A literary journey to Latin America and back
AMBASSADOR OF NOWHERE A Latin American pilgrimage
RICHARD GWYN 370pp. Seren. Paperback, £14.99.
RICHARD GWYN’S NEW MEMOIR is part travelogue, part road movie. An earlier instalment, The Vagabond’s Breakfast (2011), described how he spent his twenties travelling Europe as an alcoholic vagrant, contracted hepatitis C and had a liver transplant. In this sequel, the road beckons again for Gwyn, now a professor at Cardiff University, as he sets off for Latin America to recruit poets for an anthology he has been commissioned to translate (eventually published as The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America in 2016).
“Of all literary works”, writes Gwyn in the prologue, “it is, perhaps, the work of translation that most nearly replicates the reading of a map”. That blurred boundary between translation and travel is the book’s central theme. “Sooner or later, you realise, everything becomes an act of translation.”
As he travels up and down the continent, Gwyn attends poetry festivals, gives talks and catches up with friends (many of whom are poets themselves, such as the Argentines Jorge Fondebrider and Andrés Neuman and the Colombian Darío Jaramillo). Between attending symposia he explores “the strength of opinion surrounding literary matters in Latin America”, and doesn’t shy away from the complex entanglements of poetry and politics. Nowhere is this clearer than in Gwyn’s first destination, Nicaragua: a country where “poets have often been regarded as spokespeople for a better future”.
Gwyn’s prose is lyrical without being indulgent, whether he’s describing the salons and shantytowns of Buenos Aires, the mountains of Patagonia or cows on a beach in southern Chile (“unlikely beach bums” he calls them). Even the more reflective moments – as when Gwyn finds a pack of feral dogs following him through the streets of Valparaíso, Chile – are evocative and poignant: “I am beginning to feel like some lone caped warrior, or the lead singer of a heavy metal band, with my thuggish canine bodyguard now spread around me.”
One of the book’s most memorable sections comes when Gwyn, back in the UK, travels to Dumfries to visit Borges’s translator Alastair Reid – another writer for whom “the act of translation had replaced the need to write his own poetry”. For Reid, “translation was not a business of simply transposing something into another language, it was about getting to the very edge of saying”. As Gwyn considers the significance of this principle for his own writing,the “ghost of Borges” hovering nearby, the reader is struck by how c
