Back to Book | French Feast Preface

Introduction for French Feast

The book you are holding is a smorgasbord of flavors and situations, from the mouth-watering smell of frying onions to the sweet temptation of caramelized sugar and almonds, set in often surprising circumstances. But none of the thirty-one stories in French Feast is really about food; they’re about people. The writers in this collection are framing, through food and our connections with it, some of the most fundamental questions of human existence: who are we, where have we come from, where are we going?

Food can both connect people and estrange them. The tradition of breaking bread is a ritual that cements friendship and builds solidarity. But sharing meals can just as easily put people in unequal, even hostile relationships.

Nadine Ribault’s story “Tears of Laughter” illustrates this perfectly. A large extended family gathers in a country house for a festive meal, but the tensions between them lie just beneath the surface. A man snacks on chocolate after lunch, covertly criticizing his sister for serving too-small portions. Her quirky decision to replace a traditional cake with her favorite tart is seen as the inconsiderate act of a spoiled daughter. The smallest acts cast prickly shadows.
There is a long tradition of writing about food and its associations in French literature. Rabelais’s two sixteenth-century omnivorous giants Gargantua and Pantagruel are among its most memorable characters. Fast-forward three hundred years and the French are still sitting at the table.

Characters eat a great deal in French nineteenth-century novels, and it’s easy to understand why. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson writes in her book Accounting for Taste: “To the novelist intent on analyzing the relationship between group dynamics and individual psychology, commensality offers a wonderfully exploitable situation. Meals put groups on display, set the scene for dramatic interactions, and foster unexpected relationships across class, gender, and generations.” Balzac, a glutton in both eating and writing, focused on a recent innovation, the restaurant. Writes Ferguson: “He fixed on dining as shorthand to chart his characters’ relations as they sometimes diligently, often desperately, try to make their way in the world.”

But it was Marcel Proust who most memorably put his finger on the emotional subtext associated with, in his case, a little cake and a cup of herbal tea. When young Marcel took that bite of madeleine, he single-handedly launched the recovered memory industry. Whether or not you have actually read À la recherche du temps perdu, you know about Proust’s use of taste to reconnect with the past as an iconic experience. “Reinvoked everywhere by cultural commentary from literary criticism to cookie advertisements,” writes Ferguson, “the madeleine is surely the most celebrated literary cookie ever baked.”

(In her book, Ferguson reprints a 1989 New Yorker cartoon that shows Proust getting disappointing news. The writer is lying in bed as a vendor with a coffee cart says, “I’m out of madeleines, Jack. How about a prune Danish?”)

In French Feast, people are still making their way in the world, but these are now our people and our world. In collecting contemporary stories for the book, we searched the last fifty years or so for literary glimpses of people as they wake, work, love, fight, and, only incidentally, eat. Loosely grouped under menu headings — appetizers, main courses, and so on — these tales show how widely we cast the net.

In the stories “Bresse,” “The Taste of New Wine,” and “Acacia Flowers,” three authors revisit the past in very different ways. The narrator of “Bresse” kills frogs and chickens as a girl and grows up to become a writer. The compassionate doctor in “New Wine” stands midway between kitchen and living room, but also between his patient’s life and death. In “Acacia” a man joins his mother in a golden haze of memory, but when he describes feeling a sudden stab of longing, we realize she is dead.

Some of the book’s stories are ostensibly about food, but actually about violence. In “Brasserie,” a cozy restaurant is the scene of abuse witnessed and remembered. “Come and Get It” invites an errant lover to a delicious dinner and wild sex — followed by just desserts. In other stories, the cutting edge is subtler, more psychological. “Even Me” and “Cafeteria Wine” are basted with bitterness. “Spinach Should Be Cooked with Cream” and “Here They Are How Nice” lacerate ostensibly happy marriages.

A few of the stories are simply off the wall. In “Beef Steak,” the women of an entire town sleep with a teenage butcher in hopes of getting a special cut of meat. If you’ve ever considered eating your furniture, you’ll get some tips from “The Armoire.” And you may look at cheese differently after reading “Roll On, Camembert.”

Finally, a group of the stories focuses not on what the characters eat, but how. “The Plate Raider” and “Belle du Seigneur” are about manners, good, bad, and excruciating. That’s fitting, since they come from a country that values doing the right thing but also looking good as you do it, that prizes both savoir-vivre and savoir-faire. As Professor Higgins says in My Fair Lady, “The French don’t care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.”

Jean Anderson, Wellington, New Zealand

William Rodarmor, Berkeley, California

Back to Book | French Feast Introduction

Preface: An Amuse-Bouche from the Editor

If you’re French, you love your cabbage. I don’t mean the cruciform vegetable that lends an acrid reek to the grittier parts of town. I mean that classic French term of endearment, Mon petit chou, “My little cabbage.” For those of us not lucky enough to be French, this is more than a linguistic oddity. It’s a key to national character.

With the possible exception of the Chinese, there are few other peoples on Earth for whom food is more important. The French spend more than two hours a day eating and drinking, nearly twice as much time as Americans. A U.S. household spends 8 percent of its budget on food; a French one, 14 percent.

Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. Marie-Antoinette never actually said, “Let them eat brioche.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau made that up. But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase Les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means “the carrots are cooked,” and metaphorically, “it’s all over.” What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?

If you aren’t convinced of the intimate link between food and the French language, try to describe cooking without it. France practically invented our lexicon: entrée, quiche, escargot, crêpe, hors d’oeuvre, petit fours, Béarnaise, baguette, croque-monsieur, vinaigrette, paté, maitre d’, sous chef, even the word cuisine itself! Not to mention French fries, French toast, and French onion soup.

Far from the kitchen, French food words pop up in the most unexpected places. Here are two of my favorites. First: If you’re a besotted lover gazing helplessly at the object of your affections, you’re said to regarder avec des yeux de merlan frit, “looking with the eyes of a fried whiting,” a fish otherwise absent from romantic literature. (Anglo-Saxons make “cow eyes” at each other.) Second: When the French mean, “Who do you think you’re kidding?” they might say, Et mon cul, c’est du poulet? How a Frenchman’s ass came to be made of chicken is a topic best left for another day.

Even when language fails, food finds a way. For years my friend Toby Golick and her husband used to spend part of every summer in a village in the south of France. Despite her rudimentary French, Toby and the local butcher found an enjoyable way to communicate when she went shopping. She would point to a cut of meat and the boucher would make the sound of the animal it came from. For fans of French onomatopoeia, I offer the following list:

Cow: meuuuuhhhh
Turkey: glou-glou
Pig: grouik-grouik
Duck: coin-coin
Sheep: bêêêêê
Chicken: cot-cot

For this and many other reasons, I dedicate this collection of stories to Toby Golick. Food really speaks to her.

William Rodarmor,

Back to Book | Preface | Interview with the Editor

Preface for Argentina

When I think of going anywhere, I think of going south. I associate the word “south” with freedom. 

—Paul Theroux, Nowhere Is a Place: Travels in Patagonia 

The motif of the south carries a myriad of connotations within the Latin American experience. In the context of Argentina, the south for some extends only as far as Buenos Aires, that city of eternal light whose iconic Obelisco along the sixteen-lane Avenida 9 de Julio, bears witness to the many facets of urban reality. For the more literal minded, the south extends beyond the Pampas and the Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego — a south once populated by indigenous cultures such as the Tehuelche, literally the “people of the south,” who were reputed to be giants according to Antonio Pigafetta’s 1520 account of Magellan’s voyage. And yet for the many who were forced into exile during the years of the dictatorship, the south denotes retorno, the return to homeland. 

Vuelvo al Sur
como se vuelve siempre al amor. 

I return to the South like one always returns to love. 

Argentina: A Traveler’s Literary Companion joins an exciting series whose aim is to invite travelers to experience a country through its literature, whether they travel in the conventional sense or from the comfort of an armchair. To this end, the anthology is organized into geographic regions: The Northern Region (El Gran Chaco), the Central Region (El Litoral), Buenos Aires (capital city and province), the Western Region (the Andes), and the Southern Region (Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego). The vastness of Argentina rings clear through these stories, and the urban stands in sharp contrast with the rural. The anthology also makes a quick foray into Uruguay in the section entitled Beyond the River Plate. 

The geography of the north is poignantly portrayed through Héctor Tizón’s story, “Old Horse,” as we watch the old horse traverse the rugged landscape for the last time. Set in El Litoral in central Argentina, Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s story “About the Shape of the World” leads us up river to Uruguay through the confluences of the River Plate, and the Uruguay and Paraná Rivers on a mystical journey that is at once surreal and sensual. Carlos Chernov’s story “The Tourist” has us climbing Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, on a decisive ascent toward destiny. Down south in the Patagonia, we find remnants of native cultures, ostrich-like rheas known as ñandúes and characters like Borges’ Juan Dahlman, for whom the South offered a romantic escape into the past, a past where gauchos still ruled, and dying in a knife fight was far more honorable than being saved by modern alternatives. 

Llevo el Sur,
como un destino del corazón. 

I carry the South like a destiny of my heart. 

In Buenos Aires Marcelo Birmajer’s “The Last Happy Family” introduces us to the Jewish community of Barrio Once, Alicia Steimberg’s narrator is wary of “The Man with Blue Eyes,” Edgar Brau’s “The Blessing” has us dodging bullets outside the Pink House (Argentina’s equivalent to our White House), Ana María Shua tells us a tender “Bed Time Story,” and José Eduardo Totah reminds us of the importance of fútbol, Argentina’s national pastime. The tango is tacitly celebrated in Julio Cortázar’s “Return Trip Tango¨ by bringing us a romantic intrigue that echoes the themes of early tangos, and Luisa Valenzuela’s “The Place of Its Solitude” posits urban against rural in a story that foreshadows the tragic events of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976 – 1983) during which some 30,000 people were disappeared. 

Soy del Sur,
como los aires del bandoneón. 

I am from the South, like the sounds of the bandoneón. 

