As an eyewitness to the birth of Review magazine in 1968, I was given the difficult if not impossible task of co-editing issues 100 and 101. The mission of Review 100 is to highlight thirty years of critical writings in the magazine from its inception through 2000—Review 101 will do the same for the years 2001-2020. We hope that this collection of essays and occasional pieces will serve readers, academics, and students by revisiting significant and unique contributions to the journal over a period of nearly fifty years. Our selection traces the journal’s trajectory over a dynamic era as it expanded its attentions to women writers and poets who had been unjustly sidelined throughout history in Latin America as elsewhere; the journal would broaden its focus to include literary and cultural production including music, the visual arts, and the Latino/a diaspora in North America. Indeed, since 1985, Review has transformed its identity to address not only Latin America but cultural exchange among the Americas. Hence its design changed that year, under the editorship of Alfred Mac Adam, to provide an appropriate format for the visual arts: the journal was thus renamed “Review: Latin American Literature and Arts.”
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The modest aim of Review magazine, founded in 1968, was to chronicle the reviews of Latin American writing in English-language journals. In the earliest two issues, Review 68 and Review 69, as the journal’s first editors, Ronald Christ and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, explained, the intention was to reprint “significant American reviews of Latin American literature in translation along with some notices of books about that literature.” The year 1968, however, was also a year of revolution on university campuses and in the capital cities of the western world. The Cuban revolution had occurred almost ten years earlier and in the Cold War context of that era, the United States and Fidel Castro were at loggerheads as to which power was to have a greater impact on the many countries of the Caribbean, Central and South America. With the Cuban revolution, the world in the highly politicized environment of the 1960s was finally turning its eyes toward Spanish America. In 1968 David Rockefeller gifted a Park Avenue mansion, which had previously housed the Russian embassy, to welcome the Center for Inter-American Relations which, that same year, founded Review. The founding of Review was a timely response to the synchronicity of the Cuban revolution’s literacy campaign and what was to be called the Boom.
Some of the greatest twentieth-century Latin American poets and writers, like Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, had been around since the 1920s. However, they weren’t really recognized as world figures until decades later, after Borges received Spain’s Formentor International Prize along with Samuel Beckett in 1961, with Neruda receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. So, one could say the Boom began as early as 1961 or ‘62, around the same time Carlos Fuentes published his groundbreaking Death of Artemio Cruz. Acknowledging the presence of Borges and Neruda in the international consciousness by 1970, the Review editors saw the necessity to transform the magazine into a full-fledged literary and cultural organ in the English language to keep pace with developments in Latin America. It became obvious that a more nuanced and less overtly politicized view of that culture would be necessary to give complete attention to the great literary works being produced. In this regard, the choice of the Center’s Literature Director, José Guillermo Castillo, to bring the Uruguayan literary critic and scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal aboard, was a brilliant move.
Rodriguez Monegal had just been hired at Yale University as a distinguished professor and chair of the Spanish and Portuguese Department after resigning from his post as editor (from 1965 to 1968) of Mundo Nuevo, the first Paris-based journal devoted to Latin America. This magazine was the first, outside of the Hispanic world, to place Latin American writers in an international forum where they could share their ideas along with writers and scholars from Europe and North America. Hence, for example, Oscar Lewis and Susan Sontag could be read alongside Augusto Roa Bastos and José Lezama Lima. Poet Octavio Paz, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1990, noted that a dialogue among critical minds within and between nations was necessary to the survival and advancement of culture. Latin America, whose countries had been traditionally isolated from one another, was now a participant in a global conversation. The rich literary context of poets such as Neruda at the height of his surrealist period and neobaroque novelists like Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier helped to foment the “Boom” of innovative work by the likes of Colombia’s magical realist Gabriel García Márquez, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Cuba’s Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the Argentine Manuel Puig. This dialogue of literary inventions would be given prominence in Review, dedicated to translations in English of Latin American writers, and featuring a range of commentary by critics such as Roger Caillois on Borges, or translator Edith Grossman on Nicanor Parra.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated magnificently by Greg Rabassa, played an important role for Review regarding the Boom and a new consciousness about translation, as Harper & Row was about to publish the first edition in 1969. Editors Christ and Rodríguez Monegal wrote in their foreword to issues 4-5 of Review (1972), “in Review 70 we expanded the format to include a special section on García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude, a section that included translations of interviews and longer essays in several languages.” Following that, Review 71/72, nos. 4-5 (covering Fall 71 and Winter 72) was the real inaugural issue of the magazine and not merely a “re-view.” In Review 71/72 the editors expanded the format further to include essays and reviews written expressly for the journal. The journal, published as a quarterly, would not only review but actually preview new writers and works. The journal would provide readers in English with background and insights to help promote the innovative new fiction and poetry. The new fiction of the Boom writers in fact was a radical response to regionalism, had a densely allusive texture and postmodern complexity that could be characterized as meta-literary, and would reflect Latin American realities with greater sophistication than generations before them. The results were monumental books like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Hopscotch or Conversation in the Cathedral or Three Trapped Tigers, the latter being the first book I translated, or in this case, “closelaborated” with the author. Review covered these and other masterworks, often as special focus issues during the subsequent period.
