Iain Britton

be like this – be transitory

a gateway obstacle

to the next apartment

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

and a late-night monologue

loads

a listener’s request

to practise walking

down a long tunnel

gutted by ancestral burnings

<>

I offer my version

of events as they happen

you aren’t sure about the rain

its coldness

the integers         parenthesised

on your arms               or the inked letters

of a name

tattooed in sunsets

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

you’re into the habit of quickly

shutting doors

<>

but who’ll step up         make

altar-suggestions

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

who’ll request a right

to what I’ve hung drawn and arranged

in every room

<>

a water-colour shoves a church

through my window / monuments

crumble into drunks
xxxxxxxmixed gender
xxxxxxxxxxxxangels in shabby clothes

a crowd xxxxxhacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

you pick up another man’s junk

we are witnesses to things as they happen

we make apes of ourselves

leave slag heaps for neighbours
turn our backs on backs

we avoid confrontations

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

______

Iain Britton’s upcoming collection, Druidic Approaches, can be previewed here. It will be published by Lapwing Publications.

Image Copyright: Foomandoonian

Photo credit: Kathy Riley

How can poetry engage with economic and environmental issues? Does it need to? And ought that engagement to be on a formal level too? I am thinking especially here of your reaction to the light-wasting ‘funland’ of Vegas at the beginning of the travelogue ‘Western States (1)’….

Peter Riley: It would be wrong to think of it as a project, as if I’d decided to do something like ‘Tintern Abbey’, plotting the passing of time against natural permanence, but was diverted from this by an awareness of how the Andorran economy works. What began it all was simply that walk, which gave me a route and a shape, a plot for the poem to follow, in which the physical and the intellectual could share the same trajectory. Awareness of the socio-economic reality was thus integral to the first intent. I don’t mean I conceived of the poem as I walked – I never do that – I mean that in the writing I always knew where it was going because I’d already been there. It was going to have, eventually, to go down into that pit. Meanwhile the more diversions the better.

Like Alstonefield it mimics how the mind disports itself when you’re out walking and becomes inventive and acute in new ways because you have escaped from your everyday awareness and have nothing to direct you except the surface of the earth. It gets quite extravagant and talks of chucking poetry, and finds itself quoting parts of lyrics in remote and lost languages. This all belongs within the same area of concern, about what happens to cultures.

There’s a question here of the status of the textual voice, of exactly who makes those remarks in the poem. The separation of authorial and textual voices has now become a commonplace, as in the attempts to defend Larkin as if the poems were written by someone else – that clearly won’t do. The poet’s attitudes and beliefs always deeply inform the poetry, and I think it’s only in lyrical poetry that you can make that separation strongly. All the vagaries in that poem are mine (vagary is a kind of speciality of mine) and the gesture about chucking poetry in the skip is one of them, one of several points throughout which question the wilful venturing stance of the narrative. This renunciation is also contradicted elsewhere and the voice of the poem, whoever’s it is, also mocks itself at times.

The descent into Andorra, Part II of the poem, the reluctant descent into the commercial centre, and the escape from Andorra in the hope of sanity, these are, I think, a vindication of poetry’s power to make a theatre of our condition, which is not to solve it or critique it, but to display the hopes and fears whizzing round the place in a vibrant, engaging language and to make some sort of cohering work out of it all. That’s the hope of it anyway. I don’t know any reason why anyone couldn’t write a poem of personal development (or simply ageing) in relation to an apparent natural constant at any time; the condition is always there, and the constants are there however great the apparent circumstantial transformation, like a place the size of Wales changing from a peasant economy growing tobacco to a tax-evasion haven, and the constants are not just mountains and stars and rivers but also a living human faculty for which I might still be prepared to use the word “soul”.

But to get to your actual question, poetry engages with economic and environmental issues because we live them, personally and intellectually. They are so built into our perception that it hardly seems necessary, sometimes, to mention them, they’re in our breathing. The qualities of the writing, its virtues, are self-sufficient. They offer to be taken up into other areas outside the poem, even into politics, but are not bound to anything except the poem. A “political poem” without writerly qualities defeats its own message. A writerly virtue like “eloquence” is also political; to ask a poem to be eloquent is asking it to recognise certain forms of reality in the human condition, such as our ability to cope with harm and stand above it. It is actually a form of clarity, it means to speak out.

Generally I find it better to leave direct political engagement out of it, or just register the evidence, because I don’t want to step outside the personal earth-theatre in which the poem acts. That’s a theatre of living on earth rather than recommendations for improvement of the arrangements. If it works it’s a total theatre, hinged on the particular. Poetry must be the most inappropriate medium possible for preaching to the world, directly or through linguistic encryptment. It would defeat itself by its very nature because poetry isn’t only sharp and perceptive and incisive, it’s also obliged to be, well, entertaining in some way, or delightful, and always was however serious it got, before modernism. Even Pound recognised this necessity, at first. Or anyway, why should poetry take upon itself a task that prose does so much better?

My remarks about Las Vegas just rehearse what everybody knows really, while registering a stranger’s astonishment. The lack of main verbs, here and in other places, is a habit I seem to have got into which allows me to posit a moral position from a distant platform. I name it, as I think it is, propositionally, without letting the self take hold of it in an active idiom of event and declaration. I like to leave the reader some space around the percept. “Stranger” is exactly my position in a lot of these pieces, including the ones which are entirely at home.

TL: There are many concerns expressed in The Glacial Stairway about the depredations of the market and its effect on various more entrenched, slower-moving, traditional ways of life, with whom the poetic voice frequently aligns itself (‘we share a condition, of/having been betrayed)’. The ‘fiscal paradise’ of Andorra; villages cleared to build hotels – to what extent is The Glacial Stairway a statement of assessment on modernity and its interaction with what we might call ‘pre-modern’ ways of life?

Much of The Glacial Stairway involves non-urban places – in Greece, Italy, Provence – is there a poetics of retreat at work here? If so, how is it different to the way retreat from modernity is traditionally conceived of in nature poetry?

