It’s a peculiar path a writer must forge to find his vocation, his destiny. Not only peculiar, but singular. When I try to imagine it, when I try to understand how I came to write the books I wrote, the books that brought me here before you now, before your generosity, as readers and pupils of literature, I feel a touch embarrassed. How can I continue in this effort that was so clearly foolish for me to take up in the particular environment that molded me, with the family that raised me, in the country I grew up in, where I started down this path in the first place?
I wasn’t a precocious writer or reader. I come from a family for whom literature was a forbidden topic, a family that hoped I’d start down the typical path of a young man in my circumstances, that is, they hoped I’d become a serious, respectable professional. And becoming a writer was not considered to be something serious, respectable, but rather the opposite: a pretext for vice, laziness, and poverty. That’s why, when in my late teenage years, I started to read and became possessed by the demon of writing, my family was horrified, and they encouraged me to avoid this path altogether. They wouldn’t have cared if I’d become a lawyer and a writer, a doctor and a writer, an engineer and a writer, a formula that guarantees respectability. But it was too late for me: I was already well down the path, and a civil war loomed over our horizon, which would soon enough blow up everyone’s current reality.
It was another few years before I understood the reasons for my family’s horror at my wanting to be a writer, and why literature and writing were always forbidden topics. An uncle of mine, my mom’s first cousin, whose name was David Moya Posas, and who I never met, had been a poet and had died of an overdose of alcohol and sedatives. We didn’t talk about him at home. And the stories about his tragic life, and his even more tragic death, I heard only from the mouth of the great Honduran poet, Roberto Sosa, who was his contemporary, and who told me all of this over beers in Tegucigalpa in 1981.
I also found out that my maternal grandmother, Emma, had been a poet. She never published a book, but her verses were included in an anthology, thanks to which I learned of her literary wanderings when my own work was just starting to get published. But the demon of writing soon left her and she dedicated herself, as the cautious and foresighted person she was, to tending to and acquiring more property, which is exactly how I remember her. But in her last years of life she often talked, with a touch of contempt and even hatred, about Clementina Suárez, her childhood friend (they were both from the Honduran state of Olancho), and who would become the most important contemporary female poet of Honduras. Now I wonder if my grandmother’s roasting was a sign of envy.
On my dad’s side, another uncle, Jacinto, my dad’s older brother, also published some verse in his youth, but his real passion was politics. He lived for it, and, like many lost literary causes in Central America, bounced from jail to exile because of it.
So it isn’t all that strange then, my family’s horror with my decision to pursue literature. Becoming a writer, for them, was senseless and could only lead to failure, a lack of status, and poverty. My uncle David had been victim of that failure; my grandmother and my other uncle had avoided it and driven literature out of their lives. But what could failure mean to a young man who was deeply repulsed by the values of his family’s world, of the social class he was raised in, of the country he lived in? What could failure mean in a society that was so broken it would soon implode into civil war?
One of my favorite book titles by the Peruvian author Julio Ramón Ribeyro is The Temptation of Failure. When I ask myself how I was able to break through that first line of defense, that ironclad line of defense that my family erected around me so that I wouldn’t follow my vocation and destiny, I think that a lot of it had to do with the temptation to fail, which can also be understood as the desire to break away, the desire for risk, for forging one’s own path; giving into the temptation to fail is a gesture of unconformity, of rebellion.
It was in the mid 70’s that I started to compulsively—as if I were possessed—write poetry, having read little, having never met another writer, and without a clue as to what it was to live a literary life in El Salvador. I studied at a school under the tutelage of a Marist Brothers Congregation, most of whom were Spanish; I treated them very badly in one of my novels, and I’ve also often said that it was the fault of Brother León—my high-school literature professor—that I suffered a years-long visceral rejection of classical Spanish literature. But, admittedly, it was in that very library that I discovered the first books that proved to me that the written word was my thing: Bob Dylan’s lyrics, published by Visor Books; a selection of Walt Whitman’s poems (how many times must I’ve read Song of Myself at that age of self-discovery); Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; and an anthology of Salvadoran poetry compiled by José Roberto Cea, which introduced me to two national poets who dazzled me: Roque Dalton and Alfonso Quijada Urías. It was in this library that I found those first readings that young people devour as if they were the words of a missionary converting them to a new religion.
