Contemporary Authors

• Tomb Song ( novel) Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2018

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079LF9CHH/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

  Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of several poetry collections, a novel, a story collection, and a book of reportage. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.

QUOTED: "sometimes inelegant but deeply observed; a welcome arrival by a writer worth paying attention to."

Herbert, Julian: TOMB SONG
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Herbert, JuliAaAaAeA n TOMB SONG Graywolf (Adult Fiction) $16.00 3, 6 ISB 978-1-55597-799-3
A melancholy coming-of-age story, the American debut of Mexican writer Herbert.
Narrated in the first person, Herbert's novel tells the story of a no-longer-quite-young man who attends to his mother as she lies dying of leukemia. "It's her fault you're white trash," he reflects, quickly correcting himself: "but you're not white, you're a barefoot Indian a darkskin with a foreign name a biological joke a dirty mestizo and yes, yes: a piece of trash." MamAaAaAeA has her faults, to be sure: she h spent her working years as a working girl using various pseudonyms, and the narrator's siblings are all the products of different fathers ("My elder sister, Adriana, is the bastard daughter of Isaac Valverde, an exceptional businessman and pimp") who figured in her life in one way or another. Once passionate in his hatred for her, the narrator now inclines to a little more pity for the shriveled, exhausted figure on the hospital bed, "bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event." The narrator's tale jumps back and forth in time, recounting episodes in his life with MamAaAaAeA , who once kicked him hard so that he would have a brui to show off to the cops when complaining about an assault by a neighborhood kid. If anything, it reveals that the acorn doesn't fall far from the encino; MamAaAaAeA may not be a model of virtue, but her kid is fond of smoki crack, even in the bathroom of her hospital room, and of rough and unloving sex. Along the way, Herbert ventures pointed critiques at Mexican society, as when he notes that because of an error, MamAaAaAeA h to have two death certificates: "What better homage could Mexican bureaucracy pay to a fugitive from her own name?"
Sometimes inelegant but deeply observed; a welcome arrival by a writer worth paying attention to
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"Herbert, Julian: TOMB SONG." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735845/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0965ab95. Accessed 26 May 2018.
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• Bomb Magazine
  https://bombmagazine.org/articles/julian-herbet-tomb-song/
  Word count: 966

  The Frays of Life: On Julián Herbert’s Tomb Song by Hunter Braithwaite

  Autofiction that explores the borderland between memoir and vision quest.

  Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
  Mar 29, 2018

  Review
  Literature

  Circles of Influence by Rosa Inocencio Smith
  Frode Tiller 01
  Herbert Tombsong Banner

  Guadalupe “Lupita” Chávez Moreno lies dying. Her “best-loved and most-hated” son, the writer and musician Julián Herbert, is at her side. “I write to learn to watch her die,” he says, a simple sentence with four verbs: three his, one hers. That ratio seems about right. Herbert is not just watching her die, from acute myeloid leukemia, there in room 101 of the Saltillo University Hospital. Not just cleaning her and feeding her, administering her medicine. He also writes about her years as a prostitute and how he spent his childhood dodging rapists in the shadows of a brothel. From there, he springboards into details about narco-terror, gunshot friends, and cocaine addiction, amongst other things.

  Though Tomb Song (Graywolf Press), Herbert’s English debut, is a work of autofiction, this slight novel’s strength emerges when it veers away from fidelity, reveling in banal, abject, fantastic artifice. The effect is striking for a genre that is so often yoked to the stuff of upper-middle-class domestic realism—lives that are, by and large, like those of their readers. Part of autofiction’s success lies in this mirroring (Lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère…). Yet while reading narratives so close to our own might be expanding, there is a limit: a seldom-crossed border beyond which things truly get strange.

  In the novel, Herbert expressly disagrees with Oscar Wilde’s notion that “writing autobiographically diminish[es] the aesthetic experience,” surmising instead that “only the proximity and impurity of the two zones can produce meaning…” The proximate and impure blend of autobiography and aesthetics is the plot, and structure, of Tomb Song itself. Take the first section, the title of which—“I Don’t Fuckin’ Care About Spirituality”—is an example of Christina MacSweeney’s nimble translation job. In it, passages about his mother’s illness are spliced with asides and subplots involving rock bands, a local soccer team, and the above-mentioned rhetorical questions. This oscillation invigorates the death narrative, making it less a text about dying than about having lived, all the while deepening the more irreverent passages with a thanatotic bassline. It helps to visualize that old children’s toy: a coin on a string with a bird on one side and a cage on the other.
  Tomb Song

  The second section of the book opens in the Mandala hotel in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, where Herbert has been invited to visit, along with his pregnant wife Mónica. She “woke at eight in the morning. I should have written woke. In fact I’m writing, hurriedly, from a plane over the Atlantic.” Herbert gleefully mangles narrative time, as if to say, look, I’ve escaped. “Whenever you write in the present… you’re generating a fiction, an involuntary suspension of grammatical disbelief.” And yet, a few sentences later: “I always narrate in the present in the hope of finding velocity.” This escape velocity propels him from home and from the confines of the narrative into long digressions about say, Mexico’s role in World War II, and how that relates to the architecture of his mother’s hospital. He is propelled out of reality itself. Counterintuitively, this approach gets at how reality actually feels, especially along the frays of life: rough-edged like travel, like grief.

  While Herbert is in Berlin, Lupita comes down with a fever that, through the writer, gets transmitted to the book. Take this hallucinatory catalogue: “Mystical Purity. Thomas Mann spying on adolescents in the lobby of a Zurich hotel and Alexis Texas modeling fluorescent swimwear for Bang Bros and Vincent Vega dancing with Mia Wallace, internally connected to the syringe.” Herbert turns to Emil Cioran, via addiction: “The real inconvenience of having been born doesn’t lie in some unified meaning that can be narrated. It is rather this perpetual cold turkey of structure, these withdrawal symptoms of signification.” We see the writer ripping formal convention from the racks, vamping in the mirror, and then tossing it all off, leaving the changing room a mess.

  Two late scenes see him tiring of this “perpetual cold turkey of structure,” autofictive or otherwise. In an opium-fueled bacchanalia followed by a lot of anal sex with Renata, a local news weather-girl, we see more Bolaño and Bataille than the Ben Lerner-Rachel Cusk-Maggie Nelson axis, if only because he admits to making the whole thing up. “So, from inside fever or psychosis, it’s relatively valid to write an autobiographical novel in which fantasy has set up camp. What’s important is not that the events are true: what’s important is that the illness or madness is. You have no right to toy with other people’s minds unless you’re ready to sacrifice your own sanity.” Herbert just says he’s ready to sacrifice his sanity, he doesn’t say he does. It’s the reader who is left in the borderland between memoir and vision quest. At once a thrilling document of lives spent along the margins, and a bright burst of formal reinvention, Tomb Song remains elegiac and life-affirming.

  Hunter Braithwaite was the founding editor of The Miami Rail. His writing has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, and The Paris Review Daily. Currently, he is the editorial director of Affidavit.

  latin american literature postmodernism novels translation memoir experimental writing mexican culture

  Related

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/tomb-song-a-novel
  Word count: 899

  Tomb Song: A Novel

  By Julián Herbert; translated by Christina MacSweeney Graywolf Press 208 pp.

  Reviewed by Jenny O’Grady
  March 19, 2018

  Dazzling language and a sympathetic (if unreliable) narrator elevate this autobiographical tale.

  In the introduction of the new English translation of Tomb Song, Mexican author Julián Herbert explains that as a child he simply couldn’t believe the world was round. He casually blames this on his mother, a career prostitute, and on the fact that he and his family of half-siblings traveled constantly “because of her hysterical life crisscrossing the whole blessed country in search of a house or a lover or a job or happiness, none of which have ever existed in this Sweet Nation.”

  As a teen observing the neighborhood trainyard in motion, he is struck by the sudden realization of his mistake. Life is much more fluid than he thought — and memories, as well. And we all search madly, and often unsuccessfully, for the same things his mother sought.

  Set against the backdrop of his mother’s on-again, off-again hospitalization for leukemia, Herbert’s autobiographical novel drags his readers through a dream-like, drug-infused tour of pinnacle points of his life, interspersed with musings on the successes and failures of his career as a writer, son, and father.

  Fidgeting in his mother’s hospital room, faced with the indignities of her illness, he drives himself to memory partly out of boredom, and partly to escape truths he can’t quite accept. We learn about his eccentric but brilliant mother’s five husbands and the children these unions produced.

