Online Content Now Available

Because in Calque we stress the need to give translators space to illustrate their critical approach, the online publication of our translators' essays and interviews will be a running feature of the journal. These essays and interviews are free to be read in their entirety, and we hope they will incline readers to purchase a copy of the journal to see how these approaches play out in practice. Our first installment of online publications features:

• An essay by Brandon Holmquest investigating how The Art and Practice of Poetic Translation defines his approach to translations of poems by Jorge Luis Borges


An Interview with Hungarian poet Sándor Kányádi by his translator Paul Sohar


• An essay by Paul Sohar contextualizing The Roots of Sándor Kányádi's Poetry and their connection to his five translations in Issue One


• A translation of Juan Bosch's Notes on the Art of Writing Stories, the essay Steve Dolph used to guide his translation of Bosch's "The Masters" for Issue One

Notes On the Art of Writing Stories

by Juan Bosch
translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph



Translator's Note: Readers with some knowledge of essays on writing may find a sense of familiarity with the rhetoric Bosch uses to express his ideas on the craft of short fiction. This is probably because they predate him. In May, 1842, Edgar Allan Poe published a review of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales in Graham’s Magazine. The ideas elaborated in this review became a lodestone around which the North American short story tradition grew magnetized. The key passage from this review reads: “A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.” The concept of a “single effect” is still popular with teachers of the craft of short fiction, which is what Bosch was.


This essay was stitched together from a series of lectures on story writing given at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, hence its repetitiveness and pedagogical tone. The single note I feel compelled to make is on the choice of the translation “single event” for Bosch’s “un hecho.” The assonance with Poe’s “single effect” was too perfect to ignore, though the word “hecho” may have been better suited with a more subtle translation, as it means a variety of things throughout the essay. Adding to this need was the historical congruence of the publication of Julio Cortázar’s translation of the Complete Stories and Prose of Edgar Allen Poe, in 1956. As connections to this volume appear, what seems more and more doubtless is the influence Cortázar’s translation had on Latin American fiction in the second-half of the 20th Century.



Notes on the Art of Writing Stories, by Juan Bosch

I.
The story is an ancient genre that over the centuries has gained and maintained the public favor. It’s influence in the development of general sensibility can be great, and for that reason the storyteller should feel responsible for what he writes, as though he were a teacher of emotions or ideas.

The first thing a person with the inclination to write stories should clarify is the intensity of his vocation. No one who doesn’t have the vocation of a storyteller can come to write good stories. The second refers to the genre. What is a story? A response has become so difficult that it has frequently been evaded even by excellent critics, but it can be affirmed that a story is the account of an event which has undeniable importance. The importance of the event is immediately relative, and should be undeniable and convincing to general readers. If the incident which forms the heart of the story lacks importance, what has been written can be a description, a scene, a print, but it is not a story.

Here “importance” does not mean novelty, a strange case, a singular occurrence. The propensity to choose uncommon subjects as themes for stories can lead to a deformation similar to what professional athletes suffer in their muscle structure; a child going to school isn’t promising material for a story because there is nothing important is his daily trip to class, but the story has substance if the bus the child is in flips over or crashes, or if upon reaching school the child learns that the teacher is sick or that the school house had burned the night before.

Learning to discern where there is a theme for a story is an essential part of technique. This technique is the innate craft that moves the skeleton of every creative work; it’s the “tekné” of the Greeks, or, if you like, the indispensable tool in the artist’s equipment.

Except in rare cases, a good story writer takes years to control the technique of the genre, and the technique is acquired with practice more than with study. But he should never forget that the genre has a technique and that he should know it completely. The word story means to give an account of something. It comes from the Latin computus, and it is useless to try to avoid the essential significance that rings in the origins of words. A person can give an account of something with Roman numbers, with Arabic numbers, with algebraic signs; but the person must give the account. He cannot forget certain quantities or ignore specific values. To give an account is to cling to what is being recounted. The person who can’t give an account of an event with words is not a storyteller.

Incidentally, once the technique is acquired, the storyteller can choose his own path, can be “hermetic,” or “figurative,” as they say, or subjective or objective, which comes out the same; he can apply his personal style, present his work from his individual angle, express himself as he sees fit. But he shouldn’t forget that the genre, understood in every language as the most difficult, only tolerates innovations from those who control its most basic structures.

The interest stories evoke can be measured by the reviews they earn from critics, storytellers and aficionados. It is often said that the story is a shortened novel, and that the novel requires more vigor from its writer. In reality the two genres are distinct things, and it’s more difficult to write a good book of stories than a good novel. Comparing ten pages of a story to some two-hundred-fifty pages in a novel is tactless. A novel of that size can be written in two months; a book of stories that is good and that has some two-hundred-fifty pages cannot be managed in such short time. The fundamental difference between one genre and the other is in their direction: the novel is extensive, the story intensive.

The novelist creates characters and often succeeds in having them rebel, so they act according to their own nature in a way that makes the novel not end the way the novelist had planned, but as the text’s characters determine through their actions. In the story the situation is different; the story has to be a work that’s exclusively the storyteller’s. He is the parent and the dictator of his children, he can’t set them free or tolerate rebellions. The storyteller’s willingness to control his characters translates into tension, and therefore into intensity. A story’s intensity is not a result owed, as someone said, to its brevity; it is the fruit of the sustained will with which the storyteller works his text. This may be the reason why the genre is so difficult, since the storyteller must exercise constant vigilance over himself that is not managed without mental and emotional discipline, and this is not easy.

Fundamentally, the storyteller’s mindset has to be the same in choosing his material as in writing. Selecting material for a story demands effort, capacity to concentrate, and analytical work. Often some theme seems more attractive than another; but the theme should be seen not in its primitive state, but as if it had already been elaborated. From the first moment the storyteller should see his material organized thematically as if the story were already written; this requires almost as much strain as writing.

The true storyteller dedicates many hours of his life to studying the genre’s technique, to the degree that he manages to control it the same way that a conscious painter controls the brushstroke: by touch, not having to premeditate it. This technique doesn’t imply a surprise ending, as is often thought. What is fundamental is to hold the reader’s interest, and therefore to sustain a dipless tension, the driving force with which the events produce themselves. The surprise ending is not an imperative condition of a good story. There are great storytellers, like Anton Chekhov, who barely used it. Horacio Quiroga’s “A la deriva” doesn’t have one, and it’s a masterpiece. A forcefully-imposed surprise ending destroys other good elements of a story. So then, a story should have as natural an ending as its beginning.

It doesn’t matter if the story is subjective or objective, if the author’s style is deliberately clear or dark, direct or indirect; the story should begin by drawing in the reader. Once the reader’s interest is caught, it’s in the storyteller’s hands and he should not release it again. From the start the storyteller should be unforgiving with his text’s subject; he will drive it mercilessly toward the destiny he has plotted beforehand; he won’t allow the slightest deviation. A single phrase, even three words long, that is not logically and lovingly justified by that destiny will stain the story and take away its brilliance and force. Kipling said that for him it was more important what he left out than what he left in. Quiroga said that a story is an arrow shot at a target, and we know that the arrow that strays will not reach the target.

The natural way to begin a story was always “there once was” or “once upon a time.” That short phrase had—and still has among country people—the power of an incantation; that alone was enough to grab the interest of those who surrounded the storyteller. In its origin, the story did not begin with descriptions of landscapes, unless it was a landscape described with few words to justify the presence or actions of the protagonist; it began with him, describing him through action. Even today, this is a good way of beginning. A story should begin with the protagonist in action, physical or psychological, but still action; the beginning shouldn’t be situated at much distance from the actual heart of the story, to avoid tiring the reader.

Knowing how to begin a story is as important as knowing how to finish it. The serious storyteller tirelessly studies and practices the beginnings of stories. The first phrase holds the enchantment of a good story; it determines the rhythm and tension of the piece. A story that begins well almost always ends well. The author is bound to himself to maintain the level of his creation at the height at which he began it. There is only one correct way to begin a story: by suddenly grabbing the reader’s interest. The ancient “there once was” or “once upon a time” has to be substituted with something that has the same power of incantation. The young storyteller should carefully study the way in which the great masters begin their stories; he should read, one by one, the first paragraphs of the best stories by Maupassant, Kipling, Sherwood Anderson, and Quiroga, who was probably the most conscious of these about what the technique of the story refers to.

Beginning a story well and taking it to its end without a single digression, without defect, without detour: this, in few words, is the nucleus of the technique of the story. The person who knows how to do this has the craft of the storyteller, recognizes the “tekné” of the genre. The craft is the formal part of the work, but the person who doesn’t control the formal side won’t become a good storyteller. Only the person who controls it will be able to transform the story, improve it with a new modality, illuminate it with the touch of his creative personality.

This craft is necessary for the person who tells stories in an Arabic market and for the person writing them in a Paris library. There’s no way to know it without exerting it. No one is born knowing it, although on occasion a born storyteller can produce a good story through artistic divination. Craft is the product of assiduous work, of constant thought, of passionate dedication. Storytellers of appreciable qualities for narration have lost their gift because while they had ideas inside them they wrote without stopping to study the technique of the story and they never controlled it; when the well inside them dried up, they lacked the capacity to complicate, with subjects external to their intimate experience, a story’s delicate architecture. They didn’t acquire the craft in time, and without it they couldn’t construct.