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Not yet 21, I had started graduate school in Latin American studies in 1967 at Columbia University in New York, my native city, where one of my teachers was Gregory Rabassa, who upon my inquiry about translation, sent me, a 20-year-old neophyte, down Park Avenue to the Center for Inter-American Relations. The Center would play a significant role in my early years as a translator; I was renting a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, whose only window faced a grimy air shaft; New York was a dirty, funky city in those years but, like all great cities, was enormously vital in the arts and culture. As a graduate student in the field of Latin American literature I was adopted as a research assistant by the charismatic director of the Center, the aforementioned José Guillermo Castillo, a Venezuelan artist. A natural diplomat, Castillo assembled a vibrant network of the best writers, translators, poets, critics, editors, publishers, and scholars, all of whom would help make the Center a real center and the magazine a vital publication.
My initial publication with the Center was a bibliography of Latin American fiction in translation (1969) and my earliest translations would be supported by the Center’s literature program that was enabling prominent presses like Knopf, New Directions, Harper & Row, and E.P. Dutton to afford to publish new works, in translation, by unknown writers from South America. Aside from doing translations for Review, I also published in 1972 my first article on the creative process of translation titled “Notes on Translation,” in Review 71/72. This was a first stab at what would become twenty years later my book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.Footnote 1
Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig both of whose earliest books in English were my first book-length translations, were the authors I discussed in this early essay. I also consider these writers, featured in Review 71/72 alongside poets Neruda and Parra, as mentors, having worked closely with them on their books. Puig and Cabrera Infante were creators of the meta-literary language novel, and Review articles in that issue explored Parra’s anti-poetry alongside essays such as Julio Ortega’s “An Open Novel,” which dealt with a literature conscious of its literariness, a literature that not only confronted reality but questioned the limitations of language and the very concept of authorship. Cinema and popular culture played a new important role in books like Three Trapped Tigers and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth whose authors, each in his own way, created a rich literary language out of the everyday speech, respectively, of Cuba (or rather, Havana) and Argentina.
The original Review group of editors and consultants, aside from Emir, were the abovementioned Ronald Christ, an English professor at Rutgers who would publish a book on Borges and the art of allusion; John Alexander Coleman, a splendid critic of Spanish and Latin American Literature who was teaching at NYU; and of course the award-winning translator Gregory Rabassa. Since its beginnings as an English-language journal focused on literature in Spanish, translation was a key concern of the journal. A glance at the contents in this issue will show that not only are some of the most outstanding scholars from the Americas and Europe represented—from Amado Alonso to Peruvian critic Julio Ortega to theorist Hélène Cixous—but also critical writings by the major poets and novelists, such as Cabrera Infante, Cortázar, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa, the most recent Nobel from Latin America. Again, Review’s stress on the international reception of Latin American literature made it imperative to keep up also with the latest perspectives of critics at large and at universities. Among these contributors were, again, John A. Coleman, who from Review’s beginnings was a supportive and helpful consultant until his unfortunate death in 2003, and the aforementioned Alfred Mac Adam, art critic and professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature at Barnard who would edit Review for twenty years, from 1984 to 2004, and who serves as Editorial Consultant on Review 100 and 101.
We have anthologized around 25 articles in each issue but have also provided links to an equal number of texts in order to give the reader as broad a view as possible. The linked texts, not chosen for the main body of the issues usually because they were long, provide a broader view and work well as supplementary material to those included. As for the subject matter covered, it is inspiring to note that most of the topics covered are still resonant, and by writers who, like Hollywood’s stars of the Golden Age, are exceptional. These entries range from engaging pieces by famous writers such as Cortázar on Edgar Allan Poe—the legendary writer whom Cortázar translated into Spanish—or Vargas Llosa on Lezama Lima, to rigorous studies by a poetry scholar such as Venezuelan Guillermo Sucre, a brilliant professor whose text on poetry and the language of the body, for example, is as vibrant today as it was when he wrote it decades ago.
Our selection represents principal literary trends and original perspectives of the critics and scholars in the journal. In conversations I had with Emir Rodríguez Monegal in the 1970s, I recall him saying that “anybody can edit a magazine” and there are thousands of them to prove his point, but that it takes an expert editor to select and organize materials within the context of an overarching vision. Hence I have included a coherent yet varied selection of insightful essays by the most noteworthy contributors during those years—significant not only in their time but to the present day—to showcase the figures who helped define the era and its concerns.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Suzanne Jill Levine
Suzanne Jill Levine has translated major Latin American writers and poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Cecilia Vicuña. Her books include Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (2000) and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991). She has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, and has won several PEN awards. Her latest translation is Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020).
Notes
1 Graywolf Press, 1991.