  We learn about the seedy neighborhoods they lived in, the friends and father figures who come into their lives as she moves between brothels, and Herbert’s troubled relationships with women and his own children.

  Among his Spanish-speaking fan base, Herbert is known for his dazzling language, and this, his English debut translated lovingly by Christina MacSweeney, does not disappoint. Simultaneously gorgeous and dirty, he brings us poignant moments of beauty only to quickly destroy them with the filth lurking naturally behind. This is his life — driven by opium one moment, by love or sense of duty the next — and how he chooses to see, feel, and write it.

  As much as Tomb Song reads like a disjointed memory maze, the format feels appropriate for a man whose life so closely resembles his mother’s. In a section titled “Fever,” Herbert spins a weird tale of sex, drugs, and writing conference after-parties, only to later take it all back. It was all a lie, he says — the fabrication of a week-long fever that suddenly blurs his past and present.

  In one of her more fragile moments in the cancer ward, his mother tells him about her life after his grandfather’s death (and her memory of the lights of “La Habana” at night), and while realizing he’s “her only apostle, the sole evangelist of her existence” and steward of her life story, Herbert also admits to himself: “I no longer know if it’s the fever or my mother speaking.”

  Time and truth are troublesome in Tomb Song. It’s easy to excuse the inconsistencies of Herbert’s memory; he often succumbs to his addictions or his ego, and he’s also digging out from beneath the grief and confusion of his mother’s ailment, so he’s as unreliable a narrator as they come.

  He has at least once attempted suicide. He’s a bit of a lovable rogue but also earnestly excited to have a new child on the way. Perhaps this is why it makes so much sense to present these lives and events as a fiction.

  “Whenever you write in the present...you’re generating a fiction, an involuntary suspension of grammatical disbelief,” he explains within his own novel. “I always narrate in the present in the hope of finding velocity. This time I’m doing it in the hope of finding consolation, while I perceive the progress of the plane through the sky as a free fall into an abyss on pause.”

  Whether we trust him or not, the stories weave elegantly. And whether you like him as the protagonist or not, his performance leaves you intrigued and invested. That personality plays out as he accepts “the challenge of conquering a certain level of beauty: achieving a rhythm despite the sound-proofed vulgarity that is life.”

  In other words, life is beautiful and not beautiful. And Herbert, like anyone who approaches his problems creatively, can re-frame, or rationalize, or take what’s terrible and precious and either deal with it or run away. As he ponders the end of one life, the beginning of another, and the failures that have brought him to this place in time, he chooses to stay and examine it.

  Love rises above truth. And in the end, he can offer “a love encoded in words.”

  Jenny O’Grady edits UMBC Magazine by day and the Light Ekphrastic by night. She also makes strange books from beans and Shrinky Dinks and whatever else catches her fancy.
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• The Lit Pub
  http://thelitpub.com/tomb-song-a-novel-by-julian-herbert/
  Word count: 824

  QUOTED: "Readers looking for a current, honest, and unique novel or fans of Ben Lerner, Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin, and even Roberto Bolaño, will find a lot to love in Tomb Song."

  Tomb Song: A Novel by Julían Herbert
  02/25/18

  Julián Herbert’s mother is dying from cancer in the Saltillo University Hospital. He sits by her side, keeping notes, remembering her life as a runaway and a prostitute, cataloging their family’s slow ascent into the middle class, sharing, at times, in her fever dreams. His bedside thoughts become the novel Tomb Song, a piece of lucid autofiction that finds its structure in association and metaphor more than in any conventional plot. In one chapter, we move from the history of the small fighter squadron Mexico committed to World War 2, to the construction and architecture of the University Hospital itself, to eavesdropping on two orderlies having sex in the morgue in the present day. In Tomb Song, the present serves as more than a framing device, it constantly resurfaces with acute descriptions of Julián’s mother’s failing body and the machines attached to it, of the Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy, of Julián’s own excursions around the complex. Though any small association can lead from the present to a memory, or story, or dream, we always return, eventually, to the reality of the hospital room, the helpless son, the dying mother.

  The primary point of departure from other contemporary autofiction like Knausgaard or Lerner, is Tomb Song’s willingness to abandon the truth. Specifically, Julián seems interested in the corrosive effect that narcotics and fevers have on both actual and narrative reality. During an opiate binge in Cuba, we are introduced to a degenerate artist named Bobo Lafrauga, who Julián follows to a bar called El Diablito. We later learn that Bobo was the intended protagonist to a novel that Julián scrapped when his mother fell ill, that Bobo and El Diablito are aborted fictions blurred into autobiography. In one breath, Julián will describe a prolonged, heated affair with a television weather woman and in the next he’ll claim that none of it was true. Fiction and non-fiction intersect in this way throughout much of the novel and Julián is always present to help or hinder the distinction between the two.

  The associative propulsion from one tangent to another, from the real to the unreal, is often smooth but, due to the distractibility of the narration, topics are sometimes dropped before they have a chance to develop into anything substantial. Micronarratives start off focused then wander. In one instance, Julián remembers what he characterizes as his complicity in the death of a neighborhood boy and how this complicity has haunted him. He then steps back, describes how his family had come to live in the area and only later mentions that the extent of his involvement, in what turns out to be an accidental killing, was that he was there when the murdered boy’s brother bought the gun. There is little reflection here to guide the reader to understand Julián’s self-blame. The benefits of fiction could be used, in instances like this, to enhance these tapering anecdotes or to better calibrate suspense.

  Early in the novel, Julián takes stock of the state of fiction while setting a challenge for himself, saying: “we demand it (narrative art) be ordinary without cliché, sublime without any unexpected change of accent.” The real achievement of Tomb Song lies in Julián’s solution to this paradox: his narrative voice. Throughout Tomb Song, we have access to Julián’s lucid, honest, perspective. His voice provides continuity and allows for beautiful and unusual motifs (including a particularly strange sea cucumber metaphor). Though the subject matter is often clinical and bleak, and though he is far from the first narrator to wax poetic by the side of a deathbed, Julián provides so many fresh perspectives, analogies, and turns of thought as to make avoiding cliché in such weighty moments seem simple. It should be noted that it is Christina Macsweeney’s excellent translation deftly brings Julián’s pin-point word choice to English.

  In Tomb Song Julián Herbert draws unexpected associations between dozens of disparate topics, stories, observations, and dreams. In the last chapters, from this kaleidoscopic fabric, a larger picture takes shape, a unique perspective on life and the living of it. Readers looking for a current, honest, and unique novel or fans of Ben Lerner, Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin, and even Roberto Bolaño, will find a lot to love in Tomb Song.
  Joseph R. Worthen
  Joseph R. Worthen is a freelance writer from South Carolina. His work has appeared in Hobart, Bodega, Wag’s Revue and more.
  You might also like

• The Paris Review
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/05/an-interview-with-julian-herbert-and-christina-macsweeney/
  Word count: 3059

  QUOTED: "I got to play with layers. ... There’s Julián the author, Julián the narrator, and Julián the character. It’s a metafictional hall of mirrors. I needed to write it that way. The story was so painful that I was afraid of blackmailing the reader with my pain. I needed distance to avoid that and to give the reader a complete literary experience, which is always my goal. Finally, I think if I criticize my technique within the story, it helps me make the story better. I hope so, anyway."

  An Interview with Julián Herbert and Christina MacSweeney
  By Lily Meyer March 5, 2018
  At Work

  Julián Herbert began the book that made him famous while he was sitting in his mother’s hospital room. She was dying of leukemia, and as he cared for her, he wrote what became one of the most heralded literary experiments in the Spanish language in decades, Canción de tumba (2014). An English translation of the book, Tomb Song—an exceptional work of metafiction and autofiction—is out this week from Graywolf Press. There is, certainly, no way for a reader to know how to divide fact from fiction. A tender conversation between the narrator and his pregnant wife could be invented; a wild hallucination in Havana could be the truth. There’s no way to know.

  Fiction or not, Tomb Song is clearly a work of self-examination. As the narrator describes his itinerant childhood, his mother’s work as a prostitute, and the fracturing of his atypical family, he seems to be looking in the mirror. And yet Tomb Song is more like “a hall of mirrors,” as Herbert said to me. Once you start seeking facts, you’ll be looking forever.

  I came to Tomb Song through its translator, Christina MacSweeney, whose work I began seeking out after I read her translations of another great Mexican experimentalist, Valeria Luiselli. Like Herbert, MacSweeney is devoted to voice. When I spoke with them, both told me how vital it is for them to read their work aloud.

  I conducted these interviews over email. Julián Herbert’s answers to me were in Spanish, which I’ve translated into English below.

