Juan Rulfo and life and death and existence and language
The Mexican writer Juan Rulfo wrote the novel I claim to be, at this time in my life, my most favorite work of literature: Pedro Páramo. I’ll write about the novel more extensively when I reread it next. But for now I’ll say this: I think the reason I originally felt such deep love for Pedro Páramo was because it’s like being told a story by a dead ancestor through a means that transcends the boundaries of life and death. As if they visited you in something like a dream and told you about the life of your 5th great grandfather. And you knew they were speaking of what was once a reality – something from the past but never detached from the present. Stylistically, Rulfo’s writing paints images like fragmented watercolors. After reading, these watercolors become like long-lost memories newly ingrained in your perception of the past. His stories feel like ones you were always destined to know.
Since April, I've been reading one of the two only other books by Rulfo, a short story collection known as El llano en llamas, or The Burning Plain. It's taken me so long because, to me, Rulfo’s writing demands to be read with intention and care. Often, it felt the only time I could truly enter the desolate, tender world of his stories was late in the night next to a quiet bed lamp. It felt there was a specific melancholy required to cross over.
This collection presented its stories in the same style of his novel. Each was difficult to understand or render in its own way, but that was possibly what made them so great. I could feel there was something so important present in every story, and at moments it would jump out at me and all I could do was cry. It almost felt tangible. Sometimes I cry because I read a sentence and it puts something I've always understood but never felt able to express into exact words with haunting clarity. Rulfo’s words do this often.
I know these stories may be read again and again with a new effect, feeling, or understanding formed each time. That's the quality that designates something of value to me. Some of the stories, I finished and then immediately reread for this effect. A story titled “Luvina” took three reads to even begin to decipher. On the third read I cried hard and thought about how I'm the culmination of a great number of peoples dreams, loves, and loss and how I'll never know the extent of it all.
An unnamed speaker paints an image of Luvina, an isolated ghost town deep in the mountains ridden with heartbreak and vacant of hope. The speaker says to another: “You must think I’m harping on the same idea. And I am, yes, mister— To be sitting at the threshold of the door, watching the rising and the setting of the sun, raising and lowering your head, until the springs go slack and then everything gets still, timeless, as if you had always lived in eternity. That’s what the old folks do there.”
I will think about these stories for the months to come. And at some point I’ll read them all again and continue thinking. But for now I’m thanking the universe for gifting me eyes and a brain. In a bell hooks essay I was reading today, she quoted someone saying something like: if there’s nothing else to exist for, at least we have the ability to read. Rulfo’s stories contribute to why whoever said that is so right.
On another note, Rulfo’s writing may take much of the credit for prompting my desire to complete a degree in Comparative Literature, and thus become fluent in Spanish. I read this short story collection as an English translation written by George D. Schade and Pedro Páramo’s translation by Margaret Sayers Peden. This year a new English translation of Pedro Páramo written by Douglas J. Weatherford was published, acclaimed by literary critics and eagerly recommended by my CompLit advisor. About the novel’s previous English translations, one article writes: “[these translations] had been criticized in one case for cutting out entire sections of the original text—apparently because the translator simply didn’t understand them—and in the other for costuming the novel’s famously gloomy tone with inaccurately flamboyant language.” It's beautiful to have the ability to enjoy a novel through English translation, but in the case of Pedro Páramo, I feel a paramount necessity to understand the original Spanish text and all Rulfo’s own pen had to offer. I really can’t die without this. Sometimes it feels like that book holds everything I’ve ever needed to know to die a peaceful, unregretting death.
Another of my most favorite writers, Gabriel García Márquez, stated that Juan Rulfo was one of his work’s biggest influences. He wrote in an essay now the Foreword to Pedro Páramo’s new English translation, “my profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing, and for that reason it would be impossible for me to write about him without it seeming that I’m writing about myself.” And surely, thus, when I think of Juan Rulfo I now think of Márquez and then I’m thinking about all the great number of stories I want to read in their original Spanish, both those which have received translation and those that have not. I often notice a starry shared quality among the literature of Latin America (this quality either lacking or less supreme in American or European literature) that I can only describe as existence-affirming. Without having the words to explain exactly, these stories somehow bring a clarity to why we as people exist, why the earth exists, why the universe exists and us in its context, and why life as followed by death is not a thing to fear. I want to work towards Spanish fluency for, at the very least, to explore this quality to the greatest extent I am capable of.
Of course, there’s endless further reasons I hold for learning the language. And there’s thousands of further things I can think of to say about Juan Rulfo or Márquez and their writing alike. I could write and talk forever about this all and thankfully there’s nothing stopping me from doing that. For now, I am tired and grateful.
holt, ive been meaning to tell you this, but every time i see something that you have posted, or just now reading this, I feel like there is so much hope in the world. You ability to hold space for gratitiude is just astounding. I mean it, for real. I feel like I can be really negative sometimes, but then ill just see a post that you have made on ig, I just feel so incredibly grounded. thank you holt <3