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Lunatics, Lovers and Poets

Page 17

by Daniel Hahn


  ‘You know, at least two hundred men have been killed in Lincoln County but I didn’t kill all of them,’ he went on.

  I walked over to the window. Billy took out his box of matches and lit another cigarette. Outside, the laughter and applause had died down. There was no one in the main square except for Dangerous Dan – still tied to the hitching post – so deeply asleep that he appeared dead, his head drooping. Nimmi was standing guard beside him, holding a shotgun. She fired twice into the wide, open sky.

  I knew that was my cue. I picked up my empty chair and, in a single movement, swung it at Billy’s head. He had no time to react. A narrow trickle of blood slid down from his forehead, his whole body crumpled. His lit cigarette fell to the floor and I ground it under my bare foot.

  I checked his pulse was still beating. It was. I undressed him slowly and tied him to the chair with some rope. Then I sat astride him. You could say that, in some remote sense, I danced a jig on him. When I’d finished, I put a bunch of artificial roses between his legs.

  Shakespeare was silent and I’d switched off the light in the props room to be able to see, from my position on the floor, the burning desert stars.

  When Billy came round, maybe forty minutes later, I was still lying face up, looking at the sky, striking and blowing out the matches he’d left by his chair when he’d lit his last cigarette. He cleared his throat and said:

  ‘People thought me bad before, but if ever I should get free, I’ll let them know what bad means.’

  ‘Sure Billy, whatever you say,’ I replied.

  ‘You know, at least two hundred men have been killed in Lincoln County,’ he went on, ‘but I didn’t kill all of them.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Billy,’ I said calmly, and he obeyed.

  We went on breathing together in the darkness for a little while until we heard a slow creaking sound. The door opened, letting in the light from the hall of the Stratford Hotel. Outside, probably rather drunk, passing around a half-empty bottle, were Juan, the Contractor, and Doc Holliday, who was still dressed in his Mickey Mouse audition outfit. Behind them, like a kind of Greek chorus, a group of octogenarian tourists watched us, wide smiles on their faces, ready to enjoy the final scene their tour of Shakespeare would offer.

  ‘Quién es, quién es?’ murmured Billy the Kid, unable to protect himself from the flashing cameras of our audience.

  I took Billy’s revolver, still in the holster thrown on the floor among the tangle of his clothes. This was my moment, I was certain. I rose from the floor, and struck a match to light my face better for a few seconds. Standing next to Billy, holding his own revolver to his temple, when the flame died, I said:

  Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.

  Billy closed his eyes before the sound of the smoking shot was heard. He opened them again at the applause, which started slowly, timidly, and then exploded into a loud ovation. I was disappointed to discover that my children were not among the crowd watching my scene, though perhaps seeing Billy naked would have been an unnecessary shock. Juan Baca and the Contractor – arms around each other’s shoulders – passed the bottle between them and, wrapped in their strange cloud of torpor and half-happiness, raised it together in a toast. The pensioners cheered and whistled with generous appreciation. Doc Holliday had taken off his white plush mitts to applaud more easily and, from behind the outsized head of his mouse costume, was shouting resounding bravos.

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  ‌Note from the Editors

  The lunatic, the lover and the poet. What do these three have in common? According to Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they’re ‘of imagination all compact’. Those words might begin to explain the endless fascination exerted by some of Shakespeare’s characters; but they seem also to be the perfect fit for an unrelated near-contemporary, providing as they do an uncannily good explanation for the hero of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Because Spanish literature’s greatest lover-poet-lunatic is indeed compact – that is, formed – of imagination. He’s not merely a product of his creator’s imagining; imagination is fundamentally the material stuff out of which he is made.

  A vivid imagination is what drives Don Quixote the character as much as Don Quixote the novel. Imagination is what supplies the answer to every ‘What if… ?’ question that sets every Shakespearean plot moving. Imagination is what takes a single original moment – a scenario, a fragment of character, a point of conflict – and over the course of thousands of words pieces out those imperfections into, well, Henry V, perhaps? Our twin geniuses of Alcalá de Henares and Stratford-upon-Avon not only tapped their own imaginations to create their work, but so often made that work an explicit, committed, vibrant celebration of imaginative power.

