Celebrating World Book and Copyright Day
By Atención staff April 18, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Since 1995, World Book and Copyright Day is held annually on April 23—an important date in world literature. Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died on April 23, 1616. Vladimir Nabokov, Octavio Paz, Maurice Druon, Haldor K. Laxness, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo also died or were born on or close to April 23.

The date was a natural choice for UNESCO to celebrate books, authors and the pleasures of reading. 

Semana Literaria II: Cervantes y Shakespeare

Ongoing events

Apr 19–26
Octavio Paz Expo-Poems 
Terrazas, Casa de la Cultura
Calle Chorro


April 19–26
Octavio Paz Bibliographic Exposition
Educal Bookstore
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75


Sat, April 19
Noon - Inauguration
“Palabras en la punta de la lengua”
Terrazas, Casa de la Cultura
5pm - Literary talk
“La Lengua y el Cascabel” 
Víctor Sahuatoba
Tenth anniversary of the death of Octavio Paz 
Sala nueva, Bellas Artes


Sun, April 20, noon
“Piedra de sol,” lecture on Octavio Paz 
El Club de la musa hosca, Parque Juárez kiosk


Mon, April 21, 5pm
“Entre dichos y entredichos: dime que lengua hablas, y te diré qué escribes”
Maria de la Paz Espino
Universidad de León
Insurgentes 4


Tue, April 22, 5pm
Book presentation
David Martín del Campo
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25


Wed, April 23
World Book and Copyright Day
Activities in schools and education centers
Dirección Municipal de Educación y Cultura
Noon - Book presentation: Tradiciones de San Miguel
Alejandro Luna honoring Don Félix Luna
Sala Quetzal
5pm – Lecture: from Coloquio de Perros, Miguel de Cervantes
Lecture: Poems of Juan Gelman Cervantes 
Sala Nezahualcóyotl
Casa de la Cultura
8pm - Special radio program, “Sancho Panza de Cabeza”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Radio Station XSQ, 1280 AM


Thu, April 24, 5pm
Every inch a King! Famous monologues of Shakespeare
In English and Spanish w/ Bill Pearlman and Victor Sahuatoba of PEN
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública


Fri, April 25
4pm -“Lies and the True Story: Memoir, News and Fiction”
Panel discussion
San Miguel Authors’ Sala 
Teatro Santa Ana
6pm – Lecture
Sala nueva, Bellas Artes


Sat, Apr 26, noon
“Juventud y poesía”
Andrea Ángel presents “Claridad intacta”
La musa hosca y el Espacio Para Propuestas Creativas Independientes
Sala nueva, Bellas Artes

William Shakespeare (b.1564), the greatest writer in English and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist, wrote 154 sonnets and his 38 plays are performed more often than those of any other playwright. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact,” he said. (Shakespeare actually died 10 days after Cervantes, but on April 23 by the Julian calendar then used in England. Spain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the one most people use today.)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (b. September 29, 1547) is one of the most influential people in literature; Don Quixote, published in 1605, is considered a founding classic of Western literature. In 1607, Cervantes settled in Madrid, where he lived and worked until his death. On education, Cervantes said, “Time ripens all things, no man is born wise.” His answer to those too grounded in the “real world” is, “Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (b. 1539) was an illustrious Peruvian historian and writer recognized primarily for contributions to Inca history, culture and society. To distinguish him from the Spanish author Garcilaso de la Vega, he is known as “El Inca Garcilaso.” His father was a Spanish captain and his mother descended from Inca nobility. In Spain, Garcilaso wrote his famous Comentarios Reales de los Incas, published in Lisbon in 1609 and based on stories he had been told by his Inca relatives when he was a child.

Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 2, 1977) wrote nine novels in Russian, then became even more noted in English. Lolita (1955) is his most widely known novel.

Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19,1998) is one of the greatest poets in Spanish and gave Hispanic poetry a new dimension. Poetry is “Between what I dream and what I forget.” He was even more widely read as an essayist. The Labyrinth of Solitude, his classic 1950 exploration of Mexican character, became a rite of passage for his compatriots and required reading for anybody interested in Mexico. 


The year 1616 was rough for literature, science and society. In January, astronomer Johannes Kepler was charged with practicing witchcraft. In the Leicester witch trial, nine women were hanged on the testimony of a raving 13-year old boy. The church placed De revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus on the Index of Forbidden Books. The book displaces Earth from the center of the universe and is the starting point of modern astronomy and the scientific revolution. Galileo was forbidden by the Inquisition to support the Copernican theory of heliocentrism.