When he is starting out the storyteller creates in a state of semi-consciousness. The action imposes itself on him; the characters and their circumstances drag him along; a torrent of sharp words pours through him. While this mind state lasts the storyteller has to begin learning techniques to control the beautiful and disordered world overwhelming his interior life. Knowing technique will allow him to rule over his heady passion like Yahweh over the chaos. It’s in the time taken to study the basics that the profession of storyteller resides, and it should be taken without waste. The principles of the genre, regardless of what some young writers think, are unchangeable, at least to the extent that humanity is.

The search for and selection of material is an important part of the technique; from the search and selection will come the theme. It seems that those two words—search and selection—imply the same thing: to search is to select. But it’s not like that for the storyteller. He’ll search for what his soul seeks: motifs of the country or of the sea, scenes about men from small towns or about children, the subject of love or of work. Once the material has been picked up, he’ll choose the one that is best reconciled with his general outlook on life and with the type of story he’s trying to write.

This part of the work is deeply personal; no one can intervene in it. Often people approach the novelist or storyteller to recount things that happened to them, “themes for novels or stories” that don’t interest the writer because they don’t speak to his sensibility. But although no one should intervene in thematic selection, there is some useful advice that can be given to young storytellers: to study the material minutely and seriously, to conscientiously study the setting of their story, the characters and their context, their interior life, and their livelihood.

Writing stories is serious and even beautiful work. Difficult art has its reward in its own realization. There’s much to say about this. But what’s most important is this: the person born with the calling to be a storyteller brings to the world a talent which he is obligated to put in service of society. The only way to fulfill this obligation is to cultivate his natural talents, and to do this he must learn everything relevant to his craft: what a story is and what should be done to write good stories. If he faces his calling seriously he will study conscientiously, he will work, he will toil to master his genre, which is, without a doubt, very unruly yet masterable. Others have done it. He too can manage it.

II.
The story is a simple literary genre, and to that end a story should not be built upon more than one event. The storyteller, like the aviator, doesn’t take flight to go wherever, or even to two places at once; he is forced to know where he’s going with certainty before he puts his hands on the levers that move his machine.

The first task a storyteller should impose on himself is to learn to distinguish precisely what event can be the theme of a story. Having gotten a theme, and studied it minutely and responsibly, he should know how to isolate it, how to remove any veneer until it is left free of everything that isn’t a legitimate expression of its substance. When a storyteller has before him an event in its most authentic state, he has a true theme. The event is the theme, and in the story there is only room for one theme.

I’ve already said that learning to discern where there is a theme for a story is an essential aspect of story technique. Understood in the sense of the Greek “tekné,” technique is the indispensable aspect of craft or artistry for making a work of art. Now then, the art of the story consists in situating one’s self toward an event and driving toward it resolutely, without giving importance to incidents that mark the path toward the event; all these incidents are subordinate to the event the storyteller is moving toward; this is the theme.

With the theme isolated and duly studied from every angle, the storyteller can approach it however he wants, directly or indirectly, with language that is habitual or instinctual. But at no time can he forget that he’s driving toward that event and nowhere else. Any word that could categorize as theme an incident presented en route to the theme, any word that diverts the author a millimeter from the theme, is out of place and should be rubbed out as soon as it appears; every idea foreign to the chosen subject is a weed, which won’t let the story’s shoots grow healthy, and weeds, the Gospel tells us, should be pulled up from their roots.

When the storyteller keeps the event from the reader’s attention, removing it phrase by phrase from the sight of the person reading, yet maintains its presence in the depths of the narrative and only reveals it with surprise in the last five or six words of the story, he’s built the story in accordance with the genre’s best tradition. But the cases in which this can be done without deforming the narrative’s natural course are not abundant. Much more important than a surprise ending is maintaining the continuous flow that takes it from the point of departure to the event chosen as the theme. If the event occurs before reaching the end, that is to say, if its occurrence doesn’t coincide with the last scene in the story, but the manner in which it was reached was direct, and the flow kept an appropriate rhythm, a good story has been produced.

The opposite results if the storyteller is driving toward two events; in that case the course will zigzag, the path won’t be straight, and what the storyteller will end up with is a confusing page, without character; it can be anything, but not a story. A little while ago I noted that story means to give an account of something. The origin of the word that defines the genre is in the Latin word computus, the same that today we use to indicate giving an account of something. There is a hidden, mathematical meaning in the rigor of the story; as in mathematics, in the story there cannot be confusion of values.

The skilled storyteller knows that his task is to take the reader toward the event he’s chosen as the theme, and that he should take him without saying what the event is. On occasion it is useful to distract the reader’s attention, making him believe, through a discreet phrase, that the event is something else. In every paragraph, the reader should think he’s reached the heart of the theme, though he’s not there and hasn’t even begun to enter the circle of shadows or light that separates the event from the rest of the narrative.

The story should be presented to the reader like a fruit with numerous rinds that peel away before the eyes of a sweet-toothed child. Every time one of the rinds begins to fall away, the reader will expect the pulp of the fruit; he’ll believe there are no more layers and the time has come to enjoy the heavenly nectar. From paragraph to paragraph, the story’s internal and secret action will proceed below the external and visible action; it will be hidden by the incidental actions, by activity that in reality has no other end but driving the reader toward the event. In short, they will be rinds that upon peeling, bring the fruit closer to the mouth of the sweet-toothed child.

Now then, as far as the event that defines the theme, what should its subject be? Human, or at least humanized. The storyteller attempts to offend the sensibilities or stimulate the ideas of his reader; then, direct himself to the reader through his feelings or thoughts. In Aesop’s fables as in the stories of Rudyard Kipling, in the children’s tales of Andersen as in Oscar Wilde’s parables, animals, elements and objects have a human soul. Man’s intimate experience has not moved beyond his own essence; for him the infinite universe and all measurable matter exist as a reflection of his self. In spite of the growing humility science submits him to, he’ll continue being, for a long time to come, the king of creation, who lives in organic service of the supreme lord of activity in the universe. Nothing interests man more than man himself. The best theme for a story will always be a human event, or at least something recounted in essentially human terms.

The selection of the theme is serious work and must be taken on with sincerity. The storyteller should train himself in the art of distinguishing precisely when a theme is appropriate for a story. The natural talents of the narrator come into play in this part of the work. As it happens, the story begins to form in this event, in the instant of selection of the subject-theme. For this reason alone, the theme is not actually the germ of a story, but become this germ precisely at the moment the storyteller chooses it as the theme.

If the theme does not satisfy certain conditions, the story will be poor or frankly bad, though its author perfectly control the manner it’s presented in. The picturesque, for example, doesn’t qualify to serve as a theme; on the other hand it can be one, and a good one, for a slice of life or a funnies page.

Themes require a specific weight that make them universal in their intrinsic value. Suffering, love, sacrifice, heroism, generosity, cruelty, and avarice are universal values, positive or negative, though they present themselves in men and women whose lives never cross the frontiers of the local; they are universal in the inhabitant of the great cities, in the person from the American jungle, or in the Eskimos’ igloos.

Everything said up to this point can be summed up in these words: if the storyteller must take a subject and isolate it of its appearances to build a story on it, any random subject will not do; it should be a human subject, or something that moves people, and it should be categorically universal. The world is full of this type of subject; the days and hours are full of them, and anywhere the storyteller turns his eyes there will be subjects for good themes.

Now, if on occasion these subjects that surround us present themselves in a form good enough to be told as stories, what is certain is that the storyteller must usually study the subject to know which of its angles will best serve for a story. Sometimes the story is determined by the very mechanics of the subject, but it can also be determined by its essence, its motives, or by its formal appearances. A thief caught in fraganti can make an excellent story if the person who catches him stealing is a police officer brother, or if the cause of the robbery is the hunger of the thief’s mother; and it could be a magnificent story if it’s about the a thief’s first robbery and the storyteller knows how to present the psychological divide which supposedly runs across the barrier between the normal world and the criminal world. In the three cases the subject-theme would be different; in the first, it would be found in the circumstance that the thief’s brother is a police officer; in the second, in the mother’s hunger; in the third, in the psychological divide. How do we come to the reason we’ve insisted on freeing the subject which serves as the theme from everything that is not a legitimate expression of its substance? Because in these three possible stories the theme seems to be the capture of the thief while he’s robbing, and it turns out that there are three distinct themes, and in the three the capture of the young criminal is a path toward the heart of the subject-theme.

Learning how to see a theme, knowing how to choose it, and taking from inside it the aspect useful for developing a story is an incredibly important part of the art of writing stories. The rigid mental and emotional discipline the storyteller exercises over himself begins to act in the act of choosing the theme. The characters in a novel contribute to the writing of the narrative in so far as their personalities, once created, determine in large part the course of the action. But in a story the whole work is the storyteller’s, and this work is determined above all by the quality of the theme. Before sitting down to write the first word, the storyteller should have a precise idea of how he will unfold the work. If this rule is not followed, the result will be weak. In cases of inspiration, in a born storyteller of great power, a story can be written without following this rule; but even the author himself will not be able to guarantee beforehand what will come out of his work when he writes the last word. On the other hand, something else happens if the storyteller works consciously and organizes his construction at the level of the theme he chooses.

