Graphic Art Is the Ideal Language for Action: An Interview with Eko

July 03, 2014 in Books, Art, Interview, Latin American Literature, Translation, Graphic Novels

On June 23rd, 2014, the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Zacatecas in the Mexican Civil War, Restless Books released Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas, an epic graphic novel commemorating the pivotal victory for the División del Norte. With a story by prolific and award-winning writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II and stark illustrations by the artist Eko, this book not only depicts one of the most decisive moments of the revolution, it also profiles, in glorified action, one of the most beloved heroes of contemporary Mexico.

The cartoonist, engraver, and painter known as Eko has collaborated on projects for The New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and El País, in addition to having published numerous books in Mexico and Spain. He taps into a broad tradition of Mexican folk art with his erotic and often controversial wood etchings, which can be found on his website.

Recently, Eko was able to talk to us about the small-scale tragedies and triumphs of printmaking, José Guadalupe Posada, and what Pancho Villa would think of modern finance.

—Ilan Stavans and Jack Saul

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IS and JS: Tell us about your process for making engravings.

E: In the beginning, I think and imagine each scene. Then, I take my knife and attack the plate with furious lines, like a battle between my mind and the iron plate. I make hundreds of drawings, but taking them to the plate is a fatal process, absolute, with no return. When the drawing is finished, the plate is dipped in nitric acid and burns the drawing while its vapors invade my lungs. After some cases when you print it, it is a tragedy. In others, it’s close to the initial intention, but it’s never perfect.

How is the eBook version of Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas different from the print edition?

The difference is about mediums. You have almost the same book; the design work to adapt the format was very detailed. Maybe it’s a different kind of fetishism—the machine or the object.

What do you think of José Guadalupe Posada?

Posada to me is the first urban artist, a guerrilla for art. His work is made for the streets and the people. He uses the cheapest paper and makes his prints everyday with gossip, murders, and political criticism. Posada is the teacher of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and all those new artists. But Posada is different because he worked to the limit, in the middle of a war.

Your work interacts with both European and Mexican artistic traditions. German Expressionism (Käthe Kollwitz’s prints come to mind) and Day of the Dead imagery seem especially present. Who are your influences, aside from Posada?

Otto Dix’s The War etchings. Frans Masereel and his total black wood cuts—the constructions of his images and his notion of space. I studied Russian constructivism and Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death. I think of art as a continuum, and the epic quality of this novel demanded a dangerous language, syncretic and cruel.

Why is Pancho Villa such an icon? What is his ugly side?

The revolution is always ugly for its enemies. Villa is a rebel; he has a natural sense of justice. If Villa were alive now, he surely would make a new revolution—against the financial system, for example.

The book is based on a chapter of Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s biography of Villa. How did the idea for turning it into a graphic novel come about?

The graphic novel is about heroes and is the ideal language for action. Paco and I are a team, like the Blues Brothers.

What happened with all the civilians during the Battle of Zacatecas? They seem conspicuously absent in the book, with one panel noting that the streets were abandoned. Were they evacuated, or did they get caught up in the fight?

The Zacatecas natives have their roots from the Chichimecas, a very brave tribe. When the war fell on them they hid in the cellars. They resisted and saw rivers of blood in the streets. The bullets sounded like rain, and they starved.

The book’s last page clarifies that the book is “a mix of fiction and reality.” Isn’t everything in life that way?

Fiction is better than reality. Revolution is a chaos of blood and pain, but in the novel it has a logical order; it is a story with a conclusion.

The journalist John Reed was not present at Zacatecas, but his presence serves as a convenient stand-in for the curious reader who needs to ask questions to get acclimated. When is it inappropriate to bend reality like this?

History is a science that implies you can speculate with facts to seek the truth; Reed was a war journalist, the perfect witness.

Mexico celebrated the centennial of the revolution a few years ago. Has the revolution really ended?

The revolution is an urgent process to break our state of conformism and apathy; we need a new revolution in the collective mind. The systems are made by the powerful, and they have interests, not missions. We need a different system—more egalitarian, more human.

