Delighted to announce that my translation of the short story by Agustín Cadena, “The Apaches of Kiev,” appears in the very fine U.S. literary journal, Tupelo Quarterly. It’s a story at once dark and deliciously wry. It caught my attention because, well, everything Cadena writes catches my attention– he is one of my favorite writers in Mexico, or anywhere– and he happens to be living in Hungary, so the Eastern Europe angle is no surprise. In all, Cadena’s is a unique and powerful voice in contemporary fiction, and I hope you’ll have a read.
THE APACHES OF KIEV BY AGUSTIN CADENA (Originally published in Spanish on Agustín Cadena’s blog, El vino y la hiel) Translated by C.M. Mayo
The story about the body they found in the Botanic Garden came out in the newspapers and on television. The Kiev police identified it immediately: Dmitri Belov, reporter and political analyst known for his scathing criticism of President Poroshenko’s administration. Presumably it was a suicide, but until they could confirm this verdict, the police had been ordered to put all resources to work.
Among the underemployed— peddlers and prostitutes— who roamed the Botanical Garden, very few were aware of this. So how was anyone else to find out? They didn’t have televisions and they didn’t spend their money on newspapers. Understandably, those who knew about the body avoided that area. They knew there would have been a commotion, and especially if the body belonged to someone important. The police would go around searching for possible witnesses to interrogate, and by the way, shake them down on other charges. It wouldn’t do any good to explain to the police what they already knew: that every week all of these underemployed people paid a bribe to be left in peace.
Ignorant of everything, three men of approximately 40 years of age, exotic-looking, dressed like Apaches in a Western movie, appeared after 11 in the morning. They were Ernesto Ortega, Gonzalo Acevedo and Milton Guzmán: Mexican, Salvadorean and Venezuelan, respectively. The three of them dressed identically: a headdress of white feathers that went from their heads down to their waists, jacket and trousers of coffee-colored leather with fringe on the sleeves and the back, moccasins, and ritual battle makeup. They carried assorted musical instruments and they took turns playing Andean music: “El cóndor pasa,” “Pájaro Chogüi,” “Moliendo café,” etc. They knew the music did not go with the costumes nor the costumes with their ethnicities, but this strange combination was what worked for them commercially. Americaphilia was at its height in Kiev, and passersby were happy to give money to these “North American Indians” who played the music “of their people.” Perhaps the happy notes of “La flor de la canela” led the Ukrainians to imagine the beauty of life in teepees, among the buffalo, wild horses, mountain lions, and bald-headed eagles. The fact is, in addition to playing and signing, the “Apaches” also sold their CDs of this same music, displayed on a cloth spread on the ground. [… CONTINUE READING]
P.S. My amiga the poet and writer Patricia Dubrava also translates Cadena. Check out some of her excellent translations at Mexico City Lit. [Alas, as of 9/2019, that link went dark.]
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This past Saturday I had the good fortune to be able to attend Cadena’s book presentation in one of my favorite Mexico City bookstores, the FCE Rosario Castellanos in Condesa. (Here is where I interviewed Michael Schuessler about his biography of Pita Amor, among other works.) Cadena was presenting a novel for young readers, La casa de los tres perros (The House of the Three Dogs) and along for the ride came a group of Mexican writers who have stories in his latest anthology, Callejeros, cuentos urbanos de mundos soñados (my rough translation of that might be, Street People: Stories of Urban Dreamworlds). Happily for me, this also meant a chance to visit with my friend the Mexican novelist and historian Silvia Cuesy. Here we are with Agustín Cadena:
C.M. Mayo, Agustín Cadena, Silvia Cuesy at the Rosario Castellanos FCE Bookstore, Mexico City
Mexican writers in Agustín Cadena’s anthology, Callejeros. Front row: León Cuevas, Sandra Luna, Agustín Cadena. Back row: Eduardo islas, Cristina Manterola, ?, ?, José Antonio Bautista, Silvia Cuesy.