In the same way as in the novel the action is determined by the personalities of the protagonists, in the story the theme creates the action. The most drastic difference between the novelist and the storyteller can be found in that the former follows his characters while the latter must guide them. The story’s action is determined by the theme but must be dictatorially regimented by the storyteller; it cannot overflow or fulfill itself in all its possibilities, but only in the terms strictly imperative to the unfolding of the story and lovingly connected to the theme. The characters in a novel can spend ten minutes discussing a painting which does not function in the novel’s plot; in a story a painting shouldn’t even be mentioned if it doesn’t play an important part of the action.

The story is the tiger of the literary fauna; if it carries an extra kilo of fat or flesh, it cannot guarantee killing its prey. Bones, muscles, skin, teeth and claws and nothing more, the tiger is born to attack and dominate the other beasts of the jungle. When age adds fat to its weight and elasticity to its muscles, loosens its teeth or weakens its powerful claws, the majestic tiger finds itself condemned to starvation.

The storyteller must have the soul of a tiger to throw himself at the reader and the tiger’s instinct to select the theme and calculate exactly the distance to his prey and with how much force he should fall on it. Because it happens that in the occult plot of that difficult art which is writing stories, the reader and the theme share the same heart. One shoots at one to wound the other. In its murderous lunge toward the theme, the tiger of the literary fauna is also lunging on the reader.

III.
There is a meaning of the term ‘style’ that identifies it with the mode, the form, the particular manner of doing something. According to this meaning, the use, practice or custom of the execution of this or that work implies a series of rules which should be taken into consideration when creating that work.

Is there a known style, in the sense of mode or form, in the work of writing stories?

Yes. But since every story is a universe in itself, demanding the creative talents of whoever creates it, let us from the start make a precise distinction: the writer of stories is an artist; and for the artist—be he storyteller, novelist, poet, sculptor, painter, musician—the rules are mysterious laws, written for him by a sacred senate nobody knows; and these laws are unavoidable.

Every artistic form is a product of a series of laws, and in every chain of laws there are categories: those that give a work its generic characteristic, and those that control the materials used to create it. Some are combined to form the whole of the artistic work, but those governing the material used to create the work result determined by the artist’s unique mode of expression. In the case of the story writer, the creative medium he uses is language, the mechanics of which he should know completely.

Of the chain of rules let us make an abstraction of those governing the expressive materials. These are the primary baggage of artists, and frequently are dominated without having to study them deeply. Especially in the case of language, it seems doubtless that the born writer brings to the world an instinctive understanding of its mechanics that is often surprising, although there also appears to be no doubt that this gift improves greatly when the instinctive understanding is brought to fruition by way of study.

Let us make an abstraction of the rules referring to the unique mode of each author’s expression. These form the personal style, they give the personal stamp, the divine mark that distinguishes the artist from the multitude of his peers.

For now let’s stay with the laws that confer character to a given genre; in our case, the story. These rules establish the form, the mode of the production of a story.

Form is important in every art. Since ancient times it has been known that concerning the work of creating it, artistic expression can be broken down into two fundamental factors: theme and form. In some arts the form as more value than the theme; this is the case in sculpture, painting, and poetry, above all in recent times.

The close relationship among all the arts, determined by the character forced on the artist in light of the attitude adopted by the social conglomerate toward the problems of his time—of his generation—makes us notice that a change in the style of certain artistic genres often influences the styles of others. Our task here is not to investigate if in reality this influence is produced with decisive intensity or if all the arts change style because of deep changes introduced into the social sensibility by other factors. But we should admit that there are influences. Although we are speaking of the story, we’ll note in passing that contemporary sculpture, painting, and poetry are created with a vision on form more than on theme. This might seem an outlandish observation, given that these arts have escaped the laws of the form in abandoning their old modes of expression. But in reality, what they abandoned was their subjection to the theme to give themselves exclusively to form. Abstract painting and sculpture are only material and form, and the dream of its cultivators is to expel the theme from both genres. New poetry inclines toward leaving only the words and the ways they are used, to the degree that many modern poems that move us would not hold up to an analysis of the theme contained within them.

We’ll return to this topic later. For now let us remember that there is an art in which theme and form have equal importance in any era: this is music. Music cannot be conceived without theme, as much in the Mozart of the 18th Century as in the Bartok of the 20th. On the other hand, musical theme could not exist without the form expressing it. This balance between theme and form is explained through the fact that music should be interpreted in thirds.
But in the novel and in the story, which don’t have interpreters but spectators of an intellectual order, the theme is more important than the form, and naturally much more important than the style with which the author expresses it.

Further still: in the story the theme is more important than in the novel. Because in a strict sense, the story is the narration of an event, only one, and this event—which is the theme—must be important, should have importance on its own, not through the manner of its presentation.

Previously I said that “a story should not be built upon more than one event. The storyteller, like the aviator, doesn’t take flight to go wherever, or even to two places at once; he is forced to know where he’s going with certainty before he puts his hands on the levers that move his machine.”

The idea that the story must be limited to one event, and only to one, is what has led me to define the genre as “the narration of an event of undeniable importance.” In order to avoid having the new storyteller think that ‘an event of undeniable importance’ meant a rare event, I explained at the same time that “the importance of the event is immediately relative, and should be undeniable and convincing to general readers,” and further on said, “importance does not mean novelty, a strange case, a singular occurrence. The propensity to choose uncommon subjects as themes for stories can lead to a deformation similar to what professional athletes suffer in their muscle structure.”

Up till now brevity has been regarded as one of the fundamental laws of the story. But brevity is a natural consequence of the essence of the genre itself, not a requirement of the form. The story is brief because it is limited to narrating one event and only one. The story can be long, even very long, if it sticks to narrating a single event. It doesn't matter if a story is written in forty pages, in seventy, or one-hundred-ten; it always retains its characteristics if it is the narration of a single event, which it will not have if it attempts to narrate more than one, though it do it in only one page.

It’s probable that the long story develop in the future as the most diffuse literary work, since it is possible for the story to reach epic proportions without running the risk of entering the territory of the epic poem, and reaching that level with characters and quotidian settings, outside the borders of history and in pure and clean prose, is almost a miracle that confers onto the story a truly extraordinary artistic category.

“The art of the story consists in situating one’s self toward an event and driving toward it resolutely, without giving importance to incidents that mark the path toward the event” I said before. Note that the novelist does give characteristics of events to the incidents marking the path toward the central event serving as the theme of his narrative; and it’s the description of these incidents—which we can qualify as secondary—and their interconnectedness with the principal event, that make a novel a genre of greater dimensions, of a more varied setting, more numerous characters, and of a much longer duration than a story.

The duration of a story is short and concentrated. This is because it is during the time in which the event occurs—I repeat, only one—and the use of this time in function of the life’s blood of the narrative demands of the storyteller a special capacity for taking the event in its essence, in the purest elements of the action.

Its here, in what we could call the power of expressing the action without distorting it with words, where lies the secret through which the story can be elevated to epic levels. Thomas Mann felt the epic breath in some of Chekhov’s stories—and without a doubt in other authors—but he did not lack proof that he knew the source of that breath. The cause is found in that the epic is a narrative of heroic acts, and he that executes them—the hero—is an artist of action; thus, if through the virtue of describing pure action, a storyteller takes on the epic category to a narrative of a event carried out by men and women who are not heroes in the conventional sense of the word, the storyteller has the gift of creating the feeling of an epic without being obliged to follow the great actors of historic dramas and the scenes they took part in.

Isn’t this a privilege in the art world?

Although we’ve said that in the story the theme matters more than the form, we should remember that there is a form—in the manner, use or practice of doing something—to be able to express pure action, and without holding oneself to it, one cannot write a quality story. The theme’s greater importance in the genre of the story does not signify, therefore, that form can be treated capriciously by the aspiring storyteller. If this were true, how would we be able to distinguish between stories, novels, and histories—related but different genres?
In spite of the familiarity of the genres, a novel cannot be written in the form of a story or history, nor a story in the form of a novel or historical narrative, nor a history as if it were a novel or story.

There is a form for the story. How can we explain, therefore, that recently, in the Spanish language—because we do not know of similar cases in other languages—people try to write stories that are not stories in the strict sense of the term?

Many years ago an eminent Chilean critic wrote that, “along with the traditional story, the story which can be told, with a beginning, middle, and end, the well-known and the classic, there exist others that float, elastically, lazily, without defined outlines or rigorous organization. They are incredibly interesting and, sometimes, extremely subtle; they often exceed their relatives in the genealogy; but how can we deny them, or discuss them? What happens is that they are not stories; they are something else: ramblings, narratives, sketches, scenes, imaginary portraits, prints, slices or fragments of life; they are and can be a thousand other things; but, we insist, they are not stories, they should not be called stories. Words, names, titles, qualifiers and classifiers are meant to clarify and distinguish, not obscure and confuse things. For this reason bread should be called bread. And a story a story.” [HERNÁN DÍAZ ARRIETA, FROM “CRÓNICA LITERARIA” IN EL MERCURIO, SANTIAGO DE CHILE, AUGUST 21ST, 1955—S.D.]

What happens, as we said above, is that a change in style in certain artistic genres is reflected in the style of others. Painting, sculpture and poetry have been moving for some time toward the synthesis of material and form, while abandoning theme; and this attitude among painters, sculptors and poets has influenced the Latin American concept of the story, or the story in our language has been influenced by the same things that have determined the change in style in painting, sculpture and poetry.

For some reason or another, in the new Latin American storytellers one notices a marked inclination toward the idea that the story should accumulate literary images not related to the theme. They aspire to create a kind of story—the so-called “abstract story”—which may come to be a new literary genre, a product of our agitated and confused 20th Century, but which is not and will not be a story.