PR: I’ve brought these together because I think they’re the same question. Basically I can’t accept the dichotomy, which assumes the cultural condition of western Europe as central and optimal and to look away from it a “retreat”. Our experiential scope is greater than that. The places I visit are no more “entrenched” than central Manchester, and probably a good deal faster-moving, and they participate in more than the local market. This turns out to be why I went there and what I found. Actually the USA is about the most “primitive” place I’ve been to, in various respects. You don’t evade modernity by going to rural Transylvania, which I do from time to time, it follows you there and it meets you there, it meets you in your separation from what you witness and in your harmonisation with it.

I do think it’s salutary to get to know elsewheres, or at any rate it is for my temperament a necessary venture, perhaps because elsewhere is where I come from, though I recognise that other writers may have no use for it at all. And certainly I’ve been concerned to delineate value in terms which are foreign to us, especially of course in the book of travel sketches, The Dance at Mociu. But my idea is that it’s not a nostalgic exercise, rather a broadening one, that the faculties are exercised to their fullness in a remote Carpathian village as much as anywhere else, the visitor’s as well as the local’s. The sense of time-lapse is inevitable, faced for instance with strip-farming, but you have to understand how the place works within that apparent time-warp, and that nothing there is enviable as such or for its charm, but only as it has been achieved, in for instance the operations of a cohesive local society, all the interlocking functions, and how care is built into the inherited structure and maintained there. And indeed sometimes it’s clear that such achievement is not possible here in those terms, but that then implies the question about what is possible here, by what strategies, or is like a cultural reminder, weighing up gain and loss against what obtains in different conditions. Of course we have lost a great deal, socially, compared with these places, but there are reasons for that, and concomitant gains.

As for “nature” I take it as obvious that exposure to the raw details of the bionosphere is good for you and it would be silly to think otherwise. Air water and distance, plants, stones, birds, weather and all the rest of it. Tremendous ranges of imagery, the imagination liberated as the feet and lungs are, and entirely modern. I’m actually not interested in it until the human spirit is manifest, and sometimes you can see the place as an interactive and shaping force for the self as for the society that lives in it. And I’m happy to indicate the distinctions, the foreign beauties of the place, Mediterranean heat and light etc…I don’t think it’s appropriatory, because the self is seriously caught up in it, and the confrontation stands in a historical process.

Cover art: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham

TL: There also seems to be quite a lot of anger in the voice, would you say that’s accurate? If so, why, against what?

PR: Do you think so? Compared with the embittered fury which motivates a lot of the young poets I come across in this neck of the woods, I’m Beatrix Potter. Of course there is always a lot to complain about. Especially it has become starkly evident lately that management of the big economy is faulty, and has been for a long time. In fact the quality of life of half the population of the earth is currently being reduced because of the acts of a bunch of gangsters who gambled recklessly with the global economy and helped themselves to untold billions of public money, only to be patted on the back and told not to worry by the various politicians whose job is to arrange for their populations to foot the bill. You realise this when you travel around on the other side of Europe and find that there too almost everybody has been affected, everything is cut back, everybody’s ambitions have been curtailed, quite apart from all those who suffer actual hardship as a direct result.

Yes there is some anger, which is, or should be, directed towards injustices and despoliations which could have been prevented. I get particularly angry about the refusal of the British radical left to engage in practical politics, thus leaving the door open for the far right to walk into power, and look where that’s got us. There is also a lot of regret, which I look on as a larger condition, less specific, something that everyone knows and if they say not I don’t believe them. Anger doesn’t easily produce hope, but on the other hand regret goes hand-in-hand with nostalgia, so you have to be careful.

Beyond what’s in the news, there is a kind of modern melancholy which I think is essential to our condition; without it we’d just be in torpor. And I think there are complicated reasons for that which are to do with industrialisation and population levels and logistics but extend further. Senses of belonging and continuity became problematic, since at least the 18th Century, and the social structure has suffered distortions which seem to be getting worse. A lot of poetical militancy might just be an attempt to evade a resigned sadness which is our reality. But of course I grew up through the crazy and idealistic 1960s, and when you remember the serious dreams that lurked among all that nonsense, and the hopes given rise to, you get a sense of reversal, that societal time is going backwards: re-entrenchment of class system, return of all the authoritarian and militaristic structures, immense divisiveness, government completely out of touch with the realities of living here, really not a clue, just waving big sticks at us, and the police out of control again, and so on. You can’t dismiss regret with all this going on, and my generation did come out of their twenties thinking things were improving in a steady and irrevocable way and could only go on like that. That is, moving into a more and more egalitarian society. Then someone comes along and sets the whole machine into reverse. But to me it is a large issue, and specific temporal conditions have to be weighed against personal and nostalgic forms of regret. There may be forms of regret or melancholy which are existential. The Elizabethans thought so.

TL: A word that recurs with different senses and in different contexts throughout The Glacial Stairway is ‘structure’. It seems the poet is constantly trying to read things encountered structurally – the ‘unreal structure’ of credit finance, the indecisive and lonely world ‘An elite or egalitarian structure’ – what is the significance of connecting these sorts of political and social structures with structure as an organisational principle in your poetry?

PR: I don’t really do organisational principles. The poem grows from a starting-point, which may be a first line, or a title, or a quotation, or a vague picture or image field or the memory of a place, or a sense of a possible tone, a possible weighting, with a feeling that any of these might lead on to somewhere, might reveal something. And from there it grows and finds its form, which is sometimes determined by the intuitive construction of what becomes the first stanza, say it’s a six-line one I might go on writing six-line stanzas for the rest of the poem, though there are no rules in this. I never start from a message that I want to deliver; the message is discovered in the working through of the poem’s materials. And it ends when it’s reached somewhere which consummates the issue or which releases the inhering message preferably in a quite dramatic or rhythmically decisive gesture, though there are also codas sometimes. I used to be involved in improvised music as a listener, reviewer and occasional impresario. There structure is, of course, a non-existent entity until it’s all over. But there are structures all round us, from garden sheds to governmental systems and they’re not all constructed the same way. I look upon my intuitive structuring as a suitable process for a certain kind of fairly modest poetical production, quite disconnected from other structurings, justified as it leads to or is faithful to trustworthy perceptions of the world. That would include a sense of our failure, sometimes nothing else. And indeed I don’t think political, economic or social structures are necessarily wrong in themselves, but only as they fail us, which they often do.