Cadena, right in white hat, presenting his novel for young readers. La casa de los tres perros, in the FCE Rosario Castellanos bookstore in Mexico City, August 5, 2017.
Putting on my armchair-sociologist sombrero now: Aside from its high quality (both its literary content and as an object), what is especially interesting about Callejerosis that the editor lives abroad and the publisher is based in a provincial town– Pachuca, in the state of Hidalgo. Mexican literary culture and publishing has long been overwhelmingly concentrated in Mexico City, but with the digital revolution it seems this is opening up quickly. I talked a bit about this in my talk for a 2015 American Literary Translators Association panel I chaired:
P.S. I mention both this wondrous Mexico City FCE bookstore and Cadena in my longform essay now available on Kindle, “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla,” an overview of the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book.
Strange, muscled, riven with grief, Blume Lempel’s short stories, many set in the U.S., are for the ages. Yet because Lempel wrote in Yiddish, few aficionados of the form have had the chance to read her— until now, with the translation by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories.
“Lempel (1907–1999) was one of a small number of writers in the United States who wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. Though many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she did not confine herself to these landscapes or themes. She often wrote about the margins of society, and about subjects considered untouchable. Her prize-winning fiction is remarkable for its psychological acuity, its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of mostly women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality…
“Immigrating to New York when Hitler rose to power, Blume Lempel began publishing her short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: ‘Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers.'”
Ellen Cassedy, translator, is author of the award-winning study We Are Here, about the Lithuanian Holocaust. With her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, they received the Yiddish Book Center 2012 Translation Prize for translating Blume Lempel.
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of several books of poetry, including Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres (2013), Uncle Feygele (2011), and What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008).
Translators Yermiyau Ahron Taub and Ellen Cassedy
C.M. MAYO: Can you tell us more about Yiddish as a language, and specifically, its roots and connections with other languages, including German and Ladino?
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Yiddish is a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet. For hundreds of years, it was the everyday vernacular spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe. While Ladino became the Spanish-inflected language of Jews in the Mediterranean region, Yiddish was the everyday language among Jews living farther north, in Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: There is an alternative theory that Yiddish is essentially a Slavic language, but most scholars believe it’s a Germanic language.
ELLEN CASSEDY: For me, Yiddish is a holy tongue. Translating Yiddish connects me to a history, an enduring cultural legacy. Yiddish is precious to me for its outsider point of view, its irony, its humor, its solidarity with the little guy, its honoring of the everyday.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: The Yiddish language has been a crucial tool for my literary work. As a bridge to the past and an enhancement of my literary and social present, Yiddish opens a vibrant linguistic plane, full of texture, play, and reference. Yiddish is for me a place of primal connection and, for all its and my “baggage,” a source of strange comfort. Writing, reading, and translating Yiddish also allows me to learn new Yiddish words and re-learn forgotten ones.
Blume Lempel
C.M. MAYO: You write in the introduction that for Blume Lempel the “decision to write in Yiddish was a carefully considered choice.” What do you think motivated her to write for what was already a quickly shrinking readership?
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: For Lempel, Yiddish was a portable homeland that served her well as she encountered new circumstances and new languages. Born in 1907 in a small town in Eastern Europe, she immigrated to Paris and then fled to New York with her family just before World War II. Until her death in 1999, writing in Yiddish enabled her to express her connection to those who had perished in the Holocaust – as she put it, to “speak for those who could no longer speak.”
Writing in Yiddish also afforded a kind of “privacy.” Lempel wrote about subjects considered taboo by other writers – abor—ion, rap—, erot— imaginings, even inc—st.* Would she have felt free to exercise the same artistic freedom in English? Perhaps not.
*[C.M.: Massive apologies for inserting these ridiculous dashes but if left in plain English, which I am sure that you, gentle reader, can figure out, the Google bot may, in the Byzantine wisdom of its algorithms, send this blog into SEO netherworlds.]