  INTERVIEWER

  This is in large part a book about literary craft, and yet one of the narrator’s first statements is, “My literary technique is lamentable.” Why open the book that way?

  HERBERT

  To set a precedent. I wanted to let the reader know that authorial interventions like this would appear throughout the novel. I wanted to play with point of view—how it works and how you can use it to create fiction with technique, rather than with meaning. Harold Bloom says that in Shakespearean monologues, the character listens to him- or herself by accident. I tried to have my first-person narrator listen to himself by accident. I got to play with layers, too. There’s Julián the author, Julián the narrator, and Julián the character. It’s a metafictional hall of mirrors. I needed to write it that way. The story was so painful that I was afraid of blackmailing the reader with my pain. I needed distance to avoid that and to give the reader a complete literary experience, which is always my goal. Finally, I think if I criticize my technique within the story, it helps me make the story better. I hope so, anyway.

  INTERVIEWER

  So this is a novel? Lots of critics seem unsure, and there’s no way for a reader to know.

  HERBERT

  To me, this is a novel. A nonfictional novel, most of the time, though there are some fictional elements. But the protagonist—my mother, Guadalupe—was real. She was a prostitute, and she died of leukemia. Why does it matter if the particular events around her happened in this world or not?

  I think novels are novels because of technique, not because the content is made up. I wrote Tomb Song using a novelist’s tools—prolepsis and analepsis, digression, a plot twist that lasts three decades, plenty of characters. It’s always been strange to me that some Spanish-language critics insist that Tomb Song is a memoir and that my other book, The House of the Pain of Others, is a novel. To me, that book is a mix of reportage and narrative history. But honestly, I don’t lose sleep over this. I’ve always written between genres.

  INTERVIEWER

  Christina, does it matter to you, as a translator, whether this book is a novel?

  MACSWEENEY

  I was aware that there are biographical elements in Tomb Song, but also that the veracity of some of those elements is constantly undermined. So for me, that exploration of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction was more important than trying to categorize the work. Tomb Song is a piece of very creative writing and that was the basis of my approach to the translation.

  INTERVIEWER

  Julián, how did you develop “Julián the narrator’s” voice? How different is it from yours?

  HERBERT

  I wrote the first thirty or forty pages in less than a week, sitting by my mother’s hospital bed, though I didn’t know I was writing a novel. It was a long, confessional letter to Mónica, my former wife. Once I saw that it could be the material for a novel, my process changed. To get that transparent effect, you can’t just write anymore. I had to work hard on the voice. I had to correct, consider, calculate. Editing each paragraph took me hours.

  INTERVIEWER

  And Christina, how long did it take you to get the English voice right? How long does it usually take before you hear a Spanish text’s voice in English?

  MACSWEENEY

  I think voices develop as I progress, and if things are going well, I have a kind of yes moment somewhere in the first chapters when I know I’m on the right track. In Tomb Song, I loved the switches in register, and they were very helpful in moving from one narrative voice of the novel to another. But Julián certainly kept me on my toes as a translator in this work.

  INTERVIEWER

  What is your take on the question of fidelity in translation?

  MACSWEENEY

  That whole issue of fidelity is a thorny area. Apart from anything else it somehow denies the creativity involved in writing a text in another language. I prefer to think of it in terms of responsibility. I have a responsibility to the author, the text, and to future readers. Meaning is clearly very important, but by that I’m referring to the overall meaning rather than individual words. We translate texts in the same way as we understand language, in chunks of meaning that interact with one another.

  For me personally, I’m particularly interested in finding the music and rhythms in a text, capturing the voices of different characters. This means that speaking what I write aloud is an integral part of the process. In general, my translation process starts with a careful reading of the text, to get a feel of the rhythms and tempos. When I start getting words onto paper, then I try to keep my knowledge of the content at the back of my mind and react to the text as I write. I do a lot of research. In Tomb Song, it was very important to be aware of the authors and texts Julián refers to either explicitly or by implication, so it was a pleasure to go back to books like The Magic Mountain and Three Trapped Tigers, both of which I love but haven’t read for some years.

  INTERVIEWER

  Julián, speaking of those authors and texts, who were your major influences?

  HERBERT

  Plato. Kafka, for the humor. In Mexican schools when I was younger, we read Kafka, but it was all about darkness and suffering. These qualities of his are present, but the teachers never talked about his incredible sense of humor. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde was my first model for Tomb Song. Thomas Mann and Guillermo Cabrera Infante are very obvious influences. Less obvious are Sergio Pitol, Truman Capote, the memoirs of the actress and courtesan Irma Serrano. And when I think about point of view, I’m always thinking about Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.

  But the most important influence on the voice in Tomb Song, I think, comes from a French movie, Betty Blue by Jean-Jacques Beineix. There’s a scene in which two couples are getting ready for a picnic when one of the characters—a man in his forties—finds out, over the phone, that his mother has died. He’s despondent. He sits on the bed and cries. His friends are trying to console him, and his watch alarm starts ringing. The watch has Mickey Mouse on it, and the alarm is some dumb song. All four of them look at each other and start laughing, and crying, and laughing. That’s my novel.

  INTERVIEWER

  I love the way Tomb Song moves further from the hospital with every chapter. How did you decide that should happen? And why did you choose Berlin and Havana?

  HERBERT

  First, the book needed to travel. I needed open spaces to balance out the parts where the narrator is trapped in the hospital. Second, my mother was vaguely communist when she was younger, and I wanted to show her political ideals decaying along with her body—so where better than Berlin and Havana? There’s a parallel, too. My mother always dreamed about Havana. It was her Xanadu. Berlin is mine. Also, I was stalling. When my mother died in 2009, I was devastated. I wasn’t capable of writing her death. I wanted to keep her here. I wanted her ghost to accompany me through my grief, even if she was only in the realm of fiction, and so I spent all of 2010 writing the trips to Berlin and Havana. Those passages have really divided critics. Some think they’re indulgent, others think they give the novel the space it needs. What I can say is that it was the only honest way I could find to write the book, and I think that without those digressions, the final goodbye between the mother and the son would have lost some of its power.

  INTERVIEWER

  What was it like to return to Tomb Song years after you wrote it? What parts of the book have stuck with you most?

  HERBERT

  A lot of the prose has stuck with me. There are whole passages I still know by heart because I went over them so many times. I edit slowly, and I write out loud. I need to hear the cadence of every phrase. When I read Christina’s translation, I discovered that I sometimes can’t remember if scenes from my life happened the way I described them in the book. It’s hard to tell what I invented and what was real. I like the uncertainty, though. It’s proof that I can’t write with impunity. When I try to get in the reader’s head, I destabilize myself, too.

  INTERVIEWER

  How did the two of you work together?

  HERBERT

  When Christina sent me her draft, I was in the middle of a divorce. It was extremely painful to return to the passages in which I declare my love for Mónica and celebrate our life together with our son, Leonardo. She and I were separating, we were selling our house, and she was leaving the city with our son. I was paralyzed. My American editor, Ethan, whom I love, stepped in to help me. He answered some of Christina’s questions, but later, when she was almost done with the final draft, I managed to write her a few letters about the doubts she still had. It wasn’t the most intentional process, but I don’t regret it. Of the four translations of the book, this one is by far my favorite. Still, I don’t think our communication should be that inconsistent again. Christina is translating another one of my books now, and my role is to support her, to give her as much information as possible, and then to leave her alone to write. She’s a phenomenal translator.

  MACSWEENEY

  I enjoy collaborating with the authors I translate whenever this is possible. From my point of view, talking over different themes in the work and thinking about voices and register adds depth to the translation. But all this depends on how far the authors want to be or can be involved. It’s important to remember that often you are asking authors to return to something they wrote years before, something they may feel is in the past.

  I usually produce a first draft of the translation on my own, and then if the author wants to be involved, we open a dialogue. As with any conversation, the way that develops will vary from person to person. Julián was caught up in other things at the early stages of the translation, so I sent him a list of questions, occasionally about language—there are some wonderful norteño expressions in the work—but mostly to do with his sources of inspiration or asking for clarification of particular ideas. Julián was very generous in sharing his thoughts with me, and I treasure the micro-essays he wrote in response to some of my queries.

  INTERVIEWER

  Julián, what Mexican authors working today are you the most excited about?

  HERBERT

  If I had to pick one, I’d choose Fernanda Melchor, whose novel, Temporada de huracanes, is amazing—new and brutal, and written in prose any serious writer would envy. Then there are two poet-essayists, Luigi Amara and Luis Felipe Fabre, who are two of the most lucid, most entertaining minds in the country. And then the writers who work between genres—Veronica Gerber Bicecci, Eduardo Padilla, Gabriel Wolfson, and León Plascencia Ñol, who wrote a travel book called Seúl era una esquina blanca that I like a lot.