Or to put it differently, in fact to contradict myself, what I’m interested in is how we evade structures. That is, we get by, in the most daunting conditions short of actual warfare. The structures are like mountains and in their shadows we build bars and gardens, both full of lights and music.

TL: It is common in what some people call ‘experimental’ poetics to focus on process, and in The Glacial Stairway there are several pieces whose formal structure are concerned with expressing time and/or distance in a graphical or systematic way (especially the walk-poem ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’). How did you arrive at such methods, and what do you think they can do that more traditional verse can’t?

PR: As above, the notion of a possible trajectory carries with it the sense of an appropriate disposition of the writing on the page and the previsioning of that is part of the initial impulse. The type of emotion, even the type of thought involved in, say, ‘Shining Cliff’ is so different from that of ‘King’s Cross to SOAS’ (though they may share the same kind of message in the end) that they demand different formats. I guess I work between two extremes – the natural obscurity of song, and the open telling of narrative. The two versions of ‘Western States’ at the end of the book stretch this contrast as far out as possible, expanding the distance between them to a maximum, while covering the same ground. I wouldn’t call it a system I don’t think. If it works the form and the content guide each other through the text.

These procedures are all quite closely related to traditional genres I think. The short poems or sets of them embrace the meaning of that abused word “lyric”, the more expansive pieces recall traditional narrative writing in prose or verse, and of course ‘Aria with Small Lights’, like a lot of other pieces in the past, apes traditional procedure closely and irreverently in its not-quite-strict end-rhyming. Like agreeing to a discipline and then occasionally playing truant. I’m very fond of traditional verse and sometimes like to have the poem look like it, in regular sections on the page, even when there are no traditional metrics at work. The forms and appearance of poems have a lot to say in themselves. A sense of stability is just as important to me as disruption. In fact neither makes sense without the other.

TL: The Glacial Stairway includes some versions of poems by the 8th Century Chinese poet Li Ho, having reached this form through several translations and re-workings by 20th Century scholars. In what ways can translation be a poetic act?

PR: I guess that in poetry translation is a kind of collaboration but one which can embrace contrariety, especially when the original author has been dead for half a millennium. I take something not only not by me but also, in this case, quite alien in many ways to what my poetry normally does, with all that languorous aristocratic beauty, and make it at least partly mine, by working on small details. To realise points in it which I can recognise as my sense harmonising with something very far away, and so to come to terms with it. Thus emphasising, for instance, Li Ho’s lamenting of the servile and deprived condition of the palace women. A claim is made that those aristocratic forms of beauty are now open to the commoner as a right. It takes a lot of work and concentration over a long period of time. Some of the most unreadable poetry books I’ve ever seen are the “collected poems” of major foreign poets ruthlessly translated into English as if the translator is a kind of postal worker. Sometimes made worse by a grim determination to represent the metrics of the original.

TL: When The Literateur interviewed Sean Bonney, we began one question with a quotation from your Alstonefield – ‘I could go South, / to the heart of smooth success [. . . ] And come back up here three times a year /for humanity’ – and really, I’d like to ask you a similar question about the existence (or not) of a north/south divide in British poetry, but differently accented. How do you think your writing might have been different had you stayed in the north?

PR: I love the north of England. Apart from the hills, there’s a sense of personal openness and directness, no-nonsense, no frills, and determined and cheerful resourcefulness in comparative poverty. I suppose when it comes to the reality that’s all folklore – what you actually get is the same conditions as anywhere else. But northern hard-headed straightforwardness is a healthy fiction to cultivate as an antidote to the cryptic mannerisms of the southern poetry gangs.

Actually I don’t know any reason why my poetry would necessarily be any different if I’d stayed in the north (and it wasn’t very far north, really, just up beyond the Midlands). I trust I’d still know what was going on in poetry from Cornwall to Orkney if not further, and after all there are no barriers to this information for those who are interested. Where you live makes a difference, perhaps, at that formative stage when poets band together in exclusive groups, but all you can do after that is break it up, you have to; the only people who want the categories you create to become part of history are the academics. In the late 1960s I was in touch with people from the north who wrote a plain-speaking socialistic poetry virtually without figuration of any kind, which they probably thought was “northern” and to some degree they might have been right. But they erected a wall round this poetry, fed it to each other exclusively, turned their backs on alternatives, and we never heard from them again. I think this was a pity. There were possibilities of interaction which were closed. Groupings I knew in the south-east did exactly the same thing.

TL: One of the poems in The Glacial Stairway features the line ‘forgive me if I write badly’. A slightly facetious question, but since the text suggests it – what, do you think, does it mean to write badly, if anything?

PR: All over the poetry world people are throwing around the words “good” and “bad” and nobody hardly ever has a shadow of an aesthetic belief to support those judgements. Normally it’s gut reaction, opportunism, or surrender to endorsed attitudes, conformity to established procedures – and this happens at the “innovative” end of the spectrum as much as anywhere else. Occasionally it’s political, but the attempts I’ve seen to state an aesthetic basis for evaluating poetry have mostly been pathetic. “Poetry is a kind of magic” and so forth. Or the most abstruse philosophical critiques can be seen to be founded on pre-determined aesthetic choices. Most poets, let’s face it, make judgements which support their own poetry. In the commercialist zones, but not only there, were are told not merely what is “good” but also what is “best”, and we are told it again and again. And the prizes and the appointments repeat it. The cast of this theatre of the superlative constantly changes, but the sales-talk doesn’t and hasn’t for at least 40 years. Poets are elevated ridiculously in a quest for heroic achievement which I think is neurotic. Poets are not in fact all that much better than one another. But it’s not only in the big publicity routines, it’s also in the avant-garde claques. The poet Douglas Oliver once suggested that superlatives should be avoided completely in talking about poetry.