But if Lempel needed privacy for artistic freedom, she also wanted recognition and worked hard to get her work out to a wider audience. Her efforts paid off. Over the years, she won widespread admiration among Yiddish writers and readers and received numerous Yiddish literary prizes.
C.M. MAYO: What do you think would have been lost in these stories had Lempel written in English? This is another way of asking, what were the biggest challenges for you as translators?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I don’t put much stock in the idea that some literary qualities can be expressed only in their original language. For me, what’s important is the fluidity and freedom that Lempel herself experienced, which resulted in the extraordinary richness of her prose. I’m not sure she could have attained such heights in a language that was not part of her very being from girlhood on.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: As we translated, we encountered surprises at every turn—in virtually every paragraph, and on every page. Lempel’s prose is so poetic and rich that we had to exercise special care to capture her unique melody.
Sometimes we had to accept uncertainty, realizing we wouldn’t be completely certain of Lempel’s meaning even if her text had been written in English. It was immensely satisfying to work with a partner, to be able to bounce ideas off each other, and to know that our interchange would strengthen the final version.
ELLEN CASSEDY: Lempel’s narrations move between past and present, often several places on the same page, from Old World to New, from fantasy to reality. Imagine the conversational matter-of-factness of a Grace Paley combined with the surreal flights of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk about how it was to work together as co-translators?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Working together was a joy. Once we’d selected the stories, each of us chose our favorites and produced first drafts. Then the other one carefully went over those drafts and made suggestions.
I was brought up to pay very close attention to the wonders of the English language. Every family dinner included at least one trip to the dictionary. I brought that intense involvement with English to the translation table.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Working together has been joyful, yes… but also humbling. One had to be open to another’s suggestions and feedback throughout the process. There was a lot of give and take, back and forth about meaning, the best turn of phrase, etc. Of course, every book, even one by a single author (and no translators), is a collaboration of some kind—with the publisher, editor, cover artist, designer, etc. But collaboration on the text— of every word of it—is much more so. I’ve learned a great deal from this process—about translation, about myself … and about Ellen!
Of course, this collaboration is still an ongoing process, as we complete interviews and embark on speaking engagements on behalf of the book. I feel so fortunate to be working with Ellen.
ELLEN CASSEDY: Back at you, dear partner!
C.M. MAYO: Do you think Lempel’s visibility as a literary artist, and her life, might have been different had she written in English?
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Absolutely. The Yiddish literary circle after World War II was far-flung but cohesive, and she thrived within it. Yiddish publications all over the world carried her work. She received prizes in Israel, Canada, and the U.S. When she died, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: “Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers.”
Despite her success within the Yiddish literary sphere, though, she always dreamed of an English-language readership. Although a few individual stories of hers appeared in journals and anthologies, there has been no full-length collection in English until now. It’s a joy for us to help her unrealized dream come true.
C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to translate Yiddish?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Years ago, when my Jewish mother died, I decided to study Yiddish as a memorial to her and a way to sustain ties with my Jewish forebears on both sides of the Atlantic. I was also looking for a home within Jewish culture, and I hoped Yiddish language and literature would provide that home. And indeed it has!
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Yiddish was a part of the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world in which I was raised. I studied it formally as an adult and have been engaged in Yiddish culture since the early 1990’s.
C.M. MAYO: What brought you to translate Blume Lempel?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Early on, when I told my Yiddish teacher I wanted to try my hand at translation, he went to his bookshelf and pulled out a little volume– Blume Lempel’s first collection, personally inscribed to him by the author. When I met Yermiyahu Ahron Taub in a Yiddish reading group, we decided to look into this volume. We were astounded to find truly unique writer with a dazzling lyrical style, an unparalleled compassion for her characters, a startling diversity of settings, and a daring range of subjects.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: It didn’t take long for us to decide we had to translate these splendid stories so that they could reach the wider audience they so richly deserve.
C.M. MAYO: If you could select one short story as the most representative of her work, which one would it be, and why?
