Meng Xiayun, Department of Foreign Languages, China Foreign Affairs University
Pacheco in his youth
Pacheco, who gave a lecture at a Mexican university in 2010
Opening the Who's Who in Contemporary Mexican Literature, José Emilio Pacheco, a poet, novelist, essayist and translator, is undoubtedly a leading figure. In 2006, Pacheco was elected an honorary member of the Mexican Language Institute. In 2009, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize for Literature, known as the "Nobel Prize for Spanish Writers", and received the evaluation that "[Pacheco] is a unique writer, the representative of the whole of our language." His works describe everyday life, express deep, free thoughts, he is adept at shaping a special world, maintaining a meaningful distance from reality, and his use of Spanish is flawless."
Pacheco was first and foremost a poet, along with the Argentine poet Juan Herman, who settled in Mexico, and octavio Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, and called the triumvirate of modern and contemporary Mexican poetry. In the 1960s, the young Pacheco emerged and began to write prolific poetry. He has published poetry collections such as "Elements of The Night", "Don't Ask Me How Time Passes", "You Will Never Return", "Work on the Sea", "City of Memories", "Quicksand" and "Sooner or Later". It includes almost all the important poetry prizes in the Spanish-speaking world, including the Octavio Paz Prize for Poetic Prose in 2003, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry in 2004, the García Lorca International Poetry Prize in 2005, and the Queen Sofia Ibero-American Poetry Prize in 2009.
Pacheco's poems are bright and clear, plain as words, without too much whitewashing, and depict the world in plain language, straight to the chest, full of mocking satire and black humor. In Pacheco's view, the poet is a critic of the times and should pay attention to and reflect on the meaning of history. Each of his poems dissects an element of everyday life in an imaginative way, carrying the value of social ethics. "What I write is what I see and hear, and what I see and hear is not optimistic." Serious reflection on social reality stems from Pacheco's constant anxiety about the living conditions of the Mexican people and a cry for the weak.
The poetry collection "From Then On" contains Pacheco's thinking on time, art, nature and human existence, believing that natural time is infinitely circulating, and human time is limited and linear, human beings are like fish in a fish tank, they cannot see the future and cannot escape the reality of the situation, there are both disasters and joys, Pacheco starts from the present world, thinking about life; The poetry collection "Watching the Earth" embodies human historical memory and emotional consciousness in the form of elegy, lamentation and hymns, records the terrible world of disaster and pain, human violence, greed and depravity, and presents the happy moments of human memory through beautiful things, moral education through verses, interprets terror with beauty, and faces the real reality with calm silence; "Memory City" is composed of urban memory built by human collective engineering and memories constructed by personal experience, and is full of grief and sorrow. Borrowing animals to satirize human beings, attack moral decay and ecological crisis, and integrate into the reflection on poetry itself, seeking the reading of poetic meaning, "I only care, witness, the present moment ... The poem I seek is like a diary with no plans and no arrangements" ("To those who may be interested"); "Moonlight Tranquility" is to link the theme of time with the changes of everything in the world, show the poet's ecological ideas through natural elements, and use irony to illustrate that human existence is fleeting, and in the face of a changing world, how to live in peace is a question that should be pondered.
As a writer, Pacheco has also written many remarkable works in the fields of novels, essays, stories, news reports and even translation. Pacheco is adept at combining historical, social, and political criticism with human emotions with his rich imagination, mockingly and playfully showing the criticism and carbuncle of the old and new eras. He believes that "literature is in a dynamic change, and writers should always maintain self-criticism", so they often repeatedly revise or even rewrite works, and thinkers are always new. Pacheco's works are broad and diverse, the style is sharp and bright, the language is concise and plain, and the ideas are profound. In his three collections of stories and two short stories, these distinctive styles are evident.
Although Pacheco has only written two novels in his lifetime: "You Will Die in the Distance" and "Fight in the Desert", it represents the wisdom of Latin American literary narrative creation. The former is Pacheco's bold attempt at a labyrinthine multifaceted narrative, creating complex structures in simple language that tells the history of the Jewish diaspora to the present day. Created in 1967, at the height of the polarization between the French new novel and the Latin American realist tradition of narrative, Pacheco bucked the trend and tried to use the theory of the historical metafiction to reconcile the two styles, personalizing and symbolically reinterpreting human history with the specific history of the characters. The labyrinth of sounds and narrative layers make reading novels more difficult and worthy of repeated scrutiny. The whole text achieves a labyrinth effect through seven divisions with different names, each sub-chapter with corresponding ideographic symbols, narrated by different narrators, sometimes even in parentheses, side notes, quotations and other forms of text, creating a three-dimensional visual narrative experience, which is a proper reflection of the catastrophic history of the Jews and even the entire human race. While expressing human suffering through complex narratives, readers also feel a firm voice conveyed by Pacheco in the novel, the compassionate and resolute cry of the displaced survivors. Pacheco helps people to reflect together on human crimes, authoritarianism, persecution, retribution, vendettas, etc., but more importantly, it is a reminder that history should not be forgotten, that the mistakes of the past should not be repeated, and that the evils of history should not be repeated.
