Marjorie Agosín

"antisemitism has always existed in Latin America, as evidenced by the many nations that remained neutral during the Second World War. The barbarism of the Nazis was often praised in military circles, and some Latin American countries only joined the Allies because of pressure from the United States. One of the few Latin American intellectuals who stood up against fascism and spoke about the impending fate of European Jews was Gabriela Mistral..."

"Human rights were implemented by a group of Western nations in response to the moral crimes that occurred during World War II. Yet the same nations that ratified their declaration remain unable to protect their own citizens. The strength of a literature that denounces and questions, that speaks and implies that its own citizens can decide through the power of their voices and words, becomes effective in denouncing the moral vacuum in which the abuses took place."

"Writing is a body of human expression, in which the daily conventions of our lives join with the ambiguities and subtleties of literature. But we must add in the bodies of the disappeared without identity, without memory-and this becomes the existential body of this literature that is not quieted by the dominant ideology or its power to deny what is happening. In the context of the early 1970s, it is impossible to deny the bodies floating by the banks of the Mapocho River in Santiago. It is impossible to look at the streets of El Salvador and not see the mutilated bodies strewn throughout. The literature of this period gathers the victimized bodies and arms them with words; it restores them and offers them dignity."

"The possibilities of language reside in the possibilities of faith; they are a form of redeeming and correcting world history and paying tribute to life in all its wonder. These poems were written by a spirit that wishes to be part of a history that does not cover but on the contrary reveals and is clear in the blinding light of every silence."

"For me, my exile had nothing to do with an expulsion or with the impossibility of remembrance, because somehow or other one always returns. Dictators perish and borders change. However, the desire endures. The desire for a fragrance or for the way in which certain vines cling to doorways. The desire to wake up and recognize oneself in one's own language but more than anything to be recognized by others."

"Poetry, which is always with me and brings me to privileged horizons and uncertain but always true pathways"

"Those devoted to the study of Latin American poetry can identify the names of poets such as Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, and César Vallejo, all twentieth century male poets. It is only because she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 that Gabriela Mistral's voice is not ignored. Male critics have often ascribed the poetry of women such as Mistral to the ideology that they represent; at other times, they have simply denied or ignored the literary production of women. The poetry of these women, created in patriarchal societies, has not achieved recognition within the canon of contemporary literature. In general, anthologies of Latin American poetry include very few women."

"Though women have always been close to words, they have often been barred from speaking: Saint Paul, in the Holy Scriptures, ordered women to be silent in church, thus censuring their means of public expression. Numerous cultural maxims that attempt to predispose women to remain silent have been internalized by the female psyche, e.g., "En boca cerrada no entran moscas." ("No flies will enter a closed mouth.") Yet women have continued speaking their minds, often through the sacred language of poetry, where there is an abundance of intuition and the possibility of reclaiming power through language."

"In the house where I grew up in Santiago de Chile I heard a Babel of whispers, songs, prayers, and languages. Spanish was my language, my mother tongue spoken in the fiestas, in the schools, and in the poetry books I loved and read out loud as poetry should be read. My maternal grandparents spoke German and Yiddish. My paternal grandparents spoke Russian and often sang to the music of a balalaika bought in a flea market at the outskirts of the city. At school I learned Hebrew and songs in Ladino. At first I seemed to be confused with too many languages, but as the years progressed all of these languages were and continue to be a part of my inheritance as a Jew, as a poet, and as a woman. It was truly enchanting to hear and feel the depth of these many languages that embedded the narratives of the Jewish people throughout our history-an ancient people carrying their prayers and their legacy across the earth."

"The search for identity and belonging is also a motif for the human condition of the twentieth century-a century defined by displacements and migrations."

"Here in the United States where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine; that not even the sky has the same constellations. The trees and the faunas do not have the same names or sounds, or the rubbish the same smell. How does one recover the familiar? How does one name the unfamiliar? How can one be another or live in a foreign language? These are the dilemmas of one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation."

"Throughout history, women have always been close to language. Transmitters of legends, healers, magicians and fortune tellers, women possess a tapestry of stories that are slowly beginning to be transcribed. Curiously, with the advent of authoritarian governments in Latin America, women have left the private spaces of house, church, and marketplace to begin to poeticize their experiences through the written word that had previously been denied to them. We must not forget that even with the Cuban Revolution and the political effervescence that followed in the 1960s, the arts in Latin America continued to be dominated by men. Women were only allowed to participate through their relationships with men: the "companero," the boss, and the patriarch."

"These narrators show that written history contains the lyricism of poetry and the rational insanity of passion. They teach us that History and these smaller histories spring from an intimate, delicate conscience where memory attempts not only to preserve the great events of History such as wars, conquests, and triumphs, but also in the daily history that is created in a park, in the depths of the ocean, or in the ancient icon of the family."