ELLEN CASSEDY: It’s hard to choose, because Lempel’s range of settings and characters is huge. She tells truths about women’s inner lives that I’ve never encountered anywhere else.
“Waiting for the Ragman” is particularly rich in its description of life in a small Eastern European hometown, including a loving description of preparation for the Sabbath.
And I have to mention the title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn.” Lempel masterfully draws you into the story of a contemporary Jewish mother and her blind son as they move inexorably toward their doom.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: “Her Last Dance” tells the story of a Jewish woman forced to rely on her wits and beauty to survive wartime Paris. Despite its small scale, it evokes for me the work of Irène Nemirovsky and Nella Larsen (Passing). In capturing the desperation of a woman on the edge, it reminds me of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.
“The Invented Brother” captures the poignant emotions of a young girl whose beloved older brother is swept away into revolutionary activity.
C.M. MAYO: In one of the many blurbs for this collection, Cynthia Ozick calls Blume Lempel “a brilliantly robust Yiddish-American writer. Why should Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade monopolize this rich literary genre?”
Can you tell us more about some of the writers Blume Lempel would have been reading and corresponding with in Yiddish? (Did she know Menke Katz?)
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Avrom Sutzkever, the “dean” of postwar Yiddish poetry, was an admirer, and a mentor. She was admired by other leading Yiddish writers as well, including Yonia Fain, Chaim Grade, Malka Heifetz-Tussman, Chava Rosenfarb, and Osher Jaime Schuchinski.
And yes, she did know the New York poet Menke Katz. We found several warm letters from him within her papers.
C.M. MAYO: Of those writers not writing in Yiddish, which were important influences for Lempel?
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: She was one of a kind. When an interviewer asked which writers had influenced her, she mentioned Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and the philosophers Spinoza and Bergson, but only in passing. She didn’t feel part of any school or tendency.
The key to reading this amazing writer is to approach her work without preconceived expectations of what fiction should be. Open yourself up to the twists and turns, the possibilities. You’re in for a wild and wonderful ride.
C.M. MAYO: How do you see the future of Yiddish?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: That’s a big question. Yiddish is still the lingua franca of various Hasidic communities in Israel and the Diaspora. One can see Yiddish signs, for example, in Monroe, N.Y., Monsey, N.Y., and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among numerous other places. Of course, Hebrew encroaches in Israel, and English encroaches in the United States. Still, I don’t foresee Yiddish fading away in those communities any time soon. Hasidic communities believe in Yiddish as a bulwark against the encroaching “dominant” culture.
In terms of secular Yiddish culture, a small number of families are committed to raising their children in Yiddish. And there is considerable artistic and intellectual activity in the realm of Yiddish culture – panels on Yiddish at Association for Jewish Studies conferences, concerts, gatherings, and festivals dedicated to Yiddish, and releases of books and compact discs.
Translation is a particularly rich area of contemporary Yiddish culture. A recent anthology called Have I Got a Story for You: More Than a Century of Fiction from the Forward (Norton, 2016), edited by Ezra Glinter, demonstrates the work of numerous Yiddish translators active today. Of course, some would argue that that itself is a sign of demise. I don’t see it that way. Translation requires knowledge of both linguistic contexts.
Do I think all of this qualifies as a rebirth? Not exactly, but nor do I see Yiddish as dead, dying, or even endangered really.
C.M. MAYO: Have Lempel’s stories had an influence on you as a writer, and if so, how?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: It’s hard to know if Lempel’s stories have influenced me as a writer or if I was drawn to her because of my pre-existing interests. Certainly, we both share an interest in the realms of the marginal and the “outsider,” although we might have differing perceptions of who is marginal or an outsider. We also share an interest in poetry and poetic language, and the blurring of the line between poetry and prose. I certainly consider Blume Lempel to be a kindred writerly spirit and an inspiration.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as writers and translators?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I’m currently seeking a publisher for my translation of fiction by the Yiddish writer Yenta Mash, who grew up in Eastern Europe not far from Blume Lempel. I’m excited to have won a PEN/Heim translation grant – the first ever for a Yiddish book – to support this work.
