(This Uruguayan author published the prologue to his collection of stories waiting for the reader as we are passionate about great literature) The word 'story' comes from the Latin number, which means telling. Counting is one of the oldest skills of the left cerebral hemisphere, the language. We think that men and women who were told from the use of articulate speech, told the passing of the buffalo through the passes, told the sequence of seasons throughout the day to night, the exploits of heroes, history of the tribe and family, told the past and the future, what plants could be eaten and which were poisonous, told his travels and loves, dreams and fears. Everything can be counted, and the great master Chekhov, one of the narrators more subtle and intelligent literature, said he could write a different story every day on any object. Another great writer, Clarice Lispector, the woman who definitely modernized Brazilian literature with his fine insight (some of whose books I have translated into Castilian), wrote a story about a subtle and analytical egg.
Everything can be counted, if we find the way to go. And from very early human beings, unlike animals, we learned to count. Hence the phrase "Live to Tell", with its variation, used by Gabriel García Márquez in his memoirs, Living to Tell.
Like all girls of the world before television and the Internet (which, in its way, also narrates), loved the stories, I identified with some characters, especially with animals suffered, cried and learned to live listening and reading stories. There is no innocence in the children's stories. They are so cruel, so terrible as those who write for adults: there is envy, loneliness, pain, desires, hopes, though, unlike life, always end well, because they defeat the evil.
We can say that at first, if there ever was a beginning, it was the story. All religions, all worldviews begin with a mythical story based tradition, the past, strains, gender relations and culture.
I was a precocious writer. I, who dreamed of a total writer in all genres, began publishing a book of stories, Living, in 1963, published by Alpha, of Montevideo. (On my hometown wrote one of the dearest to me tales: "The city of Lucifer", included in this volume. I hope I have caught some of its features singular: the lengthy time, the melancholy and the fact that a city of migrants who arrived some time in Europe, fleeing war and misery, dragging an incurable nostalgia, which led to the melancholy poetry of Latin America and to tango lyrics written by poets who loved the suburbs.)
Still today I think this is a mysterious fruit of doom, how a girl of less than twenty years, rebel transgressive, and poor romantic age he published as a book of short stories early in the largest publisher of Montevideo, Alfa, founded and led by an exiled Valencian anarchist, Benito Milla. It was the best editorial of the country for their literary quality and the elegance of its printing. I was sure of my vocation as a writer, but as Jo, the heroine of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, I was shocked when Benito Milla gave me edit my first book. Years later, when he was a writer widely read and highly rewarded, she said, in an interview that he had observed me, evening after evening, eyeing the table balances of his bookshop, where I bought some of the most beloved books, published by Plaza and Janes in those beautiful hardcover editions and illustrated with watercolor jacket: Nena dear, William Saroyan, or Jacob's room, of Virginia Woolf.
My daily visit to your local bookstore had caught his attention, and being a melancholy man of few words (drew the sadness of exile, which would then be repeated, when he fled Uruguayan dictatorship), approached me and asked me what I studied. I told him Comparative Literature. Then I asked if I wrote. I said yes. And he offered to read the unpublished stories that I kept in a folder, typed on a Remington that was my most loyal friend and also accompanied me during exile. A year later he published my first book of stories, Living in the collection's flagship editorial: Carabela.
Then, in Uruguay, a country of lovers of literature, not many readers willing to read the stories, poems or novels of national writers.
We had received an education and a culture completely French style, and the only books I read were those of European or American writers. At the end of the day, three of the great French poets: Lautréamont, Jules Supervielle Laforgue and Jules, were born in Montevideo. Felisberto Hernandez, one of the best storytellers of literature in Castilian, malvivía playing piano in local cinemas and had no more than ten readers, but yes, absolutely convinced of his talent. He financed the publication of his books, but sometimes the money did not come to the front, hence this little gem called Book-top. Juan Carlos Onetti had a bit more luck, but because he had gone to Buenos Aires, the great publishing center that replaced Castilian Spain under Franco.
Publication My first book of stories, Living, was a joy that I could not share with anyone. No longer lived with my family, who, on the other hand, felt that publishing a book, rather than marry and have children confirmed that I was a very rare kind of mutant unclassifiable, and the few friends or friends who had ( all great readers) unanimously despised national literature, to write well, had been born in Europe (prejudice that shares until today Harold Bloom). I do not know any writer, nor had much interest: the writers, I only care about the work. I began to feel guilty for having published a book, she felt have done something wrong irreparable, and masturbating in public or make a streep tease in Independence Square.
However, the fact of having published a book at age twenty complicated it a little life to the whole world: my teachers, who despised the national literature, to my colleagues who considered it risky and premature, and my family did not know how to assume that I was indeed a writer. Then, working in a high school where my book was completely ignored, an attitude he shared the literary criticism of local newspapers, with a valuable exception: Mario Benedetti, that gave him a very complimentary page in a newspaper of wide circulation.
few years later, I went to the highest literary award of stories that were in Montevideo, the publisher of the Ark, who headed the unforgettable critic Ángel Rama. The awards, in the country where I was born, were quite clean. The juror was proud not to reward a friend or renounce a part of the court if he knew he had made any. The proof is that I, a newcomer to the literary world, descended from a family of immigrants and a radical political position (starting the transcendental seventies), won the prize in my book The museum abandoned. The following year, won the prize for novel of the great library of March with the novel The Book of my cousins.