This volume consists of eighteen stories. That number could easily have been multiplied many hundreds of times over. To narrow the wealth of the Argentine narrative to such a finite number automatically begs the readers’ forgiveness. Even before Borges paved the way in the mid-20th century for the writers of the Latin American Boom — whose innovations in narrative structure and use of magic realism and the fantastic were to revolutionize Latin American literature forever — Argentina had established itself as having one of the richest literary traditions in all of Latin America. In fact, Argentina is credited with the first Latin American short story, “El matadero” (“The Slaughterhouse”), written by Esteban Echeverría in 1839 while living in exile in Uruguay and published posthumously in 1871 after the overthrow of Juan Manuel de Rosas. 

Literary production in Argentina began to soar in the first part of the 20th century thanks in part to a number of literary journals such as Proa and Martin Fierro. While both journals continued to publish foreign literature, the focus gradually shifted to the River Plate. The martinfierristas, in particular, were concerned with exploring questions of national identity: What did it mean to be Argentine? Is there a unique Argentine sensibility? In 1931, the literary journal Sur was founded by Victoria Ocampo with a list of distinguished collaborators that included Borges, Bioy Casares, and Ernesto Sabato. Two years later, a publishing house under the same name was established. Each contributed greatly to the expansion of literature, both national and Latin American, as well as world literature in translation. By 1940, Argentina had already established itself as a center of literary production thanks to the Spanish Civil War, which caused an exodus of some of the most important publishing houses from Spain to Argentina. After a period of “cultural darkness” during Juan Perón’s first presidency (1946 – 55), literary production rose sharply during the 1960s reaching its peak in 1974 with unprecedented numbers of editions printed and sold nationally. This was due to a growing middle-class readership, a marked increase in university matriculation, and an explosion of innovative literature by Argentine writers, in particular, and of Latin American, in general. Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), translated as Hopscotch, epitomized the writing of the Boom era by inviting the reader to actively participate by playing hopscotch with the text and thus creating a new order. 

This kind of democratic participation in the literary and hence cultural text was later squelched by the 1976 military coup that overthrew Isabel Peron, who had become president upon the death of her husband in 1974. During la Guerra Sucia, as it was called by the people, a new kind of censorship took place that was part of the military junta’s overall Plan for National Reorganization. The Proceso, as the military called it, propelled many of Argentina’s best writers into exile, including several who are included in this volume. Mempo Giardinelli and Héctor Tizón spent their years in exile in Mexico City, Luisa Valenzuela in New York, and Cristina Siscar in Paris. This volume celebrates their return to the South and remembers those who could not. 

Sueño el Sur,
Inmensa luna, su cielo al revés. 

I dream the South, Immense moon, its sky upside down. 

And like Piazzolla’s “Vuelvo al Sur,” I too have dreamed the South. The process of compiling this anthology has allowed me that journey, a journey that could not have been made successfully without the help of my traveling companions, my collaborators. In order to ensure that this journey went beyond Buenos Aires and did not get caught up in what Giardinelli calls obeliscocentrismo, I sought out contributions that portrayed the vastness of Argentina’s geography and the wealth of its literary resources. Like the early explorers, I tried to find the open veins of Argentina in order to tap into the diverseness of its literature by seeking out new voices while ensuring adequate representation of key figures, past and present. This search produced new writers such as Totah as well as a new kind of creative non-fiction epitomized by the work of Juan José Saer and Rodolfo Rabanal. The volume also reconizes the short, short story (micro-cuento or minficción) as an important genre within Argentine literature as seen in the epigraph, “Time Travel,” by Ana María Shua. 

I would like to acknowledge the work of my fellow travelers who brought along their new translations on this journey: Jennifer Croft, Alexandra Falek, Andrea Labinger, Suzanne Jill Levine, Darrell B. Lockhart, Mempo Giardinelli, Marcelo Birmajer, and Beth Pollack. I would also like to thank Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, Marina Harss, Andrea Labinger, Suzanne Jill Levine, Gregory Rabassa, and Joanne M. Yates for graciously agreeing to have their translations republished for this “return trip tango.” These acknowledgements would be incomplete without a special thank you to the Museo Xul Solar for granting permission to use Solar’s Vuel Villa (1936) on the cover of this volume and to Dave Peattie for Whereabouts Press so that we can travel the world vicariously whenever we please. 

Quiero al Sur,
Su buena gente, su dignidad. 

I love the South, its wonderful people, its dignity. 

I have long loved Argentina for and through its literature, for the unique sounds of its River Plate Spanish called castellano with its soft “yeísmo” and use of the pronoun “vos,” for its musical traditions, and for the late Mercedes Sosa whose rendition of the above tango “Volver al sur” will make you long to return even if you have never been there before. As Bruce Chatwin proclaimed in his introduction to Nowhere Is a Place: Travels in Patagonia (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992): 

If we are travelers at all, we are literary travelers. A literary reference or connection is likely to excite us as much as a rare animal or plant; and so we touch on some of the instances in which Patagonia has affected the literary imagination. 

It can be said, therefore, that literature comes to life through travel, and travel comes alive when seen through the lens of great literature. Te quiero Sur. ¡Hasta pronto! 

Jill Gibian 

(Excerpt from “Vuelvo al sur,” written by Astor Piazzolla and Fernando “Pino” Solanas.)

