by Dick Cluster
Panama, meanwhile, has contributed two outstanding players (Rod Carew and Mariano Rivera), and Nicaragua, one (Dennis Martínez).
I think the foregoing history of the game’s first century in the countries rimming the Caribbean is enough to provide sufficient perspective on its place in their cultures.7 There is more to say about more recent trends affecting Latin American baseball, particularly the creation of Caribbean-based baseball academies by the big league clubs, but this history will be known to most readers, and these and other contemporary trends will be reflected in the stories themselves. Anyway, pregame shows should only go on so long. In sum, baseball is still the national pastime in the countries represented here, with the exception of Mexico, where soccer—fútbol—reigns supreme. Fans still follow the local teams with as much attention as they follow their own countrymen and other players in the North. So let me now just say a few words about baseball’s place in Latin American literature and a few more about my selection criteria and translations. Then you can sing the national anthem of your choice and move on to playing ball.
In North America, aside from the classic 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat,” baseball has taken literary form mostly in novels. In fact, baseball novels often become an author’s best-known work, or the one to be made into a film, as in the cases of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly, Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (Damn Yankees in the stage and screen versions), or W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams in the film version). There have also been specialists in baseball short stories, most notably the sportswriter Ring Lardner in the 1910s and ’20s.
In Latin America, by contrast, there are practically no baseball novels, despite the number of prominent novelists who have been great baseball fans—examples being Mexico’s Juan Rulfo, Cuba’s Leonardo Padura and Arturo Arango, Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and Puerto Rico’s Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá.8 Likewise, none of the region’s famous sportswriters have turned their hands to baseball stories more than once or twice.
One reason for this gap, I suspect, is that for a long time Latin American high culture looked toward Europe, while its popular culture, at least in the Caribbean and Central America, looked toward the United States. So writing about baseball was no way to make one’s literary mark as a “serious” writer. Similarly, in matters of global or continent-wide trends in Spanish-language literature, the publishing powerhouses and tastemakers tended to reside in Madrid, Barcelona, or Buenos Aires, not in the baseball powerhouses of Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan, or Caracas. Perhaps for these reasons soccer and boxing have been better represented in literature. The closest thing to a baseball novel that I know of, the Venezuelan writer and diplomat Guillermo Meneses’s 1939 Campeones, involves both baseball and boxing, with both sports providing a window into race, class, and national identity.
Also, to the extent that US baseball fiction could have influenced Latin American writing, the dominance of Spanish publishing again raised an obstacle. According to the late Mexican dramatist Vicente Leñero, whose one-act play Aut at Third concludes this collection, Juan Rulfo advised him that, for baseball fiction, he should read Lardner and other US authors, since in Mexico there was not much to be found. But the translations Leñero encountered, done in Spain by translators as remote from the game as the emblematic Chilean who didn’t know where to find first base, were laughable at best.9
Whatever the reason, what has saved Latin American baseball fiction is that prose writers and poets too have allowed their passion for the game to be expressed in the occasional story or dramatic work.10 Padura, Arango, and Ramírez, in addition to Leñero, are all represented here, as are the poets Camila Hernández Peña from Cuba and Alexis Gómez Rosa from the Dominican Republic. So are younger generations of writers, both female and male, such as Sandra Tavárez and Daniel Reyes Guzmán in the Dominican Republic, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and Cezanne Cardona in Puerto Rico, and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón and Salvador Fleján in Venezuela.
Generally, this process of venturing into baseball as a subject matter has been spontaneous, with the stories appearing in volumes of the authors’ short fiction or sometimes in magazines. In the Dominican Republic, it has also, thankfully, had official support. In 2008, observing that although “baseball has been an inseparable part of Dominican national identity” there had been an “almost inexplicable absence of a body of writing that would make use of literary situations that emerge from this sport,”11 the Secretariat of Culture of the Dominican Republic sponsored a prize contest for such stories, the winners of which were published in a collection called Jonrón 600 in honor of the exceeding of that milestone by Sammy Sosa’s career total (609). The experiment was repeated the following year, producing a new collection entitled Círculo de espera (On-deck circle). In 2005 and 2007 the Mexican division of the Spanish publisher Alfaguara and the Cuban publishing house Editorial Unicornio bucked the longstanding trend by publishing anthologies of their countries’ baseball writing, Pisa y corre (Tagging up, primarily poetry, memoir, essay, and drama) and Escribas en el estadio (Scribes in the stadium), respectively.