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: A new collection of my poems is currently in the publication process. Six of the poems also have a Yiddish version, which raises all sorts of translation and design challenges.
ELLEN CASSEDY & YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: And of course we’re getting the word out about the Blume Lempel collection. It’s exciting to introduce English-language readers to these stories with their dazzling prose and their bold approach to storytelling.
Visit Ellen Cassedy at her webpage here. Visit Yermiyahu Ahron Taub at his website here.
And if you’re in the Washington DC area, don’t miss the launch at Politics & Prose Bookstore:
Sunday, January 8, 1 pm Politics & Prose Bookstore 5015 Connecticut Ave NW Washington, DC 20008 The event is free with no reservation required. Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel Translated by Ellen Cassedy & Yermiyahu Ahron Taub Mandel Vilar Press & Dryad Press, 2016
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.
At ALTA, I spoke on two panels and read an excerpt from my translation of a work by Mexico’s great novelist and short story writer Ignacio Solares. (Had the scheduling permitted, I would have loved to have also shared new translations of works by Mexican writers Agustin Cadena and Rose Mary Salum. Here’s to ALTA in Tucson, Arizona in 2015!)
Herewith the transcript of my talk for the second panel, “Why Translate?”
WHY TRANSLATE? THE CASE OF THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO’S SECRET BOOK
A (slightly edited and expanded) transcript of C.M. Mayo’s talk for the panel “Why Translate?” American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) Conference Milwaukee, November 15, 2014
I translate for the same reasons that I write. There are many, but we have limited time, so I will focus on two, which are: I want to understand, and I want to share that understanding.
Sharing might just be with myself, as in a diary entry, or with a cadre of of loyal readers and any Internet surfers who happen onto this blog, Madam Mayo. Sharing ramps up, of course, when we start talking about books.
People have many different and varied motivations for writing and publishing books— and for some, one of them is nothing less than to change the world. Or maybe, to change our understanding of some aspect of the world— and so change the world.
FRANCISCO I. MADERO, President of Mexico, 1911-1913
TWO SYSTEMS: THE HEAVILY INTERMEDIATED AND THE RELATIVELY DIRECT
Whether in its original language or as a translation, a book is a vector for a set of ideas, a very unusual and efficient vector, for it can zing ideas from mind to mind, spreading out over great distances and, potentially, far into the future.
Books can travel through two systems, or rather, an array of systems: at one extreme, the heavily intermediated, and at the other, the direct.
Our commercial publishing industry constitutes that first extreme. To give a stylized example, a book comes into the hands of an agent, then an acquiring editor, perhaps a developmental editor, a copyeditor, a book designer, a formatter, a cover designer, the proofreader, the printer, the delivery truck driver, the warehouse employees, the distributor, the sales rep, the bookstore’s buyer, and so on and so forth until, finally, the cashier hands the book to its reader. Very possibly multiple corporate entities and dozens of individuals play some role in bringing a book to any given reader.
At the other extreme, I scribble on a piece of paper and hand it to you.
I submit that we tend to over focus on this heavily intermediated system; we often overlook the fact that it is not the only or even necessarily the best way for a book to fulfill its purpose.
TWO BOOKS BY FRANCISCO I. MADERO
I’m going to focus on two books, both political, both by Francisco I. Madero.
If you are at all familiar with Mexican history, Francisco I. Madero needs no introduction. If Mexican history is a mystery to you, the main thing you need to know is that Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913.
His first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, published in 1909, served as his political platform in challenging the old regime. Though it was after the stolen elections of 1910 that Madero declared the Revolution on November 20, 1910, informally, we could say that the Revolution was launched with this book.
The first page of Madero’s La sucesion presidencial en 1910. “To the heroes of our country; to the independent journalists; to the good Mexicans”
Francisco I. Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita, written 1909-1910 and published in 1911.