I remember my overwhelming eagerness as I finished writing my first collection of poems and set out to find a publisher. I had no idea what awaited me. There were no private or independent publishing houses in El Salvador. There was only the Ministry of Education’s Publications Directorate, which was overseen by the military, and the National University’s publishing house, which, at that point, was overseen by the army. I saw no path forward. I’d broken through my family’s line of defense, only to slam into a second line of defense, which was the Salvadoran literary world, or, to lean on the title of this text, our national literary inheritance, which I was forced to spend.
The first thing I had to do was to establish a contact, get to know someone who had the same calling. But none of my former classmates, nor my neighborhood friends, had any interest whatsoever in literature, and even less so in writing. And I couldn’t enroll in the university to study literature for another year, precisely because it was temporarily closed down and occupied by the military. Dreamer that I was, I bound my poems and sent them to the Publications Directorate, with the certainty and enthusiasm of someone who thinks their talent is a fact no one could fail to recognize and whose book would soon be published, without the slightest inkling that by sending my book of poems it was as though, like a castaway on a deserted island, I was throwing a message in a bottle into sea.
Fate took pity on me. Some weeks later, I received a letter from the editor of the Publications Directorate, thanking me for the book I’d sent, letting me know that they couldn’t publish it at the moment, and inviting me to visit his office. The editor’s name sounded like one of those soporific literary Sunday pages published in Fascist newspapers of that time. I imagined him as one of those old-school literary types, with dandruff on his lapel and that particular smell of small enclosed spaces and moth repellent, but, well, I told myself, maybe I could convince him to publish my book.
To my surprise, Miguel Huezo Mixco was, back in 1977, only 22 years old—only three years older than me—but with much more reading under his belt. He was in his second year of his bachelor’s degree, studying literature at the Jesuit University, and he was already married, while I was still living with my mother. We had instant chemistry. Puppy love, as they call it. We soon founded a small literary journal.
We spent entire evenings and nights discussing books, Salvadoran literature, and what it meant to be a writer in that bleak era in El Salvador. But I won’t bore you with the tale of a friendship. What I really want to say is that I joined the Salvadoran literary tradition not under the wing of one of those quivering know-it-alls so revered in small countries, but alongside friends who shared my same passion for discovery, debate, and controversy. I submerged myself in that literary world with a sense of adventure.
Because a literary tradition does indeed exist in El Salvador, though it's practically unheard of outside its borders, I’ll mention some of the authors who taught me a thing or two, whose books I remember fondly: Arturo Ambrogi, a spectacular chronicler, who Darío called an enfant terrible, whose texts have such irony, finesse, and even sarcasm, that they cut like razor blades; Antonio Rivas Bonilla with his picaresque narratives, especially the untranslated novel Andanzas y malandanzas, whose protagonist is Nerón, a starved and ingenious farm dog—such a Cervantine character; Salvador Salazar Arrué (known as Salarrué), is the most emblematic national storyteller, who immersed himself like no other in the soul and speech of Salvadoran children and campesinos of the first half of the 20th century, and who Juan Rulfo spoke of with admiration; Miguel Ángel Espino, whose novel Men Against Death, I discussed in my first published essay some 41 years ago. And of course, the great poets, because at that time I considered myself a poet: Claudia Lars, Alberto Guerra Trigueros, Roque Dalton…
So why then did this sense of orphanhood strike me when there was in fact a national literary tradition holding me up? The truth is that this tradition, this geographical inheritance, soon seemed too small, asphyxiating. They were authors who picked up on certain elements of our national identity and turned them into literature, yes, but almost none of them offered me the contemporaneity and the universality that my ambitious spirit of a nascent writer needed at that time. I’d crossed the first line of defense, erected by my family, but now I had to break through the second line of defense, our national tradition.
It seems to me that for a writer who comes from a poor and small country, which exists more for its tragedies than for its virtues, the national literary tradition is just a starting point, a minimal and limited compass that can help a writer take their first steps, but that is no longer useful once the writer starts walking with some sense of balance, once they cross their geographical and political borders, their mental borders, and understand that they belong to a literary language—the Spanish language—which has been made a very rich language by the many tributaries that flow through it.
