieces by the Puerto Rican American writer, Eduardo Lalo, which provided a non-mainland, American perspective.
Eduardo Lalo, Simone: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by David Frye (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("Stretched out on the and, I was watching her dig the moat for one of her complicated castles, and I realized how close I wanted to be to this body that simultaneously surrendered and withheld itself. I did't say a a word, but I fought insistently to find the form in which I could make my emotion evident. You know you love someone when you are afraid to make her suffer. There, by her side, blinded by the midday sun, I was anguished by a pain that was not my own, one that I could do almost nothing to stop. At this moment, Li was much more than a body I desired, or a Chinese person, or even a woman. Completely engrossed in her sand castle, she was then a human being whose secret pain I had glimpsed. Her circumstances, what she did or didn't do, what she knew or didn't know about herself, ceased to be relevant. She was plainly and categorically a living being with the ability to overwhelm me because I knew just how deeply she had been wounded. She was similar to me, without a doubt, but I desired more than anything, more than even my own happiness, that she not suffer, that she might be forever so: playing in the sand, as free from cares as the childhood that history had robbed her of. Love was, I realized on this beach, the impossible and failed attempt to protect someone from her own life story." Id. at 108-109. "It isn't about being fair, and anyway. literature has never pretended to be; it's not a civil code or a democratic regime. The reader also inhabits a geography, which creates a politics of passions. Literature is still one of the few arenas where it is possible to practice an elegant and constructive terrorism." Id. at 145.).
Eduardo Lalo, Uselessness: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2017).