For this anthology I chose a selection of the best works in a literary sense—a subjective judgment, of course—and one that is balanced in terms of nations of origin. There are five pieces each from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, three from Venezuela, three from Puerto Rico, and one each from Mexico and Nicaragua. (If there is baseball fiction from Panama, I was not able to find it.) I also sought to balance the predominant themes that appeared among the sixty-odd stories I had collected. Chronologically, all the works are from 1989 (Padura’s “The Wall”) or later, with the exception of “The Glory of Mamporal” (1935, but such a classic and with such staying power in Venezuela that it was made into a movie sixty-two years later, in 1997). I rejected some excellent stories because they were too densely packed with local allusions that would be Greek to US readers (that would “leave you in China,” as the Cuban figure of speech says). In all the translations I’ve tried to provide some inconspicuous help with local references by introducing a few glosses that I hope will not interrupt the flow of the story. In the case of the Dominican Republic, it’s often said that the country’s twin passions are baseball and politics. So, in a brief introduction to “The Real Thing” I offer a guide to the main allusions to political history; about “The Strange Game of the Men in Blue,” let me just say that in my view it’s a sort of foundation myth, not a literal history, and all the more interesting for being so.
A challenging and enjoyable part of the translation process has been capturing some of the flavor of Latin American baseball terminology. In the original Spanish the writers adopt a wide variety of ways of spelling English-derived baseball terms—sometimes using English spelling (italicized or not), or sometimes using Spanish spellings that best approximate the way the word is locally pronounced. Thus dogoa is the best approximation of dugout, because the spelling dugout in Spanish would be pronounced as “due-goat,” except that final ts are extremely rare. Quetcher and flai render the English sounds quite well, while jit does not do so exactly (the j sounds something like a German or Hebrew ch), but it’s better than the silent h that would leave hit to be pronounced as “it.” On the other hand, a writer’s use of hit or catcher communicates something else, which is a character or narrator’s knowledge of English or the writer’s interest in reproducing it verbatim. Still another part of the flavor comes from the inventions that have renamed baseball concepts purely in Spanish. Examples include jardinero (a gardener, or someone standing in a yard or lawn) for outfielder; cuadrangular (four-angled and thus four-sided) for a hit that lets you circle the bases; emergente (someone who emerges, who puts in an appearance) for pinch hitter; or imparable (unstoppable) as an alternative to jit.
What I’ve opted to do is scatter all these sorts of usages through the stories, in italics, but much less frequently than they appear in the originals. I hope that this serves not
to interrupt your reading while reminding you that the stories were not originally written in English and that Spanish baseball talk has a tropical flavor all its own. When you find a normal English word in italics, that means that the English word was used in the original. Where what’s in italics is something else, then I’m preserving the Spanish spelling or the Spanish invention.
And now, ¡Pleibol!
DICK CLUSTER
Oakland, California
NOTES
1. Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Ecco, 1999), 83.
2. Translated from Juan Vené, Juan Vené en la pelota (Biblioteca Últimas Noticias, 2005), 53.
3. Javier González, El Béisbol en Venezuela (Fundación Bigott, 2003), 21.
4. Los Navegantes de Magallanes (Magellan’s Mariners) are based in the city of Valencia, but they are always referred to as Magallanes, and I’ve left them that way in the story translations as well.
5. The Carrillo Puerto quote, like most of the information about baseball during the revolutionary period in the Yucatán, is drawn from Gilbert M. Joseph, “Forging the Regional Pastime: Baseball and Class in Yucatán,” in Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture, edited by Joseph L. Arbena (Greenwood Press, 1988).