  There’s Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, who’s from Tijuana and who has been translated, but I don’t think he’s gotten the attention he deserves. And last but not least, I think the best-kept secret of Mexican literature is a powerful novelist and short-story writer named Héctor Manjarrez. He’s seventy-two years old, and his most recent collection, Los niños están locos, is a Chekhovian bomb.

  INTERVIEWER

  And Christina, what are you translating now, and which Spanish-language authors who you aren’t translating would you like somebody else to translate?

  MACSWEENEY

  At the moment, I’m working on the edit for Julián’s next work in translation, The House of the Pain of Others. I’m also working on a very interesting project with Verónica Gerber Bicecci, which will involve photography, original writing, and translation, with both of us involved in all three of those elements. And I’ve just translated a short extract from the Venezuelan author Victoria de Stefano’s novel Lluvia for a dossier in Latin American Literature Today. I’m a great admirer of her work and feel English-language readers deserve a chance to share in that admiration.

  Another area that interests me is the essay. This genre is so rarely translated and Latin America has some marvelous essayists. Jazmina Barrera’s Cuaderno de faros is a beautiful personal exploration of the symbolic value of lighthouses. Luigi Amara is another of Mexico’s great essayists, and his Historia descabellada de la peluca is both fascinating and brilliantly witty. From Columbia, Andrés Felipe Solano’s diary of his first year in South Korea, Apuntes desde la cuerda floja, is insightful, thought provoking, and funny.

  INTERVIEWER

  This seems like an exciting moment to be a translator—I’m thinking, for instance, of the new National Book Award for Translated Literature. Are you excited? What other changes do you hope for?

  MACSWEENEY

  The National Book Award initiative is wonderful, and I hope other prize-giving bodies follow suit. The situation of texts in translation has been very uncertain in this respect. For example, books I translated by Valeria Luiselli have been awarded or short-listed for prizes as if they were English-language originals written by Valeria. Another positive change, at least in terms of Latin American writing, is an increase in the number of female authors who are translated. If you compare this with the situation only fifteen years ago, the shift in focus is very heartening.

  It also seems that the perception of translation and translators is in a process of change. In part, this is due to the fact that independent publishing houses like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, and Two Lines understand the importance of building relationships with their translators, valuing their work and using their experience to help promote the books. In terms of future changes, well, obviously, I’d like to see more translated literature on the shelves and display tables of bookstores. Translated books still make up less than four percent of works published in USA, and this is a shameful figure.

  Lily Meyer is a writer and translator living in Washington, D.C. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in NPR, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Make Magazine, and Bogotá 39: New Voices from Latin America.

• The Observer
  https://ndsmcobserver.com/2018/04/book-review-julian-herbert/
  Word count: 877

  Julián Herbert’s ‘Tomb Song’: fact, fiction and the contemporary bildungsroman

  Mike Donovan | Thursday, April 12, 2018
  Claire Kopischke | The Observer

  Irresponsible post-modernists tend to leave a broad, often vacuous, gash of absurdity (read: crap) in their literary wake. The acutely self-aware (semi) post-modernist, Julián Herbert, explains: “In the majority of cases, a post-modern novel is nothing more than a costumbriso cross-dressing as cool jazz and/or pedantic and/or pedantic rhetoric a la Kenneth Goldsmith that spends a hundred pages saying what Baudelaire said in three words: spleen et ideal.”

  Spleen et ideal, translated to spleen and ideal, may be the only descriptor for “Tomb Song,” Herbert’s haunting epic, and first translated to English, which places the writer’s past — specifically his relationship with a dying mother — under the spleen’s microscope (the Roman physician Galen believed the spleen to be source of melancholy and spite) and doctors the memories with an aesthete’s vision of the ideal. Consequently, “Tomb Song” becomes a simultaneously physical and ephemeral work that, instead of shattering the boundaries separating the novel, memoir and essay, ignores their existence outright.

  Herbert’s spleen — the stark truth at the heart of his narration — pierces the reader’s protective layers through Herbert’s often humorous deadpan delivery.

  “The light of the real world feels brutal,” Herbert says of his “first 36-hour shift” at his dying mother’s side — “coarse powdered milk made atmosphere.” To explain such a light, and the colors of his mother’s cancer, her unchosen lifelong occupation (prostitution) and Herbert’s unorthodox developmental history as her son, the reader might expect Herbert to assume an exclusively cynical voice. But, the writer explains, “It’s not reality that makes a person cynical. It’s the sheer impossibility of getting any sleep in cities.”

  It is in trying to cope with the exhaustion of his past and the pressures of that present that Herbert allows himself to drift in and out of fevered dream states — the fiction element of “Tomb Song.” He envisions himself as an Oscar Wilde type, plastering the aesthetic forefather’s words — “I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain” — onto the page just before his accounts veer off the tracks of reason.

  Herbert’s idyllic dreams melt the hospital’s walls (where the sheer power of his mother’s presence locks him into a cycle of love and guilt) into a drunken, violent and unkempt realm — characterized by spells of punk rock, political radicalism, sexual exploits and gambling — where an insecure writer can indulge in his own toxic masculinity. Herbert goes so far as to invent a character, the hard-partying communist Bobo Lafragua, to say and do the things that Herbert, as a creature of reality could never do. Bobo makes sense when nothing else does. He’s necessary, according to Herbert, because “One is moved by the story of a logical sequence.”

  The spleen and the ideal of Herbert’s text converge through his characterization of his mother. Born Guadalupa Chávez Mareno (but almost never represented as such), the woman becomes the focal point around which Herbert’s factual, spiritual, psychic and literary streams flow. Her virtues (acute intelligence and unrelenting kindness), supposed vices (a life spent as a sex worker), rapidly shifting identity (constant changes in her name and the character assigned to it) and devotional perspective (embodied in her relationship with Herbert), developed beneath the author’s literary and purposely unreliable eye, cast her as a warped Odysseus character of sorts. Though Herbert serves as the novel’s principle actor, his mother’s life-force implicitly underlies his every move. Her influence informs Herbert so heavily that her potential death presents him with a predicament beyond sadness — his own loss of identity.

  “I don’t have much experience with death,” Herbert admits, wondering how his writing career could possibly continue without his sacred muse. “I guess this could eventually become a logistical problem.”

  Herbert extrapolates the nuances of his pseudo-fictive mother figure to reflect the Mexico’s precarious position as a cultural entity. As with his mother, Herbert makes no effort to hide his nation’s flaws (he speaks of his nation’s aptitude for achieving “pyrrhic” victories), yet, the nation is also the wellspring from which he, as a writer, drinks. Without Mexico (and, likewise, without his mother), Herbert believes he’ll find only emptiness.

  Herbert’s “Tomb Song” aims to suspend the memories and relevant myth in a literary solution in the hope that he might preserve the fleeting character that his mother and Mexico created for him. Because it’s meant to be an honest portrayal of the mind, it makes sense that Herbert would not confine “Tomb Song” to a singular literary genre. As a preeminent character in the text, Herbert intuitively knows he could to have done so honestly. Rather, he must deliver the language of his gaze as is, ripe with wounds though it may be. To do otherwise, to strive unreflectively toward the truth, would be to obscure the truth entirely.

  Tags: bildungsroman, book review, essay, Julián Herbert, memoir, novel

• Run Spot Run
  http://www.runspotrun.com/book-reviews/tomb-song-by-julian-herbert/
  Word count: 822

  QUOTED: "Herbert captures the emotional complexities of confronting grief."

  Tomb Song by Julián Herbert

  by Jeff Alford · May 15, 2018
  Tomb Song by Julián Herbert

  Graywolf Press, 2018

  ★★☆☆☆

  Julián Herbert’s kaleidoscopic, autobiographical novel Tomb Song is a paean to his dying mother, written in what feels like a real-time bedside scrawl. “I’ve endeavored to draw a freehand portrait of my mother,” Julián, the novel’s narrator, explains. “A portrait garnished with childhood reminiscence, biographical detail and the occasional dash of fiction.” Herbert captures the emotional complexities of confronting grief, as Julián teeters between nostalgic tales from his childhood and self-centered anecdotes about the man that he has become. In embodying the trauma of his mother’s leukemia, Julián ultimately makes Tomb Song about himself. Perhaps a child can never fully understand their parents and the way they lived.