Back to Book | Interview with the Editor

Preface for India

Much of the pleasure of storytelling comes from all that is left unsaid — from the things for which we readers are given a direction, but not an end. So too, so much of what we feel for the world of a story derives from the flavour of the local — from a turn of phrase, a glimpse of a patch of earth, a memorable detail, that is absolutely specific to the worldview of a particular character or culture.

When, for instance, Chandrakant, the youth leaving his village for the first time in Jayant Kaikini’s story “Dots and Lines,” feels the wind on his face on the train to Bombay and imagines that the same wind “had just blown the tarpaulin off the night-halting bus on the banks of the Gangavati before reaching this place,” this image makes us see Chandrakant in two places at the same time. Not only does the idea of the wind from home catching up with the train going away from home encapsulate Chandrakant’s longing for what he has left behind, the specificity of the image of “the tarpaulin of the night-halting bus” being ruffled by that wind registers very strongly on our own imaginations: it is one of those flares of detail that make fiction burn brighter than other kinds of prose writing.

Similarly, in Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s “Canvasser Krishnalal,” we are told of Krishnalal, the itinerant seller of medicated oil, that “he would ply like a weaver’s shuttle, from Shiyalda to Barasat, from Barasat to Shiyalda.” This detail not only makes Krishnalal seem like a mechanised object himself, operating upon the world with the same regularity and constancy as that of a season or the trains, it also suggests the man’s jaunty temperament — it might be a metaphor thought of by Krishnalal himself. We understand, from such details, why Eudora Welty thought that while fiction’s reach, its themes, were universal, the power of a story was “all bound up in the local.”

This anthology brings to you a basket of such stories, plucked out of the gardens of literature from India’s many languages: works that are intended to bring you closer to the Indian landscape and the Indian imagination in all its variety, even as you enjoy the universal pleasures of storytelling. About half the stories here were written in English, and the other half are translations, each from a different Indian language. Indeed, the most striking feature of Indian literature when seen as a whole — a source of its strength and variety, but also of the difficulty in navigating it — is that it is multilingual to a degree not matched by any other national literature in the world. Even if we exclude classical languages and contemporary dialects, we find ourselves before a field divided up among at least two dozen languages. As with any other language, each one of these languages represents not only a particular matrix of sounds and grammatical structures but also a distinct imaginative universe, with its own myths and beliefs, its own social structures, its own view of history and time.

Thus we arrive at the paradox: because of its profusion of languages, most of Indian literature is a foreign country even for Indian readers, who at their best can be no more than trilingual or quadrilingual. I myself speak English, Hindi — which is the closest that India has to a “national” language — and my mother tongue Oriya, and, I am ashamed to admit, can only read and write in the first two, although I can sing you a number of devotional songs in the third.

Unsurprisingly, as English is the language of university education and also the favoured language of the Indian elite, a link language between people whose first languages are different from each other, and also the language that links India to the world, it is Indian writing in English — a realm in which much exciting work is being done — that receives the most attention both at home and around the world. Another factor inhibiting the appreciation of the literature from other Indian languages has been the paucity of good translations into English. These are the conditions that led Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West to controversially declare, in their 1997 anthology Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, that “the prose writing . . . created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work that most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India,” and that “‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.”

This is a contention — as I hope this book will demonstrate — that is being disproved rapidly. But the point remains: many of the riches of Indian literature are lying invisible in the shadows, waiting for a translation that will release their rhythms and energies into the world. It is my hope that some of the stories in this volume showcase the best of what is currently available of Indian fiction in English translation, and arouse in you, the reader interested in India, the desire for a more sustained encounter with writers whose work is every bit as good as their better-known counterparts who compose in English.

As with other anthologies in this series, the stories here are arranged on a geographical basis, almost laid out on a map. Each of the five regions in which I have divided the country could potentially have been the subject of an individual book, but here I have limited them to two or three stories each. Where the stories are set in a specific city or town, those have been named; otherwise the general region or state in which the story is set has been provided. I have tried to make sure that the book gives a sense of the different realities of urban, small-town, and rural India, from the world of upper-class Delhi represented in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Sound of Falling Leaves” to the village people gossiping and squabbling by the pond in Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Asura Pond.” The stories also gesture at the diverse primary allegiances of Indian people, whether it is to the city (Bandhopadhyay’s Krishnalal), the guild (Nazir Mansuri’s fisherman, Lakham Patari), caste (Phanishwarnath Renu’s villagers), or the tribe (Mamang Dai’s heroine, Nenem). The works brought together here are both old and new: the earliest was first published in 1902, while the ink is still not dry on the most recent one. Some of the writers here are legendary figures known to, even if not always read by, readers all over India; others represent the new generation, and are slowly making a reputation for themselves. I have made some notes on aspects of their craft and style in the individual introductions to the stories.

Not the least of the pleasures of the stories brought together here is that, while rooted in a particular world, they often hum with the stirrings of distant worlds that have made India such a diverse and fecund civilization. The architect of the Taj Mahal in Kunal Basu’s “The Accountant” looks at an architectural plan “drawn not simply from Hindustan but from Isphafan and Constantinople, Kabul and Samarkand — from the whole world.” In Nazir Mansuri’s “The Whale,” a trader in a port village on the west coast of India ferries “lime, dates, onions, and garlic to Basra, Iran, and Africa” till one day he never returns. Now these stories, too, go out into the world — many of them are being published outside India for the first time — and it is my hope that wherever they go, they will provide the same pleasure that they have given at home.