6. Jaime Córdova, Béisbol de Corazon (Ediciones Callejón, 2006), 99. Córdova notes that the lineup included future US Hall of Famers Josh Gibson (the “Black Babe Ruth”), James “Cool Papa” Bell (who once stole two hundred bases in a 175-game season), and Satchel Paige, as well as first baseman–manager Lázaro Sálazar (Cuba’s 1934 batting champion, with an average of .407, and, during his long career, also a star in Mexico and the Negro leagues). The starting lineup included seven winners of batting championships in their respective leagues plus the pitching ace, Paige, possibly the best of all time. That Trujillo did not also attempt to recruit white players from the US majors was presumably because the championship was played during the summer season, and thus he desired to avoid a confrontation with his allies in the US government.
7. A multitude of books, articles, and websites treat Latin American baseball history in both Spanish and English. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to confirm information by means of a variety of sources and to compare what is written by baseball historians with that by historians of other sorts. Besides the works cited in this introduction, see “Further Reading” for some more books on the history in English.
8. Rodríguez Juliá wrote a well-known collection of Puerto Rican baseball anecdotes and minibiographies called Peloteros, and a climactic scene of his 2011 novel La piscina involves a boy attending a game in San Juan’s stadium with his father, and the microcosm of class, race, and international hierarchy that he observes. Padura’s wide-ranging novel Herejes, also from 2011, features fictional use of historical characters ranging from Rembrandt in seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the Jewish refugees on the ocean liner St. Louis in Havana harbor in 1939; the Cuban American outfielder Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso likewise appears. Neither would bear excerpting very well, though I asked Rodríguez Juliá just in case, and he said “nobody would understand a thing.” By some strange diamond coincidence, however, 2011 also saw the publication of Puerto Rican novelist and poet Rafael Acevedo’s intricate mock-Chinese novel-within-a-novel, Flor de Ciruelo y el viento, from which I have excerpted the unexpected baseball piece, “Clock Reaches the Emperor’s Citadel.”
One of the few Mexican short stories about baseball is the late Daniel Sada’s “Cualquier altibajo,” which, like the Venezuelan “Glory of Mamporal,” is about a game in the countryside; unfortunately, I could not get permission from Sada’s estate to include it. The fiction writer and essayist Carlos Velazquez, who writes in the context of the violence of the northern border states, has a recent thirty-page novella called “La jota de Bergerac” about a transvestite prostitute who is put to use as a kind of good luck charm for a visiting Cuban ballplayer.
9. See Leñero’s essay “Lanzamientos para un prólogo” in Pisa y corre: Beisbol por escrito, edited by Vicente Leñero and Gerardo de la Torre (México: Alfaguara, 2005).
10. The poets have celebrated baseball in their own genre, too. Anthologies of baseball writing published in Venezuela and in Mexico feature poetry as prominently as prose, those from the latter country including Alberto Blanco’s epic “La vida en el diamante.” Nicaraguan Horacio Peña wrote a book-length poem in honor of Roberto Clemente after the Puerto Rican star’s death in a plane crash while delivering earthquake relief supplies to Managua. Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s odes on the deaths of prominent figures include one in honor of Martín Dihigo. On a lighter note, Guillén’s poem “Tú no sabe inglé’” laments the troubles of a would-be gigolo hampered by his limited English, which consists only of etrái guan and guan tu tri; the verse was translated by Guillén’s friend Langston Hughes as “’Merican gal comes lookin’ fo’ you / an’ you jes’ runs away / Yo’ English is jes’ strike one! / strike one and one-two-three.”
11. Translated from the introduction to Jonrón 600 by Luis R. Santos. For full bibliographic information, see “Further Reading” at the end of this book.
