This December 24th marks the 10th year anniversary of writer Julio Monteiro Martins’ passing. The Dreaming Machine is greatly indebted to the influence of his work and owes its name to a concept contained in one of his posthumous books La Macchina Sognante. In order to acknowledge the ten year anniversary, some of the contributors of The Dreaming Machine and La Macchina Sognante, as well as many of his friends and past collaborators, will be participating in an online reading marathon of his work, mostly in Italian, but also with some English and Portuguese pieces, on December 27. We’ll keep you posted on details. Helen Wickes and Don Stang have greatly contributed to keeping alive his work and have made it available to English readers by translating into English his collection La grazia di casa mia, and by making many of the poems available on the pages of this journal. For this issue,The Dreaming Machine proposes my English translation of an important talk he gave at a session of the conference Écrire ailleurs. Litérature et migration en Italie: 1990-2010, Journées Internationales d’études, Strasbourg, 22-23 October 2010, Université de Strasbourg, Département d’Études Italiennes and Associazione Sagarana di Lucca.
Before getting into the heart of the topic I have chosen for this meeting, “the language of life and the languages of memory,” I would like to make a few parenthetical remarks. At lunch today I was saying that rarely in my long experience as a writer have I been in a conference with so many important writers gathered at the same time and in the same place as today. In Brazil, such an event was only possible during the period of the military dictatorship, because after it ended writers had all become such stars, divas. One of them, for example, would say “I won’t go if so and so is going to be there” or “too many people at that conference.” This by way of saying that, after the Nineteen Seventies, it wasn’t possible to bring together as many writers as you have today here in Strasbourg. And if you allow me, I would like to mention three other writers who are not present here today: these three writers who are no longer with us have died in the span of these past twenty years of migrant literary history, what in Italy is known as, “letteratura migrante”. One was Heleno Oliveira, a Brazilian writer from Pernambuco, who lived in Florence, whose work has been analyzed in very important monograph edited by Mia Lecomte. He was a Christian writer, a Catholic, but was endowed with a very refined and universal sensibility. He traveled to various parts of Africa, and did some very interesting, soul-searching work about the relation between Florence and Egypt. He wrote some very beautiful poems that connect these two places of the soul. Later, in 1995, he was in Lisbon where he met a great Portuguese writer, Sophia de Mello Breyner, his friend, and while he was there he had a heart attack and died at the age of 40. He died the same week I arrived in Italy, and what’s more we were the same age. So, I can’t get rid of the suspicion that he died at the very moment I was there to pick up the baton. It has a great symbolic value. The other writer is Thea Laitef, a young Iraqi writer, a poet, also included in the anthology edited by Mia Lacomte “Al confine del verso” (On the boundary of poetry). He was an author who also died at a very young age, had written very strong, powerful poems, partly as a result of the shocking circumstances of his exile. And finally Egidio Molinas Leiva, a Paraguayan writer, who wrote an excellent novel in Italian, entitled “Yacaré”. He worked in Rome as a bricklayer. Egidio was not young, he was already about sixty, but his parents were still alive in Paraguay, and the thing that saddened him most was the fact that he was not able to see them again. He was prevented for political reasons from entering the country. The last thing he did in his life was to go to Argentina, near the border, in an attempt to see his parents again before they died. They were supposed to go to the Paraguayan border with Argentina and cross it. But they did not obtain the authorization to leave and their meeting never happened. Egidio returned to Rome very disappointed, depressed, and shortly thereafter died of a heart attack. He was buried in an anonymous mound. A grave without a tombstone. Thus, I would not want these three migrant poets, writers and novelists to be absent from this meeting in Strasbourg, so well represented today.
