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PROLOGUE

One breezy August afternoon in the village of Cashiers, North Carolina, I accompanied my mother to the local library. Despite a population of some 200 souls, the library is impressive and well-sponsored by the families who spend their summers in the mountains. They had received donations of estate books as part of the civic tradition of raising funds for community projects and we went to browse through what was available. A book edited by Whit Burnett—idea by John Pen—caught my eye, titled This Is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selection. As I flipped through the pages, I began to realize what an extraordinary piece of literary history it was. Published by Dial Press in 1942, the editor had asked the influential writers of the time to “edit their entire lifetime output to select the one unit which in their own, uninfluenced opinion represents their best creative moment. A book composed over many years, the focusing of many lifetime viewpoints, a public revelation of the private opinions of our best authors on how they look upon themselves, and what, in their writings, they most value.”

The introduction explains that neither T. S. Eliot nor Gertrude Stein were able to contribute because they were in Europe (this was 1942). However, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, a trove of writers, thinkers, poets and philosophers contributed by selecting their own favorite writing. Some took the exercise to be a form of torture, but made the effort. John Dos Passos wrote that “The pages in past books you remember so vividly as having turned out well have a way of going sour on you when you look them up again.” Booth Tarkington considered that “There are few writers, and they are to be envied for their youth, who can be fond concerning works of their own construction already in cold print.”

Others were quite pleased to be asked. William Saroyan boasted outright “I have little use for any other kind of writing, unless it is my own, in which case I am devoted to the stuff.” Dorothy Parker, in pure Parkerian finesse, responded: “Now what is a writer to say about a sample of his own work? If he takes one course, he’s simpering. If he goes the opposite way, he’s Saroyan. It may be that I felt a certain maternal obligation to say a few words in its favor. Nobody else did.”

I found it fascinating that Lillian Hellman contributed a piece from her trip to Valencia, circa 1937. “This part is about Spain during the Civil War. I hope these people are alive, that they will live to see a better day.” And John Dewey, engaged in a study of Adolf Hitler’s writing and speeches predicted Hitler’s failure: “His views and his practice rest upon the lowest kind of estimate of the capacities of human nature. The moral source of his final defeat will be just this total lack of faith. For the foundation of a pacified and unified Europe is the discovery by European peoples of the true nature of the democratic ideal and of the democratic methods by which alone the ideal can be made effective.” Seems like forever ago, although in historical terms this happened just yesterday.

I found the anthology captivating not only because of the peculiar historical context of the pieces chosen, which gives a panorama of American literature and thought at a crucial moment in time, but also because through comparing the voices of the writers presenting their own work, one glimpses the vast differences in styles and ways in which each one approached writing. Oddly, the more I spoke with friends about the find, the more I realized that in fact it was still available in many libraries both personal and public. Carlos Fuentes, upon receiving the invitation to this project, responded by saying that he was pleased to be a part of the Spanish language version, since it brought back happy memories of his own father’s library.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay History that there is one mind common to all individual men and therefore the whole of history exists in one man, all of history lies folded into a single individual experience: “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” He also wrote that “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. As we read, we must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience.” A little bit like taking a walk through Baudelaire’s forest of symbols that nod to all men in understanding.

As an American who has spent half a life in Spain working in publishing, I had long specialized in providing authors in translation for a Spanish language audience. So I found the idea of putting together a Spanish language version of this anthology a fascinating proposal for a literary adventure through some of the most celebrated writing in the language during the second half of the twentieth century. To root out the acorn, the kernel, the driving obsession of a writer, of knowing what he or she, in the quiet of their study, considers the best representation of that obsession. To listen to the individual voices and fasten the images to some reality in my secret experience, walk among the nodding symbols; to be a lonely child growing up in Peru, a young man in Madrid whose lover dies in bed before they can consummate the act, a painter in Tahiti who finds inspiration on a stormy night, or a mother who chooses power over love for her son’s future in a world of magical creatures. Perhaps, by living out these secret experiences, I might discover some occult map of the forest by its trees.