Apropos of Madero’s two books and the two systems to bring a book to its readers, the heavily intermediated and the relatively direct, a bit from the opening of chapter 2 of my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution:
When we talk about a “successful book,” usually what we mean is one that has a brand-name publisher, enjoys prime shelf space in bookstores, and earns its author buckets of royalties. In other words, we talk about it as a commodity—or, if we’re a mite more sophisticated, a hybrid commodity / work of art / scholarship. I say “we” because I am writing and I presume you are reading this in a time and place where books are no longer banned by the government, their authors no longer casually imprisoned—or worse. Lulled by endless streams of made-for-the-movies thrillers and romances, we forget that, as Ray Bradbury put it, “A book is a loaded gun.”
Francisco I. Madero intended his Manual espírita to be a beam of light, to heal Mexico and the world with his consoling concepts of the nature and meaning of life. However, it is a book that stands on the shoulders of his first book that was, indeed, a loaded gun: La sucesión presidencial en 1910, published in the winter of 1909 when Don Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who had stolen the presidency in a coup d’état and ruled Mexico on and off for over thirty years, was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday and, as Mexico’s so-called “necessary man,” take for himself a seventh term.
Madero had no interest in the capitalist concept of a book’s success; he wanted La sucesión presidencial en 1910 in people’s hands, and as fast as possible, and for that he did not need bookstores, he needed a jump-start on Don Porfirio’s police. He paid for the printing himself (a first edition of 3,000, and later more) and, as he noted in a letter:
[T]he first precaution I took was to hand out 800 copies to members of the press and intellectuals throughout Mexico, so when the Government got wind of the book’s circulation, it would be too late to stop it. . .
MADERO’S SECOND, SECRET BOOK
Now when we come to Madero’s second book, Manual espírita, or Spiritist Manual, there are two reasons the subtitle of my book calls it his “secret book”: First, he wrote it under a pseudonym; second, incredible as it may sound, for the most part, historians have ignored it. A few have begrudged it a footnote; only a very few— so few that I can count them on one hand— have dared to write about it in any depth and seriousness.
The 1924 edition published by Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona
In 1911 five thousand copies of Madero’s Manual espírita went into circulation, one assumes, among Spiritists. It was reprinted in part by Madero’s enemies, the Reyistas, as an attack– their message being, “Madero is the true author, you see what a nut he is.” And I discovered that in 1924 Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona brought out a reprint (print run unknown). I do not know what influence the Manual espírita may or may not have had in spreading Spiritism, whether in Mexico or abroad—it would make a fine PhD dissertation to delve into that question— but as far as historians of Mexico are concerned, until very recently, and apart from a very few and very hard-to-find editions published in Mexico, essentially, the Manual espírita disappeared into the ethers.
I hasten to clarify that I did not self-publish after a string of rejections. I have already published several books, two with university presses and two with major commercial publishers, among others, so I know that, with patience and persistence, should those have proved necessary, my work would have found a home. My decision to self-publish was a deeply thought-out strategy, specific to my circumstances and specific to this title. In short, I decided to skip the heavily intermediated system, which for this book probably would have been a university press. My three reasons:
First, I am not an academic angling for tenure, and as I have already published several books, as a writer and a translator I did not see much to gain by going to a traditional publisher, and in fact I had a lot to lose, mainly time and control;
Second, in English, alas (would that it were otherwise) books on Mexico are not particularly commercial, which makes me suspect that, whatever its merits may or may not be, mine would have taken a shoulder-saggingly long time to bring forth a contract I would have been willing to sign;
Third, for many readers, Spiritism is at once disturbing and beneath their notice. Let’s say, all this concern with the Afterlife and communicating with the dead creeps them out, as would a book on, oh, alien abductions or crop circles. And I believe this explains why even many of the leading historians of the Mexican Revolution do not know about Madero’s Spiritism, or know next to nothing about it. To give you an idea, one major textbook does not deign to mention it, while another textbook, also published by an important university press, blithely labels Madero an atheist, which is rather like calling the Pope of Rome a Protestant.