The topic I proposed for this section is the language of life and the language of memory, which in my case should be the languages of memory since I have at least three of them. One of these languages was the one contained in the books by South American writers that we managed to receive during a period of great repression and fear in Brazil. They were written in Spanish, not in Portuguese – Portuguese-speaking writers couldn’t write, couldn’t publish. These books came from Chile, many writers lived there, during the time of President Salvador Allende, and then from Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela. And what kind of books were they? These books were mainly collections of short stories. Two authors I should mention, who were very important in my literary education, are Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. More than the language of memory, Spanish was the language of freedom for my generation. At the time there were excellent literary magazines, such as Crisis, published in Buenos Aires by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, known in Italy for the very successful book “The Open Veins of Latin America”. It was the heyday of the short story as a genre, with highly regarded Hispanic-American authors, such as Garcia Márquez, but also by many others who were less known, and perhaps never translated in Europe, such as the Mexican surrealist narrator Edmundo Valadés, director of the important magazine El Cuento and the author of the extraordinary collection La Morte Tiene Permiso. Short stories, in the political situation in which we lived, reduced our personal risks, because their advantage was that they could be read faster. You could even make a simple photocopy and read them in public in two minutes and then make the paper disappear. We sometimes held clandestine literary reading sessions, in the basement of the Faculty of Communication, in Niterói, or during the Winter Festival in the baroque city of Ouro Preto. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I rediscovered the short story at that time mainly from American literature, but I was already acquainted with the genre since my mother was a university professor, so I was exposed to O’Henry, Poe, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald – at the time Raymond Carver or John Cheever were not yet known outside the United States. English was my second language of memory, especially the sweet English that came to me through my mother’s voice (which makes the concept of “mother tongue” a little more complex).
And now, before speaking about the third language of memory, I would like to open a parenthesis to reflect on the short story. The short story, in my opinion, is the genre of contemporaneity, because it can reflect contemporary sensibilities better than any other. In fact, the classic novel, which in Italy brings to mind Manzoni, and the type of novel that was dominant especially at the end of the nineteenth century and a large part of the twentieth century, reflects a certain type of vision of the world that presents reality in a coherent, wholistic, organic way. It explained things by the cause-effect nexus and therefore protected from chaos, with events orchestrated in a sequential or sometimes circular way, but always connected to each other by an inflexible logic. A world easily understandable by readers, perhaps even desirable to them, full of empathy, with tales that flowed with the regularity of a great river. But it was a world increasingly distant and detached from the readers’ real experiences in everyday life which are devoid of that coherence and lacking in meaning, hard to comprehend, even impenetrable and averse to any kind of identification. Because of this, reading old novels could have a consolatory effect, though a deceptive one, and convince the reader for a moment that the world reflected the dimension of his rationality, that it was a recognizable landscape and that it could be captured in the fraction of a glance.
The short story, by contrast, abandoned those all-encompassing claims to take on the fragmentation of reality and the precariousness of the subjective gaze. And at the same time, the fragmentation moved from short stories to the contemporary novel, causing a true explosion of its architecture and ideology. And then came movies, television, and the Internet, which have not only brought us intense communication and connection with the different parts of the world, they have also brought us a new form, I would say, of epistemology, knowledge of the world in a mosaic, in little pieces. By now we have a subjectivity built through zapping. What is zapping? It’s a frenetic change of television channels, producing a kaleidoscope of disparate images and emotions. The same sensation you have when you are connected to the Internet and click on one site and then on another, and leave all the windows open, receiving voices, texts, sounds, images and melodies at the same time. The great challenge of contemporary people, who can no longer escape this zapping, is to succeed, within zapping, in identifying fundamental differences and values, otherwise there is a risk of the world becoming a big newsroom, with form erasing content, through the absolute homogenizing of all the topics: from the tragedy of an earthquake, we move on to bear cubs born in the Londo zoo or the advantages of “good” cholesterol. I believe that a novel like my “mother tongue” is an example of narrative that feels no nostalgia for the traditional novel, holds no regret at all for the agony of the old novelistic structure, in favor of fragmentation, of an exploded subjectivity, of a discontinuous perception of the world. Precisely for this reason adheres more closely to our reality. The book is the story of a novel that does not want to be born, and so remains unfinished, with different narrators competing for the narration, built like a mosaic, with the use of narrative time that is too extended or too concentrated, that does not even seem to exist, or is stuck, with a strange arbitrary encyclopedia inside it. In the end, in an afterword to the same work, the novel manages to come to an end and closes all the boxes that have remained open. In another more recent book, “L’onda d’urto”, I engaged in another narrative experiment, subverting traditional genres. The stories, read in a certain order, form a novel in fragments: they are the stories imagined or dreamed by the characters, who have taken refuge in the Apennines after a huge catastrophe that occurs at the beginning, in the first story. The characters come down from those mountains only at the conclusion of the book, starting a journey towards South America. Thus, in my experience, and starting from the revolution of the short story, literary genres have merged and mixed, to the point that each new work is a literary genre in itself, cannot be reduced to traditional labels, now insufficient and useful only to create didactic categories without real meaning.