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn is much less ambitious in size and scope than Whit Burnett’s original. I suppose it is fitting for the new century and much could be and is being written on the current state of attention spans. Here there are 28 writers and they are all narrators of fiction. It’s worth noting that this in no way should be considered a canon, not even a personal one, but simply a selection of some of the important writers of the twentieth century who have been awarded prizes and widely acclaimed and celebrated in their countries. Space would never allow me to include all the writers whose work I admire and there are writers who would be considered more or less canonical who are not here, many of whom were invited but who were not able to participate—Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando del Paso, Fernando Vallejo, César Aira, José Emilio Pacheco, and William Opsina, among others. Sadly, others were invited whom we have lost before the process could begin, namely Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Daniel Sada. The late Carlos Fuentes was one of the last writers with whom I had the opportunity to work, his words having now passed into literary history.

By this I want to say that readers should not find scandal in the fact that one or another writer is not included since the selection openly assumes the multiple limitations of time and space, and the inevitable tendencies of a reader who is of the feminine sex, born in New York in 1963, who has had a more or less constant interest in Spanish language writing, and who has lived in Barcelona for the past 20 years. This is the work of an investigative reader, accompanied by the writers who have kindly allowed themselves to be carried away by the enthusiasm of a literary adventure. Here, the writers are the specialists in their own work, and my job as editor has been that of compiling the work chosen by the authors themselves.

Organized chronologically by age beginning with the Argentine writer Aurora Venturini, who received a prize from Borges as a girl and from young readers just recently, the anthology gathers the work of some of the best writers in the Spanish language of the second half of the twentieth century. The youngest writer included, Evelio Rosero, was born in 1958. The premise is that the younger the writer, the more difficult it is to think that they have already written their best pages. If the anthology is to comply with a function of being a historical document, at least the bulk of the writers should be able to choose something that might be considered the best writing of their entire career.

Each writer constitutes a chapter of their own, which is divided into three parts. The first part, titled “The Torture of Doctor Johnson” subjects the writer to the pain of selection alluded to earlier in this introduction by Dos Passos and Tarkington. Dr. Johnson wrote that “The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.” So here it becomes even more torturous when it is the writer who must speak the truth about themselves and their own work. A few of the writers found it particularly troubling; Eduardo Mendoza, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Hebe Uhart, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, but they were all good sports in the end, so much the better for us.

The second section is titled “In Conversation with the Dead,” which comes from Quevedo’s celebrated sonnet: Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos / con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos / vivo en conversación con los difuntos / y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos. This section gives us the opportunity to know more about the influences, the traditions of each author, about the departed friends—writers, thinkers, poets, philosophers—who have marked or impacted their work or whom they have read and reread and “converse” with creatively.

The third section is a coda meant to bring out some of the peculiarities of each writer’s work and intentions since, as Katherine Anne Porter mentioned in the English version of the anthology: “an author’s choice of his own work must always be decided by such private knowledge of the margin between intention and the accomplished fact.” Here I nudge a little, ask a few more pesky questions to round out the information provided in the first and second sections.

Reading the series of presentations followed by the selections themselves, together in one volume, provides an interesting mirror to the events that shaped the authors’ lives and how their writing was particularly affected, and consequently, the larger context of literature in the language. Blending the writers not by country but by chronology offers a sense of the march of literature on both continents, and follows the ebb and flow of the wider events both political and literary, the cultural traffic moving back and forth from each side of the Atlantic, the exiles and diasporas resulting from a century of turbulence. One can clearly see the devastating effects of the Franco regime, writers who had to exile or publish in other countries or self-censor, or who limited themselves to realism as the best means for denouncing the state of affairs at the time. Paris looms as more than a mere legend, here it is virtually a protagonist, a literary motherland for the lost tribe: the hub first for the Spanish writers seeking an atmosphere in which they could write, but also a city of refuge for Latin American writers fleeing instability or martial law during the ’70s. William Faulkner looms large as, to quote Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” García Márquez invoked him as “maestro” when he received the Nobel Prize and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that “Without the influence of Faulkner, Latin America would not have had the modern novel. The best writers read him and, like Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo, Cortázar and Carpentier, Sabato and Roa Bastos, García Márquez and Onetti, knew how to take advantage of his teachings, like Faulkner himself took advantage of the technical mastery of James Joyce and the subtleties of Henry James, among others, to build his splendid narrative saga.” He is one of the departed friends most cited, also by Ramón Pinilla, whose Getxo, an imaginary microcosm, can be seen as a Basque version of Yoknapatawpha.