So now, what is the form of a story?

Apparently, the form is implicit in the type of story one wants to write. There are those who attempt to narrate an action, without other consequences; there are those whose goal is to delineate a character or highlight the salient aspects of a personality; others emphasize problems: social, political, emotional, collective or individual; others attempt to move the reader, shaking their sensibility with the presentation of a tragic or dramatic event; there are humorous ones, tender, or intellectual. And naturally, in every case the storyteller must unfold the theme in the form appropriate to the ends he seeks.

But this form belongs to every story and every author; it changes and adjusts not only to the type of story being written, but to the storytellers mode of writing. Ten different storytellers can write ten dramatic stories, or tender ones, or humorous, with ten distinct themes and with ten forms of expression with nothing in common; and the ten stories can be ten masterpieces.

There is, nevertheless, a substantial form; the profound, which the common reader will not appreciate, in spite of the fact that for this reason alone does the story he is reading keep him charmed and attentive during the course of the action that develops in the narrative or in the involved characters’ destinies. In an intuitive or conscious manner, this form has been cultivated very carefully by all the masters of the story.

This form has two unavoidable laws, likewise for the oral story as for the written one, that do not change because the story is dramatic, tragic, humorous, social, tender, intellectual, superficial or profound, that govern the heart of the genre equally when the characters are fictional as when they are real, when they are animals or plants, water or air, regular people, aristocrats, artists, or poets.

The first law is the law of constant flow.

The action must never be detained; it must run freely in the channel dug by the storyteller, making its way to the end the author seeks without stopping; it should flow without obstacles or meanderings; it should move to the rhythm imposed by the theme—more slowly, more rapidly—but always moving. The action can be objective or subjective, external or internal, physical or psychological; it can even hide the event serving as the theme if the storyteller wants to surprise us with an unexpected ending. But it cannot stop.
It is in action is where the substance of the substance of the story is found. A tender story should be tender because the action is tender in and of itself, not because the words with which the narrative is written aspire to express tenderness; a dramatic story is so because of the dramatic nature of the event that gives it life, not through the literary force of the images displaying it. Thus, the action, for this reason, and because of its unique virtuality, is what forms the story. Therefore, the action should occur without disturbance, without the storyteller interfering in its flow trying to impress the reader with foreign words for the event to convince him that the author has captured well the mood of the incident.

The second law can be inferred form what we’ve just said and can be expressed thus: the storyteller should only use the words necessary to express the action.

The word can display the action, but cannot replace it. A thousand phrases cannot say as much as a single action. In the story, the just and necessary phrase is the one that gives way to the action, in the most pure state, compatible with the work of expressing it through words and in the manner unique to every storyteller of using his own lexicon.

Every word that is not essential to the end proposed by the storyteller rends force from the dynamic of the story and therefore wounds it in its very soul. Given that a storyteller should limit his narrative to the treatment of a single event—and if he’s not doing this he’s not writing a story—he is not authorized to divert himself from it with phrases that distance the reader from the course the action follows.

We can compare the story with a man who leaves home on business. Before leaving he’s thought about where he will go, which streets he will take, what vehicle he will use, to whom he will direct himself, what he will say to them. He takes with him an understood goal. He does not set out to see what he’ll find, rather he knows what he seeks.

This man does not resemble the one who wanders, strolls, entertains himself looking at flowers in a park, listening to two children speaking, observing a beautiful woman in passing; he enters a museum to kill time, moves from painting to painting, admiring the impressionist style of this painter and the abstract art of that other one.

Between these two men, the model for the storyteller should be the first, the one who has put himself into action to reach a goal. Also, the story is an active theme moving toward some end. And in the same way as the actions of the man in question are governed by his needs, so the form of the story is controlled by its active nature.

In the active nature of the story resides its attractive force, which reaches all people of all races in all eras.

Caracas, September, 1958





An Interview with Sándor Kányadi

by Paul Sohar, Kányádi's English translator

It is very easy to carry on a conversation with Sándor as long as you let him pick the topic. He likes to joke about it, calling himself loquacious. True, he is a compulsive communicator, but only because he has a lot on his mind, a lot to say. Unless you manage to get a question in before he starts speaking, you will never get a chance, you will never steer the conversation in your direction. You simply have to assume that whatever he has to say is more important than what you wanted to ask about, and, in any case, the answers are sure to be found somewhere in the long lecture you get instead of a dialogue. Fortunately, I don’t have to depend on one conversation for this interview, because we’ve known each other for nine years and maintained a constant exchange of ideas and war stories, especially when I visited him in his summer house in the Hargita Mountains of Transylvania on two occasions. And now we have Skype, and I can turn to him with any question, not only about his poetry but about Hungarian literature in general. Let me try and condense this ongoing friendly chit-chat to the short format of an interview.

(Paul Sohar) I’ve already touched upon the history of Transylvania and the fate of the Hungarian minority there, so let’s keep this more personal. Let’s start at the beginning, your family background.

(Sándor Kányádi) I come from a poor peasant family living in a small village, which meant that I often had to be taken out of school to help out with seasonal farming chores when they demanded my help. This and WWII delayed my graduation from high school until the age of 21. I lost my mother at the age of eleven, and my father was called in to serve in the war. In effect, I was an orphan in a boarding school, except for the presence of my older sister.

(PS) Yes, your schooling, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

(SK) The beginnings were just as basic as you say, but our village also had an elementary school going back 450 years. What most people in the West don’t realize is that the area known as Hungary now was completely destroyed during the Turkish invasion by the Islamic holy war that bogged down in Hungary for 150 years while Western Europe thrived. But Transylvania made a separate peace and was allowed to survive more or less intact and save Hungarian culture and language for future generations. That’s why my humble village school has a longer history than any school in present-day Hungary. And my education continued through the university in Hungarian, because of the already existing Hungarian educational institutions in what became Romania.

(PS) Did you have any teachers who inspired you to become a writer and a poet?

(SK) Yes, in boarding school – which comprised the grades 5th through the 12th in the European system, and such schools were heavily subsidized by various religious groups and were elite only in academic sense but not socially – I had a Hungarian composition teacher who was willing to overlook my deficiencies in handwriting and spelling and give me good marks for content on my compositions. He was also in charge of the library and at first he tried to limit me to two books a week so that I would spend more time on my studies and homework, but he discovered I had bribed a classmate of mine with some of my meal portion to take out books for me, he let me have all the books I wanted. I stayed in touch with him later on until he died. But I didn’t have any poetry to share with him back then, that was only later. And I shared it with my classmates at first until one of my poems posted on a bulletin board was discovered by a visiting editor from Bucharest. Strangely enough, he was four years my junior, only seventeen, but already an editor with a good eye for poetry. His name was Géza Páskándi, later an accomplished poet and dramatist himself. He printed my poem, and since then I have never had to look for places to publish my stuff. Editors always come to me for material.

(PS) Hungarian literature is very rich in poetry, and you didn’t have to look for inspiration in the world literature, but it would be interesting to know your favorites apart from the Hungarian classics.

(SK) World literature is more available in Hungarian than in English, and that’s probably true of most small nations; they need to look outside to see what’s going on in the world while the English-speaking countries cover a large part of the globe, they can feel comfortable in the belief that everything worth knowing is written in English and can afford to remain more insular and ignore smaller nations. Of course, during the war years and afterwards under communism, Hungarian readers did not enjoy full access to the outside world. I first realized that when I started reading South American poets and writers and something sounded familiar in their lines; they reminded me of contemporary Romanian poetry. My Romanian colleagues, speaking a Romance language found Spanish poetry more accessible and they could not help coming under its spell.

(PS) Did this exposure influence your own poetry?

(SK) It’s hard to say. I like to think I always followed my own intuition and then I was glad to see some similarities between my own stuff and other contemporary poetry. I found myself validated by kindred spirits rather than influenced. For example, Cavafy became my favorite poet from the world literature when I read these four lines of his: “Remember when writing your poetic lines / that you want them to preserve the flavor of your life, / you want every beat and every metaphor to proclaim / that they were written about Alexandria by an Alexandrian.”
That’s exactly what I think. These four lines could just as well serve as my ars poetica, my creative credo. I want my poems to convey the feeling that they are about Transylvania, written by a Transylvanian. Baconsky, a Romanian poet said we poets recognize one another in the same way as a thief can immediately spot another thief, as if by a sixth sense. It’s not a matter of who influences whom, it’s a matter of mutual recognition. The important thing is to remember one’s identity and to preserve it by giving expression to it. A true poet never pretends to be someone other than himself even while experimenting with new approaches and never denies the most basic influences on his poetic self: the family that gave him life and the culture that gave him identity.

(PS) In other words, we both agree that true creative artists follow preceding innovators mostly in the spirit of innovation, they use the creative freedom claimed by earlier innovators to find their own path in their chosen field. For example, Wagner’s influence was still fresh and overwhelming to Puccini, Debussy, and even to his contemporary, Verdi, but all these composers went on to use this new creative freedom to make their own way in music, to write their own brand of new opera.

(SK) And there was Baudelaire. His influence was unavoidable for subsequent generations, but the best poets gained courage from it to do their own thing, they were inspired by it to explore new poetic vistas.