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Poetry Doesn't Have to Win: An Interview with Tal Nitzán

June 18, 2014 in Books, Interview, Poetry, Translation

This month, Restless Books releases At the End of Sleep, a bilingual Hebrew-English anthology of poet Tal Nitzán’s past decade of work. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Women Writers’ Prize, the Culture Minister’s Prize for Beginning Poets, and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Writers, Nitzán writes from between cultures and into both intimate and global realms.

Acclaimed and award-winning poet Robert Pinsky says, “Tal Nitzán’s poetry thrills me with its double nature, at once passionate and sardonic. It’s a pleasure to read a book of translations that have formal grace in English. It’s the formal grace that enables that dual voice, compassionate and harsh, capable of being topical and inward, heartfelt and ironic.”

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After touring Europe and arriving back at her Tel Aviv home, Nitzán took the time to answer some questions from Restless publisher and fellow Spanish translator Ilan Stavans. Here she talks about her favorite poems, literary influence, and the intersection of poetry and politics.

Ilan Stavans: Parents are not supposed to have favorite children. Do you have favorite poems of yours?

Tal Nitzán: Several are more essential and may form some sort of a poetic portrait. "The Third Child," "The Point of Tenderness," "In the Narrow Boat," and "Thus" [all of which appear in At the End of Sleep] are a few of them.

What is your relationship with the various languages you know?

I dream and write in Hebrew. I find it an ideal language for poetry.

Spanish is dear because it's the language of my parents and my childhood. Some things come to mind only in Spanish. The names of the months, for example. When I moved from Israel to Argentina as a child, in the gap between the no-longer useful language and the not-yet learnt one, I became mute. The memory of that experience remains, and has probably been a significant factor in my life.

French and Portuguese are more passive, I read and translate from them. They come alive after a few days in France or in Brazil. And English is English.

How do your poetry and your work as a translator intersect?

It's a complex relationship. Translation was almost lethal to my poetry, which preceded it. Curiously, as soon as I started translating, I stopped writing altogether. The impact of the Hispanic titans I translated – Paz, Neruda, Vallejo – turned out to be paralyzing to my own writing. They cast a shadow too large. At that early, frail phase it was too easy to silence myself and leave the stage to them. For some years I wrote their work instead of mine. It took a long process to find the way back to my own voice, to realize that it can and should be heard too. But translating has also enriched my writing, given me a wider range; for instance, I don’t know if it would occur to me to write sonnets having not translated Cervantes.

How did you come to translate Hispanic literature?

I read a poem of García Lorca, "La luna asoma" ("The Moon Comes Out") and just had to translate it. It was an imperative need: the ultimate reading of a perfect poem. Then the same happened with a book by Octavio Paz. I was studying art history at the time, and instead of writing my papers about Mannerism and Egon Schiele I'd translate poetry from Spanish. It was a criminal waste of time, and it was the most urgent thing to do. The translation of Paz has won the annual literature prize of the university. That was the largest sum I earned till then (I spent it right away on a trip to Thailand and Nepal) and I realized that this enjoyable, seemingly pointless activity, could actually be work. Soon afterwards I started translating for publishing houses.

Has Pablo Neruda been an influence in your work?

No.

How many versions of a poem do you usually generate until you consider it ready?

It varies. Many poems walk around with me for weeks or months, developing in my mind. Some are revealed complete, and I just have to write them down. And some have come as dreams – not meaning that the poem describes a dream or is inspired by it, but that I actually dreamed the text, it was written in the dream. This only happened twice.

Does writing anti-war poetry in Israel feel futile?

Yes, if poetry is regarded as an elections slogan or something of the kind.

But poetry doesn't have a duty or an external goal to achieve. It doesn't have to win, convince, influence. It doesn't even have to be loved. Will it be read and understood? Hopefully, but one doesn't ask these questions while writing. You write what you must, what screams to be written, what wouldn't let you sleep if you didn’t write it. That being said, a text that defies the false axioms and propaganda planted by those in power and echoed by the media, that plants doubts and resistance and may arouse mental insubordination, can't be futile.