Chandrahas Choudhury, Mumbai, March 2010

Back to Book | Preface

Interview for India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion

What was the most difficult part of the selection process for choosing which stories to include in India?

India is so diverse geographically, and Indian literature itself is a house of so many rooms, that the greatest difficulty was in putting together a selection of stories that would convey a sense of the whole. I’ve tried to find a balance of classic and contemporary, and work both in English and in translation, so as to produce a book that, while being the crystallization of a theme, is also an ideal short introduction to Indian literature.

Did you find it a challenge limiting the stories to ones that provide “a sense of place”?

The concept was actually a very liberating one. Place is integral to the human sense of self, to our awareness of history, to our dreams—and therefore to storytelling. Most fiction gives us “a sense of place” in some way, but in some writers this attachment to a particular landscape or city is particularly strong, and they alter one’s understanding of a particular place forever. I’ve tried to put together a set of Indian writers who do this.

How do you think fiction informs a traveler to India in ways that nonfiction cannot?

I think that where fiction scores over non-fiction is that it offers, without the self-consciousness of a travel writer, the felt experience of a culture from within. In moving between character, society, and landscape, all the while telling a story, fiction offers an intensity and depth of representation that most reportage cannot achieve. Fiction, precisely because it does not explicitly set out to “inform,” gives us a kind of knowledge that other forms of prose writing cannot.

For instance, Kunal Basu’s enthralling story about the Taj Mahal (“The Accountant”), which shows us a middle-aged accountant in present-day India suddenly transported back into the time of the Taj Mahal’s construction, refashions the pleasure supplied by the familiar story of the Taj Mahal by adding to it a story conjured up by the literary imagination. To read Salman Rushdie on Kashmir, or Vikram Chandra on Mumbai (Bombay), or Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay on Kolkata (Calcutta), is to feel as if one is being led through these places by a marvelously perceptive and charming insider. The traveler to India will find his awareness both of contemporary Indian realities and the deep structure of Indian culture greatly enhanced by India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.

How do you think the various original languages (English included) of stories affect the perspective that readers gain?

A language is not just a transparent window supplying a view of the world, but a world unto itself. It has certain rhythms and syntactical structures unique to it, a worldview with certain assumptions and cultural inflections. When these are brought across into another language (in this case, English), they deepen the reader’s understanding of the world he or she is encountering.

For instance, the many local names of fish in Nazir Mansuri’s “The Whale” make the world of his story both fascinating and mysterious at the same time, as do the particular speech-stresses of his characters (such as the word “La” where you and I might say “Oh”). The bouquet of translations from seven Indian languages available in India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion productively complement the stories originally composed in English, and give a sense of the great diversity of Indian cultures. Even the stories in this book that were written in English show a whole range of attitudes toward and uses of the language. I expand on these thoughts in my introduction and my notes on the different stories.

In your preface, you say “many of the riches of Indian literature are lying invisible in the shadows, waiting for a translation that will release their rhythms and energies into the world.” Can you elaborate, or give examples?

Because Indian literature contains within it more languages and literary traditions than any other national literature in the world, literary translation in India is an especially complicated field, and no one reader or scholar has a sense of the complete picture. Many texts which one set of readers, who have read it in the original, know as classics, are not yet available in worthy English translations, though this is slowly changing. Sometimes the arrival of a new translation (such as that of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s marvelous satirical novel Six Acres and a Third in 2005, published in America by University of California Press) blows up the entire field and makes the reader rethink the entire story of Indian fiction. Some of the excitement of this work in translation will come through, I hope, in the stories chosen for this book.

Back to Book | Preface | Foreword

Foreword for Brazil

Gregory Rabassa

The isle of Serendip was said to be Ceylon (or Taprobana or Sri Lanka) but it also could have been Brazil, because it too was discovered by the Portuguese and was taken to be an island at the time. Although it has never been admitted officially—and most likely never will—serendipity and happenstance seem to be a mainstay of Brazil’s history from its very start, when Cabral supposedly stumbled upon it on his way to India. Even its name was not what they called it in earliest times. It came to be called Brazil in Portugal because of the colony’s wealth of the fine hardwood tree called brazilwood.

The language itself wandered off from the standard tongue in a manner of some kind of linguistic Darwinism, although far from any kind of theoretical rigidity. Brazilian Portuguese says what is best to be said at the moment or maybe just what it wants to say. In spite of this and many other freedoms, Brazil has managed to survive as a country, perhaps because of this same brand of individualism that quietly says “Why not?” The spirit behind all this is what the Brazilians call jeito, the impossible-to-translate word which seems to mean whatever they want it to mean. As we go from north to south, or from one region or city to another, the very separation of customs and manners is what holds them together as a nation: the paradox of jeito.

When reading things Brazilian it is wise not to plug them into universal literary currents, even when the authors themselves say this is where their muse lies. It is better to look at them side by side with other Brazilian things, looking past the words themselves to see what makes them siblings. The same can be done with buildings, paintings, and music as we seek out a common essence. And most often it will be the originality that is born of the moment. This is what you will find in these writings as you read them, while contemplating or unconsciously synthesizing what is around you or has been around you or will be around you in this variegated and free-spirited scene that is called Brazil.

