Poet, writer and teacher Pat Schneider has passed on. She left a remarkable body of work, and over many decades, as the visionary founder of Amherst Writers & Artists, she taught and helped and otherwise influenced uncounted writers and poets. Read her obituary here.
Pat Schneider. Screenshot of photo from Amherst Writers & Artists Founder’s bio.
Back when I was editing the bilingual journal Tameme, Noemí Escandell sent me her lovely translation of Pat’s poem, “How to Tell a Daughter.” It appeared in the third and final issue, “Reconquest/ Reconquista,” published in 2003. In tribute to Pat, here it is:
After a battle with brain cancer, my dear amigo Bill Gruben has passed onto new and surely most wondrous adventures. He had such a good heart and a brilliant, wildly whimsical sense of humor. I will miss him more than I can say.
I met Bill some 30 years ago when I was working as an economist in Mexico City and he as an economist with the Dallas Fed. New flash: Not all economists are just economists! Bill, who spoke fluent Spanish and knew more about Mexico than most Mexicans, had written jokes for Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller and published some of his brilliant comedic essays about Texas in no less a venue than The Atlantic Monthly. I was then already writing poems and short stories, and translating Mexican poetry. Later, when I got the notion to publish Tameme, a bilingual literary journal that brought together writers and poets from Canada, the US, and Mexico in bilingual English/ Spanish format, I asked Bill if he would contribute something to the first issue. I was immensely honored and quite tickled when he sent me “Animals in the Arts in Texas.” It was translated into Spanish by the splendid Mexican poet and novelist Agustín Cadena. In Bill’s memory, herewith that piece from Tameme, originally published in 1999:
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From the Dallas Morning News, March 29, 2020: William Charles Gruben III died peacefully at his Dallas home on Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, at the age of 76, due to complications from an inoperable glioblastoma. Husband, father, economist, polymath, polyglot, musician, humorist, prankster, Bill was a classical thinker, a Medieval scholastic, a Renaissance man, a modern theorist, a postmodern ironist, and, above all else, a true soul of The Enlightenment, in that his whole life was a determined, joyous pursuit of knowledge fueled by the power of human reason and an endless supply of jokes.
Born on September 29th, 1943 in Sacramento, California, Bill was a conscientious and devoted older brother (one not above launching a younger sibling down the occasional laundry chute) during a childhood of multiple family moves: from Illinois to rural Texas, San Antonio, Houston (where he swam the bayous, alligators included) and suburban Dallas. He was an enthusiastic cadet in the Junior Yanks in the mid-50’s, and spent a few weeks every summer at his grandparents’ cotton farm in West Texas. As a high school student he mastered the guitar and the trombone, earning spending money gigging with a Dixieland band. Later in life, he learned to play a mean and somewhat soulful didgeridoo.
A graduate of Richardson High School, SMU, and The University of Texas, where he earned a doctorate in economics, Bill’s working life was a paradox. He spent the better part of his career at The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, where he specialized in practical applications of economic theory and the then emerging Mexican and Latin American markets, and where he co-created The Center for Latin American Economics. But Bill’s relationship to “The Dismal Science” was anything but. He understood that at the root of economic study was both the human and the quite-possibly marvelous: that economies were more than diminishing marginal return curves and income elasticity, but places where our desires and dreams collide with reality in all kinds of fascinating and exhilarating ways. An inspiration to colleagues and mentees alike, Bill’s favorite rejoinder while crunching data or preparing a paper or presentation was always, “Do you believe we get paid to do this?!” followed by another one of his brilliant one-liners. For, much as he found joy in Peso stabilization forecasts and comparative GDP analyses, Bill Gruben found hilarity in everything else.
In the 1970s, he, along with his brother, wrote, produced, and hosted a 30 minute comedy show on KCHU called “Dallas Arcade.” In the 80s, he published pieces in The Atlantic that satirized the excesses of oil-boom Texas. He wrote jokes for Joan Rivers, who used some on The Tonight Show, and for Phyllis Diller, who tried to persuade him to dump economics, move to Hollywood, and write comedy full time. Bill Gruben was too good an economist to take her suggestion. But he was terribly flattered.
Upon his retirement from The Dallas Fed, Bill spent his time among homes in Dallas, Laredo, and Monterrey, Mexico. From 2008-2014, at Texas A&M International University, he was Director of the Ph.D. Program in International Business at the University’s A.R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business, and a Radcliffe Killam Distinguished Professor of Economics; from 2013-14, he directed The Center for Western Hemispheric Trade.
Upon his second retirement, Bill transferred his creative energies from the literary to the visual arts. His last series of canvasses depict the suffering of narcos tormented by comically enraged demons. And even this past January, when he struggled to walk and eat, he insisted on going to Fort Worth to see the Renoir show. He spent two hours on his feet looking at every painting.
