En diciembre del 1948, el New York Times publicó un artículo sobre la traductora Harriet de Onís con el título “La señora de Onís traduce el folclore latinoamericano, e incorpora recetas latinas en su cocina”. [Read more…] about Harriet de Onís y la traducción de la literatura latinoamericana
Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Knopf archive documents Nobel Prize–winner Alice Munro’s early struggles with the genre of the short story
On Thursday, October 10, the Nobel Prize Foundation awarded the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature to author Alice Munro, making Munro the 13th woman to win the award since its inception in 1901, and the first ever female winner from Canada. Munro—unlike most previous prize winners—is renowned not for novels or poetry, but for short stories, most of which are drawn from her small-town upbringing in rural Ontario. Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy that bestowed the award, called Munro a “master of the contemporary short story,” declaring that throughout her career she “has taken an art form. . . which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection.”
Upon receiving the award, Munro herself acknowledged her hopes that winning the prize would foster long overdue recognition for the short story as a genre on par with novels, poems, and plays. She stated “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”
Indeed, documents in the Alfred A. Knopf archive at the Ransom Center reveal that Munro struggled for recognition of the short story as a sophisticated genre from the earliest days of her career. The Knopf collection contains two rejection sheets that address Munro’s work: one for Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), her first book of short stories, and another for Lives of Girls & Women (1971), her first novel. Both books were initially published by the Toronto house McGraw-Hill Ryerson and achieved such accolades in Canada that the firm sought a wider reading audience in the United States.
Upon reading Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, Knopf editor Judith Jones wrote in her rejection sheet that although she “quite love[d] these stories,” she found “nothing particularly new and exciting here.” She also expressed misgivings about Munro’s future ability to develop longer forms of narrative: “her forte is the story; she doesn’t seem to have the larger reach of the novelist.” Two years later, after reading Munro’s first attempt at longer fiction, Jones reiterated her reservation toward an author seemingly not destined to develop into a bestselling novelist; after reading Lives of Girls & Women, she commented, “there’s no question that the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer,” and anticipated that the book would be “easily overlooked.” Jones rejected the novel, which was published in New York by McGraw-Hill in 1972, to great acclaim. Ironically, the success of Munro’s first novel encouraged McGraw-Hill New York to subsequently publish Munro’s first book of short stories in 1973—nearly five full years after its first appearance in Canada.
In an interview with The New Yorker in 2012, Munro stated that “for years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. . . . Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that.”
Since 1968, Munro has published 14 short story collections, almost all of which have been translated and distributed worldwide.
Please click on the thumbnails below to view larger images.
Fellows Find: When Knopf Inc. published a master work by Fernando Ortiz: A strange hurricane
Armando Chávez-Rivera, an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Victoria, has published four books, among them Cuba per se. Cartas de la diáspora (2009), which summarizes extensive information about Cuban writers located off the island. He worked as a journalist for more than a decade in Latin America, with long stays in various countries in the region, and has published in magazines and popular journals. Currently his academic research is concentrated on Spanish-American literature while he maintains his work as a columnist for the Latin American Data Base, a unit of the Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexico. His research at the Ransom Center was funded by the Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment. The Ransom Center is now accepting applications for 2013–2014 fellowships.
In the spring of 1947, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. published the first English translation of Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar) by Fernando Ortiz. This inspired essay explores the island’s history, culture, and economy through references to its principle crops, and provides detailed information about the internal tensions within society and its relationship with the United States.
The Harry Ransom Center preserves the correspondence between Ortiz and the publishing house, as well as routine communications of the legendary team formed from Herbert Weinstock, editor, and Harriet de Onís, translator, who were responsible for the first English translations of other celebrated Latin-American writers like Alejo Carpentier.
Knopf Inc.’s growing interest in Latin America was rooted in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, and Blanche W. Knopf visited several countries in the region in 1942. Contrapunteo was the first important Cuban work published by Knopf Inc.
Ortiz’s book created a controversy among the editorial advisors; one of them undervalued it for being written in a supposedly “tropical” style, grandiloquent and almost impossible to translate. Nevertheless, Ortiz’s international prestige as an academic and his encyclopedic knowledge of culture, versed in ethnography, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields, tipped the scales in his favor.
The book received excellent reviews from the press, with praise for a translation that maintained the original language’s seductive blend of rigorous scientific knowledge, profusion of quotations, and sustained poetic prose. We now know the subsequent impact the volume had on terminology, coining terms like “transculturation,” to refer to the mutual exchange between cultures in contact.
Contrapunteo reviewed Cuba’s economic situation and its dependence on foreign markets and capital, primarily from the United States. The book found a way to state scientific knowledge without sacrificing literary elegance, while addressing political, cultural, and economic aspects of a region that the U.S. public knew little about or viewed stereotypically.
Ortiz’s works—as well as those by Knopf’s tireless collaborators in those years, Columbian Germán Arciniegas and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre—hinted at the brewing political upheavals that would yield uprisings, revolutions, and dictatorships, and focused on milestones such as the Cuban revolution and its radicalization to communism and confrontation with the United States.
In the course of my two-month stay at the Ransom Center, I followed this thread of analysis in the letters between Knopf Inc.’s editors, translators, and advisors from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the subsequent reaction of the press and the markets. Knopf’s publications promoted a better understanding of the rest of the hemisphere by the United States and laid the groundwork for a favorable reception of Spanish American Boom literature.
I read the Knopf Inc. archive as if it was an intellectual, cultural, and societal “counterpoint.” Several books from the New York publisher showed the cultural change, literary renovation, and the approaching political explosion in neighboring countries. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar was one of those rare books that, through its information and biting political reflections, was a strange hurricane of premonitions, bitter and sweet, for the Knopf editors and United States’ readers.
