Blood of the Dawn Read online

  THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK:

  Diamela Eltit and Antonio Muñoz Molina, for their reading, advice and generosity.

  My colleagues and friends from the literary workshops led by Diamela Eltit in NYU, especially Margarita Almada, Lorea Canales, Carolina Gallegos-Anda, Sandra García, Mar Gómez, Javier Guerrero, Felipe Hernández, Madeline Millán, Elisa Montesinos, Alejandro Moreno, Jorge Ninapayta, Joanne Rodríguez and Rubén Sánchez.

  Margarita Saona, Julio Villanueva Chang, Martín Pinedo, Leonardo Dolores and everyone at Animal de invierno, for their time and dedication.

  My parents, always.

  Ana Ribeiro, for the long road traveled. Words aren’t enough to describe how much this novel and I owe you.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  In an article in El País, Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina noted contemporary Peruvian novelists’ aptitude for creating narratives infused with historical and political reality: novels that set out to capture the real. Blood of the Dawn’s allusions to events of the recent past—some oblique, others named, but all with real-world equivalents unmistakable for Peruvian readers—make it not out of place, I don’t think, to name those events here so readers of the translation are better equipped to find out more.

  There is another reason to do so. Historian Cecilia Méndez G. has argued that, while the Shining Path insurrection has had an indelible effect on Peruvian society, it is a period that many Peruvians, especially those who live in the capital, do their utmost to forget. Dwelling on this “time of fear,”—or, for Quechua speakers, the “sasachakuy [difficult] time”—which claimed at least 70,000 lives, is too painful. The urgency of representation present in Blood of the Dawn is a courageous response to this amnesia, a demand to remember as much as an attempt to represent, a pointing toward the real as well as a transformation of that real by means of the imagination.

  So, a list: the 1983 Lucanamarca massacre, the 1985 Accomarca massacre, the 1986 prison riots and massacres (including at the women’s prison in Santa Mónica), the 1991 Barrios Altos massacre and the 1992 Tarata bombing. Reference is also made to a 1989 video that features the Shining Path leader dancing to “Zorba the Greek” with the high command.

  The Quechua words I decided not to gloss mostly represent complex ideas from the Andean cosmovision, where features of the landscape are invested with spirit. Some rough approximations: Apus are sacred mountains or powerful mountain spirits; Pachamama is something like Mother Earth; and Pachacuti is a space-time turnover, a chaotic time where everything is turned on its head after a thousand-year cycle of the earth ends and the next begins. Another Quechua term derives from Andean experiences of colonialism: the Pishtaco is a mythological bogeyman, often a white stranger, who kills Andean individuals to steal their body fat. Body fat is a sign of vitality and beauty in the Andes. Add to this the Andeans’ horror on observing the way Spanish conquistadores treated their wounds with the fat of their enemies’ corpses and you have the makings of a myth set to endure. Its modern incarnations include the belief that sugar-mill machinery uses human fat as grease—a critique of Western capitalism if ever there were one.

  Blood of the Dawn manages to compress a great deal into very little space, which has made translating it an absorbing and sometimes daunting challenge. One remarkable feature is the way a single idea is expressed twofold through content and form. For example, the plot’s focus on women as drivers of history is reflected in how their stories are told: Salazar Jiménez reminds us that language is a means of articulating systems of domination, patriarchy among them, through her steadfast refusal to use the full sentences dictated by standard grammar. In another example, Blood of the Dawn wrestles with how we might begin to represent violence in light of the physical and psychic damage it wreaks. The fragmentary nature of the narrative—its rapid switching among scenes, perspectives, grammatical tenses and persons, and especially the sections that turn away from grammatical organization almost completely—articulates the near impossibility of relating trauma while at the same time offering up an ambitious attempt to do the same.

