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| Samanta Schweblin |
DRAGON
DE OTROS MUNDOS
Cuentos
Samanta Schweblin
1978
Samanta Schweblin was born in Buenos Aires, 1978. She obtained her degree in Film Studies from University of Buenos Aires (UBA). In 2001 she was granted the awards Fondo Nacional de las Artes and Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti with her book “El núcleo del disturbio”, published by Planeta Publishing House in Argentina and neighboring countries. In 2008 she spent part of the year in Oaxaca, Mexico, as she was granted an artist residence scholarship by CONACULTA. In that same year, she won the International Award Casa de las Américas for her second book of short stories “Pájaros en la boca”, which was translated and published in more than twelve countries. Some of her short stories have also been translated into German, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, and Swedish in order to be published in several anthologies, newspapers and magazines. This year she was included in the Granta's list as one of the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists.
SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN
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BIRDS IN THE MOUTH
By Patricia Klobusiczky
The enduring international fame of Argentine literature was reached long ago, and as its German readership we thank Argentina’s guest of honour appearance at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair for acquainting us with a wealth of new discoveries. Numbered among these literary highlights is Samanta Schweblin, whose first publications – two slim volumes of prose, “El núcleo del disturbio” (The Core of the Disturbance, 2002) and “Pájaros en la boca” (Birds in the Mouth, 2009) – immediately led to her international breakthrough. Meanwhile, her prize-winning stories have not only been translated into German, English, French, and Swedish, but also into Hungarian, Italian, and Dutch. In addition, she appears in the 2010 anthology “The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” published by the renowned Granta Magazine.
Born in 1978, Samanta Schweblin grew up in Buenos Aires, where she studied film. Among other acquired skills, she learned to write screenplays and sitcoms. Before devoting herself entirely to her writing, she founded an agency specialized in web design. She began working creatively at an early age: as a child she dictated her first stories to her mother, and illustrated them herself. From her grandfather, a visual artist, she learned early on in life that one should to be in the position to manage without money. Indeed she attached so much importance to her artistic autonomy that she sought other means to support herself – which led to founding the agency. In December of 2001 the first literary prize she received as a very young woman was namely a “Fondo Nacional de las Artes” (National Endowment for the Arts), the country’s most prestigious art prize, but awarded then of all times, when the Argentine financial crisis had reached a devastating height. While this highly remunerated prize retained only its symbolic value, the financial breakdowns were followed by political ones. Despite the confusion and general uncertainty dominating Argentina at that time, Samanta Schweblin, who had only published a few articles in various newspapers until then, was taken under contract by the renowned Planeta publishers. As she stated in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, this bordered on a miracle: “There I was, twenty-two, an unknown writer, and a woman in Argentina, where the literary scene is largely dominated by men. Everything was against me. Those were really terrible days. There were violent protests in Buenos Aires, and twenty-five people died.”
Great violence and uncertainty have shaped Argentina’s history not only since the military dictatorship which lasted from 1976 to 1983, and even today this is reflected in various ways in its literature. But unlike many other young Argentine writers, Samanta Schweblin does not work solely with the country’s historical trauma. This strengthens a sense of latent danger in all of her stories published so far. The threat, which shows itself in countless ways without being explicitly named, develops to a palpable presence. First and foremost, this provides the undertow and tension which Schweblin attaches so much importance to. For this reason too, considering her conspicuously concise and emphatic writing style, the short story is her most preferred genre. In conversation with the magazine Páginal/12, quoted by Eberhard Falcke in his book review of the German first edition of “Birds in the Mouth” (published by Suhrkamp as “Die Wahrheit über die Zukunft”), which appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit, Samanta Schweblin stated: “Short stories offer more possibilities for pulling the rug out from under one’s feet, and that’s what interests me about literature.”
In just 130 pages, “Birds in the Mouth” presents a great deal of upsetting and abysmal material without the slightest trace of sensationalism. Its fourteen stories revolve around universal and timeless subjects like family, divorce, loneliness, aggression, poverty, and illness, without the writer renouncing her contemporary gaze. The volume begins and ends with a story connected to wishing for a child. The first story, “In the Steppe”, leads literally into the pampas, the mythical, identity-stimulating setting of the early Argentine literary tradition and links the seemingly archaic, nocturnal hunt for an unnamed creature with the longing for a baby of one’s own – a longing that can be stilled in ultramodern laboratories, and the last story, “Conserves”, which plays against precisely this backdrop, reverses the simple process as economically as expressively illustrated, and goes on to show in which direction reproductive medicine might develop next. This would not be the first time – in the broadest sense – that fantastic literature anticipates prospective developments. But Samanta Schweblin hardly wants to be pigeonholed in this area, as she confessed to the interviewer from the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel: “Reality is made up of odds and ends, which can cause a situation to tip over into sheer eeriness. The closer the fantastic is to the normal, the eerier it becomes. That’s why all my stories begin with perfectly normal situations. (…) Argentine literature criticism associates me with the tradition of Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Of course, I’m honoured. I admire their work. But I don’t think my stories qualify as fantastic literature. Since they could all happen exactly as told!”