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Back to Book | Preface | Foreword

Preface for Brazil

I want to keep this preface short, allowing the stories to tell themselves, unmediated.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, occupying nearly half of South America. It pulsates with life. It percolates death. Everywhere there seems to be more of everything, all of it intertwined, like a mangrove swamp, like a rainforest draped in lianas.

How to capture it all? How to be representative?

It can’t be done. And so this mini-preface is a confession. There is something arbitrary about any anthology. This one owes a great deal to chance. In his foreword, Gregory Rabassa is right to focus on the word serendipity, “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.” It is my hope that this book will prove itself a kind of paean of praise to serendipity.

The stories in this collection are presented by region, with the initial focus on Brazil’s two major cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Their friendly rivalry in the Brazilian imagination is depicted with a light ironic touch in the first story of the book, Luis F. Verissimo’s “The Real José.” After Rio and São Paulo, the reader, heading in any direction, will encounter Brazil’s ebullience, humor, sensuality, passion, abundance, tenderness, and the menace of violence.

Beyond the organizing principle of geography, this is an unprincipled anthology. I hope its richness of disorder and diversity mirrors that of the country itself. As for the authors represented and the stories selected, the anthologist must fall back upon the truth: serendipity. Some authors are world famous icons (Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado), some are newcomers, still little known even in their own country. Many of the stories are urban, others rural, some almost epically primordial. Some resonate with irony, irreverence, satire. Others speak in the rhythms of myth and tragedy. Some of these stories were drawn from my own earlier translation projects, others from previous anthologies. Various friends and colleagues contributed to this collection.

But whatever its sources, in the end this anthology lays no claim to being comprehensive or definitive. Rather it seeks to give the reader a glimpse here and there of a rich and bewildering land and its people.  Editorial decisions have relied upon one very simple principle: the pleasure principle—mine and, if all goes well, your own. I hope that the literary traveler in Brazil will savor this book as a rich and textured seasoning to the land itself.

Alexis Levitin

September 2009

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Back to Book | Preface

Preface for Vienna

Thousand-year-old Austria has lived through a turbulent and colorful history, and much of it has been preserved and can still be viewed today throughout the land but nowhere more than in Vienna. The country was founded to serve as a buffer to keep invaders from the east and south from attacking Germany, a role that it performed valiantly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the Turks. In the nineteenth century, the wall around the inner city of Vienna was razed and replaced by the acclaimed Ringstrasse, which was lined with such impressive buildings as the University of Vienna, the Burgtheater, the Art Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Imperial Palace and the Opera House, each in a historical style that matches its function. Well-kept spacious parks and lavish palace gardens, all in close proximity, added to these sights. Within the Ringstrasse one is surrounded by history.

After decades of being reduced to a small portion of its former Habsburg self, Austria’s fortunes took a major turn for the better with the formation of the European Union, which has brought prosperity, closer ties with Germany and with most of the former Habsburg states, and an end to the nagging and much-debated question of Austrian identity, as the country becomes increasingly European in outlook. Much of Viennese literature grapples with the issue of identity. Two years ago Austria created the first literary prize for a book by any member of the European Union. There had been voices in Austria since the 1920s advocating a united Europe with Vienna as the center because of its geographical location at the heart of Europe, making it a natural bridge between east and west and north and south, but this suggestion was not followed.

Vienna, which once served as a Roman encampment (as the excavation on the Minoritenplatz on view in the center of the city documents), has developed differently than the rest of the country because of the masses of Eastern Europeans, who, beginning in the 1880s, flocked to the magnetic flourishing city, lured by the prospect of jobs and a better life. By 1900 Vienna had the largest Czech population of any city, including Czechoslovakia itself (Franz Kafka’s inclusion in this collection is a literary reflection of this). The city is known as Red (liberal) Vienna as traditionally opposed to the Black (conservative) provinces. In recent years, however, Styria, Burgenland, and Salzburg have broken ranks and adopted a socialist outlook and think and operate more like Vienna. Since the nineteenth century, Vienna has served as a mecca for tourists, fascinated by this attractive city, rich in historical atmosphere and warm in hospitality. Apart from a few modern buildings like the Hochhaus, the inner city, dominated by Vienna’s main landmarks, the imposing Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral from the twelfth century, the Graben with its highly ornate baroque statue commemorating the deadly plague in the seventeenth century, and the entrance to the grounds of the imperial palace flanked by its guardian statues and featuring the impressive iron grill over the entryway on Michaelerplatz . . . all remain as they have been for hundreds of years. A vigilant government carries on an active program of restoration and preservation, as it strives to protect Vienna’s historical appearance. Buildings in the inner city may be modernized on the inside, but the original facades must remain unchanged.

