To keep my Spanish up and with some amorphous future project ideas in mind, I’ve been reading some of the works of Eduardo Galeano, José Luis Sampedro and Olga Lucas. Here is a rough translation from Eduardo Galeano’s El libro de los abrazos, The Book of Embraces, a book of short prose and meditations first published in 1991. Galeano’s writing exemplifies the seamless melding of history, politics, culture and everyday life that takes place in Latin American literature, and is very approachable. His more famous works are available in translation here.
Original Text: Las tradiciones futuras (1991)
Hay un único lugar donde ayer y hoy se encuentran y se reconocen y se abrazan, y ese lugar es manaña.
Suenan muy futuras ciertas voces del pasado americano muy pasado. Las antiguas voces, pongamos por caso, que todavía nos dicen que somos hijos de la tierra, y que la madre no se vende ni se alquila. Mientras llueven pájaros muertos sobre la ciudad de México, y se convierten los ríos en cloacas, los mares en basureros y las selvas en desiertos, esas voces porfiadamente vivas nos anuncian otro mundo que no es este mundo envenenador del agua, el suelo, el aire y el alma.
También nos anuncian otro mundo posible las voces antiguas que nos hablan de comunidad. La comunidad, el modo comunitario de producción y de vida, es la más remota tradición de las Américas, la más americana de todas: pertenece a los primeros tiempos y a las primeras gentes, pero también pertenece a los tiempos que vienen y presiente un nuevo Nuevo Mundo. Porque nada hay menos foráneo que el socialismo en estas tierras nuestras. Foráneo es, en cambio, el capitalismo: como la viruela, como la gripe, vino de afuera.
Translation (mine): Future Traditions (1991)
There is only one place where yesterday and today meet and acknowledge each other and share an embrace, and that place is tomorrow.
Certain voices from America’s ancient past sound as if they’re from the future. These elder voices, for instance, still tell us that we are children of the earth, and that one does not put one’s own mother up for sale. While dead birds rain from the skies of Mexico City, our rivers turn to sewers, our forests to deserts, and our seas fill with trash, these defiantly living voices proclaim another world, one that doesn’t poison water, earth, air and spirit.
Another possible world also appears when they speak of community. Community, a common mode of life and production, is the oldest tradition of the Americas, the most American of all: it belongs to our earliest times, to our first people, but also to the times that come. It proffers a new New World. Because nothing is less foreign to our lands than socialism. Capitalism is what’s foreign: Like smallpox, like influenza, it came from afar.
This text is from 1991. It must have rung strange in US ears, those who heard it, as totalitarian socialism fell and TINA capitalism seemed victorious. But the experience of US capitalism in Latin America is one of greed and exploitation, of civil war and antidemocratic tyrants. The limitations of our all-or-nothing capitalism and the upsides of certain forms of socialism have only become newsworthy for Americans since the dawn of our latest crisis, but much of the rest of the world has lived with them for decades.
Now there’s more and more talk of a return to community values and how to honestly distribute our wealth, even as we try to protect an environment and a climate spiraling deeper into crisis. I was struck when I read this how much our current social vocabulary has begun to match this 15-year-old text. Better late than never.
Header image credit: I don’t know. I searched around, tried reverse image search, everything, but of the tens of websites using the image, non gave credit.
360 by bike 