I also think that throughout life, a writer chooses their tradition, a writer looks for those they identify with. And, in that sense, a writer doesn’t have to be bound by geography, history, or language to a tradition imposed on them with the authority a parent has over a child. I think literature is akin to searching and rebellion, the rebellion of an orphan who knows he has a family, but doesn’t recognize their power over him; who knows where his family is, but doesn’t want to spend all his time with them. He sometimes visits them, but then he gets bored, he gets drowsy, because the family strips that sense of freedom from his creative spirit.
Latin American writers have been trying to break through the limits of their own language since at least the 19th century. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that, in 1882, when the young Ruben Darío had to leave Nicaragua for the first time—for having gotten involved with the wrong woman—and arrived in El Salvador with letters of recommendation to show to the powerful in this country, instead of continuing to write poems in the Spanish tradition—which I imagine felt too restrictive for him, like a pair of shoes one can’t squeeze into—he began studying Alexandrine French, the metric employed by the great Hugo, as he called him, alongside the Salvadoran poet Francisco Gavidia. In 1882, Gavidia was 19 years old and Darío was 16. They became fast friends. Their friendship was described in Darío’s autobiography, originally published in 1981 in Barcelona under the Voltarian title, The Life of Ruben Darío, Written by Himself: “One of my friends was Francisco Gavidia, who very well might be one of the finest humanists, and certainly one of the first poets of Spanish America. It was at Gavidia’s side, during my first time on that Salvadoran land, that I walked into the harmonious forest of Victor Hugo, and the readings of the great French alexandrines. Gavidia was surely the first to use the French alexandrine style in Spanish, and he gave me the idea to renew our traditional metric, which I would later come to work on.”
In History of My Books, when he refers to those who inspired his book Blue, originally published in Chile in 1888, Darío circles back to the same topic: “It wasn’t from Chile that I set off on my first journey to the French world of art. Years ago, in Central America, in the city of San Salvador, in the company of the great poet Francisco Gavidia, my adolescent spirit explored the immense jungle of Víctor Hugo and contemplated its divine ocean where everything is held.”
Gavidia is considered the founding father of Salvadoran literature, the great national modernist. Author of a voluminous oeuvre of verse and prose, he’s practically unheard of outside of El Salvador. Did you notice that I didn’t mention him when I spoke of the Salvadoran writers that I so enthusiastically read in my youth? That Gavidia was the founding father of Salvadoran literature can, at least in part, explain my sense of orphanhood: I could never get through his books. I think Gavidia’s work aged more quickly than its author. Darío left him behind on the road. Darío understood poetry as an adventure, and he took from the communal inheritance—which is global literature—whatever served his work, without feeling bound to anything in particular, making the world his own along the way. In contrast, Gavidia opted for a comfortable provincial fame. Of course it’s true that Darío descended from El Quijote, as Sergio Ramírez pointed out in his recent speech when he accepted the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in literature. But that wasn’t the end of Darío’s journey.
And what can I say of Miguel Ángel Asturias, the most universal of the Central American story tellers, who was nursed by the Parisian surrealists before submerging himself in the world of indigenous Guatemala? And what can we say about Borges who, among other things, took from the best of English prose and satire and brought it to our language?
The writer should get to know and confront his or her own language and world with great audacity, with great expertise, in order to be able to mine the best of other languages and other worlds. Darío, Asturias, and Borges had the talent to do this and enriched the Spanish language with new inflections, rhythms, sonorities, gestures. This is something radically different from the oppositional mentality that is now championed, as when many Spanish-language writers want to be more American than the Americans.
I wouldn’t dare compare myself to those geniuses who mixed the mud of other lands with our mud and so created perfect pieces: the great re-inventers of our language. I’ve only learned from them. As part of my inheritance, I’ve assumed their curiosity and love of the other, of literature in other languages, and cultures whose perspectives and understanding of the human condition are radically different from my own, and which I have incorporated in my own work, without much method, simply by osmosis. Some of my predecessors have pointed out how I’ve waded through the German literature that came out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the so-called minor literature (letters, diaries, memoires), ripened fruit of the French salons of the 17th, 18th and even 19th centuries. One phrase I’ve pinned to the wall of my studio I took from one of the letters that Madame Du Deffand, an old woman, blind and in love, sent to Horace Walpole: “Everything around me seems to be my enemy.”