Most of the conversations were done in person and I have very fond memories of the afternoon spent with Javier Marías in his home in Madrid, taking down books from the shelves of his library, looking up translations of Nabokov and searching for the origin of his “luna pulposa”; and of Antonio Muñoz Molina in a coffee shop on a very hot August afternoon, also in Madrid, talking about memory and literature and Mágina, how time in the south of Spain jumped a century in the year after Franco died. And the animated conversation with Ana María Matute in her home in Barcelona where we spoke about Medieval literature, Arthurian lore, the limits of realism, and the difficulties of having been an intelligent woman at a time when nice girls didn’t go to college. Cristina Fernández Cubas, who met with me in one of her favorite spots in the Eixample, was a sparkling conversationalist, entertaining with delightful turns of phrase and a passionate defense of the short story, and Enrique Vila-Matas whose literary playfulness on the page is but a manifestation of the erudite writer. I strolled the Ramblas with Juan Goytisolo to buy a newspaper after spending some time chatting in the salon of Hotel Oriente, and had drinks with Carlos Fuentes in the Hotel Majestic, who spoke using his flawless English to honor the original anthology and his father’s library. I spent an afternoon with Juan Marsé in his home remembering the original “Teresa in Paris” and wild Monte Carmelo back in the day, with Esther Tusquets talking about Virginia Woolf, shared 5 o’clock champagne (on more than one occasion) and secret milongas with Edgardo Cozarinsky, enjoyed a bookstore café with Abilio Estévez who recreated the nostalgia of his pre-exile times in Cuba, delighted in the cultivated exchanges at dinner and lunch with Jorge Edwards in Madrid and Mallorca, in tequilas and taxis with Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Mexico. There were many long and repeated conversations by telephone with Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio who started out gruff and imposing but who grew more and more endearing with every conversation. Ramiro Pinilla’s delightful humbleness before his own monumental achievement and impressive command of American literature, and the list goes on.

As in Burnett’s anthology in which Hemingway sent a note from Cuba asking to include the story A Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber instead of others that had been until then the fodder of all school children, so A Thousand Forests in One Acorn has had some interesting surprise responses. For example, Mario Vargas Llosa chose a fragment of The Way to Paradise (El paraíso en la otra esquina) instead of Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral) or The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) as I or many others might have expected. Carlos Fuentes decided upon a fragment of Terra Nostra instead of something from his highly celebrated The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz) or beloved Aura. Or the discovery that Vila Matas has a story in Explorers of the Abyss (Exploradores del abismo) that he considers to be highly representative of his deepest literary obsessions.

Four years of work and many hands went into this project. It has been a literary adventure to be sure and there are myriad interesting conclusions that can be drawn, and I suspect more than one occult map of the forest to be revealed for the discerning reader. But I will leave that to each individual to decipher according to his own secret experiences, to find the thousand forests in his own acorn. This is not meant to be a curated experience, but one of discovery and even self-discovery. The objective is to provide a direct connection between the reader and some of the writers who have left a mark on the history of literature in the Spanish language, who have played an essential role in painting with words and years of trade its many moods, its various colors, its diverse aspects, its rich landscape, its history, and tradition.

It would make me very pleased if some day far into the future, someone would donate a copy of this anthology to a local library, and perhaps thereby allow it to fall by chance into the hands of a reader who finds in it a pathway into the nodding forest of letters. My wish is that she enjoy this reading adventure through Spanish language literature at the hands of its writers and recognize that she has been touched by a project whose idea goes all the way back to New York in 1942 when T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein couldn’t send their contributions for the U-boats.

Happy reading!

Valerie Miles

Barcelona, Spain

May 17, 2012