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Agility and Freedom, Strength and Audacity Because my English is very elemental and my reading possibilities in this language are minimal, the contact that I have always had with American lit- erature has been through translated editions, which means a double limita- tion: a) the loss of ample possibilities of relationships caused by that inevitable “treason” in the translation of a text into another language and b) the subjection of publishers to motivations that have nothing to do with lit- erature-not only North American but Latin American publishing houses, and in most of the world. With these parameters, to cite an example, I did not read Hawthorne in my adolescence (or ever) because publishers here were not interested in his work. I didn’t read James until a few years ago (but only What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw). I did read Poe (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and Melville (Moby Dick) as adventure novels, but not as great deeds of universal literature, as I found out years later). In my preadolescence I had of course read Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (later I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper; nothing else), and Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle.” (Years later I read The Alhambra, and I’d find out that “Rip van Winkle” was part of The Sketch Book of Geof- frey Crayon and that Irving was a great connoisseur of Hispanic culture.)

Chronologically, the North American literature that I had handy when I was about twenty years of age (195 1) was by the left-wing writers of the ’ ~ O S , translated by Argentine publishers: Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos (USA) and John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, The Wayward Bus, East of Eden). I read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in a Cuban translation of the ’70s. When I was reading Caldwell and Dos Passos, I discovered Faulkner, whose literature subdued me. Heming- way, whom I should have read in those times, was introduced to me later, and disgracefully, I did not capture his narrative virtues with much justice. After Hemingway, I knew something, very little, about Gertrude Stein. In those times I also read things by Howard Fast and Louis Bromfield. And, above all, Conrad. From the mid- to late-’5Os, I enjoyed Bradbury and Sturgeon.

In 1964 I had to leave my country as a political exile and was given asy- lum in Mexico, where I stayed for eighteen years, even though the reasons for my exile had long disappeared. In this new cultural environment, much richer than Ecuador’s, my relationship with North American literature was better and more fluent-not necessarily more systematic-and always through translations. I had access to Norman Mailer (Why Are We in Viet- nam? The Naked and the Dead, The American Dream), John Updike, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, John Barth (Letters), Pynchon (very little), John Hawkes (Second Skin and The Blood Oranges)-these three last were very

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appreciated in Mexico, when experimentalism dominated the Latin Ameri- can literary scene-William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), James Baldwin, and Jerzy Kosinski. So strong was our interest in the experimental that John Irv- ing’s The World According to Gatp was a great success, whereas Barth’s Let- ters was a failure with regard to sales; I came to read it and knew about its existence after my return to Ecuador and after having traveled to Spain (I lived in Montgat in those times, a little town fifteen minutes from Barcelona in the mid-eighties), where I was introduced to John Kennedy Toole’s A Con- federacy of Dunces.

In Mexico I had read out of time the main writings by Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night), Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Henry Miller, and Katherine Anne Porter, and with rel- ative actuality (always subjected to translations), some of Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Bukowski, James hrdy, Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Kerouac (On the Road), Styron, Susan Sontag, Carson McCullers (Reflec- tions in a Golden Eye), and Truman Capote.

Of American poetry, I know even less: Whitman (one of the best transla- tions of Leaves of Grass is by an Ecuadorian, Francisco Alexander, mas- sively edited by Novaro in Mexico), Pound, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Leroy Jones, Lowenfels, Blackburn, and I can stop counting.

Only a few years ago I met Raymond Chandler, stimulated by the homage paid by Osvaldo Soriano in his novel Triste, solitario y j n a l . And just now, thanks to her Nobel Prize, I had the opportunity to read Toni Mor- rison (Sula, Beloved, and Jazz).

With the exception of Faulkner and Dos Passos, maybe thematically Miller, I don’t think-and I am sorry for this-that I was very influenced by North American literature in my writings. I would have liked to have received it and assimilated it (its agility and freedom to tell stories, its strength and audacity to refer to certain situations). I think that some of Faulkner’s ways of creating environments must have helped me, and some of Mailer’s and other North American authors’ verbal audacity (in spite of my not knowing the language and having appreciated them only in translation), the pertness of some-Von- negut, Brautigan, and Bukowski, for example-probably determined my style. I don’t know; one cannot detect those things very well. I would have liked a less-dense influence than Barth, Pynchon, or Hawkes (with their ori- gins in the density of European narrative), as I would have also liked the exper- imentalism of the ’60s not to have been great. Anyway, “It’s a done deal,” so the only thing left to do is to assume that’s the way it was and period. I would have loved, of course, to be able to read in English. I would have assimilated a lot of valuable things. It is a great disadvantage to be monolingual.

MIGUEL DONOSO PAREJA Ecuador