SWIMMING UPSTREAM
Eduardo del Llano
(Cuba)
Eduardo del Llano (born in Moscow, 1962) lives in Havana, where he founded and directed the theatrical/literary group NOS-Y-OTROS (1982–97). His prolific literary work includes poetry, short stories, and novels in genres ranging from science fiction to detective fiction, children’s literature, and literary fiction and has received prizes in both Cuba and Italy. In addition, he has written and directed several award-winning films and participated in film festivals around the globe. His latest novel, Bonsai, was published in 2014.
“I don’t like ballet,” the doctor admitted.
“Okay,” Nicanor said, “but it’s different with me. It’s not that I don’t like sports, it’s that they don’t make any sense to me. Like I wouldn’t understand a salmon explaining why it has to migrate. I just don’t get a stadium full of people screaming with enthusiasm or outrage about eight guys who can bang a leather ball around better than the other eight.”
“Nine.”
“Whatever. The point is that a playing field doesn’t leave any room for the spirit. An artist has talent, no doubt about that. So does a mathematician. But a ballplayer just runs or hits better than an ordinary guy. Tell me what that has to do with humanity.”
Nicanor was Rodríguez’s patient, but Rodríguez was out on leave. To describe Nicanor, suffice it to say he was skinny and bald with bad skin. Right away, part of the doctor took a dislike to him. The other part tried to be professional.
“Sports are a lot more than that. They’re struggle, strategy, teamwork. When a sprinter sets a record, when a guy jumps two and a half meters as if he were made of rubber, there’s beauty in that. It’s about surpassing human limits.”
“Okay, but in the wrong direction. You’re saying struggle and strategy. That’s the language of war.”
With apparent nonchalance the doctor closed his newspaper, covering the sports page to which it had been turned. He checked his watch.
“O’Donnell, you didn’t come here to tell me your opinion about sports. That’s not a problem in itself. Maybe the fact that your position is so rabid, so reductionist . . .”
“I came to see you, doctor, because sometimes my soul leaves my body and reappears in the body of a baseball player in a tight situation.”
The doctor nodded ever so slightly, holding the patient’s eyes until he blinked.
“Your soul migrates. What did you say earlier about salmon?”
“Nothing,” the patient said curtly. “You’re not getting rid of me by telling me my mother forced me to eat fish when I was a boy. Which, by the way, isn’t true. What is true is that sometimes for a moment I transubstantiate into a baseball star.”
The doctor felt a brief attack of envy. One of these days, he t
hought with annoyance, I’ll have to ask Rodríguez to analyze me.
“What team?”
“Havana. The Industriales.”
“I see. And under what circumstances does this occur? Sometimes the most ordinary things can provoke fantasies. Fatigue, for instance, or problems with your wife, or sniffing ten or twelve lines of . . .”
“The weird thing is, it doesn’t happen to me. It happens to them. Typical situation: the Industriales have their backs to the wall at the end of the ninth inning, down three runs, but with the bases loaded and their last hope at bat. In that situation, it’s almost a sure thing that my soul is going to take part in the game.”
“And you strike out.”
“No. I hit a spectacular jonrón. The whole time I’m conscious of being an intruder in a foreign body. I’ve got this tension, you know, like I’m about to be found out. The way to dissolve the tension is by swinging. Generally I hit it out of the park.”
“And the player’s soul? Where does it go in the meantime? Into your body?”
“For me to answer that, you’d have to prove that baseball players have souls. Anyway, the thing isn’t that symmetrical. My body faints. Maybe the ballplayer’s soul sits in the grandstand and watches.”
“And does your soul choose to emigrate into any player in particular?”
“It used to, but he left the country. In fact, I think it’s thanks to my soul that he’s a major league star today. But the thing doesn’t work over such a long distance, so now he’s got to take care of himself.”
The doctor twisted the table lamp so its beam pointed at the other man. He began waving a pencil.
“Concentrate on this. You’re getting tired. Your eyelids are heavy. You want to sleep. When I say one-two-three, you’ll fall into a deep sleep. One. Two. Three. What do you feel?”