(PS) Let me get back to your own creative freedom and/or the lack thereof. You spent the prime of your life during Ceaucescu’s oppressive communist regime. How did you manage to survive?

(SK) I must have spent 7 of my 77 years on fighting for my rights, especially for the right to travel abroad, getting a passport for myself and my wife. Every trip was a hard struggle even though I was always very careful never to offend the state of Romania by any public statement when abroad. That would have been a capital crime and would have jeopardized the possibility of future travel for others, too. Our only possible protection was the law as longs we never broke any. We insisted on our legal civil rights, and only way to assert ourselves was to remind the authorities of their obligations to obey the beautifully described – but rarely observed – laws set out in the constitution. But civil disobedience was unimaginable under that system, the authorities were just waiting for such an excuse to crack down, throw you in jail or worse, found suicide, shot in the back of the head in the woods. Or run over by an unidentified truck. They were very ingenious in their methods. Under these conditions, if you make an illegal U-turn, you’re finished. A friend from abroad wanted to do just that when he once offered to drive me some place, and I asked him to let me out of the car, I could not afford to be party to the slightest infraction. As a last resort, once I went so far as threatening publicly to go on hunger strike, but there was no law against that, as I was quick to point out to the outside press.

(PS) So in a way you were a dissenter?

(SK) No, I was no dissenter, simply because there was no possibility of dissent. We supposedly lived under a perfect system, and any criticism was taken as an all-out attack on the whole system.

(PS) Were people expected to inform on one another?

(SK) Yes, of course. We all had our phones tapped, our apartments wired to listening devices, and many of my friends were forced to turn in reports about me. So I told them what to write in the statement.

(PS) Now all that information is supposed to be available. Did you ever look at your dossier?

(SK) No, I never bothered. On one occasion they ordered me to appear before a high-ranking officer of the Securitat (State Security Force), and he pointed at my file on his desk, it was at least 4 or 5 inches thick, filled with reports. But now I don’t want to know who said what about me, because these reports would not describe the circumstances under which the statements were obtained. And of course, that file did not contain the transcripts of the listening devices; a stack of those would reach the ceiling. It’s over now, but in the meantime my generation spent the best years if their lives in a Kafkaesque world.

(PS) How about party membership?

(SK) I refused to join the Communist Party. Needless to say, in a totalitarian state any form of communication is used as a propaganda tool, entrusted exclusively to reliable party members. That was why I could not work for any major publisher or publication, only a children’s magazine. But it was a living and allowed me to keep writing my own stuff. And I loved writing children’s poems and stories too. The way I see it, the only difference between children’s literature and grown-up, mainstream literature is the size, but not quality. It’s like a carpenter should make a smaller chair for a child with the same care he bestows on a full-size chair. However, for a long time I was a member of the Romanian Writers Guild, a state-run organization. All full-time writers and journalists were members. In 1987 I publicly resigned when the Guild failed to help me get an exit visa and passport for a trip to Rotterdam, to an international poetry festival as part of a Hungarian delegation. But my absence at the festival made big news in Holland, and the following year I was invited again. Then the authorities gave in to international pressure and let me attend the festival. A year later, as you know the regime crumbled, and the feared Securitat was abolished.

(PS) It seems your growing international reputation gave you some protection.

(SK) Yes, it did. I was made a member of the Austrian P.E.N. Club, only secretly, of course; we Romanian citizens were forbidden to join any international organization. In the 1980’s already I had a long poem (“All Souls’ Day in Vienna”) published in an illustrated special edition in Germany, and I was published in Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, and Russian long before I appeared in the US market with “Dancing Embers”.

(PS) Any more exciting news in that respect?

(SK) Last year a collected volume of my poems came out in Russia from several translators, and now a major Russian literary monthly (Innustrannaya Literatura) has a 25 page essay about it.

(PS) Congratulations. And I might add, I keep working on my Kányádi translations and publishing them all over the English-speaking world. Is there anything else you would like to add?

(SK) Yes. I would like to finish this interview with a quote from a poem (“Heretic Telegrams to the Other Side, Joint Communiqué”, first published in To Topos, 2006) I wrote on hearing about the death of Zbigniew Herbert in 2000. I had met him at that international poetry festival in Rotterdam in 1988, and we immediately connected, like two thieves who recognize each other. This quote gives another ars poetica, another way for me to summarize my attitude toward poetry. Here it goes:
“We agreed that poetry like love is the private business of the one in love no one in love has the right to demand love in return a felicitous indeed blissful state of mind comes from having one’s love requited but unrequited love affairs sometimes even often result in literary works of great cathartic power no one asks let alone forces anyone to take up the pen if someone does let that writer accept the full burden of the venture but if in return for the resultant intellectual profit the writer’s community people readers audience provide the writer with a living then it is to the credit of both sides the poet is not chosen the poet separates out the poet can be neither recalled nor replaced by someone else the poet can be rewarded awarded humiliated ignored silenced wiretapped arrested hanged but – and this is salvation itself – the poet can be resurrected not only after death but while still alive too the poet is the untenured laborer of love without pension benefits and committed to the language beyond the grave otherwise as a physical person the poet is just as fickle vulnerable liable to spoiling and spoilage and perhaps even more intolerable than the fellow human beings around in large part proud but never haughty toward other peoples nations constantly self-critical Basta
Written in Rotterdam in June of nineteen hundred and eighty-eight by Z. H. and yours truly.”

(PS) Obviously you wrote it in your mind as the meeting was unfolding and then copied it from memory 12 years later. Thank you for your time, and I wish you good health and strength to carry on.

(SK) And I thank you for bringing my poetry to the American reading public. And please, thank the readers for me for their attention. And don’t forget, you’re always welcome in my mountain retreat in Transylvania.

The Roots of Sándor Kányádi's Poetry

by Paul Sohar

Kányádi and I had our best joint appearance together at the First International Prague Poetry Festival a few years ago. It started somewhat formally, perhaps we were feeling somewhat self-conscious being the only ones dressed in suits and ties, among the usual assortment of rather grungy poets and artistically informal audience consisting mostly of English-speaking students and expats. Sándor’s snow-white hair shone like a moon in the dim light in the backroom of Shakespeare and Son, an English-language bookstore and café, and I am not much younger. In addition, we were pressed for time, and the bilingual aspect was somewhat curtailed, especially when it came to exotic languages like Hungarian. After an introduction by Howard Sidenberg, our publisher, I launched into the reading of the translations, interspersed with an occasional recital of the original by Sándor. Between poems I interpreted a few questions from the students and Sándor’s – somewhat suspiciously – succinct answers. The smooth process came to a sudden halt when Sándor held up a hand with a grave expression on his face.

“Look at this book,” he pointed at our book I’d left open, face down, on the table. “My father was a barely literate peasant who only traveled from his village when he had to go to war. But he had great respect for books. I’d read well over ten times as many books by the age of ten as he had when he admonished me once never to leave a book open with face down and the spine forced cracked.” With that, he rescued our crucified volume of poetry from the café table and shut it with a dramatic snap.

And the stern look did not turn to a smile until I’d interpreted, and the audience broke into laughter. Suddenly the language barrier crumbled faster than the Berlin wall. The stiff traditionalist was seen as a barefoot peasant boy, eager to learn, eager to enter the world of letters. It was as if a time tunnel had opened up through space between the little, out-of-the-way Transylvanian village and these literati from the US, UK, and Australia, most of them at least a generation or two younger, brought up in a modern industrialized world. But we were all united by a common bond, the love of poetry, the love of the word, whether written or spoken, but used to create a world beyond the world of everyday experiences; we were all there to find the importance of that world confirmed, validated and demonstrated.

No matter whether words are put together by shepherds telling tales by a campfire, printed in a book, or composed on a laptop, they retain their importance. It was not the physical object of the book that the poet’s peasant father had treated with almost religious reverence, but that idea that words can be more important than bricks when it comes to building a monument to man’s creativity, to the expression of the spirit.

I didn’t have to elaborate on any of these thoughts to the audience, it was enough to translate the poet’s words for them to understand that this white-haired old man was proud to be still a peasant boy, filled with the same awe for books, these building blocks of civilization, in a world that no longer values civilization but sees it as the enemy of mankind. This boy had grown up to be a poet, a sophisticated man of the world, but the world he wants to live in will always include books, because they are the most important products and depositories of our civilization. To him civilization is not ready for the ash heap of history, not an empty artifice that stands in the way of individual development and fulfillment, but an important part of it.

From then on our presentation took on a more spontaneous flow that continued all through the intermission. The rapport with the audience was no longer impeded by appearances; the elderly poet was no longer seen as a stuffy – and kindly – old man but a messenger from another world with an exciting massage to deliver, and the scruffy fellow poets in the folding chairs suddenly became old friends, eager to receive news from Transylvania.