  Julián’s mother was a prostitute, and many men drifted through their home. He has a handful of siblings, but never grew particularly close to them, relying instead on stories of their lives and actions. “Every household runs aground at the feet of a domestic myth,” he writes. “It can be anything: educational excellence or a passion for soccer. I grew up in the shadow of a turn of the screw: the pretense that mine was really a family.”

  Tomb Song alternates between scenes of Julián’s childhood and those of him at present, traveling through Europe on book tours and struggling with his mother’s illness. His partner, Mónica, joins him throughout these later scenes, and together, as they consider starting a family of their own, they establish an interesting counterpoint to the novel’s memories.

  But these two poles — the family of one’s past and the family of one’s future — are not enough to keep Herbert on track with his prose. He’s repeatedly distracted, drawn to tales of his/Julián’s drug activity and sexual conquests. In Herbert’s mind, everything is eligible for intellectual analysis, resulting in an insufferable amount of name-dropping and references. In a memory of walking to high school, Julián sees a sunrise and declares it “[his] way of getting out of Plato’s cave.” In one digression about donating blood, he expounds that the “mortification had been more or less Rabelaisian, although governed by Darwinian and fiduciary logic: I need your blood, give it to me in exchange for that mercantile zone of idealism we term Friendship.” One long chapter describes a past lover who insisted they only having sex via a relatively unconventional method; he describes her:

  “She was (and I say this without boasting or with any desire to offend the feminist academics who scorn male Mexican writers, considering us incapable of including plain women in our erotic tales) the living image of Botticelli’s Venus coming out from the water.”

  Herbert writes with what Julián describes later in the novel as a “bestial mantle”. It’s an apt term and a perfectly acceptable tone: Tomb Song is a swarthy little book on masculinity and grieving. But it’s not the novel’s manliness that ultimately lands poorly, it is its overwrought intellectualism. He cites porn star Alexis Texas and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, boasts a wealth of cultural references like 12 Monkeys and Pulp Fiction, and clearly knows his literary theory, but there’s an emptiness to all this knowledge, particularly noticeable in Herbert’s inability to describe beauty beyond saying someone looks like a nude in what is widely accepted as one of the world’s most beautiful paintings. Herbert leans heavily on his scholarly knowledge in Tomb Song, and frequently wedges in these asides when he’s unable to find the words he needs.

  “Guilt and nostalgia are paltry emotions,” Julián explains in one digression, ignorant of the fact that they’re also the emotions upon which Tomb Song is built. Julián hides from guilt and nostalgia at a time when he needs to face them, and invokes everything he can to transform them into feelings of pride and glory. There’s a way to read Tomb Song as an intentionally tenuous meta-memoir, but it is not easy. to do so would require one to embrace all its shortcomings and contradictions, and revel in the novel’s ability to fail at accomplishing what it seemingly intends to achieve.

  About Latest Posts

  Jeff Alford
  Jeff Alford
  Jeff Alford is a critic and book collector based in Denver, CO and the Managing Editor of Run Spot Run. He is a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Rain Taxi Review of Books and the New Orleans Review and author of the now-retired rare books and small press blog www.theoxenofthesun.com.

• Cleaver
  https://www.cleavermagazine.com/tomb-song-a-novel-by-julian-herbert-reviewed-by-katharine-coldiron/
  Word count: 2341

  QUOTED: "Tomb Song is not a continuous story as much as it is a patchwork, a coat of many colors made from memoir and imagination and scintillating intellectual reflection and political diatribe and self-excoriation. What seams it into a single garment is Herbert’s voice, his energetic, free-associative, sardonic, charismatic voice."

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  ASK JUNE: The Wedding-Wrecking Sister and the Loose-Lipped Teacher
  ASK JUNE: The Wedding-Wrecking Sister and the Loose-Lipped Teacher
  Dear June, Zeb, a guy who works at my office, just gave notice because he got a job teaching art at a private school. Today when we were all sitting around after our monthly all -staff meeting—which is one of the only times I’ve ever seen him, since he’s in another department and building—somebody asked him about the school. After telling people where it is, how many kids go there, and so forth, he summed it up as “a fancy school for spoiled fucked-up rich kids.” ...
  April 19, 2018
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  LIFE AS ACTIVISM originated from a need for action, protest, and solidarity. We began this feature seeking works with the theme #ResistTrump. Now we are looking for a broader spectrum of work with social justice themes. Submit fiction, flash, and nonfiction up to 1500 words. Manuscripts should be single-spaced. Submit up to three pieces of poetry […]
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  On Cleaver’s five year anniversary, we continue to celebrate with interviews featuring our senior editors. Grant Clauser is the Poetry Craft Essay Editor for Cleaver, and he also reads poetry submissions. His most recent books are The Magician’s Handbook, published by PS Books, and Reckless Constellations, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Prize. His […]

  TOMB SONG
  by Julián Herbert
  translated by Christina MacSweeney
  Graywolf Press, 224 pages

  reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

  What an odd book Tomb Song is. It contains prose both beautiful and profane, extensive self-awareness and a troubling level of self-ignorance. Its author and its narrator blur together into an entity that is never quite one or the other, and it doesn’t distinguish between fiction and nonfiction with especial meticulousness. That is, the narrator and the author have the same name, the same wife and child, the same job, and the same literary accomplishments. It remains undefined whether, in what passages, and to what extent Herbert has fictionalized his life to write this book, which a reviewer in a Chilean newspaper called “an elegy to his mother.”

  The book is, in fact, summarily about the narrator’s mother dying over the course of a year in and out of the hospital, but the reader will find the scope to be much wider. The narrator examines his childhood, his marriage, his perspective on Mexican politics, his drug use, and his struggle to make the world conform to his needs, or vice versa. Since this is Herbert’s first book translated into English, it’s difficult to determine whether the voice in Tomb Song—which most resembles a petulant, smart-alecky boy—is a gesture toward the filial relationship at the book’s center, or is the author’s usual tone. Off-putting though this voice may sometimes be, Herbert’s style, and his skill with the boundaries of genre and narrative distance, are singularly accomplished. Herbert, a poet and essayist, won the Jaén Prize for unedited novels and the Elena Poniatowska Prize for the original Spanish version of Tomb Song.

  Julián Herbert

  Destabilization is a key texture that the reader must appreciate in order to enjoy Tomb Song. For instance, the narrator, in exploring the hospital where his mother lies dying, dreams or hallucinates or genuinely takes part in a conversation with a man in the basement whom he identifies as “Bobo Lafragua, the hero of the unfinished novel I’d attempted to write a couple of years before.” Thirty pages later, he meets “the conceptual artist Bobo Lafragua” in Cuba for a dissolute vacation, complete with hookers, opium, and existential conversations. It is unclear whether the section in Cuba is adapted from life, as so much of this novel seems to be, or lifts a passage from that previously mentioned novel. The name is the only indication that we may have moved genres from nonfiction to fiction, and its reappearance causes a fine little frisson.

  The prose, particularly in the Cuba passages, recalls Kerouac in its freshness and enthusiasm, and indeed, the literary performance of Tomb Song is captivating. Translator Christina MacSweeney, in recreating such a performance in English, made a daunting task look easy.

  The prose, particularly in the Cuba passages, recalls Kerouac in its freshness and enthusiasm, and indeed, the literary performance of Tomb Song is captivating. Translator Christina MacSweeney, in recreating such a performance in English, made a daunting task look easy. The author’s exposure of his inner weather is unsparing and precise, and his one-liners are without equal:

  Every household runs aground at the feet of a domestic myth.

  T]he main objective of true revolutions is to turn waiters into bad-mannered despots.

  There’s no route to the absolute that doesn’t pass through a fever station.

  Berlin is a civic graveyard project into which has been drained the best of its sacred art: dead bodies.

  Herbert pulls no punches, exploring his narrator’s flaws and the desperate circumstances of his childhood mercilessly, as if writing about a character he doesn’t especially want to shield. The glitches in this objectivity appear during certain passages about the narrator’s—Herbert’s—mother, who was a prostitute. Herbert is capable of standing back enough to see the irony in insulting someone by calling them “son of a whore” when his narrator’s circumstances embody that insult. But the pointed self-awareness that characterizes the narrator’s relationship with his mother sometimes slips, and the prose reveals an unsettling mishmash of innocent devotion, sexual desire, and contempt. “Some days she’d tie her hair up in a ponytail,” he writes,

  put on dark glasses, and lead me by the hand through the lackluster streets of Acapulco’s red-light district, the Zona de Tolerancia, to the market stalls on the avenue by the canal (this would have been eight or nine in the morning, when the last drunkards were leaving La Huerta or Pepe Carioca, and women wrapped in towels would lean out over the metal windowsills of tiny rooms and call me “pretty”). With the exquisite abandon and spleen of a whore who’s been up all night, she’d buy me a Choco Milk shake and two coloring books.

