cuaderno de lecturas: guillermo cotto thorner, "manhattan tropics"
El mes pasado tomé unas notas sobre la nueva edición bilingüe de Trópico de Manhattan y las apreté en un vestido de reseña in english para Reading in Translation, una página de reseña de traducciones editada por Stiliana Milkova. Dice así:
Caribbean literary archives are very much like those metaphoric sea shores where the leftovers of shipwrecks of the past constantly wash up. A few years ago, in an important anthology of Puerto Rican narrative published in Venezuela, novelist Marta Aponte Alsina put it best when she wrote that the literary critic who wishes to address Puerto Rican or any other Caribbean literature has to account, or at least acknowledge, the fact that the region’s history is characterized by the dissolving effects of various lines of flight. Emigration is, perhaps, the most evident of these fugues. But there’s also class, racial and gender antagonisms that exclude, erase, and eject works out of the many traditions that crisscross a literary field. This, of course, might be true of all traditions, but in the Caribbean, this forced incompleteness is constitutive. It is for this reason that anthologists, editors, scholars and translators—readers, in short—play a key role in these traditions, daylighting works that have either been forgotten, forgiven, or forsaken by history.