On March 19, Sir Walter Raleigh was released from the Tower of London to embark on his ill-fated search for El Dorado. Pocahontas arrived in England June 12 with her husband John Rolfe; she died, probably of smallpox, the following year. Rene Descartes, 20, graduated from the University of Poitiers, where he became disillusioned with books, preferring to seek truths from “le grand livre du monde.” Ben Jonson presented “Father Christmas” at the court of King James I on December 25. Later considered a papist symbol by Puritans, it was banished from England until after Oliver Cromwell’s death. 

Lies and the true story
By Lynette Seator

Semana Literaria
Authors’ Sala
Fri, Apr 25, 4pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25

Several distinguished panelists will discuss Lies and the True Story: Memoir, News and Fiction as the Authors’ Sala part of Semana Literaria (Literary Week).

The issue of where the truth lies has surfaced in a number of recent scandalous or suspect publishing events. One imaginative author made memoir a hot topic. When David Frey gave up trying to sell A Million Little Pieces as a novel and promoted it as a memoir, bingo, he found a publisher. After it hit the bestseller list, his story was found to be riddled with lies and gross exaggerations, and he came under fierce attack. When Oprah called him on the carpet after she had innocently promoted his “inspiring” story, she, as one journalist termed it, “skinned, gutted, and filleted him, basted him with vitriol, and baked him in a 10,000º oven for one hour.” Recently, a publisher had to pulp the entire print run of a purported memoir that was discovered to be entirely fictitious.

Memoir claims to be a telling of events from one’s own history, but history itself, once considered infallible or at least beholden to facts, has recently gotten a bad rap from many sources. “Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance,” William Godwin begged in Of History and Romance in 1797. He goes on to say: “Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts.” Thus is a case made for fiction as the most reliable version of the past. In search of the truth? Read a novel, and find out what life was really like way back then, or in Afghanistan today. The Spanish essayist and novelist, Miguel de Unamuno, speaks of the novel as intra-historia, what you might call “the inside story”: an intimate account of lives that don’t make it into the history books or the headlines, yet shed a broader light on the subject at hand.

Readers of newspapers in Mexico and all over the world have learned to take their news with a large dose of skepticism. The point of view of the reporter impacts on how the story is told, how much of the story is told and what we are to deduce from that story. These are some of the same reasons history is suspect.

Actually history, traditionally viewed as a researched run-down on the doings of powerful men and their battles, began to change in the past century, and the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies played a key role in making that change. Where were the women in all those volumes of recorded history through the centuries, and what were they doing? In fact, it was the re-visioning of history from the more personal standpoint of those formerly considered inconsequential that brought memoir to the fore as a popular genre.

To what extent can we call the memoirist to account for embellishing his or her own story? And what about the biographer? Or the journalist? Shall we stop buying newspapers and throw away the history books in favor of the novel? Please come to hear what the panelists have to say and jump in yourself to what promises to be a lively discussion.

Panelists

Artist and photographer Lulu Torbet ran a graphic design studio in Manhattan before being lured into the writing trade by an editor who picked her up on the street (as she was selling her wares), desperate for a book on macramé. She moved from writing craft books under her own name to ghostwriting, mainly for psychologists, and then to ghostwriting memoirs (most recently the memoirs of the last direct descendant of Hernán Cortés), where she ran into some of the issues this panel will discuss. More information and a complete book list can be found at www.lauratorbet.com).

Jesús Ibarra, Atención San Miguel’s reporter for two and a half years, is also a biographer of Mexican cinema stars. From 2003 to 2005, he researched and wrote Los Bracho: tres generaciones de cine mexicano, published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a multi-biography of five members of the Bracho family, involved in Mexican cinema since the thirties. He is currently writing the biography of Cuban-born actress Carmen Montejo, who made her career during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.

Moderator Lynette Seator is a Professor Emerita of Spanish literature, scholar and a poet. Two books of her poetry, After the Light and Behind the Wall Poems will, she hopes, soon be followed by Flowers and Dust. In 1992, Seator organized a symposium in Moscow and edited Changing Lives of Russian Women: Conversations and Contentions (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, 1998). In 1992 and 1974, she received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Illinois Arts Council in 1995.

This panel discussion represents the Authors’ Sala contribution to Semana Literaria, a series of events organized by Víctor Sahuatoba to commemorate the shared date of death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

More panelists to be announced in next week’s Atención.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

What others are reading

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading. —Rufus Choate

Here are some novels San Miguel residents have read.


A Gesture Life by Chang Rae Lee, The New York Times Notable Book 1999 (submitted by Aida Cousino) is elegantly restrained fiction, eloquent insight into the nature of human relationship and the sense of living as immigrant. Franklin Hata, a Korean child, was adopted by a Japanese family, served in World War II and immigrated to the US as a young adult. The story takes place as Hata “Doc” has retired after 30 years in a prosperous town in New York State. Artistically weaving past with present using flashbacks, Hata relives his painful memories as a medical officer in the Imperial Army stationed in Burma nearing the end of the war. His work consisted primarily of overseeing the health of a group of young Korean “comfort girls.” Doc’s relationships with his superiors and his patients were formal and carefully geared towards keeping the good reputation of a well-educated medical officer.