His humble background, the village lifestyle – what we would now call Third-World conditions – go to the very core of Kányádi’s poetry. When he was born (1929) peasants in Transylvania still lived the same way and tilled the land the same way as their ancestor had done for hundreds of years, farming a few acres usually with one horse, a cow, and a barnyard filled with poultry and pigs. It was hardscrabble life, barely above subsistence level by today’s standards. The only book a typical household would have was the Bible, and that was what the teacher used as a textbook when he gathered the children of the village around him in his backyard. And he had a small, hand-held blackboard on which he wrote on the first day of school: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Living so close to the soil, helping around the farm in growing plants and raising animals, put the growing boy right in the lap of nature. And images of nature continued to illustrate his poetry long after he had left the village for the city, up to the present day. Parallels between village life and modern life abound in his poems; he keeps seeing his village world even from the window of a jumbo jet about to take off: “at the edge of the runway / the leaves of grass flutter like / the mane of a leaping horse”


And this close relationship with and dependence on nature suffused his thinking and the resulting lines with reverberations of both fear and reverence. Reverence for and fear of natural forces go hand in hand living on a tiny farm; it was crucial to reach a proper balance in order to live in harmony with nature. Even though Kányádi has been living in large cities most of his life, he retained a countryman’s healthy skepticism of the mechanized life style. In a turnabout he claims our modern technological age removes man from nature where man is but one of many other living beings and places him in a dependency situation that man cannot cope with on an individual basis; the gods of technology are not amenable to worship, entreaties or even sacrifices, they are but blind forces that man faces helplessly.

You can whisper into the ear of a galloping horse and direct it gently so that it will not throw you, but what can you do to make a jet plane land safely?

No matter how destructive a storm is to your crops and fruit trees, you can always take shelter against it somewhere, but what can you do about the threat of a nuclear bomb?

Kányádi’s poetry depicts modern life as if with a double exposure, so to speak; it is always superimposed on an earlier, more basic, more down-to-earth, more pagan, more animistic image from earlier times.

Nature holds only one of the roots that feed Kányádi’s poetry; the other one goes down into the one redeeming product of mankind, civilization in the form of the already existing literature, music, and the arts.

Hungary’s contribution to music is fairly well-known; the names of Liszt, Bartók, and Kodály are household words all over the world. But poetry remains, unfortunately, Hungary’s best-kept secret; the language barrier keeps this veritable treasure trove from the outside world. And yet in Hungary poetry is considered the very apex of civilization, the highest achievement of Hungarian culture. Poets are almost like pop culture idols and more: the torchbearers of the national spirit. Kányádi had a very solid foundation on which to build his contribution to Hungarian poetry, he didn’t have to go far abroad for inspiration. But he did, from Shakespeare to Rilke, he was well-educated in Western literature, and he made a special effort to acquaint himself with the poetry of his Romanian contemporaries; since he had to share a country with them, it only behooved him to build bridges between the two cultures by translating these poets into Hungarian and thus promote more understanding and reduce tensions. At least two-third of his translation volume of poetry is devoted to Romanians. For his efforts he was rewarded with a Prize of the Romanian Writers’ Guild and the friendship of all the poets involved.

The third root of Kányádi’s poetry extends into history, not just the past but living history as we experience it now and call it politics; contemporary problems seen through the filter of history, from the perspective of centuries and millennia. This is a sort of reversal of the old adage: Historia est magistra vitae; it requires those aware of history to make it relevant to current affairs and bring it to the attention of the movers and shakers of society. In this sense, poets are like shamans, spiritual leaders and the conscience of the nation. And, of course Hungarians consider themselves one nation, whether they live in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, or the US.

Hungary, being a small nation, has had more than its share of woes, invasions, near extinction sometimes, lost wars, lost revolutions, lost causes, and it’s no wonder people would rather not think about it, or else dwell only on some of the high points. It is the poet’s duty keep a balanced view in front of his fellow countrymen and do it without exacerbating old wounds. And luckily, history is often evoked in Kányádi’s poetry without specific references and historical figures that would mean nothing to outsiders and thus render those poems unpromising in translation.

Whichever of his roots Kányádi chooses to tap into, he finds something universal to say even about the most personal experiences. That is what makes him stand out among contemporary poets and a thankful target for translation. The five poems presented here are admittedly a random selection, but they give fairly representative sample of Kányádi’s oeuvre. Let us see how the ideas sketched out above can be applied to these poems.

In “Deluge” the poet seems to exult in the power of nature to show the upper hand and put man in his place. The city, man’s fort against nature, is in the grips of an endless shower that threatens to swamp the buildings. Of course, if it were a real danger of flood and the if the city were deluged, the poet would be in panic with everyone else, but since it’s just an endless rain, an inconvenience, only a reminder of nature’s role in human affairs, even in our mental state, he can safely side with nature and root for her show of strength.

In “Hypothesis” Kányádi describes the indescribable, the awe we feel confronted by infinity, what Freud called an “oceanic feeling”, that stops us in wonder, but after a while we get distracted or tired and then we turn away to attend to some other business and let this ecstasy escape us. Kányádi manages the impossible task by a role reversal; instead of saying we, frail humans, cannot maintain this kind of heightened level of consciousness for too long, he ascribes our failure to the phenomenon itself, and in talking about its waning and prostituting itself he gives a hint of that special something we search for but when we find it we cannot bear to look at it too long. We can only see its promise and then its disappearance, that’s what our mind is capable of registering. But by switching the subject from the observer to the observed he can pinpoint something we may be able to take in. And he uses a deliberately prosaic and dense language, almost as if it had been lifted from a scientific dissertation, found text, very raw and uncompromising, as far away from poetic flights of fancy as you can get. And yet, it’s wonderful, insightful poetry, very concise and to the point.

“On the Shore” dramatizes the clash of civilization and nature, more like the underside of civilization in its more trivial form, and nature at the height of its power, seaside resorts versus the sea, a battle in which man seems to have the upper hand with man-made noise and lights subduing the waves and the moonlight, the features that supposedly attracted the vacationers to this place, but now these people succumb to the usual man-made diversions they could find anywhere else. Kányádi was a landlubber, it must have been a special occasion for him to visit the seashore and, disappointingly, he had a hard time finding it from the boardwalk and the nightclubs, etc.

Some critics may quibble whether folksongs should be included in literature in general, and in this case, “Twice the Full Moon” would require us to resort to yet another root in Kányádi’s poetry, namely folksongs. Clearly, the influence is unmistakable; the repetition, the brevity, the playful hyperbole are all essential ingredients of folksong. And this anonymous art form was always a source of strength for Hungarian poetry, often it was used to restore vitality when it was threatened by sterile classicism. But Kányádi may be the last poet with direct contact with the living tradition of folk art, now slowly overwhelmed by the pop culture of the city, a globalized, brand X form of civilization. No other comment is necessary on this unabashed celebration of a night of love making, erotic pleasure glorified, although without a hint of crude excess.

Nature is neither cruel nor kind, it’s an impartial force that compels us to live – and to want live, desperately! – and yet at the end it rewards us with death. It forces us to engage in a fight that we are doomed to lose, because it’s rigged from the beginning. This theme cast a melancholy pall over Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but Kányádi takes a more positive attitude in the final poem of this collection, “In Fearless Fear”. He denies that the certainty of death renders life meaningless; instead, he proposes it makes life all the more worth living. That’s the meaning of life: living in harmony with nature, doing our best to keep up tradition and prepare a world for the next generation, in calm acceptance of the ultimate defeat. An interesting aspect of the poem is the way he weaves his own personal struggle through life together with the history of the nation, or perhaps, by extension, whole mankind. In this case, the traditional form evokes the inexorable pacing of ballads instead of the lighthearted spirit of a folksong.

More of Kányádi’s poems are available in my English translation in our book, mentioned above: “Dancing Embers”, published by Twisted Spoon Press (Prague, 2002, but available in the US on Amazon, or can be ordered at any bookstore). Another work is for sale in e-book format, “The Curious Moon” (SynergEbooks), a long narrative poem, a children’s book with serious undertones. I also collaborated on a translation of three children’s storybooks by Kányádi, published in Budapest. Our work in progress is the publication of an illustrated bilingual edition of several late long poems, also from Twisted Spoon Press. And, of course, we’re looking forward to more joint appearances, wherever we may get invited.

The Art and Practice of Poetic Translation

by Brandon Holmquest

In my work as a translator of poetry, I have found over time that my work conforms in a broad sense to the following three guidelines. They are:
1. The translation should say, as closely as possible, what the original says.
2. The translation should say it, as closely as possible, the way that the original does.
3. The translation of a good foreign-language poem should be a good English poem.

These are not rules, they are guidelines, and loose ones at that. Hard and fast rules have no place that I can see in literary translation. They would result in nothing but the repeated abandonment of work that cannot conform to rules. To demonstrate the way these guidelines function in practice, I shall detail my work on one poem. That poem is El general Quiroga va en coche al muerte by Jorge Luis Borges.

Before we get to any actual translation, I have already done a great deal of very important work simply by choosing this particular poem. I could, after all, have chosen any poem in the vast body of Spanish poetry. Why this particular one? Well, for one, I simply like Borges’ poetry. For another this particular poem has for its subject a violent murder, which is rendered in very forceful language. I feel that I can convey the force of this language well in English. For another it is a famous poem which has been translated many times, but I do not feel that any of the other translations of it that I have seen are satisfactory.

The next thing I need to do is to know the poem. In this case, the poem deals with an historical event, the assassination of the Juan Facundo Quiroga, which took place on February 16, 1835, in Argentina. A little research gives me information about Quiroga, the man the poem accuses of his murder, Juan Manual Rosas, the circumstances of the murder, its location and so on. None of this information is particularly relevant to the discussion taking place in this essay, so I omit it, but research of this kind can and will prove extremely useful in the course of translating. Also useful to know is when the poem was written. This one came early in Borges’ career. It was first published in his second book of poems, Luna de enfrente, in 1925, and characterizes much of his work of that period, with its preoccupation with Argentine history and violence.