  All the men watching her.

  But she was with me.

  At the age of five, I first experienced the masochistic pleasure of coveting something you own but can’t understand.

  Later, as an adult:

  Out of sheer perversity, out of sheer self-loathing, out of pure idleness, I scanned the leftover girls of the night, trying to decide which one reminded me most of my mother.

  In passages like these, when Herbert’s self-awareness is missing, the reader notices. Particularly if the reader is female. Men’s experiences are front and center in Tomb Song, whether as sons, fathers, carousers, authors, or mourners. The novel is so subjective, so purposely claustrophobic, that the dearth of women who appear as autonomous creatures, rather than “sex on legs,” is not as egregious as it might be in other novels. But it’s there. “I wanted to settle accounts with the mother goddess of biology,” he writes, “shooting a pistol at her, ejaculating in her face.”

  One of the words used in the promotional material regarding this novel is “incandescent.” This is true, inasmuch as the word has two meanings: the ordinary, meaning light-emitting, brilliant, exceptional; and the obscure, meaning furiously angry. Anger comes off this book in nearly visible waves.

  One of the words used in the promotional material regarding this novel is “incandescent.” This is true, inasmuch as the word has two meanings: the ordinary, meaning light-emitting, brilliant, exceptional; and the obscure, meaning furiously angry. Anger comes off this book in nearly visible waves. Mexico eats its own heart, politically, and the narrator is angry. A boy grows up in grasping poverty, and the narrator is angry. A mother dies, and the narrator is angry. The narrator snorts liquefied opium continuously out of a sinus-medication bottle, and he is still angry. With this anger comes pointed critique, gleaming insight, and an entertaining method of ADD-like writing, but the reading experience toes the line between exhilarating and exhausting.

  Tomb Song is not a continuous story as much as it is a patchwork, a coat of many colors made from memoir and imagination and scintillating intellectual reflection and political diatribe and self-excoriation. What seams it into a single garment is Herbert’s voice, his energetic, free-associative, sardonic, charismatic voice. This tone, in which Herbert paints being the middle child of five siblings by five fathers, approaches “rollicking,” but doesn’t quite make it. Is that a flaw, a miscalculation, or a demonstration of the situation’s tragic absurdity? The reader will have to determine for himself whether the voice of Julián, in its variations, attracts or repels.

  Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.

• Three Percent
  http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2018/03/19/9-moments-that-make-tomb-song-the-frontrunner-for-the-national-book-award-in-translation/
  Word count: 3514

  logo
  9 Moments That Make “Tomb Song” the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation

  Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

  Moment Number One

  “Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.”

  To hell with it: in her youth, Mamá was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a police officer riddled with bullet holes, a splendid goodfella, a suicidal musician, and a pathetic Humphrey Bogart impersonator. PERIOD.

  ———————
  The 2018 translation that’s the occasion for this post is Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and published by Graywolf Press. But to be honest, this is mostly just going to be banter. Or whatever you call banter that only involves one person and is written instead of spoken.

  But we’ll start with a bit about Tomb Song, one of the better works of international literature to come out so far in 2018. It’s referred to as “An Incandescent U.S. Debut” on the press release, which normally would land it on my “do not read” list, but I like the cover. And suspect this is a potential finalist for the National Book Award in Translation (more on that below).

  Categorized as “fiction,” it’s a book in which Julián Herbert writes about Julián Herbert writing about the death of his mother from leukemia. (And the death of his father as well.) It resides in that Ben Lerner, or Karl Ove Knausgaard, or maybe Geoff Dyer realm of being a “nonfiction novel,” in which truth and literary technique come together and create something else.

  From a recent interview in the Paris Review:

  To me, this is a novel. A nonfictional novel, most of the time, though there are some fictional elements. But the protagonist—my mother, Guadalupe—was real. She was a prostitute, and she died of leukemia. Why does it matter if the particular events around her happened in this world or not?

  I think novels are novels because of technique, not because the content is made up. I wrote Tomb Song using a novelist’s tools—prolepsis and analepsis, digression, a plot twist that lasts three decades, plenty of characters. It’s always been strange to me that some Spanish-language critics insist that Tomb Song is a memoir and that my other book, The House of the Pain of Others, is a novel. To me, that book is a mix of reportage and narrative history. But honestly, I don’t lose sleep over this. I’ve always written between genres.

  ———————
  Moment Number Two

  We’re always hearing about what a headache the frontier is for the United States because of the drug trafficking. No one mentions how dangerous the United States frontier is for Mexicans because of the trafficking of arms. And, when the subject does come up, the neighboring attorney general points out: “It’s not the same thing: the drugs are of illegal origin, the arms aren’t.” As if there was a majestic logic in considering that in comparison with the destructive power of a marijuana joint, an AK-47 is just a child’s toy.

  ———————
  Earlier this week, the National Book Awards announced all the specific details about applying for this year’s awards—including all the info on the recently re-established National Book Award for Translation.

  Back when it was announced that the National Book Foundation was bringing this back, I wrote a long post about how great it was that Lisa Lucas (and her predecessor at the foundation, Harold Augenbraum, two of the most energetic, concerned people in the book world) made this happen, while also wringing my hands over what this would do to other existent translation awards (the BTBAs in particular, which will be greatly overshadowed), and who exactly would able to afford to apply. (We also did a podcast that touched on this, which has been getting a lot of downloads.)

  My primary concern was about all the backend fees for books that are finalists. From that first article:

  All publishers submitting books for the National Book Awards must agree to:

  Contribute $3,000 toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist ($750 for presses with income of under $10 million).

  Inform authors of submitted books that, if selected as Finalists, they must be present at the National Book Awards Ceremony and at related events in New York City.

  Inform authors that the Finalists Reading will be held at The New School on Tuesday, November 13, 2018.

  Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018.

  Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists and provide them with a seat at the Awards Ceremony.

  Purchase from the National Book Foundation, when appropriate, medallions to be affixed to the covers of Longlist, Finalist, and Winning books. The Foundation also will license the medallion image artwork for reproduction on the covers of Finalist and Winning books.

  For presses that are doing well for themselves—Graywolf, New Directions, Europa—this is likely to be less of a concern. (And for other nonprofits with functioning boards, they could probably raise the money if it was a big issue.) But for a lot of other presses, these extra thousands could be prohibitive, leading to questions of who this award is really for.

  BUT! When the actual details came out, almost all of those extra fees were eliminated for translation presses. From the updated National Book Award website:

  Contribute toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist. For presses with income of $10 million or above, a contribution of $3,000; under $10 million, a contribution of $750; and for presses with income under $1 million, the fee is waived. (So this went from $750 to $0.)

  Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018. If the publisher attends, it is the expectation that they will provide a seat for their Finalist (discounted tickets are available for small, nonprofit, and/or university presses) (Still not sure what the cost actually is, but the fact that we don’t all have to pay Big Five rates is reassuring.)

  Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists (the Foundation will provide travel support for Finalists in the Translated Literature category). (Even if the NBF only covers part of this, it’s still a big help.)

  So there you go! Even though a Twitter conversation established that Lisa Lucas never read anything I ever wrote on the subject, and was only aware of the BookRiot piece (which is basically a 1:1 rewrite of everything I said), I’d like to think that maybe Three Percent did a bit of good by remarking on all of this and making the economics of translation publishing a bit more transparent.

  (Which is bullshit. The only time anyone reads or responds to any of these posts is when they’re offended. A near weekly occurrence, and something that’s really getting me down and making it hard to fully enjoy writing these. This is how self-censorship happens. Although, to be honest, since it seems that no one actually reads these, I should feel way more liberated!)

  ———————
  Moment Number Three

  This last point must refer to me. I prefer to imagine Mamá—drunk and sniveling—singing to the sham lights of La Habana than to see her as I do today: bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event. For over a week now, my mother has been, biochemically speaking, incapable of crying. The ideology of pain is the most fraudulent of all. It would be more honest to say that, since she fell ill with leukemia, my mother’s political thought can be expressed only through a microscope.

  ———————
  As much as I like this book, there are a few instances where I think the voice wavers. This isn’t to detract from Christina MacSweeney’s work at all—as a whole, this is quite good—but there are a few choices that I’d be curious to know the back story on. This one, “breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event” is simply a question of meaning. I’ve never heard that phrase in my life and am unsure if it means a “chicken”? or a derogatory term for a woman? When I Google the phrase, all that comes back are references to Tomb Song. I’m just curious.

