Horacio Castellanos Moya Fun

I will now present to you many links regarding Horacio Castellanos Moya, whom you will all remember as the Salvadoran author of the recently translated Bernhardian novel Senselessness.

First, there is this profile of him that I wrote for Boldtype magazine. Here I will quote myself:

After fleeing El Salvador, Moya eventually ended up in Guatemala in 2003, and his stay there inspired his only novel that is currently available in English, Senselessness. This passionate, sexual, paranoid rant is the story of a writer gradually driven insane as he edits a 1,100-page report documenting atrocities committed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. As with most of Moya’s work, Senselessness is short overall, while its sentences are long and sinuous. It is a book that gapes in horror at the brutalities people inflict upon one another, but, at the same time, it also indicts the audience for craving art about the darkest incidents of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Second, I will remind you that The Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Moya himself. We also reviewed Senselessness. Please read both of those right now.

Third, the current issue of The Bloomsbury Review features my interview with Katherine Silver, translator of Senselessness. (As far as I know, the interview is unavailable online, but the magazine itself is widely available). One more time I will quote myself:

TBR: In Senselessness, Moya is a big
comma-user. To a large degree these commas
regulate the pace of the sentences, and
the sentences are always changing speed. If
you compare Moya with someone like
Proust or Henry James, these writers have
long, elaborate sentences too, but their sentences
always seem to move at the same
speed, whereas with Moya we’re up and
down depending on the narrator’s erratic
consciousness. What was it like trying to
reproduce this effect in English?

KS: Again, this is part of what made
the translation interesting, challenging.
One thing we did—and this was the
editor Barbara Epler’s suggestion—we
got rid of the serial commas. I liked the
effect of that because it made the adjective/
noun combinations more fluid, as if
they were all one unit, and it let the
comma be more of a pause in these long
sentences. If we had cluttered up the
book with things like serial commas, I
think we would have lost the impact of
the punctuation.

TBR: Do you feel like you were successful
in keeping Moya’s rhythms?

KS: I hope so; this was the biggest
challenge of working on Senselessness.
Whenever I hear Horacio read the book
out loud, I’m pleased. I can see him getting
into a rhythm with the English;
even though he’s not pronouncing the
words quite right, he gets into his own
rhythm and he seems to have an intuitive
sense of the text. It’s a beautiful
kind of layering: There’s his text on the
bottom, and then my translation, and
then him again reading it—interpreting
it, really—and drawing on both.

Fourth, those living in the San Francisco Bay Area have the opportunity to see Silver discuss Senselessness, translation, etc as part of the Center for the Art of Translation’s Lit&Lunch series. The date is October 7, the time 12:30 – 1:30, the place 111 Minna Gallery:

Join us for the first reading of our 2008-2009 season. Katherine Silver reads and discusses her NEA award-winning translation of Senselessness, Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel in which a boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army’s massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors.

The event is free, although I believe you will be smiled upon favorably if you make a donation.

More from Conversational Reading:

1. John Biguenet, Rising Water; Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness We are not lacking for literary responses to Hurricane Katrina; the one that has engaged me the most so far is playwright and novelist...
2. How Effective Writers Use Colons and Commas Sameer Rahim has some interesting thoughts on colons: I was taught that a colon indicates that what follows it contains information that fulfils or explains...
3. The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 13, Fall 2008 As we enter our fourth year . . . Here’s your TOC. Latin America’s Kafka: What a Sly Argentine Has in Common with a Tubercular...
4. Tweilve-Tone Fun Oh good God is this hilarious. An imaginary infomercial for Twelve-Tone’s greatest hits. ...
5. In Translation The Guardian asks 10 experts to recommend 10 writers not writing in English that we should be reading. Of the 10, 2 ring a bell:...

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