With all of that in my pocket, I can now proceed directly to the work. I leave the title to the end. I know what it says, of course, but I wait to give my translation a proper title until the work is done, so that the poem can illuminate the title for me more fully. The poem’s first line reads:
El madrejón desnudo ya sin una sed de agua

The first word in the line, madrejón, can be rendered, like all words, any number of ways. “Floodplain”, or “riverbed”, perhaps even “river valley”, and several other choices are available to me. The second bit, desnudo ya, means “naked now” or “already naked” or perhaps “naked already”. The last part, sin una sed de agua, is fairly simple: “without a thirst for water”.

With these rough options sitting on the table, I just start tossing them together to see how they sound. I quickly narrow it down to two choices. The first is “The floodplain naked already without a thirst for water”, and the second is “The floodplain already naked, without a thirst for water”. I have chosen “floodplain” for madrejón because it is rhythmically closer than my other options, and also because the long “a” in “plain” serves in some slight way to echo the accent on the last syllable of madrejón. As for my two choices for the line on the whole, I choose the second because the formulation “The floodplain already naked…” simply seems clearer to me, and because the comma I have inserted in the middle of the line replicates the caesura I have perceived after ya in the original. Understand, that caesura may not be there for another reader, but it is there for me and so it goes into my translation, in the form of a comma. So, my first line reads:
The floodplain already naked, without a thirst for water

Borges’ second line is:
y una luna perdida en el frío del alba

Personally, I find the phrase una luna perdida to be quite beautiful. I wrack my brains for a while, trying to find an English phrase that will be as beautiful. I come up with nothing. Therefore, I move on, and realize that the language of the line is very simple. So I translate it simply. My line reads:
and a moon lost in the cold of dawn

Line three is:
y el campo muerto de hambre, pobre como una araña.

Here I have two slight problems. The first is with the word campo, which is the rural area, what in English we call “the country”. However there is also the English use of country to mean “nation”, the Spanish word for which is país. To avoid confusion I could use another word such as “countryside” perhaps, but I reject this simply because I do not like the sound of it. I reconcile myself to the slight possibility of confusion between the two senses of the word, and choose “country”. The other problem is with the word como. This is a minor dilemma. Como in this context means either “like” or “as”, and the choice is mine, to be made along poetic lines rather than others. I choose “as”, and my line reads:
and the country dead of hunger, poor as a spider.

With the poem’s fourth line I run into a serious difficulty for the first time:
El coche se hamacaba rezongando la altura;


El coche here means “the carriage”. The problem is with the word hamacaba. I don’t know the word, so I look it up, but it isn’t in my dictionary, so I consult a battery of on-line dictionaries. Not there either. So I call my native-speaker friends and ask them. They don’t know. So I return to my dictionary to hunt for similar words, to see if I can puzzle it out, and I find, buried in the definition for hamaca a listing for the verb hamacar. This is the first time it occurs to me that hamacaba is a verb. I feel foolish, then proceed.

Hamaca is the Spanish word for “hammock”, and hamacar is a verb meaning “to rock or sway gently”. Since the word is clearly derived from hamaca, I assume that the rocking or swaying carries hammockesque connotations. The problem them becomes the utter lack of a suitable English word to translate it. If I say “rocked” or “swayed”, I have thrown out the hammock connotations, which I assume Borges wanted, since he could easily have chosen a more common word. I agonize over this for perhaps ten minutes before finally coming up with the idea of a hyphenated solution. “Hammock-rocked” or “hammock-swayed” are the most obvious. I prefer the latter but do not like the “-ed”, so I alter the tense of the verb and settle on “hammock-swaying” because I like the phonetic properties of “swaying”, the way the word itself seems to sway.

I also have to deal with rezongando la altura; and the word here that troubles me is altura. It means “height” or “high”, but the height of what? The carriage? Perhaps the surrounding land? I decide that, given the fact that the carriage is “hammock-swaying“, the top of it must be rocking back and forth, and in the process it is making noise, indicated by the word rezongando. To clear this bit of confusion up, I toss an “of it” in and arrive at this version of the line:
The carriage hammock-swaying, the height of it grumbling;

Now, I am far from happy with that line. The original is so much smoother and more musical, even with two more syllables than mine, but what can I do? I think about a while longer and decide I have done the best I can. The line says what Borges’ line says, more or less, and is not as bad as it could be, so I let it go, and move on to the next line:
un galerón enfatico, enorme, funerario.

A galerón is a type of song accompanied by a specific dance. There are many such music and dance pairings in South America, such as the tango. The term “tango” refers both to the music that is played and the dance that is danced to that music. While the tango is an urban form, galerón is a rural one. The problem, from the point of view of translation, is that galerón is basically unknown to English readers, unlike the tango. This means that I cannot simply use the word galerón. I must find another. In order to find the best English word for galerón, I first proceed to the rest of the line, thinking that once I have those words set they will help guide my choice. The three adjectives in the line I translate using the words that most closely resemble them in English. In this case, I am fortunate because each word has a nearly exact English counterpart. When this is true, I almost always use the English word that is homophonically closest to the Spanish. Here I go with “emphatic”, “enormous”, and “funereal”. With those words in place, I return to the problem of galerón. The first thing I come up with is “folk song”, which carries something of the rural natural of a galerón. With this formulation the line would read “an emphatic, enormous, funereal folk song”. But when I read the line together with the others I have translated I do not like the rhythm of it. It is one beat too long, and so I drop the “folk”, and with it the hint of rurality and the alliteration, but the result is a better line:
an emphatic, enormous, funereal song

The poem’s next line:
Cuatro tapaos con pinta de muerte en la negrura

Here I run into a problem that is similar to the one I encountered earlier with the word hamacaba. I cannot find a definition for the word tapaos anywhere. Not in any dictionary of any kind, including the Real Academia Española online edition. None of my native speaker friends know the word. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist. So I sort of cheat. I go get my bilingual edition of Borges and I look at the translation of the poem in that book. The word used is “horses”, which works with the rest of this line and the next, so I steal it. The first part of the line is “Four horses…”.

There is some difficulty with the phrase con pinta de muerte en la negrura, mostly because the Spanish construction is very clear and very specific to Spanish. I have trouble finding a translation of this phrase that is clear in English. I get around this by substituting a possessive preposition, “their”, for the Spanish definite article, la. This makes it clear that the negrura, blackness or darkness, is that of the horses specifically, and my line reads:
Four horses with the mark of death on their darkness

The next and final line of this stanza is:
tironeabon seis miedos y un valor desvelado.

Here the difficulty is with miedos and valor desvelado. Miedo is the Spanish word for fear. In this usage it means men who are afraid. To convey this I have to add something, and I decide on the word “souls” because it will give me an alliteration with the word “six” earlier in the line. As for valor desvelado, it is more complicated. Valor has many meanings, from “value” to “worth”, “staunchness”, “courage”, etc. I choose “brave” for the contrast with the earlier “fearful”. Desvelado means one who is kept awake. The common English word for such a person is “insomniac”, but I reject this first because I do not like the sound of “brave insomniac” and also because of the connotations of neurosis that “insomniac” carries. But there is no other, better word which means the same thing. I resolve this by changing desvelado from a noun to an adjective, “sleepless”, after which my line reads:
pulled six fearful souls and one brave and sleepless.

The first line of the third stanza reads:
Junto a los postilliones jineteaba un moreno.

At this point we run into a problem of a cultural rather than purely linguistic nature, centered around the word moreno. Its most literal translations are “brown” or “swarthy”, but is used colloquially in the Americas to mean a person with very dark skin, a descendant of African slaves.

The issue here is one of Latin American blood mongering. Societies throughout Latin America are and have historically been very stratified in terms of race. At the top of the scale are the Spanish, or people who physically look Spanish. They tend to have lighter skin than the people further down the scale. The further down the scale you go, the darker the people get and the more marginalized they are. This sort of thing is of course familiar to any North American. However, unlike in the United States, where there basically is no significant Native American population and the descendants of African slaves have long occupied the bottom of the racial social order, the bottoms of Latin American societies are crowded with a mix of people of African and Native American descent. The Spanish word for “Indian”, Indio, is an insult, applied, for example, to an exasperatingly bad driver.

The case of moreno is more complicated. I have seen Puerto Rican people look both ways in a bar before using the word, then apologize for saying it. The appropriate English word for that usage would obviously be “nigger”. However, I have also heard people from the South American mainland use the word matter of factly, in the way that American liberals of the 1960’s would have used the word “Negro”. In contemporary American society, “Negro” has fallen out of use, but in its day it was the most widely used inoffensive term.

A valid part of this question is whether or not Borges was himself a racist. If he was, then the unfortunate word “nigger” will have to be used. If not, then “Negro”, with its English connotations of an out-dated and somewhat condescending liberalism would be the better choice. The decision is essentially mine. Reflecting on Borges work, all of which I have read, I do not recall anything that might resemble racist ideology. On the contrary, Borges was an early and vocal critic of Hitler’s regime. Also, we live in an age when writers and artists are constantly being re-evaluated along political and ideological grounds. I am not aware of any academic or critical scandal surrounding Borges’ thoughts on race. Therefore, I decide, in a purely subjective fashion, that Borges was not a racist, and make my word choice accordingly. The line reads:
Beside the postillions pranced a Negro

The poem’s next three lines, which conclude the third stanza, present no major difficulties. Those lines are:
Ir en coche a la muerte ¡qué cosa más oronda!
El general Quiroga quiso entrar en la sombra
llevando seis o seite degollados de escolta.