I’ve dared to give myself the freedom to think, to imagine, which of the contemporary Spanish-language writers’ inheritance I most want to draw from. I did this while writing these pages, lying in bed at the hotel trying to hit upon a feeling that could guide me. This is what came to me: the inheritance I most want to draw from is Juan Carlos Onetti’s; he’s the writer I feel closest to. I would’ve liked to write like him, to have his take on life, his finesse and silences. Paradoxically I don’t have anything in common with him, not in temperament nor in prose, not in the literary world nor with his take on life. This is how complicated and contradictory people are, writers are. In an interview Onetti once said that people shouldn’t read his books, and instead read William Faulkner, that he’d only dedicated himself to copying that great southern writer; and on another occasion he once said that he didn’t want to give interviews because he’d leant out his dentures to Mario Vargas Llosa. Maybe these two anecdotes explain my admiration for Onetti. The best inheritance is the one we get with no strings attached, the one that brings us pure joy.
I’d like to wrap up these disorderly words, written in bursts, by circling back to the theme of literary orphanhood, of the orphanhood I felt when I discovered that, on the one hand, there was no way I could bear reading the founding father of Salvadoran literature, Francisco Gavidia, and, on the other hand, almost none of the national authors I most enjoyed were able to connect me to the world I was currently living in, nor satiated my young-writer’s thirst for contemporaneity and universality, with the exception of Roque Dalton.
Dalton had everything I loved: he loved provocation, humor, carelessness, sarcasm, irreverence, courage. I was only suspicious of one of his traits: his faith, and, what’s worse, a Jesuit faith, though he could also always laugh at it.
Besides, Dalton had a fresh way of writing poetry, stripped of ornament; with a respect for consequences, for the responsibility of the written word. And he was an innovator, always searching for new forms; using varied literary techniques that molded to the subject at hand.
As if that weren’t enough, he wrote from around the world, from places that history passed through shaking its hips: La Habana, Prague, Mexico, Paris. He was part of the hottest debates about what it meant to write in Latin America. He was a well-recognized poet and intellectual, but far beyond the Central American literary circles. He hobnobbed with those who really stood for something.
I started reading Dalton’s poems in that general anthology of Salvadoran poetry that I mentioned at the beginning of this text, the one I found in the Marist school in 1975, the same year the poet was murdered. I didn’t know and wouldn’t find out about his murder until much later. It’s strange: I don’t remember when or where I was when I found out that Dalton had been murdered by his own comrades. I don’t remember how I found out or how I reacted. I’m sure I felt a strong emotion, a commotion, but the memory is hidden from me. Maybe that’s why, a decade later, when I was writing my first novel, Diaspora, I included a character who gravely suffers the sense of orphanhood that Dalton’s murder symbolized, generally, for Salvadoran literature, and personally for me. He was a writer who, had it not been for his murder, I could have met, but never did. His death meant both orphanhood and inheritance. Orphanhood, in the strict sense of the word, for how terrible it was for his family and for those of us who could have lived in his shadows, under his provocations, but who were only able to know him through his books; orphanhood, in the literary sense, because he could have connected us, the youth of that time, with the intellectual and literary world of our time, because his death left us stranded in a bloody well where there was no light but the light of the fiery war blazing over us. But his death also left us an inheritance: if there was no one to lead the way, we had to forge a way for ourselves; because there was no one to open the doors, we had to open them ourselves.
On the personal level, I took away another lesson: to never believe in or risk anything for ideologies that promise a more beautiful world in exchange for the blood of others. In his poem “Taverns” Dalton said: “To have faith is the best audacity and audacity is beautiful.” And on the other extreme, in the first pages of Onetti’s brilliant novel, Let the Wind Speak, the character Deputy Medina says: “A man of faith is more dangerous than a hungry beast.”
Somewhere between these two phrases, between these two extremes, I follow my path.
*Translated by Daniela Ugaz.
Horacio Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran novelist and journalist who in 2014 received Chile's Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award.