  ———————
  Moment Numbers Four and Five

  “If you want to move in with that frigging bitch, fine: do it. But she’ll make your life hell. And you’re abandoning me, the person who’s taken so much shit to get you this far. If you’ve already made up your mind, go ahead. But you’re not my son anymore, you bastard, you’re nothing but a mad dog.”

  *

  In my family, it’s fine to utter any kind of curse (frigging, bastard, screw, idiot), but obscenities (prick, ass, fart, whore-monger) are prohibited. Although it’s a bit late in the day for me to offer a clear explanation of the difference between the two categories, I can easily intuit which new words belong in one hemisphere and which in the other. The universal term my siblings and I employ to substitute impolite expressions is This.

  ———————
  The first time “frigging” came up, I was immediately reminded of this bit from an interview MacSweeney gave about Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims:

  With Among Strange Victims, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive “bloody” (my translation of pinche) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with “damn.” But the problem was, I’d already used “damn” in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on “frigging,” which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.

  Really curious to know if that’s the same situation here. I personally have never heard anyone say
  “frigging” before, and would never think of it as a substitute for any swear. It does help maintain the confusion between the categories of “curses” and “obscenities” (bastard and screw are allowed but fart isn’t?), but it stands out to me, especially when his mother says it, and against the larger backdrop of characters who say “fucking” and do a lot of cocaine and opioids.

  If there really isn’t a satisfactory match for pinche (assuming that’s the original in this book as it was in Among Strange Victims), it would be bold—and cool—to just leave it. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant number of readers had come across pinche before, or could at least glean it’s swear-status from context. Which brings me to my last translation-related observation/question:

  ———————
  Moment Number Six

  (Scrawneebly is a word Mónica and I invented to refer to cowards: a mixture of scrawny and feeble. We stand facing each other, arms akimbo, in superhero pose, and recite in unison, “And did you really think I was scrawneebly?”)

  ———————
  I’m all for neologisms—and hate autocorrect for making word inventions difficult to circulate—but this feels a bit too forced to me. The Spanish neologism MacSweeney is working out is “ñañenque,” which, obviously, doesn’t have an easy English solution. In both Spanish and English, the terms components are explained, so it’s possible that this could’ve been another instance where one could leave it in Spanish and use the following line as a chance to make it clear that this is a translation and that there is a distance between languages. “Ñañeque is a word Mónica and I invented to refer to cowards: a mixture of spanish word (scrawny) and other spanish word (feeble).”

  Again, not that there’s anything wrong with MacSweeney’s solution. It just stood out to me, and I’m again curious about the thought process and other possibilities.

  ———————
  Moment Number Seven

  We occasionally had breakfast with other Latin American poets, who seemed deeply self-satisfied with their own genius. [. . .] The best poets were, naturally, from Cuba and Chile. But when it came to conversation, nothing doing: they would have had to send them over with built-in subtitles.

  ———————
  Going back to the NBA for Translation and the great job Lisa Lucas has done with this (which only builds on what she’s done for the foundation as a whole since taking over for Harold Augenbraum) is in her choice of judges for the award. The five judges this year are: Harold Augenbraum (former head of the National Book Foundation, translator from Spanish), Karen Maeda Allman (Elliott Bay Book Company), Sinan Antoon (The Corpse Washer, which he translated into English himself), Susan Bernofsky (translator from German), and Álvaro Enrigue (Sudden Death). That’s a good mix of very qualified and generous people.

  Since it’s never too early to speculate, based on my pre-existing knowledge of these judges and the eligible books, here are five that I expect to see on the longlist:

  Emissary by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions) (I’m assuming this is eligible even though Bernofsky translates Tawada’s German works)

  Armand V or T Singer by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally, respectively (New Directions)

  My Struggle: Book Six by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Martin Aiken (Archipelago Books)

  Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

  Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebvre, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis (Transit Books)

  One question: Is it OK to lobby for your own books? Given how small the translation world is, I know four of the five of the people on this committee, which makes me uncomfortable. I’m desperate for our books—and our website, and Open Letter as a whole, and myself personally—to get some national respect, to be considered to be “cool” or “necessary,” but prefer that it happens because people read the work itself and respond to quality. As you surely know, I suck at generating favorable vibes for myself or our press and its programs. It’s a curse I struggle with all the time in ways that I don’t want to share, and that you wouldn’t want to experience. But if I were a good publisher, maybe I could do that extra bit of Oscar-esque soft-diplomacy that creates a warm context within which these judges would more likely appreciate our submissions . . .

  There are four books of ours that I think deserve to be longlisted: Fox by Dubravka Ugresic, The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresán, Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira, and The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen. If one of those makes the longlist, I’ll be ecstatic.

  ———————
  Moment Number Eight

  As a child, I wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. A man in a white coat. But all too soon I discovered my lack of aptitude: it took me years to accept the roundness of the earth. In public, I faked it.

  ———————
  The other day, I came across this headline from the Chicago Review of Books: “You’ve Never Read a Novel Like Empty Set.” That’s some solid Internet hyperbole! I made a joke on Twitter about how this sounds like a BuzzFeed headline, but that didn’t go over well (as per usual), in part because most people favor exaggerated positivity over learned accuracy—especially in headlines. (Even the title of the L.A. Times review of this book brushes up against that: “Mexican novelist Julián Herbert’s ‘Tomb Song’ marks him as one of the most innovative prose stylists of our time.”)

  (BTW, the review that went along with the Chicago Review of Books headline is totally reasonable, and Empty Set is totally reasonable as a book as well. It’s not Joyce or anything—which that headline implies—but it’s good.)

  So what I decided is that I should go back and change all of my previous posts to reflect this sort of “clickbait” mentality. Hell, I wrote an article once about how no one reads articles, they just glance at the headline, who’s tweeting it, and then click “heart” and/or “reshare.” It’s a complete inefficiency to write long, voice-driven posts that shoot for nuance and call-backs and embedded jokes, but I’d get way way more readers if these posts have BuzzFeed-inspired titles like: “9 Moments That Make ‘Tomb Song’ the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation,” or “How ‘Empty Set’ Revolutionized the Marketing of Translations,” or “10 Paths to Obscure Books That Will Make You Say ‘Wow’,” or “Readers Born in the 1970s Will Recognize These Vargas Llosa Classics,” or “15 Ways Books About Chess Can Rewire Your Brain—And Make You Smarter!”

  That’s the new Three Percent policy: sell-out when you can. Rochester is lonely enough, there’s no honor in spending four hours a weekend writing shit that no one ever clicks on.

  ———————
  Moment Number Nine

  All of a sudden Émil Cioran’s little books on antipersonal development for adolescents come to mind. The one, for example, in which insomnia reveals to him the most profound sense of the trouble with existence: it impelled him toward unlimited spite: walking to the shoreline and throwing stones at some poor seagulls. Jeez, what a punk.

  ———————
  This is something I’ll get into more next week, but I wanted to mention it here since it’s on my mind.

  A lot of Book Twitter was talking about this profile in the Guardian of Will Self, in particular, this bit:

  You’re not awfully optimistic about the future of the novel, are you?

  I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that’s already happened. I’ve been publishing since 1990, so I’ve seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.

  It’s frequently said that that’s partly because narrative has migrated to box sets. Is there any truth in that?

  The relationship between the novel and film in the 20th century was like the relationship between Rome and Greece. Film depended upon the novel, at least in its infancy and youth. The problem is that now that film itself is being Balkanised – carved up, streamed, loaded on to DVDs, watched on people’s phones – it no longer needs its grease, it no longer needs the novel lying behind it. It’s a disaster for the novel, actually – I think the novel is in freefall.

  All of the reactions I saw were of the “It’s hypocritical to say the contemporary novel is doomed and not read any contemporary novels!” line. I might be completely off-base, but I thought Self was getting at something different. There are questions about narrative approaches within contemporary novels—and whether good TV is more narratively innovative than, say, a Franzen novel—but I think there’s also the question of the relevance of the novel within culture. It’s really hard to think of a novel that generated the same amount of discussion about non-book industry people as several Netflix shows. And that doesn’t seem to be going away. The centrality of the novel to culture has definitely evolved since 1990—and not in a particularly positive way.