Personally I look for a “poetic” quality in the writing. Poetry is after all what I am mainly interested in; so for me it is its own objective. But whatever that quality is, which may well involve certain echoic, historical tones, I’d want to see it as an active force, I’d want to recognise the world in it. And a balance of forces. But the important thing is perhaps that there’s no knowing where you’re going to find this, or how it may be disguised.

Juan Pablo gets acquainted with the Liberian Pygmy Hippos at London Zoo. Photo by Rita Platt

Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos has had quite a year. His first novel Down the Rabbit Hole has been translated into English, French, German, Portuguese and Hungarian, and nominated for 2011′s Guardian First Book Award. Published in the UK by innovative independent press And Other Stories, Adam Thirlwell describes the novel in his introduction as ‘a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective … a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.’ The Literateur caught up with Juan Pablo in Bloomsbury to talk about language, childhood, drug barons and, perhaps inevitably, hippos.

Interview by Dan Eltringham

The Literateur: Let’s start with the title: it’s an evocative one for Anglophone readers, and I’d like to unpack the resonances a little. ‘Tochtli’ [the book’s young narrator] means ‘rabbit’ in Nahuatl [Aztec language], neatly making the connection with Alice in Wonderland, also concerned with a parallel world and childhood perception. How do you see, then, the relationship between the rabbit hole and Mexico? Is it an alternative mirror image, in the way of Through the Looking Glass?

Juan Pablo Villalobos: In Spanish the title is ‘Party in the Lair’ (Fiesta en La Madriguera), something like that, literally. So when Rosalind the translator and the guys at And Other Stories suggested the title Down the Rabbit Hole, my first reaction was, why? Where’s the party? They explained to me that there was this parallelism with Alice in Wonderland, and Tochtli’s a rabbit, and then I started to think… I don’t know if there’s an influence of that book (Alice) on my novel, but I love the book. I started to think that it’s a good idea, because maybe British readers have this connection, and it must be attractive to them.

And yeah, it’s a claustrophobic world, and a trapped world, that in some ways has some relations with Alice in Wonderland, I think. And this style of narrating with some absurd connections between things that seem like they are so far away, but you can connect them, like the French with the Samurais with Mexico with the Liberian Pygmy Hippos – all this stuff together, it’s something like surreal.

Click the jacket image to read The Literateur's review of Down the Rabbit Hole

TL: I want to ask about narrative method, based on a point Nick Lezard makes in his Guardian review of Down the Rabbit Hole. He notes that certain recent novels – the example he gives is Emma Donoghue’s Room – build themselves around a young narrator who is, as Tochtli would say, ‘precocious’. Usually this manifests itself as a precocious knowledge of words, and in many cases the attempt results in ‘the slipping of authorial control, the fumbling of register’; a failure of consistency with what they ‘would’ and ‘wouldn’t’ know. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might be another such example. This doesn’t occur with Rabbit Hole because, one might argue, the very point is in Tochtli’s misuse or over-application of the complex words he does know.

What is Rabbit Hole doing, or how does it enact your ideas about, the relationship between language and the ways it can both constrain and give freedom to perception in narrative?

JPV: When I started to write the novel I had I think like 90 percent of the plot defined, I was really sure about what I was going to tell. But I wasn’t sure about the tone, about the voice. Then I started to write from Mazatzin’s perspective, who’s the professor, and from Yolcaut’s perspective, and I wasn’t happy. Suddenly it came to me in this magic moment the first sentence of the novel, ‘Some people say I’m precocious’. In Spanish it’s different, because I don’t use the word ‘precoz’ (‘precocious’); I use ‘adelantado’ (‘advanced’). In all the translations I have read they use the word ‘precocious’ and not ‘adelantado’, because it wouldn’t work that way in other languages. I thought that in this sentence was all the tone and the spirit of that voice; then I tried to be convincing and worked a lot correcting it. I wrote the novel in five months, and I kept correcting it for two years, every sentence and every word, and doing apparently simple things, like after a sentence with some difficulties [of consistency] saying, oh, that’s what Youcault told me, so he’s [Tochtli’s] repeating things.

TL: You were correcting it so you could explain everything that was there in Tochtli’s vocabulary?

TL: Yeah, I found this quote by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro. He says, ‘la ficción no trabaja con la mentira sino con lo inverificable’ (‘fiction doesn’t work with a lie but with the unverifiable’) and the writer doesn’t aspire to falsify but ‘ser ciertas de otro modo, a construir una segunda realidad’(‘to be sure in a different way, to build a second reality’). That seems to me applicable to your book…

JPV: Yeah, I agree. I wasn’t worrying about realism, you know? As a writer you create the rules, you say, this is my world and I’m going to play with these rules. And I think the reader enters this world and then you have to walk with him across the pages so he’s never like, oh, what’s happening here?

TL: Do you also have a sense that that is manifested on a more structural level, and not just in terms of words he knows and doesn’t know?

JPV: Yes of course, it has to be with a view of how I perceive literature, and life, of course.

TL: I remember reading in I think El Universal this quote by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: ‘Mis primeros libros no son sobre Colombia porque no entendía mi país y sentía que no podía escribir sobre él. Fue gracias a vivir fuera, a la distancia y al tiempo que pude escribir sobre él.’ (‘My first books weren’t about Colombia because I didn’t understand my country and I felt that I couldn’t write about it. It was thanks to living elsewhere, with distance and time, that I could write about it.’)

You lived in Barcelona for eight years, now Brazil and – correct me if I’m wrong – Down the Rabbit Hole could be said to be a product of no longer living in Mexico. In what way does a certain distance alter the way you see a place, and change the way you are able to write about it?

JPV:  Yes, it’s like that. When I started to write the novel I had [been] I think three years outside Mexico, and the novel for me it’s like a, how to do you say, a ‘reflexión’?