Excerpt: I know that more often than not in the past few years of my retirement, I’ve found the collective memory here to be shorter than I wished to believe, and getting shorter still. I’ve gone from being good Doc Hata to the nice old fellow to whoever that ancient Oriental is, a sentence (I heard it whispered last summer while paying for my lunch at new Church Street Diner) which carries no hard malice or prejudice but leaves me to wonder all the same. For while I’m certain this sort of sad diminishment befalls every aging gentleman and woman and even those who once held modest position in the town’s day, I am beginning to suspect, too, that in my case it’s not only the blur of time and modern life’s general expectation of senescence but rather the enduring and immutable fact of what I am, if not who.

About A Gesture Life, Michiko Kakutani said in The New York Times, “Lee created suspense out of the seemingly static story of a man trying hard not to feel, lays out these events in precise elliptical prose that echoes Hata’s own fastidious detachment.”

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, 2006 (submitted by Lynda Schor). This novel is about a man who has an accident and survives, but with a brain injury that causes him to think his sister is a person who simply looks and acts like her, but isn’t. It’s about the many ramifications of identity. 

Excerpt: The suture of the centerline drew her downward into the snowy black. It made no sense: Mark, a near-professional driver, rolling off an arrow-straight country road that was as familiar to him as breathing. Driving off the road, in central Nebraska—like falling off a wooden horse. She toyed with the date: 02/20/02. Did it mean anything. Her palms butted the wheel, and the car shook. Your brother has had an accident. In fact, he’d long ago taken every wrong turn you could take in life, and from the wrong lane. Telephone calls coming in at awful hours, as far back as she could remember. But never one like this.

The Raw Shark Texts, Cannongate, 2007 (submitted by Gerry Camp), is a brilliant first novel by Steven Hall. Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memories. From notes he has left himself, he discovers this is the eleventh time this has happened to him and that he is the victim of a “conceptual shark” that feeds on human memories. Can he escape becoming its victim again? The book is both a metaphysical and a physical thriller as Eric enlists the aid of a beautiful girl and a mad (?) scientist to keep his current memory intact.

Excerpt, the opening:

“I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing.

“I don’t know how long it lasted, but the engines and drivers that keep the human machine functioning at a mechanical level must have trip-switched, responding to the stillness with a general systems panic. Autopilot failure—switch to emergency manual override.

“This is how my life started, my second life.”

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.

A Mexican Mouthful
By Betsy Swann

From gorgeous to cute and everything in between

As native English speakers, we all know the difference between cute and beautiful, pretty and gorgeous. When speaking Spanish (and please note that we’re talking about Mexican Spanish only), it’s good to get a handle on the subtle differences between the most common adjectives of beauty: bonito, lindo, guapo, hermoso, bueno, precioso, and bello.

The closest Spanish gets to cute is lindo. If a kid does something cute, the correct response is, “¡Que lindo!,” most often executed with a yearning stress on the first syllable (“¡Que liiiiiiindo!”). If a girl is good-looking but not a knock-out, linda works there too. But most often, lindo is used to describe an inner beauty or goodness that in English is described with “sweet” or “dear.” If you really get a good feeling about a friend, they are “lindo.”

Bonito is the Mexican equivalent of pretty. It’s tender, commonly used, and indicates almost mediocre good looks. Bello is a synonym, and much less frequently used. A good rule of thumb is to use these adjectives, as well as lindo, in more reserved or formal conversations. They are polite enough to use when speaking to someone whom you’d address as “usted.”

To take it up a notch, one would use hermoso, which is basically equivalent to beautiful. Precioso is a synonym. These adjectives are warmer than bonito and bello, ever so slightly more romantic and sensual. Think of a man describing his new Porsche in that slightly sensual way that men can feel about cars, “It’s really beautiful,” he might say, indicating a satisfaction that touches him deeply. A Mexican man would say, “Está hermosísimo.” (Same goes for women and a good pair of shoes.)

Last but not least, guapo. Guapo is gorgeous, gorgeous with a lean towards sexy. It’s a more educated way of saying “hot.” The less educated way to say this is bueno; many a construction worker would describe the gorgeous gringa walking by as buena. If someone is guapo, they’ve got sex appeal. Your girlfriend is guapa. To describe anyone with whom you have a platonic relationship as guapo (mother, grandfather, etc.) is perfectly acceptable, but winks in the direction of his or her sex appeal.

¡Hasta la próxima, vayanse a practicar!

Betsy Swann is a teacher with a degree in literature and a lifelong love for the Spanish language.