  Is that, perhaps, why their stories continue to supply such rich fuel for literary creation today? Certainly the kind of imagination that constitutes and governs lunatics, lovers and poets (such as those who populate these pages) also serves to explain how the stories in this collection have come to exist. We asked a dozen brilliant novelists to take these two vast figures as their starting points and set their own imaginations to work, and far from being crippled by the anxiety of these influences, our contemporary writers acquitted themselves most bravely, launching themselves at their giants – armed only with a pen – with resourcefulness, generosity, wisdom and wit. (Just as Cervantes and Shakespeare so often did with writers who came before them, of course.) We are grateful to them, and to our twelve translators (six stories have been translated for the English edition, six for the Spanish edition) for sharing their skill and the fruits of their imaginations with us.

  Some of these new stories occupy the same narrative spaces as their predecessors, but are transplanted in place or time: Coriolanus is moved to Mexico in Yuri Herrera’s story, and Caesar and Mark Antony, who appear as both characters and literary references in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s story, to Bogotá; Mir Aslam, Kamila Shamsie’s creation, is both Cide Hamete Benengeli, the fictitious narrator of Don Quixote, and Quixote himself, a fighter ready to face giants. Don Quixote is also the main character in Ben Okri’s ‘Don Quixote and the Ambiguity of Reading’, which restages (and relocates) the famous visit Don Quixote makes to the printing workshop in the second book.

  Some stories take merely a Shakespearean theme, or a Cervantine flavour, rather than the shape of a particular existing narrative. Cervantes’s ‘The Glass Graduate’ remains one of his most intriguing texts and it has inspired two new stories here: Deborah Levy tells the story of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, convinced she has swallowed a glass piano, while in ‘Glass’ Nell Leyshon also creates delicate characters made vulnerable by love, just like Tomás in the original story. Marco Giralt Torrente’s suburban story, meanwhile, talks of the love and jealousy and treason in Hamlet, concealed behind layers of boring bourgeois life. And in Rhidian Brook’s ‘The Anthology Massacre’, we find Cervantes’s brutal sense of humour on every page, as an undervalued writer (much as Cervantes himself) tries to find an editor for his decidedly long novel, Rocinante’s Revenge.

  Other stories take on the real worlds of the writers that inspired them – in Vicente Molina Foix’s story we meet playgoers in Jacobethan London – or that of the readers and scholars who come after them: in ‘The Secret Life of Shakespeareans’, by Soledad Puértolas, a story within a story leads us to a mysterious bazaar in Aleppo, while the characters recover love through boring Shakespearean lectures. In Hisham Matar’s ‘The Piano Bar’, a man walks into a café in Cairo with a copy of Don Quixote under his arm. And in Valeria Luiselli’s story an actor in a tacky New Mexico historical re-enactment company is really just waiting for a chance to give us a bit of her Macbeth.

  In his introduction, Salman Rushdie identifies s
ome of the possibilities modern-day storytellers have inherited from their colossal ancestors. The writers in Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, in embracing our challenge, have produced stories that demonstrate the richness of these possibilities; and in doing so, they open the promise of unexplored routes for those who come after them, too.

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  ‌About the Contributors

  THE WRITERS

  Rhidian Brook is an award-winning writer of fiction, television drama and film. His novels have been translated into twenty-four languages and adapted for the screen. His short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines including the Paris Review, Time Out and the New Statesman. He has also written screenplays for BBC Drama, as well as for cinema. He is a regular contributor to ‘Thought for the Day’ on the Today programme. Rhidian lives in London with his wife and two children.

  Marcos Giralt Torrente has published novels, collections of short stories and a memoir. In 2014 three of his works were translated into English. In 2011 he won the Spanish National Book Award. He has received several other awards, such as the Premio Herralde in 1999 for his novel Paris. He was part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme in 2002.

  Yuri Herrera is a Mexican novelist who won the 2003 edition of the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven with his first novel Trabajos del reino, which also received the Otras Voces, Otros Ambitos prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008. His second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World), was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His work has been published in journals and newspapers in Spain, Latin America and the United States.

  Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards and 2013 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, while the title story of Black Vodka: ten stories was shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award and another story from the collection has been turned into the graphic novel Stardust Nation. ‘The Glass Woman’ was researched at the Royal College of Art as part of Levy’s AHRB research fellowship titled ‘The Life of Objects: what objects tell us about our secret selves’.