And I translate them more or less literally as:
To go toward Death in a carriage, what thing more vain!
General Quiroga wished to enter the shadow
carrying six or seven severed heads as escorts.

The only note on these lines is my choice of “toward” as opposed to the conventional “to” for the Spanish preposition a in the phrase a la muerte. The English construction of a verb and the phrase “to death”, such as “beat to death” implies that is was the action of the verb that brought about the death. That is not the sense of the Spanish here, hence my use of “toward”. Also, I have capitalized “Death” because the original seems to grant death some small agency.

Borges begins the next stanza with the line:
Esa cordobesada bochinchera y ladina

There are two problems here. The first is cordobesada. This is another word that is not in any dictionary, which no one seems to know. This is a frequent problem in the translation of Borges’ early work, in which he strove, through the use of old forms and archaic words, to be a Spanish poet of the 16th century. I cheat again, consulting another translation. It has “gang from Córdoba”. I alter the formulation, making it into “Córdobans”. The other difficulty is with bochinchera, which means a person or group producing noise through ostentatious activity, usually partying or other rowdiness. It is a complicated adjective, difficult to bring into English with a single word, and so I split it into two, using “flashy” for the ostentation and “loud” for the noise. My line reads:
Those Córdobans, flashy, loud, and sly

The next two lines are relatively simple:
(meditaba Quiroga) ¿qué he de poder con mi alma?
Aquí estoy afianzado y metido in la vida

My version of them is:
(thought Quiroga) what power could they have over my soul?
Here I am secure, well-placed in life

The last line of the stanza is:
como la estaca pampa bien metido en la pampa

The problem here is la estaca pampa. It is a term meaning a stake which is driven into the ground in order to tie animals to it. The term estaca pampa indicates that this is a tool used in the flat plains of Argentina, called the pampa, where there are very few trees to which horses might be tied. I feel comfortable expecting English readers of Borges to know what the pampa is, but the estaca pampa is much more specific. I again resort to a hyphen to get the meaning across in a somewhat fluid fashion:
like a horse-tying stake well-placed in the pampa.

The first three lines of the next stanza go smoothly from:
Yo, que he sobrevivido a millares de tardes
y cuyo nombre pone retemblor en las lanzas,
No he de soltar la vida por estos pedregales.

To:
I who have survived a thousand afternoons
and whose very name puts a trembling in the lances
cannot lose my life in this stonescape.

Here I have changed millares de, literally “thousands of” to “a thousand” because my formulation still connotes a great many and is smoother in English. I have also translated pedregales as “stonescape” which is only vaguely a real English word, it does, however, mean what the Spanish means more than any other option I might have used, and I believe it to be comprehensible with a minimum of effort.

The final line of this stanza detailing Quiroga’s certainty of his safety reads:
¿Muere acaso el pampero, se mueren las espadas?

Here we find the word pampero which means the winds that blow, usually from the southwest, across the pampa. I translate this as “pampa’s wind” and make the line into two rhetorical questions, rather than one long one, for the sake of smoothness in English that would not exist in a literal translation of the line:
Do the pampa’s winds die, perhaps? Do swords?

The next stanza in its entirety presents no major problems:
Pero al brillar el día sobre Barranca Yaco
hierros que no perdonan arreciaron sobre él;
la muerte, que es de todos, arreó con el riojano
y una de puñaladas lo mentó a Juan Manuel.

My version is:
But as the day shone over Barranca Yaco
iron, which grants no pardon, raged upon him;
Death, which is for all, drove with the man from Rioja
and one of the daggers mentioned Juan Manuel.

Here I have altered hierros, literally “irons”, singularizing it into “iron” because this is the more natural English formulation. It is interesting to not that in this passage Borges has altered the historical facts, of which he was certainly aware. General Quiroga was actually killed with a pistol shot, rather than daggers.

The next and final stanza begins with the line:
Ya meurto, ya de pie, ya inmortal, ya fantasma,

Which I translate as:
Now dead, now on foot, now immortal, now a phantom,

The Spanish word fantasma is more commonly given as “ghost”, but I use “phantom” here and elsewhere use that or “phantasm” due to my predilection for homophonic translation where it is possible without much violence to the sense of the original.

The final three lines are complicated in that the information that they convey very easily in Spanish becomes muddled in the simplest available English translation. They are:
se presentó al infierno que Dios le había marcado,
y a sus órdenes iban, rotas y desangradas,
las animas en pena de hombres y de caballos.

The first is easily made clear by making presentó, “presented himself” into a simpler, shorter verb. I have chosen to use “met”; and by adding a possessive preposition, indicating whose infierno it is for certain. The line reads:
he met the Hell that God had marked as his,

The next line is complicated because it is saying, essentially, that even in Hell Quiroga is still a general. This is conveyed with the phrase a sus órdenes. Rendered simply the phrase translates as “on his orders”, but this is not as clear in English due to the presence of two possible subjects in the sentence, God and Quiroga. I have resolved this by making a sus órdenes into “under his command” and letting the lower case “his” make it clear that the command is Quiroga’s rather than God’s. This line, then, is:
and under his command went routed, pouring blood,

For the final line I have altered the phrase animas en pena, literally “souls in Purgatory”. In my version it reads “suffering souls” because this is better English poetry and the presence of the word “Purgatory” might cause confusion regarding the location of this final scene. The last line reads:
the suffering souls of men and horses.

With the poem now translated, and a complete picture of both the original and my version of it in my head, I return to the title. In this case, it is very simple: General Quiroga Goes Toward Death in a Carriage.

As this real-time simulation demonstrates clearly, the guidelines given at the start of this essay are indeed just that. As has been shown, I follow them when I can and ignore them completely when I have to, but I always return to them again once a particular problem has been solved and proceed with them until the next time the must be stretched or discarded. They function to provide a foundation for the work, and in that sense are very useful.

Another thing this demonstration illustrates is the extent to which literary translation is a totally engaging act. It requires the mobilization of the translator’s every resource, from his or her knowledge of the language, to memories, intuitive associations, sense of image and metaphor and much more. In this sense, translation is every bit the kind of demanding literary work that the composition of original material is, and presents many of the same problems. Where translation differs from original composition is obvious. I have attempted here to illustrate the extent to which translation is in no way as simple as it may seem.

In short, there is a great deal of difficult work involved in the translation of even a short poem. If this work is done well by a person who is capable of doing it, the result is a good translation, which is something distinct from but intimately related to the original. If it is done haphazardly by a bad craftsman the result is a bad translation, which is something that benefits no one.

I conclude this essay with the full text of Borges’ poem, followed by my own version.

El general Quiroga va en coche al muerte
By Jorge Luis Borges

El madrejón desnudo ya sin una sed de agua
y una luna perdida en el frío del alba
y el campo muerto de hambre, pobre como una araña.

El coche se hamacaba rezongando la altura;
un galerón enfatico, enorme, funerario.
Cuatro tapaos con pinta de muerte en la negrura
tironeabon seis miedos y un valor desvelado.

Junto a los postilliones jineteaba un moreno.
Ir en coche a la muerte ¡qué cosa más oronda!
El general Quiroga quiso entrar en la sombra
llevando seis o seite degollados de escolta.


Esa cordobesada bochinchera y ladina
(meditaba Quiroga) ¿qué he de poder con mi alma?
Aquí estoy afianzado y metido in la vida
como la estaca pampa bien metido en la pampa.

Yo, que he sobrevivido a millares de tardes
y cuyo nombre pone retemblor en las lanzas,
No he de soltar la vida por estos pedregales.
¿Muere acaso el pampero, se mueren las espadas?

Pero al brillar el día sobre Barranca Yaco
hierros que no perdonan arreciaron sobre él;
la muerte, que es de todos, arreó con el riojano
y una de puñaladas lo mentó a Juan Manuel.

Ya meurto, ya de pie, ya inmortal, ya fantasma,
se presntó al infierno que Dios le había marcado,
y a sus órdenes iban, rotas y desangradas,
las animas en pena de hombres y de caballos.



General Quiroga Goes Toward Death in a Carriage
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish by Brandon Holmquest

The floodplain already naked, without a thirst for water
and a moon lost in the cold of dawn
and the country dead of hunger, poor as a spider.

The carriage hammock-swaying, the height of it grumbling;
an emphatic, enormous, funereal song.
Four horses with the mark of death on their darkness
pulled six fearful souls and one brave and sleepless.

Beside the postillions pranced a Negro.
To go toward Death in a carriage, what thing more vain!
General Quiroga wished to enter the shadow
carrying six or seven severed heads as escorts.

Those Córdobans, flashy, loud, and sly
(thought Quiroga) what power could they have over my soul?
Here I am secure, well-placed in life
like a horse-tying stake well-placed in the pampa.

I who have survived a thousand afternoons
and whose very name puts a trembling in the lances
cannot lose my life in this stonescape.
Do the pampa’s winds die, perhaps? Do swords?

But as the day shone over Barranca Yaco
iron, which grants no pardon, raged upon him;
Death, which is for all, drove with the man from Rioja
and one of the daggers mentioned Juan Manuel.

Now dead, now on foot, now immortal, now a phantom,
he met the Hell that God had marked as his,
and under his command went routed, pouring blood,
the suffering souls of men and horses.