Lilianne Ruíz, Translating Cuba, Translator: William Fitzhugh
Well now I am in my house, just returned from the sixth birthday of
Ada's twins; Ada is the sister of my friend Agustín. I love going with
my daughter, all very simple, just great in the way that she knows how
to share this family whose roots are in Villa Clara. There is nothing
warmer than a home of Cuban peasants. And Agustín; he administers the
Dakaisone blog.
The girls have played, the adults have chatted. When a person lives in
a country with laws that limit what one can eat, what books you can
read, what you are permitted to do and what you risk when your
conscience wants to take you beyond that, you go over and over the same
things, but it is left to the rest to talk about their experience and
why it is a good thing to find other similar people who repeat to each
other with their own voice what you already know. Nobody has a
solution, only to speak about resistance. The resistance of conscience
that knows to plant itself on free ground and which can face the winds
that the constipated entrails of the Revolution spew, not without
holding our noses. A beautiful and tragic image of the awoken conscience
in the middle of a sewer.
At the party, I met Omaida and her daughter Jennifer. Omaida is the
source for a network of independent libraries. The term "independent
library" could sound strange but in communist countries, in
dictatorships of the extreme left, such libraries are the only oases of
good literature. In the case of Cuba, the history of literature is not
even totally complete for the twentieth century. All that was saved was
what the magazine Orígenes collected. The second half of the twentieth
century is empty in the piles of shelving or repeated in others, such
that it seems like no-one writes poetry that is worth the trouble in the
contemporary world, or novels, or essays that are not indigestible in
the realm of the Americas.
As for myself, I'm getting sick and tired of Saramago and the Castro's
personal Columbian friend (Gabriel Garcia Márquez ) because I'm
convinced that enough better literature has been written in the world
than to have to forgive the creator of the town of Macondo of his mortal
sin. I have books that are dearer to me but they continue to be back
issues to which I can return as is only possible when so few books are
known.
In Cuba, only the friends of the Revolution get published. Because the
Revolution; apocalyptic beast with the number of man that "very few have
understood" is a beast with few friends. It can't survive when it is
compared to the free expression of the mirror that has found its nature
in the vacuum between the freedom of the glass and the quicksilver, the
absoluteness of the death of ideologies, the easing of the mind before
the serenity of a lake that perfectly reflects a mountain, the silence
of haiku.
It is rare to find a book from Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, M. Kundera,
Vargas Llosa, absolutely impossible to find a book from Carlos Alberto
Montaner. It is easier to be badgered by Italo Calvino who was a
communist or Eduardo Galeano who has remained as the only one that state
misanthropy can resort to. Calvino wrote very very well, but Galeano
did it terribly terribly badly, and used the case of Cuba as a symbol,
I'm not sure of what, but he behaves for the world like no Cuban
resident of the island does.
In this Cuban experiment, that is about how submissive human nature can
become when it submits to the absolute control of government political
and economic totalitarianism, it has been seen that the first recourse
has been the education of "the people" that are thought of like
livestock. The example of that unglamorous little library where the ex
president of the island made the curatorship of the University's books
for everyone without universality. The information that the conscience
would be subjected to was selected carefully, it was repeated, it was
threatened and the result is this will to survive in an autophagic way,
to not protest save a few exceptions. On of the ways to produce
consciousness to open up the bandwidth of information, providing news,
evangelizing with the literature of liberty, and for this reason it is a
crime to administer a separate library.
That's how I learned, with horror, about the harassment to which Omaida
has been subjected by state security. They sent an agent she describes
as having crawled out of a dumpster who has the nerve to sit uninvited
in her living room and threaten her. And although it seems like
something out of a bad Bukowski novel, he dares to call on her birthday
to remind her that an evil shadow lurks where only her guardian angel
should dwell.
But these guys have no fear of God. She also told me that the chief
agent made a visit too, a man who can cite books and authors.
Undoubtedly he is autistic, because agents do not understand what they
read. Their core value is the constipated revolution. These thugs do not
know the potential Delphic curse Lezama invented having to do with the
famous inscription "gnothi seauton" (displaying my complete ignorance of
Greek), which means "Know thyself." That is what literature is for: to
illuminate, to transport, to change the adornments of the soul until its
final form is found, released by the image.
My Christian charity is not sufficient to pity them.
Translated by William Fitzhugh
January 30 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment