Synopses & Reviews
For those readers of Latin American literature who are tired of being fed a particularly monochrome image of Mexico — replete with virgins rising into the heavens sheathed in white gowns, with idealized peasants, tortillas in hand, staring off at the volcano in deep contemplation of The Revolution That Cannot Fail — José Emilio Pacheco will come as a welcome relief. One of Mexico’s leading poets, he has also successfully ventured into the area of the short story and the novel. Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction that deals mainly with themes of childhood and innocence betrayed, is the first book of Pacheco’s fiction to appear in English. Here there are no narrative arabesques, no flights of magical-realist fancy. Instead, Pacheco confronts the reader with the uglier sides of urban Mexico — its grime, its beggars, its suffocating pollution, the constricted lives of its lower middle class — all with a simplicity and directness of style impeccably shaped and clearly distilled. Pacheco himself has said that he believes that his work could never really appeal to anyone outside of Mexico City. Yet none of us lives very far from the city he so implacably portrays. His sinking, stinking metropolis becomes a metaphor for something much larger and threatening, and we respond with natural feeling to his quiet-spoken outrage. Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, a companion volume to the author’s bilingual Selected Poems, includes work written over a period of two decades. The stories were translated by Katherine Silver, who has also translated Pacheco’s poetry.
Review
"Pacheco often hits with deadly accuracy." Quarterly Conversation
Synopsis
Pacheco, Battles in the Desert. Intense, despairing accounts of life in Mexico City.
About the Author
José Emilio Pacheco (1939- ) is one of Mexico’s foremost poets, novelists, and essayists. A lifelong resident of Mexico City, Pacheco has been a guest lecturer throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain. Some of Pacheco’s best known collections of poetry include Miro la tierra (which documented the Mexico City earthquake), El reposo del fuego, Fin de siglo y otros poemas, Arbol entere dos muros/Tree between two walls, and Selected Poems. His No me preguntas cómo pasa el tiempo was awarded Mexico’s National Poetry Prize. New Directions publishes two titles by Emilio Pacheco: Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, translated by Katherine Silver; and Selected Poems, edited by George McWhirter with various translators (bilingual) (both 1987).
Katherine Silver is an award-winning literary translator and the codirector of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her most recent translations include works by Daniel Sada, César Aira, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Ernesto Mallo, and Carla Guelfenbein. She has also translated works by José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Franco, Martín Adán, and Pedro Lemebel, among others.