"You Will Die in the Distance"
"Fight in the Desert"
In addition, Most of Pacheco's narrative works use the perspectives of children and youth, trying to present a vivid, noisy Mexico City. The novel "Fight in the Desert", written in 1981, is a "wonderful story of childhood and youth". Although the novel is less than seventy pages short, it encompasses many themes such as love, friendship, psychology, politics, history, and economics, and uses multiple perspectives such as children's narratives, political criticism, historical novels, and religions. While the story goes through ups and downs, it also shows a different side of Mexican society. Both in terms of creative concept and form of expression, the work has opened up a new path for latin American novels in the 1980s after the "literary explosion". Because the novel was so popular with readers, Mexican filmmaker Alberto Isaac made it into the film Mariana, Mariana in 1986, which won eight awards from the Mexican Film Academy. In addition, the Mexican rock band Cafe Tacubba also based on the story of the novel and created the song "Fight", which was included in the 1992 self-titled album.
The protagonist of the novel, Carlos, was born into a middle-class family and became infatuated with Mariana, the mother of his classmate Jim, as a child. Carlos's father's native soap factory survived in the cracks, changed several times, but failed to withstand the impact of American capital on the market, and finally declared bankruptcy, and his father also joined the U.S.-controlled soap company as an employee. There was a rush to American goods, and learning to master English was a stepping stone to the upper class. Even Mariana, whom Carlos loved, looked down on domestic goods and only bought American toys and books for her son Jim. The story takes place in Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Mexico was in a special historical period of social change, modernization shock, influx of foreign capital, and social class differentiation. The rise and fall of his family reflects the ups and downs of the fate of individuals in the torrent of social modernization. The people who lived during this period were bittersweet, seeing both the progress and development of society and the corruption and injustice of the social environment.
Carlos's parents transferred him to another school in order to get him rid of this demonic obsession. Although he had been thinking about Mariana, he had never seen her again. He regretted confessing to her because it had caused so much trouble that he had been cut off from her, and he had never regretted falling in love with her. Carlos's childhood was spent in this beautiful infatuation, unrequited love, and all the memories revolved around this fruitless love. As time went on, Carlos's family deteriorated, his siblings were sent to the United States to study one by one, and he never heard anything from Mariana again, until he met rosales, a classmate who sold chewing gum, on the street, and learned the story of Mariana's humiliating suicide because of an argument with the official's lover. This was so unbelievable to Carlos that he even went to the place where Mariana and Jim had lived, only to find that no one knew about it. He searched the building, without any trace or clue to Mariana's existence, and it seemed that everything related to her had vanished and evaporated. And carlos's memories of his first love are also scattered like smoke.
Pacheco ends the fruitless love affair with a slightly fantastical brushstroke, everything seems mysterious, and the circumstances of Mariana's death and the disappearance of information related to her make people wonder and even question whether Mariana really existed. In fact, in light of the socio-historical background and political situation created by the works, it is not difficult for us to find that all this is a true reflection of reality. The question of whether Mariana really existed is a metaphor for the confusion and deceptiveness of some of the suspenseful events in Mexican history. The author uses fantasy techniques to expose the historical truth, so that people feel the panic and uncertainty of living in an unstable and precarious social situation, only in this uncertain state will people hallucinate and question, will be like a dream, and then disappear. Pacheco borrowed Mariana's tragic fate to expose the corruption and injustice of mexico's social environment and expose the dirty corners hidden in the torrent of Mexican history.
"Fighting in the Desert" ostensibly takes the love story of the young protagonist as the main line, but in fact it explores and considers issues such as social politics, historical process, economic development, social education and religious belief. Pacheco is a writer with a humanistic mind, he strives to reflect reality and history through literature, and the tragedy of Mexico's past has become a social indictment, thus reminding the younger generation to learn from history, not to forget history, but to learn from it.
As the title of the novel says, individuals and collectives, societies and nations are all faced with a struggle in the desert. For the protagonist, it is a single-handed struggle in the desert of love, a struggle between the innocent childhood world and the hypocritical and corrupt adult world; For Mexican society, it is a struggle between traditional culture and foreign culture, a struggle between new changes and the old system, a struggle between the rich and the poor, and a struggle between old and new ideologies. However, no matter which kind of fight is not smooth, it is difficult and cruel, like a shirtless battle in the yellow sand and grassless desert.
Pacheco was not prolific in literary creation, he pursued the excellence of his works, and it became his habit to constantly update or rewrite old works. He believed that literature was a dynamic and changing thing that needed to be constantly re-examined with new perspectives, which prompted him to constantly rewrite his work and strive for self-criticism. Oviedo once described Pacheco as "in part an anthology of adaptations of his readings—a new text superimposed on other existing texts." It can be said that Pacheco is extremely elaborate and rigorous in the text and structural style of his works, and does not pursue esoteric obscurity, but maximizes the charm of language in minimalism. Both poetry and narrative works are full of figurative metaphors, vivid symbols and satire.
Pacheco is confronted with both social responsibility and self-responsibility, refusing to fall into the routine and making concessions, and he will empathize with the discrimination, injustice, and unfortunate disasters suffered by others. Some literati called him the "Prophet of Disaster", and in both poetry and narrative literature, he constantly described the real human suffering, constantly searched for answers and puzzles in the suffering, and predicted the signs of the future history of mankind, spurring people living in the reality of forgetting history. As he wrote in his poem "Sublime Betrayal": "I do not love my country. Her abstract brilliance, ethereal. But I would give my life for her side of the land, for the people, for her port, for the pine forest and the castle, for a ruined city, gray and ugly, for her historical figures, for her mountains— and three or four rivers. "The passionate Pacheco has firm self-judgment and lofty belief in the face of reality, the future, the motherland, and history, and is willing to shed his blood for justice and the life and death of the nation-state.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Luan Meng