  More on that next week . . . Along with some thoughts about Lispector’s The Chandelier.
  Tags: 2018 translation, christina macsweeney, graywolf press, julian herbert, review, tomb song

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-tomb-song-20180316-story.html
  Word count: 1141

  QUOTED: "rollicking, surprising and deft flurry of chapters, some as short as a paragraph, others spooling along for lush pages of artfully rendered set pieces."
  "Mexico's Julián Herbert, known previously mostly as a poet, is now — with this playful experiment of memoir, fiction, humor and tragedy — among the more interesting and ambitious prose stylists of our time."

  Books

  Mexican novelist Julián Herbert's 'Tomb Song' marks him as one of the most innovative prose stylists of our time
  By Nathan Deuel
  Mar 16, 2018 | 8:00 AM
  Mexican novelist Julián Herbert's 'Tomb Song' marks him as one of the most innovative prose stylists of our time
  Julián Herbert (Ignacio Valdez)

  A mother lies dying. Is she really sick? Will she survive? Is the writer by her side a son, a man or merely another doomed citizen? These are the questions that fuel the new novel "Tomb Song's" rollicking, surprising and deft flurry of chapters, some as short as a paragraph, others spooling along for lush pages of artfully rendered set pieces. Mexico's Julián Herbert, known previously mostly as a poet, is now — with this playful experiment of memoir, fiction, humor and tragedy — among the more interesting and ambitious prose stylists of our time.

  "I dance," the narrator's mother tells her young son, when in fact she works as a prostitute. That burden isn't easy for a young Herbert (narrator or author — the lines are blurred), and as a survival tactic, he soon adopts his mother's mercenary relationship to the truth.

  Bouncing from the cancerous agony of the bedside to their shared slum past — the night the cardboard blew off the roof of their grim little home, the unlikely success of a brothel's soccer team, a parade of bad men doing their best to be half fathers — the narrator explains how his world steadily orients around sex, and the idea that this most taboo of subjects is also our most delicious and important pursuit. How could something so natural and personal feel revolutionary, powerful, worth pursuing, but also dangerous? It's what leaves his mother beaten, broken, but their bellies full. So better to bend the truth.

  Years later, by her bedside, the narrator remains really, really mad at this woman. Why couldn't he have a better life? But within his anger are moments of awareness. One of the rare times the family rented a proper house (rather than a brick shed or shared bedroom at a brothel), they planted a small plot of carrots "that never grew." But something magical happens anyway. Evicted from this house, the boy is allowed by the police to remove just two books before they lock up. "Literature has always been generous with me," he writes. "If I had to go back to that moment, knowing what I know now, I'd choose the same books."
  Julián Herbert
  Julián Herbert (Carsten Meltendorf)

  What luck. If mothers let us down, maybe literature is enough. Beyond all the power and poetry of a reckoning with poverty is the book's sly and wonderful handling of the literary world, from the narrator's assignment to write about a slain union boss to his boozy, opium-fueled trip to Havana with a writers' conference. In these moments, Herbert is at his surest and funniest, blurring the line between fact and fiction, between the idea of story as something we inherit versus the idea that any good narrative is merely a record of invention itself. Also: Cocaine can be really fun.

  Especially in the Cuba scenes, it's hard not to think of another poet-memoirist, Ben Lerner, whose first work of prose, "Leaving the Atocha Station," shares much with "Tomb Song," including an ability to make us admire and despise our hapless narrator at the same time — he's not really gonna cheat on his wife with that lady spouting Lenin, is he? — while subtly reorienting, for instance, how we might understand the post-Castro elite's pursuit of joys, despite all the obvious reasons for unhappiness.

  Appearing only sparingly, the narrator's wife emerges as a wonderful counterpoint to dying mother and bitter son, because she loves them both, and this pure feeling keeps us reading. Good thing too, because the book is propulsive and sly and studded with memorable moments that feel irresistibly wise.

  A few favorites: After a hangover, "the light of the real world feels brutal: coarse powdered milk made atmosphere." Suffering in the morning: "It's not reality that makes a person cynical. It's the near impossibility of getting any sleep in cities." The simplicity of sitting outside: "Cynicism requires rhetoric. Sitting in the sun doesn't."

  Family matters aside, wisdom shelved for later, it's government incompetence and the violent power of the state that hang over "Tomb Song" like a dark cloud. The Mexican government's failure, after all, is why his mom had no choice but to turn tricks. The narcos sever heads. A hospital is a place to stand in line all day for a dose of cancer medicine. The president is an idiot. So, probably, is the next one. He's only able to write at all because of grants and sponsorships.

  No diatribe or bitter complaint, Herbert's ambitious novel is the pleasing work of a high stylist having fun, loving life, making a good story despite a country's miseries and his own. "So long as I have the will," he writes, "I can go out, negotiate friendship, ask for plain speech, buy things at the drugstore, carefully count change. So long as I can type, I can give form to what I don't know and, in that way, be more human." It feels like a blueprint for us all.

  Our mothers will die. Our country will let us down. The next president will probably be an idiot too. The future contains as many or at least as final a set of ways to die as the past. All we can do, even if our mother was a prostitute, is hope she lives long enough to meet our daughter, if we have one, and then to try our best to love both. As Herbert writes, to love is to agree to bury someone — or indeed to be buried by them. "I am," the narrator whispers to his wife toward the end, "the one who will cover your face in that hour."

  Deuel is a writer in Los Angeles and author of the memoir "Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East."
  “Tomb Song” by Julián Herbert
  “Tomb Song” by Julián Herbert (Graywolf Press)

  "Tomb Song"

  Julián Herbert, translated by Christina MacSweeney

  Graywolf: 208 pp., $16 paper

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-tomb-song-by-julin-herbert-translated-by-christina-macsweeney/475596723/
  Word count: 628

  QUOTED: "This novel sprawls, but never loses sight of the human connection at its core—and it’s all the more moving as a result."

  Review: 'Tomb Song,' by Julián Herbert, translated by Christina MacSweeney
  FICTION: A man ponders his complicated family as his mother is hospitalized.
  By TOBIAS CARROLL Special to the Star Tribune
  March 2, 2018 — 11:18am
  Julian Herbert Photo by Ignacio Valdez
  Ignacio Valdez
  Julian Herbert Photo by Ignacio Valdez
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  Sometimes the simplest premises can result in complex, philosophically rich narratives. That’s certainly the case with Julián Herbert’s novel “Tomb Song,” which takes as its starting point an almost primal moment in the life of its narrator, a writer who shares several qualities with the book’s author.

  As the book opens, the narrator’s mother is hospitalized, and it’s doubtful whether she will recover. “I don’t have much experience of death,” he says at one point — but this isn’t only the story of one person grappling with the sudden presence of mortality and the loss of someone close to them. Those are certainly elements of the narrative, but they’re not the only ones.

  Early on, the narrator talks about how “my mother worked in the prostitution industry” — which involved her working under different names, and which led to his having several half-siblings.

  In the present-day scenes of the novel, the narrator’s attempts at wrangling a geographically and temperamentally widespread family are one of several scenes that keep the book grounded.

  Elsewhere, he takes a more philosophical and even experimental approach: The book leaps around in time and space, echoing the ways in which memory can follow an emotional trajectory rather than a temporal one.

  Sometimes this involves descriptions of his own childhood and early adulthood; sometimes, his mother’s life; sometimes, other aspects of the family’s history.
  Tomb Song, by Julian Herbert
  Tomb Song, by Julian Herbert

  “Tomb Song” leaves space for the high-minded, the sociopolitical and the pop culture-obsessed.

  The changing political situation in Cuba is a perpetual touchstone throughout the novel. At one point, the narrator cites a number of creative works as references for a period of his youth: This includes Luis Buñuel’s 1950 neorealist classic “The Young and the Damned” and the beloved 1978 martial arts film “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.”

  At other times, the narrator refers to the narrative we’re reading as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with his mother’s illness. He describes what we’re reading as a book, then delivers a parenthetical aside: “(if this does become a book, if my mother survives or dies in some syntactical fold that restores the meaning of my digressions).”

  “Tomb Song” is an inherently contradictory book: The experimental aspects of its structure have a playfulness to them, which in turn contrasts with the (literally) life-or-death stakes at its core. That it’s also able to fold in such disparate elements as a meditation on perceptions of the Cuban revolution, ups and downs of a small-town soccer team and explore the nature of parenthood serves as a testament to Herbert’s narrative deftness.

  This novel sprawls, but never loses sight of the human connection at its core — and it’s all the more moving as a result.

  Tobias Carroll is managing editor of Vol. 1, Brooklyn.

  Tomb Song
  By Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney.
  Publisher: Graywolf Press, 207 pages, $16.