I continued writing stories all my life. He published eight volumes, of which I am very satisfied, most of these stories are included in this book, along with some unpublished.
is a genre I love, as a reader and writer, who always return and I will be faithful for all my life. I like the grammar of the story its structure, its brevity (he also wrote some long stories) and the fact that you have to do without the accessory, as insignificant. Most of the time my characters, like those of Kafka, not named, because it would be a bit unnecessary data: the story has an economy as implacable as poetry.
The story is the genre that has evolved in the twentieth century, thanks to the authors of the two most important literature of this century: the American and Hispanic. Has had an extraordinary rise and high readership in South American countries, where the novel is a less, compared to the narrative and poetry, exactly the opposite in Spain, where still a nineteenth-century vision, it is considered that the story is a novel kind of shorthand. The great writers in the twentieth century Castilian were excellent storytellers: Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Arreola, Augusto Monterroso, Juan Carlos Onetti, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Besides these authors, there are many writers of original tales, full of wit, especially in the short story formula. And a Mexican magazine, the story, paradigmatic that for more than twenty years he published the stories of writers around the world, in addition to readers' spontaneous collaborations.
It counts for something. The good storyteller (and is widely known my condition talkative, often, stories that I told in a meeting and I have not written back to me, as stories of others) applies, without knowing it, the board of Edgar A. Poe, the great innovator of the genre: the unity of purpose and strict economy must have a good story. Like poetry, the story does not support modern digressions, is a clockwork mechanism which every word is essential. Can not fail or overrun.
often occurs to me that I convert my dreams into stories. Experiences is one of the most complex and difficult literature, but also the most rewarding. It is a form of exorcism: the nightmare is a series of symbols and a moral, it is disclosed. And German Romantic writers had discovered that dreams are a kind of writing, the writing of the unconscious.
This book is a story, 'Tsunami', which arose from a recurring nightmare, a few days before the terrible tsunami that destroyed entire cities. I stopped dreaming about him, causing test script exorcism.
Sometimes a story haunts me, but do not try to write until I can not think the first sentence. I know the anxiety of the blank page, which many writers talk. When I sit down to write, I know the first sentence, and if you do not know, I dedicate it to something else. Because the first sentence of a story is crucial: if you manage to seduce the reader, if he can catch it, install it, outright, in time and space of fiction (albeit a timeless time and an unnamed space) continue reading. Otherwise, stop reading.
effect for that unit spoken of Edgar A. Poe, as important as the first sentence is the last. Sometimes, this is a final blow, a masterful KO. But in other cases, it is the emotion you want to cause an ambiguous ending, open, full of uncertainty.
Lumen The publisher has given me the opportunity, I appreciate very much, to publish most of my stories, from different books, most spent a long time. He added others, unpublished. From 1963 to 2007, when publishing this volume, after many years, and yet, I have written stories retain their power, sometimes its alienation, irony, humor, poetry and psychological observation. My only regret is not being able to write: I know that I enjoyed doing it and, sometimes, I have also suffered. How I would like to make the reader enjoy and suffer.
Jorge Luis Borges said that every encounter is a casual appointment. The stories I find them by chance, apparently, living, watching, dreaming, listening, pero, como Borges, creo que al escribirlos, cumplo con una cita previa. Como él, pienso que están escritos en alguna parte y que mi tarea es descifrarlos, quitarles el polvo y la paja, para que su moralidad aparezca como en una parábola. Siempre se escribe para algo. Una de las frases más hermosas y terribles de Jesús, en los Evangelios, dice: «Hablo para que los que quieran entender, entiendan». La suscribo. Escribo para que los que quieran entender, entiendan.
Los relatos son una especie sofisticada de parábolas, en el sentido pedagógico y moral del término, aunque la forma haya evolucionado muchísimo. And they are parables for human beings, unlike animals (for whom I have great respect and affection) learn through stories. The enjoyment of children and girls when they hear a story (are concentrated, attentive, his eyes bright) and its reluctance to accept any changes show that for them, as for any reader a story is an experience of knowledge, contains a kind of truth, but truth, in literature, is relative and paradoxical. A story is a fiction that hides a truth sometimes hard to take.
The history of mankind and personal ethics have been formed through great stories of the Iliad
First you feel, then you know. This is the principle on which I write the stories, so that, as in a hall of mirrors, the reader will enjoy, suffer, smile or laugh, learn to recognize or understand what is different.
A story is a small incision in time to carry forward in a sense, an idea, a dream. Waiver of the accessory and as a scalpel, sinks into the depths of emotion or feeling.
My only regret is not being able to write, because I have written.
But I'm sure he will continue writing stories because I love life, and stories, life vibrates.
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