Many tourists never stray far away from the inner city because of the number and variety of museums, theaters, operas, coffee houses, restaurants, and stores, except to take the D-streetcar to Belvedere Palace to see the important Museum of Modern Art or the number 38 from Schottentor to Grinzing to sample the vintage Austrian wines in the atmosphere of the old wine houses. From Grinzing one can also take a bus up to the Kahlenberg, where one has a spectacular view of Vienna and can also hike in the Vienna Woods. There are commercial day and evening tours that in addition to the sightseeing in the city include a stop at a wine house in Grinzing, where one may wine and dine, possibly with the accompaniment of some zither music. The selection here by Ingeborg Bachmann humorously satirizes such a tour and the inadequacies of the guide in language and knowledge. For another trip one can take the subway (Vienna features one of the most efficient mass-transit systems you will find anywhere) to Hietzing to see Schönbrunn, the former imperial summer palace with its extensive, manicured grounds and the prominent Gloriette on the hill as an imposing backdrop. From the subway station one will see the Park Hotel, where Mark Twain, who loved Vienna, lived for two years.

Viennese, whose identity is largely shaped by their political affiliation and the Catholic Church, have not always been kind to outsiders. They persecuted Protestants in the seventeenth century, made the Czechs and other Easterners feel unwelcome in the nineteenth century, and throughout their history have always displayed some degree of anti-Semitism. Today the climate of intolerance has not disappeared entirely but it has improved. The government finally apologized for the country’s role in the Holocaust, and in recent years Austria has done more than any other European country to provide a haven for many asylum seekers from Eastern nations and also from Africa to add to the mix of former Turkish and Yugoslav guest workers who did not wish to return home. The ethnic diversity of the population will increase in future years because people from all of the member nations of the European Union may now move to any country to live, study, and seek employment, and Vienna remains a magnet.

Vienna has become one of the most successful cities in Europe in terms of business and finance, but not at the expense of its role as a center of culture. One of its first actions after World War II, when Austria was devastated and then occupied, was to renovate and reopen the theaters and the opera as a means of uplifting the spirits of the people. The nation has always turned to its literary and cultural heritage to draw strength in difficult times. After 1945 Otto Basil with his journal, Plan, worked to revitalize literature by reconnecting to the tradition that had been interrupted in 1938 by the German annexation. No noteworthy Austrian literature appeared during the war years, except ironically that produced by the Jewish writers in exile, who continued to produce important works while living for the day they could return home.

In the 1950s the returned exile author Hans Weigel began gathering and encouraging the numerous young writers with new themes and modern techniques. An enlightened government recognized the importance of literature and the other arts to the country and adopted a cultural policy to provide financial support to writers and artists in every field, a program that continues unabated today. For that reason Austria has many more writers than would be expected in a land of its size and has remained the leading German-language literature to the present day. Authors may receive a subsidy to write a book, which the state pays to have published and officially presented. No writer can live on the income from his or her books, not even the leading Austrian author, Peter Handke, whose literary papers the Government recently purchased so that he will have money to live on in retirement. To help authors survive, they are paid for lectures and for readings from their works, subsidized for reading tours, at times in foreign countries, and ultimately granted a pension in their old age. The theaters, operas, and the radio station ORF are also heavily subsidized, as are such literary organizations as Die alte Schmiede, Die Gesellschaft fuer Literatur, and the Literaturhaus, each of which offers the public several presentations—literary lectures, readings by authors and exhibits—every week without any admission charge.

Because of the close relationship of Austria and Germany up to 1804, distinctly Austrian literature only began to appear in the nineteenth century. Franz Grillparzer proclaimed independence in 1832 when he declared he was an Austrian, not a German author. The unique character of Austrian literature is henceforth readily apparent, particularly in the plays of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy, authors who have no counterparts in German literature. Other notable nineteenth-century writers of note include the poet Nikolaus von Lenau, who attempted a new life in Ohio but returned home because of ill health, and the remarkable Charles Sealsfield, who emigrated to the United States and became a noted author of books about the western expansion. He wrote in English and critics, thinking he was an American, praised his writings as superior to those of James Fenimore Cooper.

Up to 1848, under the rule of Emperor Franz I and his loyal Chancellor Metternich, there was no freedom of speech or press in Austria because of the fear instilled in the emperor by the French revolution of 1789. He dedicated his rule to stifling progress and maintaining the status quo. He did not want enlightened citizens but obedient subjects of the state. Even the universities were prohibited from engaging in research. After the revolution of 1848, the new young emperor Franz Josef I was persuaded to tear down the old city wall that prevented expansion of the inner city and construct the showcase of buildings and palaces along the Ringstrasse. By around 1900, writers and all other artists and intellectuals contributed to implementing the program of modernity, devised and publicized by the author Hermann Bahr, the movement that ushered Austria as well as the eastern states into the twentieth century.

