10 Questions for Alan Grostephan
- By Franchesca Viaud
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first translation project was poems and short stories by young Colombian writers for Historias de vida y muerte/ Stories of Life and Death. That writing came from workshops I taught in Cazucá, a slum south of Bogotá where many of the writers had been displaced by violence and rural poverty. The poems are raw, intimate, fearless, and some are by writers so young they had not even learned how to use a cliché yet.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
As an undergraduate, I took a Latin American literature course in which my head exploded. I read Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Gabriel García Márquez, María Luisa Bombal, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Rosario Ferré. This was a whole world of writing and storytelling that expanded the form of the novel or story, and it motivated me to go live in Latin America. Bogotá, my first novel was influenced by these writers and by one of their favorites, William Faulkner, among other modernists like Virgina Woolf and James Joyce. I also studied under Christine Schutt whose stories were dense, gritty, hard, and musical. I’ve read her over and over my whole life. I found this same grit in Jean Rhys, Denis Johnson, J.M. Coetzee, and Cormac McCarthy, and I found a kind of love and quiet lyricism in William Maxwell that I needed at that time for my writing. My most recent novel, The Banana Wars, was guided by novels with labyrinthine structures that connected many characters, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River. These books are about subjects that have long interested me: exploitation, work, memory, and violence. For style, for the directness and unpredictability and great language, I have loved reading and rereading everything by John Keene, Natalia Ginzburg, Pilar Quintana, and Clarice Lispector.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have been a restaurant server, a front desk clerk at a hotel, a Spanish interpreter in hospitals, a janitor at a strip mall, a social worker, but ever since graduate school I have taught literature and writing to university students.
What did you want to be when you were young?
Very young, I wanted to be a professional baseball player, which is what my father wanted me to be, but as I got older I grew bored with it and weary of coaches who gave long speeches. I was so lost in high school, I don’t think I had a clue what I would become, but by then I had discovered literature.
What drew you to write a translation of this piece in particular?
I first read Alberto Salcedo Ramos’s “Portrait of a Loser” in a terrific anthology of Latin American cronistas (Antología de crónica latinoamericana actual) and later picked up his books and read everything. Salcedo Ramos is loved in Colombia and Latin America, but he has barely been translated to English. This particular essay is about a boxer who is destined to lose his fight against a superior opponent. He is also destined to lose against a world where he was born poor and had no chance to study or find decent work, but in spite of all this, as he tells his story and prepares for his fight, he’s dignified, resilient, and hopeful. The essay evokes Montería, a hot, tough place on the Atlantic coast of Colombia, mostly run by wealthy cattle ranchers and their paramilitary groups. Years after the essay was published in a Colombian magazine, Víctor Regino, the boxer, was shot and murdered as he walked out of church.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Both of my novels are set in Colombia, the first in Bogotá, where I lived for several years. Bogotá is a massive city in the Andes that has always fascinated me with its intensity, its grit, its humor, its hustle. My second novel is set in Urabá, a region in northwestern Colombia, adjacent to Panamá. I have been travelling there to see friends and to write about it for the past six years. It is a hot, humid, rainy landscape, dominated by large banana planters and a drug cartel, and it’s also full of people who have nothing to do with these industries and who have survived the war and are fighting to live on their own terms.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I write in silence, but I love jazz. I think hearing jazz while driving or in the evening with a drink is a way to put the disparate and messy experience of the day, including the difficulty of writing, into a kind of balance. My first love was bebop, those fast tempos and difficult melodies of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, but in recent years I have been listening to more contemporary musicians, like Immanuel Wilkins, Avishai Cohen, Jonathan Blake, The Bad Plus, Joshua Redman, and Brad Mehldau.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
No one goes first necessarily. I have some writer friends like Michelle Latiolais, Jen Beagin, Alberto Gullaba, Emily Nemens, who are all smart readers, but my wife María Korol, a visual artist, is my toughest and best reader.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on a novel and some essays. I have also been making a documentary with my friend Enilda Jiménez Pineda about her father’s murder and her family’s struggle to reclaim their land which was stolen by paramilitaries in 1995.
What are you reading right now?
The two novels I loved the most this summer were Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin and Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the TransTibetan Angel. I just read Barbara S. Walter’s Troy, Michigan and Ama Atta Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, both very good, and I’m working through Robert Hughes’s Rome and a stack of books about Mexican architects Luis Barragán and Juan O’Gorman.
