Crash Course Latin American Literature

Picture this: You're in a hallway lined with mirrors, leading to a strange hexagonal room with books.

You pass through another mirrored hallway, leading to a room exactly like the first.

And another.

And another.

All with the same number of shelves.

Same number of books.

Same number of pages.

Except...every book is unique.

Somewhere in the stacks is "Pedro Pramo."

And The Spice Girls' memoirs.

Oh, and "Everyone Poops."

But a lot of the books just look like gibberish.

So-qu demonios?

What the heck is going on?

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] Who decides what a book means?

Is it the writer?

Literary scholars?

The translator?

There are so many people we engage with when we pick up a book.

So many little choices that shape our experiences as we read.

And so much that we bring to the act of reading.

So, who gets the final call?

If your interpretation isn't the same as mine, how do we know who's right?

You want me to answer that?

I'm just asking questions here.

Let's get back to the story.

That room of books is from a 1941 short story called "La biblioteca de Babel," "The Library of Babel," by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Remember that guy who said Latin American writers should "believe the universe is [their] birthright"?

It's him!

First episode guy!

In this story, he imagines the universe as a limitless library, containing every possible combination of the alphabet, the period, the comma, and the space.

This universe-slash-library holds every book that ever has existed and ever could exist!

But mostly a lot of nonsense that looks like a cat walked on a keyboard.

When the people in the story figure out that the library holds every book possible, they're thrilled.

That means "[t]here was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon."

Gracias a Dios!

Somewhere out there is "How to Be More Shrek: An Ogre's Guide to Life"!

But then they thought, maybe one of the books could tell the future, or hold the secret to all the other books.

And that very tantalizing idea made folks go wild.

In a bad way.

We're talking Walmart Black Friday circa 2005.

Some thought the gibberish books should be destroyed, to help surface only the most important books.

But that raises an interesting question: if a book doesn't hold meaning for us, does that make it meaning-less?

Our narrator doesn't think so.

He says, "There is no combination of characters one can make [...] that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance."

In other words, just because we don't understand it yet doesn't make it gibberish.

The story of an infinite library might confuse us, amaze us, or fill us with dread.

Much like the universe itself.

But this short story is really an example of metaliterature - writing that's reflecting on writing, and all the possibilities of literature itself.

You see, literature isn't a stale, lifeless thing.

It's an encounter that can generate possibilities, and those possibilities can keep going for as long as there are words on a page, and people to read them.

And Borges isn't the only writer who explored these possibilities.

I've gotta tell you about "Los detectives salvajes," "The Savage Detectives" by Chilean author Roberto Bolao.

The 1998 novel is told through diary entries and interviews, and it's kind of a detective-slash-adventure story.

It follows some young poets on an international quest to find the extremely elusive founder of an obscure poetry movement called "visceral realism."

Don't worry about looking that up- visceral realism doesn't actually exist.

But in this novel, the visceral realists have basically vanished.

Most of their poems were never published; those that were mostly disappeared.

And so did the poet who started the movement, Cesrea Tinajero, last seen somewhere in the Sonoran Desert.

All that remains of her is one poem with no words.

Just squiggles on a page, open to your interpretation.

And you might ask: we're supposed to... do what with this?

Nothing?

Anything?

Whoa!

I feel like I'm in the infinite library again!

It's enough to drive you wild!

Or fill you with dread.

Or inspire a kind of...freedom?

Sure, we can hold out hope that a work of literature will just tell us what it means.

Just give me the Curly Notes already.

Or maybe - hear me out - we can open ourselves to the possibility that literature isn't limited to just one meaning.

I mean, here we are, decades later, still talking about what Borges's infinite library was all about.

A writer doesn't get the final word on their words.

Literature remains open to readers' interpretations.

And we can bring different lenses to how we think about it.

Like, what influences surrounded these words at the time they were written?

And what influences are we bringing to them now?

Maybe this mysterious visual poem at the end of "The Savage Detectives" is an invitation from Bolao... to become a detective yourself.

Sadly, Bolao died in 2003 when he was only 50.

But his work lives on.

To the credit not only of Bolao, but also of his English translators, Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer.

And really, it's thanks to translators that this series exists at all.

And that people across the world are reading Latin American literature today.

Otherwise, if you didn't speak Spanish, these books would all be gibberish to you.

Translation's importance in the region stretches all the way back to the 1500s, with the adaptation of religious texts into Indigenous languages.

Although those translations were less about sharing the wonders of literature and more about converting Indigenous folks to Catholicism, which has a different ring to it.

Later, during the 19th century, translations of French political thinkers sparked Latin American independence movements.

And during the 1960s, translation helped introduce Latin American writers to the rest of the world.

Plus, many Latin American authors have been translators themselves.

Julio Cortzar translated Edgar Allan Poe's work into Spanish, and Borges was a super-prolific translator who brought works by English writers, like Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf, to Spanish-speaking readers.

And this work isn't easy!

A good translation takes way more thought and care than plugging "como se dice" into Google Translate.

A word can carry different connotations in one language versus another.

And often a literal translation just... doesn't work.

Like, "El mundo es un pauelo" means roughly the same thing as when English speakers say "It's a small world."

But it literally translates to: "The world is a handkerchief."

Now imagine taking a poem or novel that already plays with the meanings and rhythms of words in one language and finding a way to convey that spirit in another!

It's an art.

Take Edith Grossman, Garca Mrquez's long-time English translator.

She got started in the 1970s, at a time when translation wasn't yet considered a serious career or academic field, especially for women.

But she was one of the first translators to demand credit on a book's cover alongside the author -which, by the way, is still an ongoing campaign.

She worked to dispel any idea that translation happens magically, without a real human being involved.

She insisted translators everywhere deserve recognition and respect for their work as a creative act.

And she described them as "a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers."

Which is a polite way of saying, "You'd be lost without me."

And as more readers have grown hungry to consume Latin American literature, new voices in translation have emerged.

Megan McDowell, for example, is one of the most influential translators around today, responsible for introducing English readers to Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enrquez, and many other Latin American voices.

And some books, such as Juan Rulfo's novel "Pedro Pramo," are even getting retranslated.

It's an opaque book, and translators have struggled to get it right.

The first English translator left out entire sentences that he didn't understand.

And the second overembellished, which also didn't feel right to the Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli.

But she praised the newest translation by Douglas J. Weatherford, writing that "Maybe the novel was ... meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness."

Which makes me think back to Borges's infinite library, and how the possibilities for literature go on and on and on.

There's so many untranslated Latin American works out there, waiting to be added to those shelves!

Who knows?

Maybe you'll be the one to translate them for us.

But even if you're not a translator, any time you read a book, you contribute to its meaning.

Literature isn't a one-way street, where the possibilities end when a writer puts words on a page.

It's a communal act, shaped by translators who read, write, and interpret across languages; filmmakers who reimagine stories; authors who take inspiration from other works... And, of course, you!

Readers who bring their own perspectives.

No one can read a book quite like you can.

Today, Latin American literature is truly international.

Latin American writers are being read all over the world, and inspiring new voices to join their own.

And you know what?

I think Borges was right.

The universe was our birthright all along.

Thanks to all of you for joining me on this series!

And to my fellow latinamericanos, keep celebrating the culture, keep celebrating each other.

Our voices matter more than ever - we're changing the world through our words and our ideas.

Hasta la prxima!