Life was grand in this heady atmosphere of what author Stefan Zweig called “the golden age of security,” that is, if you were titled, wealthy, or talented. The turn of the century, or as it is often called, fin-de-siècle Vienna, remains one of the most glamorous, exciting, and significant periods of Austrian literary, cultural, and scientific history, a flowering that rivals the Renaissance in its scope and importance, radiating from Austria in all directions. Much of the thinking shaping societies today—the independent lifestyle, the belief that each individual should be free to develop to the fullest—and a number of scientific developments were introduced during this uniquely fertile era, which gave birth to the unstoppable dynamic modern spirit animating, driving, and transforming societies from the stagnant nineteenth to the explosive twentieth century. The dramatic changes that took place in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century—the rapid expansion of industrialization and the concomitant shift from a primarily agrarian to an urban society, the breakthroughs and advances in the sciences, the change from a belief in absolute to relative values, the replacement of the aristocracy by the monied bourgeoisie as the dominant economic and political class, and the gaining of voting privileges that propelled the move to democratization—acted as a catalyst for the “transformation of all values” (Nietzsche) during the transitional years, which lasted up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

One of the greatest social changes has been in the status of women, who are still struggling to achieve full parity in the patriarchal society, including equal pay with men. Great improvement has been made, especially in the arts, where acknowledgment is based on ability rather than gender. When the noblewoman Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach began to write in the nineteenth century, an attempt was made to discourage her by insisting that such activity was unseemly for a woman. Because of her status she could ignore the warnings and persevere to become one of Austria’s greatest authors. Today outstanding women writers are well represented in the upper echelon of important authors, and all have received the same recognition in terms of support, awards, and prizes. Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Lovers,” included in this collection, is an apt representation of literature’s reflection of this feminist change.

Great literature aims to convey information and provide entertainment, and this collection of short prose writings by a small representative sample of the leading Viennese authors of the last hundred years is intended to fulfill that goal. These stories reflect the lifestyles, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships of a constantly developing society. As might be expected in the land that produced Freud, Viennese authors often focus on the inner life of the characters, portraying how they live or fail to fully live and how in terms of their nature, character, and background they react to an unexpected occurrence or circumstance in their lives. Thomas Bernhard, whose “Woodcutters” is included in this anthology, is a perfect example of an author whose work focuses on the thorough exploration of the inner human condition. Up to 1945, Austrian writers, including all the major authors in exile, focused their attention almost exclusively on Vienna. Only after the war, because of the Four Power Occupation and exiles who returned with expanded horizons, did the authors begin to range more widely in their choice of themes. Contributing importantly to this broadening was the influx of American and British literature and cinema.

Austrian literature has a global reach today, and it is particularly no stranger to the United States. At the turn of the century the plays of Bahr, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler, among others, were regularly performed on New York stages in German and in English, while the works of other authors were regularly translated. In the late 1920s, to speed up its development and at the same time to eliminate competition, Hollywood began aggressively recruiting talented writers, actors, actresses, directors, and cameramen from Austria, which had been instrumental in developing the film business. This influx of professionals was augmented significantly in the 1930s with the rush of exiled artistic talent, a veritable Who’s Who of authors, musicians, and artists, fleeing from the threat of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. In the United States, however, Austrians have never promoted themselves or featured their nationality and so their accomplishments gain no recognition for their country. They are The Quiet Invaders, as G. Wilder Spaulding titled his book describing the many contributions they have made to their host country. Writers in particular often go unnoticed as Austrians because of the tendency of American publishers to identify everything written in the German language as German literature.

The focus of this volume on Vienna and the space limitation prevented the inclusion of some of the most important contemporary authors, whose work deals with other areas of Austria, or appear in the form of poetry or plays. This brief collection is only the tip of the iceberg. If this introduction appeals to you, I urge you to further pursue the writings of Ilse Aichinger, Peter Handke, Marlen Haushofer, Robert Menasse, Anna Mitgutsch, Felix Mitterer, Christoph Ransmayr, Elisabeth Reichart, and Peter Turrini. The books of these authors can all be found in English translation. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, every writer of importance is represented in English, in some cases by one or two works; in many others by their complete works. In the meantime, whether you are visiting this city that I love and have come to call my second home—or you are at home in the comfort of your armchair—I hope that this companion of Viennese authors provides you a window into the rich world of Austrian literature, and into the hearts and minds of the Viennese themselves.

Donald G. Daviau

July 2008

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Foreword for Japan

From the foreword:

“This cunningly constructed anthology affirms, among other things, the nature of Japan. In the West (particularly in the United States) leaving home, making your way in the world, is still deemed somehow a virtue. In Japan (and some other Asian countries, perhaps) staying in the furusato [hometown] and trying to return to it are somehow equal virtues.

Indeed, many of the authors represented in this anthology are attempting through their work to describe or to define their own position in regard to the places where they were born or those that became their homes. By the act of writing, the authors embrace the furusato, helping to construct those internal homelands that form the cognitive map of Japan.

In Japan a sense of place retains a social value, and the differences between Tōkyō and Kyōto (as well as those between Hokkaidō and Kyūshū) are strongly perceived and consequently quite real. It is because of this that the sampler you now hold in your hands suggests a world of diversity, a small place of great variance, a paradigm of an irregular but balanced world.”

–Donald Richie

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Foreword for Gay Travels

“This volume makes no attempt to rival those gay travel guides that already exist. It is something different, far more intriguing: a collection of stories that aim at being what Herman Melville deemed “an inside narrative.” That is, what being a gay man in a foreign land really feels like, smells like, tastes like, and hurts like. The voices here might be likened to those of friends sitting around a dinner table the night before your journey who provide you with insights and warnings that only later do you discover add infinitely to your excursion.”

From the foreword by Felice Picano

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