A Temporary Truce with Reality

Farewell to Mario Benedetti/Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farugia (9/14/1920-5/17/2009), Uruguayan writer and poet with Italian ancestry. I'd like to read more of his work, along with so many others from Latin America and everywhere else. Barring magic, though, and limited by a pitiful Spanish language reading ability (I can do it in a rudimentary way but only with a lot of time and a couple of dictionaries -- out of having had to translate some historical bits in graduate school), this would mostly be done in translation, which is how I've read most international writing for most of my life. Meaning that I'm mostly reading approximations of the original, but still -- even in translation, international non-English literature often feels very different from Anglo-American writing, and therefore worthwhile for the different perspectives and more.

When first putting together a Latin American Studies course years ago, I came across Mario Benedetti, just a few mentions, really. A good one to try first would be his first novel, La tregua / The Truce (1960), coming in at under 200 pages. It taps into the balancing of family life, gender issues, personal freedom, choices, luck, fate -- a lot of universals in the particular. Not to mention the Influenza, if memory serves. La tregua is of course still quite relevant, for in our lives even in 2009, time often seems to reach a resting point, a truce, before resuming its flow, I suppose.

Today's Rune: Joy (again).