"More than anything, fantastic literature offers territories and spaces for subversion, disorder and illegality by using the only code possible: the imaginary. The fantastic, whatever genre it occupies, has the option or, better said, the desire to act through what has been culturally defined as forbidden and marginal. By talking and writing about the forbidden, about zones of silence, fantastic literature resides in the area of the always possible."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"The blue cloud finally opens-just when the bell rings to let the Juana Ross School out for the weekend. (first sentence)"

"Her face is beaming, lit from within by a memory. (p39)"

""I am not worried about earthquakes that come from the ground as much as those that are born in the soul...When the earth trembles and you don't have anything to hold on to, you can't steady yourself. It seems like even your house, which you thought was so safe, is nothing but a flimsy raft being knocked about by waves...Our souls can crumble when we don't care about our neighbors, or when we say hateful things about others, or exclude people for being different. But remember, Celeste, that there are always so many more ways to heal and help a soul than to break one. Human beings are just like the earth. We want to be whole. Remember that. Promise?" (p44-5)"

"I don't understand how equality can be dangerous. How could it make someone...anyone...angry? (p62)"

"That night the voice on the radio calls what is happening to Chile "the restoration of order to the country." I write the words down in my notebook and wonder what was out of order before? (p91)"

"“Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?” (p184)"

"Maybe once you are an exile, you always are an exile. Always missing somewhere else, always carrying a bit from here and a bit from there and always with a bit of a broken heart. (p280)"

"“I have been so busy asking for faith that I forgot to ask for patience. (p330)"

""...sometimes memory is dangerous, but on most occasions it can be a salvation. Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present." (p357)"

""Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)"

"I want literature to be a means for creating humility. (Introduction)"

"children are a universal treasure...I believe that the best way to determine if a country is defending its human rights is to see how the children of that country live. (Introduction)"

"As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")"

"Home, for many Jews, was their existence in the Diaspora, their perpetual state of homelessness. Home was that place where they sought refuge from persecution and discrimination. However, the Jews are not and have not been alone in"

"Only while in nature's perfection—where there is no difference between the outside world and myself and, at the same time, my own indifference—have I truly felt that I belonged."

"We are what we remember and we understand heritage and belonging through our own passion to remember. Home is a living scrap-book of memory that we carry as we move about, as we remember the vanquished and their respective passions and sorrows. Memory can never reside in abstraction. Memory must be cemented into concrete, must be worn like a dress, must be lived in like a home of differing levels, textures, and colors."

"Home is understanding and being understood."

"If America is a grandiose melting pot and multicultural society, then it is also a place that has not fully welcomed its immigrants, especially those of color. It is a place that used to prohibit the speaking of native tongues, and it is a place that racially profiles those whose origin is from elsewhere. A friend recently asked me why I seem so critical of this society that has given me so much. I think that to be critical is to be American. Freedom, complete freedom, includes the right to a dissenting opinion, the right to question an election. However, considering that only 30% of the citizens of the United States vote, it is fair to call the political culture dormant."

"as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self."

"Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices."

"translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original."

"The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said."

"I think that memory is a form of translation. What motivates the artistic expression of poets and fiction writers, essayists and painters is memory. But memory is also very complicated because it consists of what one chooses to remember."

"how to become someone else-that's perhaps the greatest challenge for a translator because to become someone else is to become compassionate. To become someone else, you have to be in love with someone else. And in that sense I strongly believe that translations are acts of love"

"To write in Spanish is for me a gesture of survival, and because of translation my memory has now become a part of the memory of others. Translators are not traitors, as the proverb says, traductores, traidores--but rather splendid friends in this great human community of language."

"Since the earliest history, poetry and the spoken word have been the pulse of human civilization."

"To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal."

"Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world."

"Books unite people and books in translation are the thresholds of other cultures, invitations to travel and to know others."

"Sometimes I imagine the Torah as the great book of the world handed from person to person and generation to generation so that we may remember what unites us and to help us imagine that in all lands there is the possibility of creating a history and participating in it. Books have the strength to create a mutual complicity between writer and reader and they allow the great human family to celebrate through words the memories of other times and places."

"In literature I found the caress, the unguarded pleasure, and the voice that had eluded me in this new country. I turned to books with a passion, almost in desperation, because they consoled me. I saw myself criss-crossing the hallways of the library, ransacking in particular the Spanish section and shelves. I discovered the warmth of words, words that belonged to me alone. I paused along their hills, invented the destinies of those exiled like myself. Above all I loved dictionaries, faithful guardians of my language. Through books I crossed borders. Wasn't Latin America an immense shawl united by a free and beautiful language?"

"To write meant to always be awake, willing to take risks, full of magic and happiness, eager to create and undo, because life was that way, like words."

"Writing is bewitching, like a song or cadence. I arrive at words the way one arrives at spells. Poetry is a story that attaches itself to my feet, my being. Sometimes I will lie down on the earth, invent poems about lost love and fear. Writing is a form of love, of loving and being loved. These aren't words, syllables, or useless alphabets launched by chance or an obsession with speech. Each word wants its own freedom to transform reality into wonder, to create another story, to uncover longings, happiness, the astonishing world between the pen and the shattered paper, limber and fragile. Writing is a way to truth, to telling the truth and tieing it to books, to stone walls."

"To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner"

"The words, such ample, respectable ladies, were fraught with the possibility of love beyond diminutives. I never stopped writing in Spanish because I could not abandon my essence, the fragile, divine core of my being. It would have meant becoming someone else, frequenting sadness, losing a soul and all the butterflies. I always spoke Spanish, even in my most solemn dreams. I did not want to translate myself."