TL: Thought process?

JPV: Yeah, a process of thinking. How do you perceive Mexico after some time living outside? Because your perspective changes, and it’s true, I agree with Juan Gabriel Vásquez because your vision of the country changes. Suddenly you understand some things, and suddenly some things you were doing when you lived there seem really horrible, and you take this distance from the reality. Then when you go there on holiday, or when you talk with your family and friends you have these reactions like, come on, why? You know? It’s shocking.

TL: Can you give an example?

JVP: Well, in family relations, for example, we don’t talk clearly. If I speak to my mother and she has to say something to say to me, she doesn’t say it, she’s like ‘well, because, you know, we are in a difficult time, because maybe’…you know? What’s happening? Just tell me!

TL: So it’s language, again.

JPV: Yeah, it’s language. And I think the novel, in my own personal view, is an exercise in the way Mexicans think about Mexico after we leave.

TL: Do you feel that that gaining of perspective from being farther away is kind of the opposite of Tochtli’s lack of perspective?

JPV: Yeah, and then you can play with that, you know? Doing the opposite. But it’s true, I hadn’t thought like that, but it’s true.

JPV: I wasn’t thinking of writing a narco novel when I started. I first thought of writing about the narcos when I thought: if I create a character, a child who wants a Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus and can have it, who would that be? And maybe twenty years ago it would be the son of a politician, the son of a deputy, or the son of a governor. At that time – 2005, 2006, when I started to write the novel – it was the beginning of all this escalation of violence in Mexico. And obviously this narco culture exists from I think the 70s and 80s, and I started to write because of that.

Sometimes my novel in the bookshops is surrounded by all these other narco novels. I understand that, it’s normal, at the first reading it [seems like] a narco novel. But I think that really it’s a [rite of] passage novel. It’s about learning to deal with reality, and about the loss of innocence. In the beginning I wanted to write about learning the exercise of power. How do you learn the use of power? When you are a child you experiment with how much power you have through your wishes, and you discover it through your parents. It’s a very simple but I think symbolic way to understand the use of power. This boy, who is the son of this drug baron, is having this terrible experience with power, because he can have everything.  He understands that his father can do everything, always says, ‘I can get it’.

In Spanish it’s stronger, ‘Youcault siempre puede’ (‘Youcault always can’). I keep repeating that sentence because it’s like a mantra, the essence of the book.

TL:You know Vásquez’s book also includes a private zoo, and a Hippopotamos that’s fetched from very far away…

JPV: When I presented the book in Barcelona two years ago, a Colombian journalist said to me, ‘ah, you wrote about hippos because of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’, and he explained to me that Pablo Esobar [Colombian drug baron] had these hippos that ran away when he was killed, and now they have this terrible health problem in that region because the hippos are free and killing people…I didn’t know, I didn’t.

TL: There’s an essay to be written on hippos in Latin American literature…This next question is perhaps going to overlap with the previous one, but we’ll see how it goes. How does your method of rendering violence, in a literary sense via Tochtli’s blankly innocent descriptions of ways of ‘making corpses’, work to deflate or satirise the obsession with violence in narcoliteratura and narco culture? Or is it doing something else?

JPV: No, I was trying to work with or through humour. Which is difficult, because you never know if you are reaching the objective, or if you’re failing terribly and nobody will laugh. I read a lot of of humouristic literature and I like the humouristic way of understanding life and understanding reality, to satirise and criticise the power and the politicans. Most of the time [when] readers or spectators of film or other kinds of art are faced with some humouristic work, they’re like, oh, it’s funny. Well yeah, it’s funny, but it’s more than funny. It’s another way to approach knowledge. Another approach to reality, to experience of life. So in the tone of Tochtli’s voice I was always thinking of that effect.

At the beginning I thought that maybe it was not that correct to use that tone to narrate those kinds of things, like talking about dead bodies and how you can kill somebody. And most of the time in narco novels these issues are treated very seriously.

TL: Except perhaps they’re repeated so many times they lose their meaning, I don’t know.

JPV: Yeah, maybe. Literature is about language for me, I work with words, and I can’t imagine working with a transparent style, you know? Like, ‘Salió de casa, y caminó hasta la esquina. Cruzó la calle,  y miró al cielo, pensando…’(‘He left the house and walked to the corner. He crossed the street, looked at the sky, thinking…’). I can’t. I have to find a voice, a tone, a perspective. I think Tochtli’s voice is the reason why the book is being translated and has been, in the case of Great Britain, well-received.

JPV: I like it a lot, I think it’s great. It’s different, obviously. I read the Portugese translation, which is great, and the French translation, which is a really good one too. They are different books. Sometimes translators have to make decisions – [to] work with this word, ‘precocious’ instead of ‘adelantado’. In the case of Portugese it was this huge discussion about using ‘pulcro’, which is the last of the five words [that Tochtli knows]. In English it’s ‘immaculate’. The translator wanted to use ‘impecável’, but ‘pulcro’ exists in Portugese. I said, but why don’t you use ‘pulcro’, it’s the same? [they said] No no, the meaning is different, but it’s the sound of the word I am concerned with. I work a lot with the music of the voice, and that’s why [it was important] to keep repeating all the time, ‘Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus’, ‘Liberian Pygmy hippopotamus’, ‘Liberian Pygmy hippopotamus’.

TL: Did you find you had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, a lot of going in between with the translators over individual words, a lot of emails exchanged? Or did you just let them get on with it?

JPV: It depends on the translator. For example the German and the Dutch translators, suddenly the translation was ready, and I was like, huh? With Rosalind we had a lot of contact, which was very nice, because she is really observant, she detected some issues and problems that I hadn’t noticed. It was nice as a writer to experiment like this – I believe that the best readers of novels are the translators.

TL: And working with And Other Stories, how was that?

