Review 100 (Spring 2020), guest-edited by Suzanne Jill Levine, with additional editorial consultation by Alfred Mac Adam, compiles a selection of “Review’s Twentieth-Century Essays,” as the issue is aptly titled. The contents feature texts first published in the journal, many in translation, from the magazine’s early years—following its inception in 1968 by the Center for Inter-American Relations (later known as the Americas Society)—to the end of the millennium. Review 101 (Fall 2020), the companion to this issue, will present a selection of “Review’s Twenty-First Century Essays,” covering the period 2001 to the present.
As introduced and contextualized by Suzanne Jill Levine—first-hand witness and contributor to the new Latin American writing beginning in the late 1960s as well as to the founding of Review—the essays in this special issue reprise a host of international writers and scholars expounding on Latin American literature in the journal’s pages over thirty years. The selections thus bring together contributions by and about a number of the region’s most prominent authors as well as by esteemed literary critics and translators.Footnote 1 These offerings represent a broad array of writers and writing showcased in the journal—for example, the verbal wit and stylistic innovations of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy; reflections by Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Victoria Ocampo, and Mario Vargas Llosa on cultural icons and others such as Poe, William Styron, Isadora Duncan, and Lezama Lima; and essays by critics Hélène Cixous, John Alexander Coleman, Julio Ortega, and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, exploring now-classic works by Sarduy, García Márquez, Arenas, Puig, and Borges. Other texts, by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and, again, Cortázar, focus respectively on the Boom from a Cuban perspective, the nature of Caribbean identity, and the “fellowship of exile,” among other notable and still-relevant topics. Together these pieces suggest the rich history of Latin American literature in the United States in the twentieth century, provide a panoramic view of that literature, and underscore Review’s unique role in helping to shape it.
Review 100 also includes Features—a remembrance of Peruvian scholar Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, an essay on Martinican author Edouard Glissant by critic A. James Arnold, and a review of the recent exhibition on Leonora Carrington, the issue’s cover-artist, complemented by a portfolio of her work and an excerpt from her play “Opus Siniestrus.” And, true to the journal’s mainstay throughout its history, the issue concludes with reviews of recently published titles in translation, including works by Silvina Ocampo, Raúl Zurita, Hilda Hilst, and Jorge Eduardo Eielson.
I invite our readers to discover and rediscover the treasures reprinted in this special issue as well as the new contents that follow them. My continuing thanks to Suzanne Jill Levine and Alfred Mac Adam for their wisdom and vision, and for their commitment to this essential compendium of Review as well as to its companion-issue to come out later this year. It’s been a privilege collaborating with both of them on this venture, one that bears witness to Review’s continuing value for scholars, students, and general readers of Latin American and comparative literatures.
Note: Review mourns the passing of three stellar figures in the international literary community: literary critic José Miguel Oviedo; Caribbean poet and cultural historian Kamau Brathwaite; and Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. Their significant respective work has been published in Review over the years. We will feature memorial pieces to honor all three of these iconic men in our next issues.
Notes
1 It’s worth mentioning the translation subvention program established by the Center for Inter-American Relations (active 1968-85), which commissioned translations of more than 80 works of Latin American literature, among them Gregory Rabassa’s translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Center worked with publishers to facilitate U.S. publication of these translations. The goals of the subvention program dovetailed with the mission of Review, i.e., to promote greater awareness in the U.S. about the literature of the Americas. Review 3 (1970), for example, featured a special supplement on García Márquez’s masterpiece, the year of its publication in English translation.