  A key challenge in bringing across all this compressed complexity was trying to reflect the different voices of the protagonists. These voices are painted with Quechua-inflected Spanish (in sentence structure as much as vocabulary), Maoist ideology, echoes of Catholic catechism, the language of elitist prejudice and racism, and much more besides. Through the rhythm of Modesta’s voice, I hope I have conveyed something of the repetitions that call to mind predominantly oral cultures, where lodgment in the listener’s memory is often favored over economy of expression. With Marcela/Marta, I have tried to emphasize the sense of indoctrination into Shining Path ideology. For example, when the word “encarnado” (“in the flesh,” “embodied,” “personified”) is used to describe the way she exemplifies the revolution, I opted to include a biblical allusion by translating “revolución encarnada” as “the revolution made flesh” in an echo of both the 1611 and standard versions of the King James Bible, “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). Attentive readers will notice other biblical echoes throughout. And as for Melanie, where possible I included cultural references that would suit her milieu, such as when she describes the movements of a café as being like a dance. After a café-wide pause, she describes this dance as starting up again with the verb “reiniciar.” Given the dance-related metaphors of the passage and the high cultural capital of her milieu, why not use, instead of my initial thought (“resume”), the word “reprise,” which also means a repeated passage in music? In the case of the lyrics scattered through Melanie’s sections, in my translations I have privileged rhyme over, in some cases, the exact meaning. I have done this so that they are more likely to be understood as lyrics, while at the same time I have tried to ensure that the thematic echoes of the lyrics remain intact.

  The translation has benefitted from the input of many people. Thank you to Percy Cáceres Manrique for mentioning a book he’d seen on a flyer stuck to a telegraph pole in Arequipa, which he thought sounded like something I’d like to read; to the wonderful people of Herhúsið, Siglufjörður, Iceland, where I did most of the first draft of the translation; and to Jarrah Strunin and Paul Begovich for their astute suggestions. And my deepest thanks go to Claudia, for her enthusiasm, faith, generosity, and encouragement.

  A NOTE ON QUOTATIONS

  The epigraph on p. 3 is Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia’s translation of César Vallejo’s poem “Los nueve monstrous”—“The Nine Monsters”—in César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1978, p. 173.

  The quoted lines of poetry on p. 64 are also Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia’s translation of César Vallejo, this time of his “There is a man mutilated…”, which can be found on p. 29 of the abovementioned book.

  On p. 55, both the “Dicotyledonous group” and “Let’s see. Don’t let it transcend…” poetry lines are Clayton Eshleman’s translation of César Vallejo’s “V.”, in The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 2007.

  The Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Engels and Lenin quotes, used on pp. 5, 19, 36, 46, and 80 respectively, as well as the oath taken by Shining Path members on p. 46, are drawn from popular sources.

  The quote from the Shining Path Central Committee on p. 71 is my translation.

  The Andean song lyrics on p. 93 and song lyrics based on Jeremiah 10:6 on p. 67 are my translations.

  The song lyrics on p. 28 are from Charly García’s “Demoliendo hoteles” from his 1984 album Piano Bar, and are my translation.

  The song lyrics on p. 44 are from Miguel Bose’s “Amante bandido” from his 1984 album Bandido, and are my translation.

  The song lyrics on p. 94–95 are from Frágil’s “Avenida Larco” from their 1980 album Avenida Larco, and are my translation.

  CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ, born in Lima, Peru in 1976, one of the most recognized Peruvian writers of he
r generation, is also a literary critic, professor, cultural manager, and the founder of the literary journal Fuegos de Arena. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and holds a PhD from NYU. She edited the anthologies “Escribir en Nueva York” (2014) about Hispanic American Narrators and “Voces para Lilith” (2011) on contemporary South American women writers, and is also the founder and director of PERUFEST, the first Peruvian cinema festival in New York. Her debut novel Blood of the Dawn was awarded the Las Americas Narrative Prize of Novel in 2014. She also received the TUMI-USA Award in 2015. Her most recent publication is the collection of short stories Coordenadas Temporales (2016). She is currently based in New York City.

  ELIZABETH BRYER is a translator and writer from Australia. Her translations have previously appeared in Words without Borders and Overland Literary Journal, and her writing about translation has been published in Sydney Review of Books. In 2016 she curated an edition of Seizure Online, which she dedicated to translated fiction and poetry. Her creative writing has been widely anthologized in publications including The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Best Australian Science Writing.

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