Bill is preceded in death by father WIlliam Charles Gruben II, mother Virginia Dorothy Anderson Gruben, and wife, the artist Marilu Flores Gruben. Bill is survived by beloved spouse Nieves Mogas, daughters Adrienne Gruben, a film executive and documentarian, and Anna Gruben Olivier de Vezin, a non-profit director, sons-in-law David Goldstein, a technical director for live broadcast events, and Charles Olivier de Vezin, a screenwriter and film editor, grandchildren Maria Francisca Goldstein and Manel Olivier de Vezin, sister Patricia Gruben, brother Roger Gruben, and a host of adoring nieces, nephews, and cousins. The family expresses its deep gratitude to caregivers Penelope Clayton-Smith, Dario Delgado, and Frank Aven. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, services are on hold, but there will be a virtual service in mid April.
In lieu of flowers, the family welcomes contributions in Bill’s name to The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association or to El Instituto de Atención Integral Discapacitado Retos, A.B.P.
In the audience: several very distinguished literary translators (lotus petals upon y’all). The Q & A was extra crunchy, and in true ALTA fashion, in the sweetest way.
(Seriously, literary translators, and especially the crowd that regularly attends ALTA conferences, are angelically generous and encouraging. If any of you reading this have ever thought of trying literary translation and/or attending a literary translator’s conference, my recommendation is, YES!)
LAS TRES AMIGAS: Yours Truly, Clare Sullivan, and Patricia Dubrava.
Jeffrey C. Barnett, C.M. Mayo, Patricia Dubrava
Transcript of C.M. Mayo’s Remarks for the panel on
Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers: Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital
ALTA, Tucson, Arizona, October 31, 2015
I started translating in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Mexico City is Mexico’s capital, but it’s not analogous to Washington DC or, say, Ottowa, Canada. The megalopolis, “the endless city,” as Carlos Monsivaís calls Mexico City, is like Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, all piled into one. In other words, its the political capital, financial capital, publishing capital, cultural capital, and television and movie capital. Oh, and business capital, too. Yes, there are other important cities in Mexico, and they have become more important in many ways, and some of them have some excellent writers and poets. But Mexico City is MEXICO CITY.
Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party, the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power, about to enter the last decade of its more than 70— yes, 70—years in power. How did it last so long? There are many answers to that question but the main one relevant for our topic at hand is that the PRI attempted to bring everyone, whether farmers, campesinos, industrialists or intellectuals, and that would include poets and writers, under its own big tent. It had its ways. Stick and carrot— or bone, as Mexicans like to say.
You may be aware that after two consecutive presidential administrations under the PAN or the Partido Acción Nacional, over the past decade, Mexico’s Presidency has since returned to the PRI. But it’s not exactly a return to the past. Not exactly.
I’m not going to get all political on you, I simply want to underline the fact that back in early 1990s, the Mexican literary establishment, concentrated in Mexico City, was heavily influenced by and subsidized by the PRI government. Just to give you a notion of this: If you were to go into a library and look at some back issues of the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine of the time— of course that would be Octavio’s Paz’s Vuelta— you would see a large number of advertisements from government-owned entities and Televisa, the party-allied television conglomerate. There were literary gatekeepers, as there are everywhere in this world, but in Mexico City at that time, they were very few and ginormously powerful. Octavio Paz was king.
Though Octavio Paz met his maker some years ago, in some ways things remain the same. Mexico City is where it’s at. The government still plays an important, although lesser role. Letras Libres, successor to Vuelta, remains a leading magazine of influence, and in fact it does publish some of the best writing you’ll find anywhere.
But since the early 1990s there have been political and economic sea-changes in Mexico. Power is more dispersed. Other political parties have become far more powerful. On the right and the left they rival the PRI and on many an occasion, beat the PRI at the ballot box.
And even more than the political and economic changes, the technological changes have been sea-changes. I’m talking about the rise of digital media, from blogging to YouTube, podcasting, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and publishing— and by the way, amazon is now in Mexico with www.amazon.com.mx.
To find a Mexican writer to translate, you no longer have to travel to Mexico City and get chummy with the powers that be who can make recommendations and, perhaps, invite the anointed to tea. Now, say, from Boston or Hong Kong or Cleveland, you can follow any given Mexican writer’s blog, and comment thereupon. Or, say, send her a Tweet!
I would love to tell you the story of how, in the late 1990s, I started my bilingual magazine, Tameme, which published many Mexican writers, and my experiences with putting together the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion— no easy task, since the idea of the TLC series is to provide writing about the whole country— and that would include writing from and about Baja California, Yucatan, Chiapas, Chihuahua…
At present I am translating short stories by four Mexican writers: Ignacio Solares, a novelist born in Ciudad Juárez, long based in Mexico City; Agustín Cadena, who was born in the state of Hidalgo and is living in Hungary; Araceli Ardón, who was born in San Miguel de Allende and lives in Querétaro; and yet another, Rose Mary Salum, who is from Mexico City and is now based in Houston, Texas.
But I don’t want to take time from my fellow panelists and what I hope will be a rich question and answer session. The main thing I want to emphasize is that, as literary translators, we can play a powerful role in influencing who is and who is not read in English.
Whom to translate? It’s good to ask for advice from the powers that be of the literary establishment in, say, Mexico or Cuba or Chile, and maybe even choose to translate one of them. They might be blast-your-wig-to-the-asteroid-belt fabulous! But we also have to recognize that there are power structures in literary communities, some of them entangled with political structures, and we need to acknowledge and examine, in our own minds, and our own hearts, what part we play in that or choose not to play. And why.
