Translator's Introduction to Poco-loco — Web Exclusive
By Chris Andrews
Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. Happily, he is not a stranger to readers in the English-speaking world. Three books of his early fiction were translated by Paul Bowles (The Beggar’s Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, and The Pelcari Project); more recently, Esther Allen's translation of The Good Cripple (2004) was published by New Directions. Rey Rosa's first feature film What Sebastian Dreamt, based on his novel Lo que soño Sebastin, premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
While not abandoning the short story, with which he began, Rodrigo Rey Rosa has also adopted ampler forms, particularly the short novel in short chapters. It would be misleading to call Que me maten si . . . (1997) or Piedras encantadas(2001) novellas: although short, they stake out large and complex imaginative territories. They seem to have been produced by drastic, ascetic editing of much longer texts. Rey Rosa's structural economies are reproduced in miniature at the level of the sentence; his precise, laconic style is the opposite of tropical luxuriance. The systematic and expert practise of the ellipse stimulates speculation on the reader's part without slackening narrative tension.
In a stimulating preface to La orilla Africana (1999), the Catalan poet and critic Pere Gimferrer compares Rey Rosa's narratives to oriental and medieval tale—telling. Rey Rosa, he says, is a poetic narrator, not because of anything florid in his style, but because his stories seem to be self-sufficient, not pointing to any wider significance. In that respect, they are, according to Gimferrer, like the tales of the 1001 Nights, and the opposite of Marcel Proust's giant novel (compared by the narrator to "the Arabian Nights [ . . . ] for a new age"), which is animated by a desire to weave significance back into experience through writing.
Fortunately, however, it is too soon to suppose that any characterization will apply to all of Rey Rosa's writing, for he continues to experiment, impelled by a salutary restlessness.
"Poco—loco" is taken from Ningun lugar sagrado (1998), a collection of shorter narrative texts mainly written in New York in the winter of 1997-1998. As the author explains in a prefatory note, "Poco—Loco" is "the simple retelling of a senseless crime that took place at 700 Ninth East Street," very close to where he was living.
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions, he has published a critical study (Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge) and a collection of poems.