Is there a connection—any connection—between Israeli and Palestinian poetry?

Unfortunately there are scarce translations of contemporary poetry on both sides, so it's hard to talk about mutual influences. As other aspects of culture and everyday life, Hebrew and Palestinian poetry exist side by side without really touching. It's one anomaly among many. These days I'm involved in the editing of a joint anthology of contemporary Palestinian and Israeli poets, to be published in France. I hope that similar projects will follow.

Does poetry matter?

Not to most of humanity. Others would find it hard to live without it. Naturally, I belong to the latter.

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Restless Women Travelers: Q&A with Lavinia Spalding

June 17, 2014 in Interview

Over the past few weeks, we've been excited to introduce you to some of the most compelling travel writing by women. This is the summer of Restless Women Travelers, and we hope that we have inspired you to go forth and adventure, or to at least to soak up the journeys of these fearless voyagers.

But just in case you haven't yet been hooked on the series, we got Lavinia Spalding, acclaimed travel writer and introducer of our new edition of Edith Wharton's A Motor-Flight Through France, to share with us her fascination with the book, her advice for visiting France, and her biggest inspirations as a writer and traveler.

RB: What will readers be surprised and delighted by in Edith Wharton's A Motor-Flight Through France?

I think what’s most surprising is how encyclopedic Wharton's knowledge was about French history and architecture. It would be tricky to compare A Motor-Flight Through France to any of today's travel memoirs—it isn't filled with the usual odes to meals or poignant interactions with locals; she doesn’t infuse the narrative with a lot of personal anecdotes. It’s really a long love letter to the country’s cathedrals and culture, small towns and byways. What’s most delightful are the gorgeous, evocative descriptions of place—both close-up and panoramic—and the rare view of this part of the world during a bygone era when cars were brand-new and travel wasn’t something anyone took for granted.

What should a first-time visitor to France be sure to do—and be sure not to do?

My standard advice for a first-time visitor to any place is to get lost on your very first day, when your sense of wonder is still peaking. In Paris (or any city in France for that matter), just wander. Make a sport out of seeing and smelling and touching and tasting absolutely everything. If you’re driving through the countryside, stop in every small town to sample the local olive oil and wine and cheese and bread. There’s really no limit to what you should do in France, and I think the only thing I’d tell you not to do is be afraid of speaking the language. There’s a misconception about the French, that they’re intolerant of hearing their language butchered, but I massacre that lovely language every time I open my mouth to speak it, and I’ve never experienced anything but warmth and graciousness as a result.

Who is your greatest travel-writing hero? If you could take a journey together, where would it be?

I have too many to name just one—and Edith Wharton is certainly in my pantheon of heroes—but I’d definitely want to visit France with MFK Fisher. And yes, I’d be in it mainly for the eating and drinking. But also for the stories—I’ve always admired how Fisher could tease out the kookiest stories from every character she encountered. I’ve also always loved Beryl Markham—her 1940s memoir West with the Night was one of the first travelogues I ever read, and it made a deep impression on me. Markham was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, and she was also one of the first bush pilots. Flying around Africa with her, admiring the animals below, would have been an extraordinary adventure. Finally, if I get to pick a contemporary, it would be Alexandra Fuller, because I know I’d never stop laughing. In addition to being a truly brilliant writer with a breathtaking talent for capturing both place and people, she’s one of the most hilarious human beings alive.

Launch event at Edith Wharton's The Mount:

On Sunday, June 22, we'll be hosting a very special book launch for the first title in our series, Edith Wharton's A Motor-Flight Through France. The event will take place at The Mount—Edith Wharton's gorgeous home in the Berkshires. Beginning at 5:30, we'll have a short reading by Lavinia Spalding, conversation, and cocktails on the patio overlooking Wharton's gardens, with fellow readers, writers, and travelers. We hope to see you there!