  Nell Leyshon is an award-winning playwright and novelist. Her first novel, Black Dirt, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and The Colour of Milk has been published worldwide. Her plays include Comfort Me with Apples, which won the Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright, and Bedlam, the first play written by a woman to be performed at Shakespeare’s Globe. Nell also writes for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and her first radio play, Milk, won the Richard Imison Award. She taught creative writing for many years with marginalised communities, and is on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors.

  Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican novelist (Faces in the Crowd) and essayist (Sidewalks) whose work has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta and McSweeney’s. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and she was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’.

  Hisham Matar’s novels, In the Country of Men (2006) – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), have won several international prizes and been translated into twenty-nine languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He divides his time between London and New York, where he is the Weiss International Fellow in Literature and the Arts in the English Department at Barnard College, Columbia University. His new book, The Return, will be out in the summer of 2016.

  Vicente Molina Foix is a Spanish dramatist, critic, and film director. His poetry was included in the famous anthology Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (1970), but he has mostly published novels ever since: Busto (Premio Barral 1973), Los padres viudos (Premio Azorín 1983), La quincena soviética (Premio Herralde 1988), El vampiro de la calle Méjico (Premio Alfonso García Ramos 2002). He has translated Hamlet, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice.

  Ben Okri has published ten novels, three volumes of short stories, two books of essays and three collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than twenty-six languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, honorary vice-president of English PEN and has been awarded the OBE. The recipient of many international honorary doctorates, his books have won numerous prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize. He won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. Among his credits is the screenplay for the film N: The Madness of Reason. He is an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London. His latest novel, The Age of Magic, was published in 2014.

  Soledad Puértolas won the Premio Sésamo in 1979 for her novel El bandido doblemente armado, the Premio Planeta in 1989 for Queda la noche and the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo in 1993 with La vida oculta. She has published several novels, essays and stories. She has two children (one of them a writer) and lives in Madrid with her husband.

  Salman Rushdie is the author of eighteen books, including Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993, and, in 2008, the ‘Best of the Booker’. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Prize in 1995 and the European Union’s Aristeion Prize in 1996. In 2007, Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood for services to literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

  Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels, including Burnt Shadows, which has been translated into more than twenty languages and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and A God in Every Stone which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Three of her other novels (In the City by the Sea, Kartography, Broken Verses) have received awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.

  Aside from writing novels, short stories and essays, Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has translated into Spanish works by EM Forster, Victor Hugo and John Hersey. The Sound of Things Falling won him the 2011 Premio Alfaguara de Novela and the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has also published The Secret History of Costaguana (QWERTY Award), The Informers and Las reputaciones (RAE Award, 2014). His collection of stories, The All Saints’ Day Lovers, has just been published in English.

  The Translators

  Lisa M Dillman teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and translates from the Spanish and Catalan. Her translations of Andrés Barba’s August, October and Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World were published in 2015, and her translations of their next novels, Death of a Horse and The Transmigration of Bodies, respectively, are forthcoming in 2016.

  Rosalind Harvey’s translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and longlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network and takes part in regular translation-related events in the UK.

  Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by many authors, including Héctor Abad, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón and Enrique Vila-Matas. Two of her translations have been awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies in 2009. The Sound of Things Falling, her translation of El ruido de las cosas al caer, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  Christina MacSweeney’s translations of work
s by Valeria Luiselli have been recognised by a number of literary prizes. She has also translated texts by such Latin American authors as Daniel Saldaña París, Elena Poniatowska and Silvina Ocampo. Her work has appeared on a variety of platforms, including Granta Online, Words Without Borders, McSweeney’s, Quarterly Conversation and Litro Magazine, and in the anthology México20 (Pushkin Press, 2015).

  Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize and won the Typographical Era Translation Award. Her translation of Spanish author Laia Fàbregas’s Landing will be published by HispaBooks in 2016. She is also a trustee of English PEN.

  Frank Wynne is a literary translator. He has translated over fifty works by French and francophone authors including Michel Houellebecq, Boualem Sansal and Ahmadou Kourouma, and by Spanish and Latin American authors including Pablo Picasso, Tomás González and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. His translations have earned him a number of awards, including the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the Premio Valle Inclán in 2012 and again in 2014. He is a three-time winner of the CWA International Dagger. He has spent time as translator-in-residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyons and at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.

  THE EDITORS

  Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator (from Portuguese, Spanish and French), with forty-something books to his name. Recent books include The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and translations from Brazil, Spain and Angola.

 

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