- Any writer or artist, women or man, has a sixth sense which indicates when the goal has been reached, when what she or he has been molding has acquired the definitive form it must have. Once that point has been reached, one extra word (a single note, a single line) will irreversibly extinguish that spark or state of grace brought about by the loving struggle between the writer and his or her work. That moment is always one of awe and reverence: Marguerite Yourcenar compares it to the mysterious moment when the baker knows it is time to stop kneading the dough; Virginia Woolf defines it as the instant in which she feeks the blood flow from end to end through the body of the text.
More From Rosario Ferré’s Essay, The Writer’s Kitchen
July 31, 2019 at 6:05 am (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Memoirs, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: advice, essay, inspiration, Puerto Rican writers, Rosario Ferré, writing process
Rosario Ferré: Her Island
July 5, 2019 at 12:13 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, Latin American writers, memories, Puerto Rican writers, Rosario Ferré, short story, summer, The Philippines, translation
Self is reading the last piece in Ferré’s book, On Destiny, Language, and Translation. As self has explained elsewhere, she decided to start this re-read with the last piece and work her way front. Nothing can match the genius of the title story, The Youngest Doll, which begins the collection, and self would rather work her way up to the good stuff.
She must have forgotten (honestly, it’s been at least two decades since she’s read Rosario Ferré) or mebbe it didn’t strike her as significant at the time, but Ferré is from Puerto Rico, and her primary subject is the class divisions between landowners and share workers, on an island where the main crop is sugar.
Self knows quite a bit about sugar, because that is her family’s crop, too. Maybe that is why she found Ferré. Yes, she found her.
It’s not as if Ferré is the easiest Latin American writer to read. Before getting to Ferré, self read Clarice Lispector, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado. But when she found Ferré, there was instant engagement.
To read is to engage, but when self found Ferré, she didn’t just engage, she engaged fiercely.
On to Ferré’s essay. She unpacks the process of translating her own novel, Maldito Amor, from Spanish to English.
The title of the novel “is also the title of a very famous danza written by Juan Morelli Campos, Puerto Rico’s most gifted composer in the nineteenth century, which describes in its verses the paradisiacal existence of the island’s bourgeoisie of the time . . . I decided to change the title altogether in my translation of the novel, substituting the much more specific Sweet Diamond Dust. The new title refers to the sugar produced by the De Lavalle family, but it also touches on the dangers of a sugar which, like diamond dust, poisons those who sweeten their lives with it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Reading on the Fourth of July, 2019
July 4, 2019 at 7:39 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Holidays, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: California, essay, favorites, Latin American writers, reading lists, Rosario Ferré, second reads, translation, writing process
HOME: 4 July 2019
Today self finished Stephen Westaby’s Open Heart and began a re-read of the Rosario Ferré collection The Youngest Doll (University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Some pieces are memoir, some are nonfiction, some are magical realist.
- Being a writer . . . one has to learn to live by letting go, by renouncing the reaching of this or that shore, to let oneself become the meeting place of both . . . In a way, all writing is a translation, a struggle to interpret the meaning of life, and in this sense the translator can be said to be a shaman, a person said to be deciphering conflicting human texts, searching for the final unity of meaning in speech.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
“A Good Wife and Mother”: Rosario Ferré
June 29, 2019 at 4:41 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Relatives, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, inspiration, Latin American writers, Rosario Ferré, Saturdays, short story, writing process
The day of my debut as a writer, I sat at my typewriter for a long time, mulling over these thoughts. Inevitably, writing my first story meant taking my first step toward Heaven or Hell, and that made me vacillate between a state of euphoria and depression. It was as if I were about to be born, peering timidly through the doors of Limbo. If my voice rings false or my will fails me, I said to myself, all my sacrifices will have been in vain. I will foolishly have given up the protection which, despite its disadvantages, at least allowed me to be a good wife and mother, and I will justly have fallen from the frying pan into the fire.
Recommended Reading: Rosario Ferré’s short story, The Youngest Doll, from the collection of the same name
Words: Rosario Ferré
July 20, 2018 at 6:09 pm (Artists and Writers, Flowers, Links, Sayings, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: essay, Fridays, inspiration, Rosario Ferré, wisdom, writing process
I write because I am poorly adjusted to reality; because the deep disillusionment within me has given rise to a need to re-create life, to replace it with a more compassionate, tolerable reality. I carry within me a utopian person, a utopian world.
— from the essay The Writer’s Kitchen, Feminist Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 1986), translated from the Spanish by Diana L. Velez
A minute ago, self decided to google Ferré and learned she had passed away, 18 February 2016. She was 77.
Noooooooo!
The View Across the Street From the Gallery Bookshop, Main Street, Mendocino, 21 April 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog writers. Stay tuned.