JPV: I have an international rights contract with my Spanish publisher and they received an offer from And Other Stories. From the beginning it was really great to get involved [with And Other Stories] because it’s a small project, about translation, and in a country, in a language that translates so little. They are really amazing. The love for literature and for books, you can feel it still in this project. It’s not like when I go with other huge and big publishers, when you feel this literary system, working. Here I have this impression when I come to Great Britain that we are working in a project where all the people involved love books, love literature, and that we’re doing this because of that.

Jenny Holden

Hendrickje poured the tea, and remembered her dead. Who was it now? Simon, with his long nose and seriousness. He was already old when she met him, and tall as a larch. Cord trousers. He liked her waist, and her buttocks, he was incorrigible. She smiled, and a late afternoon sun made it down the years and through her kitchen window. A pigeon cooed somewhere, and on her forehead the light rested. Her cheekbones formed hollows, but her hair blazed; white fluff. Her forehead had a strength, a barrel prominence that made her, as a younger woman, formidable. She looked like Danaë in Rembrandt’s painting, strong under duress, and covered in gold, a liquid warmth in her bones and in her crevices. Hendrickje had known too, and Simon’s fingers about her shoulders were marvels, long and pale and knotted, and though there was a little pain, there was joy also. A daughter, Lara, who called him daddy long legs and climbed up his frame, holding his hands. She flipped herself all the way over while he supported himself against the work surface, and every time it made her mother gasp. Hendrickje could be serious too. She was named after her Oma, but that head made her all Rembrandt’s, his shamed second wife. Not puffy sweet Saskia, but Hendrickje, his companion. He outlived her, and the rest.

She tore the corner off a sugar sachet. We are put on earth to bear these things, and if we can lessen another’s pain, so be it. The teaspoon’s clink made the noise which is pleasant to hear if you are susceptible to cosiness, to the state of nestling in, settling down. Three bars on the heater, and the oven light on, crumble inside. She drank it the proper way, without milk, in a glass with a handle. She was leaning on the sink and watching the sky. The palest blue, and empty of anything of note. A tree stuck its limbs out, but it was naked, and she remembered Joost before they moved over here, when she was not short of suitors. He walked with her and held her arm, or let her ride on the back of his bicycle. His hair was red, many coils which she thought of now, and wondered what it would have been to have touched them. There was Penny, from next door. She was dead, and fat, and silly too. Like a pigeon, forever head-butting something invisible.

Two teenagers pushed bicycles down the path beyond Hendrickje’s back fence. She heard fuck sake, and then a mobile ringing. They spoke differently now, expressing the violence latent in youth. In a way, she admired them. She had sworn at Simon only once, after visiting his sister’s children. He had been over the top, bought the boy a model train, the girl a first edition C. S. Lewis. Gone on and on in the car home, what darlings, how well disciplined. She called him a bastard, and closed the door firmly on the car, and went into the house, and felt nothing else. There was nothing to let out. Everything he said was true. They were impeccably behaved, like miniature people, not children at all. Lara, at that time, was unimaginable. Even the idea of a child – it was simply outside the realms of thought. Not that Hendrickje was choosing a career instead; what he never could understand was her deep commitment to their happiness. She saw the world in terms of wasted energy and selfish excess. What she had, she would preserve, and nourish, without fuss. Hendrickje sipped her drink, and saw the sky. The block of them laid out supine on the bed, and the first light through under the Velux. A white sheet revealed them, two interlocked pairs of hands laid across two chests. They were lacking only a spaniel at the foot, a book under his head inscribed with numerals. Hen, she remembered, and his hand breaking the symmetry, plunging below the covers and looking, without sight, for a warm crevice, some resting place about her. She had wanted to preserve this, and was quite firm on the subject. There were ulterior motives behind everything, sex most of all. Things looked patchy, for a while. And then, a slip-up. And after – what she would have to live with. That she’d have aborted it, from the off, perhaps without telling him. She’d always had reserves, she knew her own mind. Her mum dying young had done that, or the move to England.

The best thing in life is the ability to change. When it came to it, Lara was the best person she’d known, and Hendrickje allowed herself to put on a little weight, and worry less about Simon’s long hours and their shaky income. Lara learned to draw, the table, a kite and doll, anything. Nothing on earth had such a capacity for concentration, tongue out, solemn at her paper. Mother watched daughter, who watched only her fist and pencil, learning how to make a world, and live in one too. Life could be good.

The afternoon had passed, and soon she would be late. She had known skies like this – deepening blue, with a low moon growing brighter and fatter – and known people, with whom she’d talked. Some she’d loved. She was going to be late, but perhaps supper would wait, until after. Lotje was dead, and Simon’s brother Eric, who was a perpetual charmer, until he died of something horrible and told Simon on his deathbed that it should have been Eric at the last, with the name, and the life, and the missus. Simon had always thought his brother was gay, and was quietly satisfied that this was, after all, not the case. They had been in competition after all – and he, the lankier, mousier brother, had won. This was not spoken, but Hendrickje knew, and would never judge him for it.

She watched two birds together, dipping, black on blue. If she moved from here, from where she supported herself on the sink, legs stiff as soldiers, if she went to turn on the lamp by the TV, or to put a jumper on for outside, or apply a swipe of lipstick – if she was efficient and capable in any of these ways then there would be no edges to the hell she was living in. The cat, eventually, would have to be fed, and it would begin. But now. There was tonight, and there was Hendrickje, a small, stout woman with the forehead of a Rembrandt, her hands spread on the sink.

