This is Ground Control speaking. Can you hear me?
Put your helmet on now. And remember to count: ten, nine, eight, commencing countdown and engines on. Check ignition. And, seven, six, five, four, three, and now we’re moonwalking.
This is Ground Control. Can you hear me?
Do you remember that song? And our game? After the moonwalks comes the part we love the most. Two, one: and you’re launched into space. You’re up in space, floating in a most peculiar way. Up there, the stars look really different. But they’re not. They’re the same stars, always. You might feel lost one day, but you have to remember that you’re not, because you and I will find each other again.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began writing this novel in the summer of 2014. Over time, a large number of people and institutions have helped it come into being. I am deeply thankful to all, but I especially want to thank the following:
The Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, which offered me a fellowship and residence in the summer of 2015, and where, after a year of note-taking, I finally began typing.
Shakespeare & Co., in Paris, and especially Sylvia Whitman, who in the summer of 2016 generously offered me a roof and bed above the bookstore, where I was able to devote many hours to the manuscript.
The Beyond Identity program, at the City College of New York, where I was a visiting fellow between the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018, and thanks to which I had time to finish and edit the manuscript.
Philip Glass, who exists, and whose Metamorphosis I listened to approximately five thousand times while writing this novel.
My agents and sisters-in-arms, Nicole Aragi and Laurence Laluyaux, as well as their wonderful assistants, Grace Dietshe and Tristan Kendrick Lammar.
My brilliant editors: Anna Kelly, at Fourth Estate; and Robin Desser, at Knopf, as well as Annie Bishai—the best editorial assistant I have worked with.
My editor and longtime interlocutor at Coffee House Press, Chris Fischbach.
My friends—generous early readers during different stages of the manuscript—N. M. Aidt, K. M. Alcott, H. Cleary, B. H. Edwards, J. Freeman, L. Gandolfi, T. Gower, N. Gowrinathan, R. Grande, R. Julien, C. MacSweeney, P. Malinowski, E. Rabasa, D. Rabasa, L. Ribaldi, S. Schweblin, Z. Smith, A. Thirlwell, and J. Wray.
Miquel and Ana.
And my parents, Marta and Cassio.
WORKS CITED
(Notes on Sources)
Like my previous work, Lost Children Archive is in part the result of a dialogue with many different texts, as well as with other nontextual sources. The archive that sustains this novel is both an inherent and a visible part of the central narrative. In other words, references to sources—textual, musical, visual, or audio-visual—are not meant as side notes, or ornaments that decorate the story, but function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past.
References to sources appear in different ways along the novel’s narrative scheme:
1. The fundamental “bibliography” appears within the boxes that travel in the car with the family (Box I–Box V).
2. In the parts narrated by a female first-person narrator, all sources used are either cited and quoted or paraphrased and referenced.
3. In the parts narrated by the boy first-person narrator, works previously used by the female first-person narrator are “echoed,” while others are quoted or paraphrased and referenced.
4. Some references to other literary works are spread nearly invisibly across both narrative voices as well as the Elegies for Lost Children and are meant to appear as thin “threads” of literary allusion.
One such thread alludes to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, wherein the technique of shifting narrative viewpoints via an object moving in the sky was, I believe, first invented. I repurpose the technique in point-of-view shifts that occur when the eyes of two characters “meet” in a single point in the sky, by looking at the same object: airplane, eagles, thunderclouds, or lightning.
5. In the parts narrated by a third-person narrator, Elegies for Lost Children, sources are embedded and paraphrased but not quoted or cited. The Elegies are composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc. The allusions need not be evident. I’m not interested in intertextuality as an outward, performative gesture but as a method or procedure of composition.
The first elegies allude to Ezra Pound’s “Canto I,” which is itself an “allusion” to Homer’s Book XI of the Odyssey—his “Canto I” is a free translation from Latin, and not Greek, into English, following Anglo-Saxon accentual verse metrics, of Book XI of the Odyssey. Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Pound’s “Canto I,” is about journeying/descending into the underworld. So, in the opening Elegies about the lost children, I reappropriate certain rhythmic cadences as well as imagery and lexicon from Homer/Pound, in order to establish an analogy between migrating and descending into the underworld. I repurpose and recombine words or word-pairings like “swart/night,” “heavy/weeping,” and “stretched/wretched”—all of which derive from lines in “Canto I.”
Sources in the Elegies embedded in the third-person narrative follow a similar scheme as above, and include the following works: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad; The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot; The Children’s Crusade, by Marcel Schwob; “El dinosaurio,” by Augusto Monterroso; “The Porcupine,” by Galway Kinnell; Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo; Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke; and The Gates of Paradise, by Jerzy Andrzejewski (translated by Sergio Pitol into Spanish, and retranslated by me into English).
Below is a list of exact lines or words alluded to from each work, roughly in the order in which they appear in the Elegies sections of the novel:
Ezra Pound, “Canto I”
. And then went down to the ships
. Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
. Swartest night stretched over wretched men there
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
. lightless region of subtle horrors
. Going up that river…It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.
Ezra Pound, “Canto I” and “Canto II”
. impetuous impotent dead,
. unburied, cast on the wide earth
. thence outward and away
. wine-red glow in the shallows
. loggy with vine-must
Ezra Pound, “Canto III”
. his heart out, set on a pike spike
. Here stripped, here made to stand
. his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered
Augusto Monterroso, “El dinosaurio”
. When he woke up the dinosaur was still there.
Galway Kinnell, “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible”
. Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
. A heap of broken images where the sun beats
Galway Kinnell, “The Porcupine”
. puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned / on willow flowers, poplar catkins….
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
. Looking into the heart of light, the silence
. Unreal City,
Under the brown fo
g of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (retranslated by me from the Spanish original)
. Up and down the hill we went, but always descending. We had left behind hot wind and were sinking into pure, airless heat.
. The hour of day when in every village children come out to play in the streets
. Hollow footsteps, echoing against walls stained red by the setting sun
. Empty doorways overgrown with weeds
Rilke, Duino Elegies (loosely retranslated from Juan Rulfo’s free translation of Duino Elegies)
. knowing they cannot call upon anyone, not men, not angels, not beasts
. astute beasts
. this uninterpreted world
. voices, voices, thinks listen heart, listen like only the saints have listened before
. how strange it feels to not be on earth anymore
. angels forget if they live among the living or among the dead
. toilsome to be dead
Jerzy Andrzejewski, The Gates of Paradise (loosely translated from Pitol’s Spanish translation of the Polish original, and retranslated by me into English)
. they walked without chants and without ringing of bells in a closed horde
. nothing could be heard, except the monotonous sound of thousands of footsteps
. a desert, inanimate and calcined by the sun
. he touched the sand with his lips
. the sky was stained with a violet silence
. in a strange country, under a strange sky
. far away, as if in another world, thunder resonated heavily
To the best of my ability, I have quoted, cited, and referenced all works used for this novel—aside from the boxes, embeddings, retranslations, and repurposing of the literary works in the third-person narrative thread of the novel, which I cite above.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
1 Courtesy of Humane Borders
2 © Felix Gaedtke
3 By J. W. Swan (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
4 Courtesy of Kansas Historical Society
5 Geronimo and fellow Apache Indian prisoners on their way to Florida by train. 1886. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
6 Image courtesy of the Hofstra Hispanic Review; poem © Anne Carson
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.
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Lost Children Archive: A Novel Page 32