Therefore the more long-lasting the shiver that these masterly precise and laconic stories cause in mesmerized readers. Writer and translator Angelica Ammar has paid close attention to maintaining their atmospheric density and poetic allure in her transcription of the original texts into German.
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| Birds in the Mouth |
November 20, 2013
By Shi Xi
Editor: Amanda Wu
Samanta Schweblin, one of the best young Spanish language novelists nominated by British literary magazine Granta, has visited Beijing to promote the first Chinese edition of a collection of her short stories titled Birds in the Mouth.
The collection has been translated and published by Shanghai-based publisher 99reader.
"Sometimes I hold the Chinese edition and choose a story at random and try to guess which one it is. But it is almost impossible for me; even the length is different," says Schweblin.
"When a book is translated into a Western language, I can at least understand some parts of my stories, and therefore suffer some doubt about the quality of the translation. But my Chinese edition is more like an act of faith."
Schweblin's works have been translated into 10 languages including English, French and German.
"Samanta's stories are daring and have a disconcerting beauty to them. Like a poet, she traffics in images," said Daniel Alarcon, the English translator of Schweblin's works in 2010 when the author was included in Granta's list of best young Spanish language novelists.
A Yi, a budding novelist in China, compares Schweblin's stories to Chinese paintings. "Both of them leave a lot of open space for readers' imagination."
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1978, Schweblin says she is influenced by the literary traditions of the La Plata area, which is the home to many famous Latin-American novelists, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Schweblin says she is interested in writing stories of ordinary lives where suddenly something extraordinary happens, something new, strange or unknown.
"The stranger and the unknown are not always related to zombies, ghosts or aliens, the stranger and unknown can be something related to the known world, something that actually could happen," she says.
In the title story of Schweblin's Chinese edition, Birds in the Mouth, the narrator is a divorced father who worries about his 13-year-old daughter and her mysterious appetites. His daughter, it turns out, eats live birds.
The idea for this story came to Schweblin when she was browsing the Internet, "Click, click, click, a picture of a little girl who looks frightened with her hands covering her mouth came to my eyes," says Schweblin.
"But after taking a closer look, I found her mouth under her hands was actually smiling. It was so intriguing to me that I started to think about what happened to the girl, who she is, and what she just had done. Little by little, I developed the story in my mind, and then wrote it down."
Although there are elements of violence and bloodiness in Schweblin's stories, she skillfully hides them. Schweblin says she thinks the trick to writing a thrilling story is to stop the monster from appearing, while maintaining a frightening and mysterious atmosphere.
When asked about her experience in China, Schweblin says the unfamiliar language and cities have allowed her to have more interaction with the local people, which is valuable for a writer.
"Due to the language barrier, I encountered some difficulties when getting the door pass at the place where I am staying," says Schweblin. "But now every time I pass the door, the guard will smile and give me a victory gesture."
Schweblin is currently a fellow of the DAAD Artists' Program and lives in Berlin.
About the book Birds on the Mouth
by Branko Anđić
Samanta Schweblin believes in good, interesting, encouraging literature, and is mortified by the boring one. The reader has a selection from her two collections of stories: El núcleo del disturbio and Pájaros en la boca, which are ‘dangerously close to the Utopia of perfect books’. Schweblin has become the most original and the strongest voice of modern young narrative, not only in Argentina, but perhaps in entire Latin America. Short stories of Samanta Schweblin have been translated into 15 or so languages and interest in her work, both with wider audience and in academic circles continues to grow.
In the narrative world of Samanta Schweblin, in each story about it, there is always an almost invisible crack through which her protagonists try to escape into some other, better reality that neither us as readers, nor them as characters know.
Latent suspense that follows all stories by Samanta Schweblin, even in anecdotes of seemingly trivial content, producing the constant undertone of horror or absurd, turns everyday life into a vicious circle which offers meagre chance of escape. It is suspected that each bottom is false.
The unmistakably recognisable bitter, cruel and subliminally violent world of her prose, many linked with Kafka due to its fantastic traces and Beckett-like strong taste of the literature of absurd. Hyperbole, the wonder of ‘one premise’ is followed by subtle humour, which moves across a wide register, from light irony to caustic cynicism, placed in the grey zone between illusion and extra-artistic trivial existence.
All texts by Samanta Schweblin are more than exemplary: in the manner of Raymond Carver and Gabriel García Márquez. Good use of sparse, direct language without adjectives creates the sense of false bottom, of something (menacing) unspoken and inexpressible, but deeper and more important, which despises nice language and standing still. Maybe it all just another name for literature about the core of things.
Samanta Schweblin is one of the most promising voices in modern literature in the Spanish language. I haven’t the slightest doubt that this storyteller has a brilliant career ahead of her.
Mario Vargas Llosa
This is the greatest Argentine storyteller, of any gender.
Ana María Shua, Daily newspaper Perfil
The surprise of discovering that all other arts are contained in a literary text. Schweblin is more like an experience you would have in a gallery or through an authorial film than a book taken off from some grey shelf.
Mario Bellatín
One of the most powerful voices in the new Argentine narrative: the heir to Bioy Casares.
El Mundo
One of the twenty most promising young writers in the Spanish language.
GRANTA magazine
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2002, El núcleo del disturbio
2009, Pájaros en la boca
2015, Siete casas vacías