At Simon’s college she had met some of the other fellows, they flirted with her and liked her jokes, she was a terrific little woman to them. Formal hall, high table. Passing the port round, and all of these great men’s faces, made beautiful in the candlelight. She laughed for them, and was interested in their research. Of Simon’s field she was sweetly naïve, knowing enough about the English madrigal to tease out a professor’s superior knowledge in the subject. She said she liked Carole King, and blushed. She said she liked your Peter Grimes, because of how its salt air took her home. They had holidayed in Norfolk, she and her husband, but she leaned in to hear about Florence, and California. She was certain that if she had travelled so widely, she would not describe it in these terms – the Uffizi, but the locals coarse, or the Redwood, and a Syrah to die for. She wanted terribly to know whether this or that Fellow had seen bears, or eaten Lebkuchen, but never asked. She praised the food, and knew how to make her features still and self-contained for the Latin mass. The textures of the language were different from her native Dutch, more even-tempered and insistent, but she was beguiled all the same. She perched on the oak bench, her weight on her rump, trying to balance her handbag on her lap and reach the food. After those nights she discovered she had pulled unfamiliar muscles, and developed a taste for rabbit. Once, she tripped across Front Quad, aware of each step because she was a little tight, and tried two staircases before she found the toilet engaged. A recently appointed Law Fellow emerged through the ancient door and closed it behind him. He was a large man, ridiculous in all that flapping material. The Dutch Wife, he said, putting both hands on his hips. His wings, and his paunch, stood between her and her bladder’s relief. Too much wine, he said, and, I’ve seen you. You’re a little tease. You’ll forgive me, he said, taking two steps towards her. She took two back, and felt wall. Excuse me, she said. That Laphroaig, he said, it’s terrific, and pressed his groin against her womb, to do which he had to lean back slightly, to accommodate his stomach. No – she said, having always hated Scotch, and wedged her hands between, prodding at too much flesh. She kicked his shin, and he lost balance, and swore. All these men, and she was guilty before them – for what? And as she dipped past him she thought, confusedly, that Simon would be so cross, and there flashed in her mind his body and hers, and cold plaster against her bum, and this was wrong, too. He’d never know, but that night she dug her fingers into his back, wanting to be rid of something. Stepping across the quad, the moon bobbed in the corner of her eye, and Hendrickje was forced to notice such things; a spire, pale greeny-blue with a yellow lamp somewhere within, and points of wetness the moon picked out on the grass.

Hendrickje thought of home, of white pavements and the chill of the North Sea blowing in behind Centraal, she thought of the Begijnhof and its courtyard silence, generations of women who knew, as she did, how to soothe, and suppress. That she was descended from one of them, she had no doubt. It didn’t matter that there was no Our Lord or Blessed Virgin, the very will of the beguines was subtle, and it spoke to her bones.

It was gone half seven. A telephone was ringing, somewhere off in the house. She would answer it. She would not. How her heart had been used to go at the sound of it, wondering who would be on the other end. Baby – a lover might address him so. This happened to other wives. For a period after Lara had started at university, Hendrickje would apply herself to her daily tasks and, nearing the time of his return, would lose all stomach for them. She would put on the oven but forget to feed it, instead would curl like a comma in the bed. That he made her jealous was some feat – Hendrickje, the toast of the Jordaan – and he did it by a certain indifference, or staid acceptance of her love. She loves me, sure! He was incapable of malice, was as soft as his best cashmere wool pullover, folded up in a box in Lara’s room – the spare room – stalled halfway to the charity shop. To doubt him was to doubt herself – how terrifying that was! With a little effort of will, she regained her surety of touch and motion. She would think of other men – it was a particular pleasure of hers to summon Omar Sharif into the bedroom – and feel the scales shift once more. Roses, for no reason other than it being a Thursday, other than her being his Hen. The first draft of his paper, for her eyes only, and the dedication at the beginning, from the Song of Songs. The beams of our house are cedars; our rafters firs. There, so. She saw how the power went back and forth between them. Having learned this, she had to forget it, in order that they might continue. Her husband, at the end, admitted no infidelity into the house of their marriage. He died – in his sleep! And he slept so little, down the years. For death to find him there, and with precision stop the breath in his throat and close up his eyes – there was skill in that. There was some comfort. He would work early in the morning and she would roll into his half. Here the sheets around her were cool, and the change of location would alter the substance of her dreams. She would lie spread-eagled, one foot keeping her own corner’s counsel, and a nightmare in which she was failing someone would ebb sweetly into some new narrative, a gathering, or a celebration. She slept well when he was not there, and loved him all the more for it.

Hendrickje turned on the tap. Its noise was startling, more so than the telephone. These were the things of which man was once afraid; fire and flood. She had never been scared of the dark, not of anything really. Mice, perhaps, or snakes. Both unlikely visitors here. She scrubbed the teacup, rinsed it, laid it on the sink. There was the dishwasher, sometimes she forgot. The stone sink from her childhood she remembered now, and the smell of gritty soap powder as her mother washed clothes. How the shirts billowed out and then with a great shhhlup you pushed them under. Her mother’s hands were red and coarse, and beautiful to her fourth daughter. She was dead – sometimes Hendrickje forgot. Oh my God, someone said. This was not some pious relative, speaking through her. This was Hendrickje. The sound of her own voice was the most startling of all. It was low for a woman’s, and it betrayed age. Something had happened to Danae, with her fine forehead and her excellent grammar. It was the word of the town, Kijk naar haar rimpels! Lotje was rushing up Prinsengracht, carrying eggs and bread and trying not to trip. Hendrickje could hear her calling, though the face was not clear. This was certainly not her sister’s body, straddling a chair, dressed only in strips of leather and backlit red. They had walked past the red lights, together, just once. She told him not to be such a prude, and took his hand and was proud how they beckoned, these poor, extraordinary women. Her English man, with his hand in hers. Their bodies were hers, after all, and what he felt was desire – abashed, conflicted. This was as it should be. She begged him to try the hashish, but he would only take a little of the biscuit, and insisted that it was juvenile, that he felt nothing. She pointed out to him how the air admitted the depth of her foot, how it fizzed minutely around each toe. He told her she was imagining it, and she was glad to believe him, and in him. It felt good to be told she was wrong.

She sat down. Her legs had taken her to the living room, there was an easy chair next to the phone. If only it would ring again! She would be late, and had perhaps learned how to be scared, late in the day. A plane passed low overhead, her right foot was tapping. Well, so. All those bodies up there in that metal barrel. The food on trays, and the girls with their painted lips, offering you things. Her daughter had once stated a desire to serve in this way – an air steward, it was called now. She was so stubborn, her Larenka. Knitting her fingers together on her lap and making her two thumbs orbit each other, Hendrickje realised her daughter would not suffice. She had grown thick around the waist, and there was a lumpen complacent way about her. Her eyes focused just through, or above, your head; that simply would  not do. It was her father’s; it was infuriating and dear to Hendrickje in equal parts. In almost equal parts.