In our day, what we think of as self-publishing usually includes intermediaries such as amazon.com. In my case this would be amazon.com and Ingram. Ingram’s recent move into the realm of self-publishing is really the topic for another panel, but suffice it to say that for traditional publishing, no exaggeration, this is as momentous as Hiroshima. Ingram is a major book distributor and now also an on-demand book printer, and what listing with Ingram means is that all major on-line booksellers can now, on demand, easily source that self-published book. Libraries can order it, just as they order many of their books from Ingram, and while Barnes & Noble as well as many other major bookstore chains and independent bookstores may not necessarily stock it on their shelves, it’s right there, as easy to order as any other book, on their webpages—again, sourced from Ingram.
As for getting my book into people’s hands, that is a challenge, for without a publisher, I do not have a marketing staff and sales reps. Like Madero with his La sucesión presidencial en 1910, I simply identified key individuals and gave each a copy. These individuals, mainly but not exclusively academics, are experts on Madero, on the Mexican Revolution, Mexican history in general, the history of metaphysical religion, and Masonry (Madero was a Mason).
The process of the book, my little turtle, finding its readers may be a long and winding one, but it is underway [see reviews] and I feel no urge to hurry. Unlike a traditionally published book, which must dash out like a rabbit, digitally available books (ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks sold on-line) are not so heavily dependent on “buzz” generated to coincide with the fleeting moment when a book, thanks to the efforts of marketing staff and sales reps, might be available on physical shelves in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Like grocery stores, brick-and-mortar bookstores must move their merchandize with the seasons and oftentimes, as with the proverbial cottage cheese, even more quickly. Digital bookshelves, however, are of a different nature; at the click of a button, they can unfurl vast dimensions, additions to which impose a marginal cost approaching, or in fact, zero. Now if, on a Tuesday at 4 am, say, seven months or, say, seven years in the future, someone in Oodnadatta, Australia wants to download my Kindle or order my print-on-demand paperback, with a click, he can do just that.
BLASTING THE SOMBRERO OFF THE PARADIGM OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
Will my book with its translation of Madero’s Spiritist Manual change our understanding of Mexican history? Well, I do think it blasts the sombrero off the reigning paradigm to consider that Francisco I. Madero, the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution— an absolutely transformative episode in Mexican history and the first major revolution of the 20th century—was a not only a Spiritist but a leading Spiritist and a Spiritist medium (and, it all relates, a devoted student of the Hindu holy text known as the Bhagavad Gita).
Madero believed that he was channeling written instructions and encouragement from spirits in writing both of his books, and furthermore, in his Spiritist Manual, he detailed his beliefs about such esoterica as astral travel and interplanetary reincarnation, and the moral duty of political action.
For anyone who chooses to open their eyes and look at the overwhelming evidence, the connection between Madero’s beliefs and his politics is clear. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writes in his seminal 1987 biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, in the case of Madero, “Politics does not displace Spiritism; it is born of it.”
I do not deny other motives and the millions of other participants in that Revolution. But its spark, and the way it played out, and, I believe, Madero’s murder, are a radically different story once we take into account his Spiritism.
My aim with my book and my translation of Madero’s book is to deepen our understanding of Madero, both as an individual and as a political figure; and at the same time, deepen our understanding of the rich esoteric matrix from which his ideas sprang, in other words, not to promote his ideas nor disparage them, but explain them and give them context.
It is also then my aim to deepen our understanding of the 1910 Revolution and therefore of Mexico itself, and because the histories are intertwined, therefore also deepen our understanding of North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and more— for as long as a book exists, should someone happen to read it, it can catalyze change in understanding (and other changes) that ripple out, endlessly.
Such is the wonder, the magical embryonic power of a book, any book, whether original or in translation: that, even as it rests on a dusty shelf for a hundred years, or for that matter, an unvisited digital “shelf,” if it can be found, if it can be read, it holds such potential.