After this long digression – the topic of the short story fascinates me like few others – we come to the third language of memory, my mother tongue par excellence, Portuguese. For me, until adolescence, it was the linguistic center of the world, the source language of everything that existed, the Word of the beginning. An expression comes to mind that was used, and perhaps is still used in Brazil, with foreigners who struggled to make themselves understood in Portuguese. We used to say: “Fale em língua de gente, por favor”, literally “Speak the language of the people, please”. That is, all other languages except our own were not human languages for us, for the same reasons that the ancient Greeks called foreigners “barbarians”, that is, “stutterers”. I spoke, and wrote, in “the language of the people”. Natural, right? It was the same language that the poet Fernando Pessoa considered his only homeland. The first nine books I published were written in Portuguese, but in a certain sense, if you like, the subsequent ones as well, because behind Italian, my language of life, of the present, that is, of the only portion of time I am allowed to always draw from, there is a strong echo of the mother tongue of memory. With its music and metaphors, the wisdom of its sayings, the pauses and percussion of its vowels, the sighs it exhales in the silent consonants, it enters into a discreet relationship with foreign words, slightly shifting their meaning as it does their pronunciation. It walks alongside them, whispers something to them, tugs a little on their arm, mother and daughter “en promenade”. And you know, the mother is always there, she never abandons us.
However, it is not uncommon in a person’s life to lose their mother at a young age and spend the rest of their life in the company of their brothers and sisters. Similarly, one can lose their mother tongue, due to exile or migration. Over time, it will become a very sweet memory, it will return in dreams every night, while the orphan will spend the rest of his/her existence in the company of sister languages. I coined this concept of “sister languages” because I could not find a better way to express what seems to me to be an increasingly common tendency among writers and others: to have another language that is not the native one, but a peer, with whom you can form an adult to adult a relationship. Starting from any one point in the maturity of the new speaker, this language will accompany them until the end (and then will also take care of his/her children). Just like a good sister.
So, the Italian language is my dear sister language. To her, I confide my secrets and stories every day. And she answers me, interpreting my thoughts with ever greater intimacy.
Lucky is the writer who can count on such a wonderful family!
Thank you.
Júlio Cesar Monteiro Martins (known in Italy as Julio Monteiro Martins) was born in Niterói, in the Greater Rio, in 1955 and died in Pisa in 2014. His Portuguese literary production includes several short-story books: Torpalium, Sabe Quem Dançou?, A Oeste de Nada, As Forças Desarmadas, and Muamba. Monteiro Martins is also the author of three novels: Artérias e Becos, Bárbara, O Espaço Imaginário and a volume of essays: O Livro das Diretas. He was one of the founders of the Brazilian Green Party and from 1992 to 1994 worked as a lawyer for the Brazilian Center in Defense of Children’s Rights. He taught creative writing at the Goddard College in the US and was a professor in Italy, teaching literary creation and Brazilian literature at the University of Pisa. His Italian language literary production is extensive and includes short story collections, novels and poetry. Among his most important works: “Racconti italiani” (2000), “La passione del vuoto” (2003), “madrelingua” (2005), “L’amore scritto (2007), the poetry collection “La grazia di casa mia” (2013) and the posthumous book “La macchina sognante” (2015). He was the founder and director of the online international literature quarterly “Sagarana”, which he directed uninterruptedly from 2000 to 2014.