She was crying now. She found a handkerchief in her sleeve, and held it to her face. The concert would have started, and so – this was the decision she had made. There would be other concerts, just as there would be days and days to live in. She would ask someone to go with her next time. She would call up Joan, Dr Weston’s widow – those two used to enjoy the opera. One summer the four of them saw Figaro al fresco, and Robert Weston brought a Japanese rice wine which they drank, swallowing with it some of Mozart’s giddiness. They would go to the Far East, they would set up a magazine! They were blind drunk: you could have too much of joy, that’s why she and Simon preferred Bach. Even-tempered. No, Hendrickje would go alone to the next one, if at all. She switched the lamp on beside her and bowed her head, thumbs still circling. The hoovering. A cake for Sarah down the road, with her new baby. A boy, was it? But still, she didn’t move. The bulb had warmed up now, and the window was a black square, which showed her nothing. Traffic noise, a too-empty sky over Oxford. Soon they would be preparing for Christmas, and everything that it entailed. Shopping, and a handful of recycled traditions, cut off from their meaning. In Holland it was different, waiting for Sinterklaas to ride in on his steamboat, surrounded by the Zwarte Pieten – the first sight of the procession, the first gluhwein of winter. Lotje always kept her house stocked with kruidnoten, which Hendrickje would tip into her palms and work through until they were gone, savouring each ginger button. A clock upstairs struck the hour. She should have used the dishwasher – she saw the cup upside down on the sink, tapped her foot in irritation. Back to the kitchen, and picked it up, placed it by itself on the top rack of the dishwasher. Came back. Her thumbs, the motion of them, made a little noise. Her bones were good, for her age, she was strong. A cry, from somewhere, and the heating clicked on, its hum filled the air as though the house would take off. When will he be home, she wondered?

Now Lara was an infant, between them on a back pew of St Barnabas Church. Only a few weeks after they had moved, they discovered the church, an egg neatly ensconced in their nest of streets. The complete Bach cello suites, and a home they were settling into. A winter sky pressed down on pastel-coloured terraces, children playing on the street. There was a health centre, and a pub; its oak and grime not so different to the darkened interior of a brown café back home. Jenever would be a while coming; perhaps when this corner of Jericho caught up with its rapidly modernising front-face. Hendrickje would take little Lara to stroll up bohemian Walton Street and stare in the windows, hand in mittened hand. Delicatessens, second hand clothes. Bookshops, bookshops. This was not the western canal belt – and this was not the Westerkerk – but there was something which kept them here.

Lara’s feet didn’t touch the floor, and she leaned her head against her father’s arm, put a finger in her mouth and listened. She closed her eyes, and her feet stopped swinging. When it was over she pressed her hands together dazedly, but the roots of the music had got in. Hendrickje thought the cellist handsome, thought the playing somewhat mannered, the music beyond words. She looked left – at the other aisle of listeners, and wished she was a painter. Heads off this way and that like boats and their wake seen from an aeroplane. Varying looks of contemplation. The dances were dances, and then were something more. She looked across at Simon, who frowned a little. His hair needed cutting, his mouth was open, slightly. Light showered down from the clerestory, on the audience, and on the musician. Imitation Roman, built for the workers of the nearby Press. She thought it ugly, and liked it. After the ebullient third suite, Hendrickje noticed something. An old woman, a row in front but to the left, sitting alone. Each time applause filled the church, the woman’s head jerked upwards, like a time-lapse flower visibly growing towards the light. Once the cellist had settled into the opening bars of the next dance, down it would go, as though she were praying. The silences of the fifth’s sarabande revealed the quietest of snores. Hendrickje tried, and failed, to erase the memory of the hair, so thin it exposed the scalp beneath.

They got home, and ate chips off newspaper. They got home, and squabbled over the TV, and read Lara a story. It was possible she would never remember which. It didn’t seem to matter, terribly.

The phone rang. Yes? It was a girl’s voice on the other end; how are you today? she asked, as though they were previously acquainted. This was acceptable, apparently. Everyone was your friend, now. Hendrickje didn’t catch the next rush of words, couched in the awkward phrasing of the script-reader. Not enunciating clearly; falling far short of Lara’s beautiful RP. She had resisted throughout her teens, dropping t’s and g’s and speaking lower than was natural, almost in a whisper, to her friends. Mates, they were called. But she found the accent again in adulthood, she grew into it. Sometimes, Hendrickje thought she sounded like a little old lady already, saying such and such was awfully something or other. She had been angry, ferociously so. She stood in opposition to this and that. Her skin was sensitive, and she couldn’t stand dogs. It was terrible. There was nothing else you could say, or think. And still this girl was banging on, in some call centre in Newcastle or Delhi or wherever they put them these days.  Something about a computer, a network problem in her area. No, I – my daughter deals with all that for me, thank you. Only after she hung up did she realise the mistake. Perhaps she had gotten old, after all. The muse of Rembrandt, the toast of the Jordaan. Hendrickje’s hand was still on the receiver, and she heard then the noises of the city about her, of other people, trying to live. She would buy flowers for the kitchen, and avoid excess sentimentality. She would make a cake, and grieve for her daughter. Tomorrow she would go to the vegetable market.

___________

Jenny Holden is a writer based in Oxford, where she is working on her first novel. She has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick. She was runner-up in the 2009 Harper’s Bazaar/Orange Short Story Competition, and longlisted in the 2010 Short Fiction New Writers Competition and the 2011 Cinnamon Press Short Story Award. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in nthposition, Horizon Review, Brand Literary Magazine, Fuselit, Fractured West, Junctures Journal, likestarlings and (Short) Fiction Collective. 

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