Writing deals with the problem of transforming this tradition, the daily grind, the everyday and street language into art. It is only in the 20th century, with for example Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and the influence of William Faulkner that time is moved to the present tense, that the Maya and Aztec poetries are discovered, that people became conscious of their cultural roots: Latin America is a mestizo continent, with Indian, Black, Mediterranean, Arabic, Jewish roots. When Hopkinson asked Fuentes to talk about time in The Eagle’s Throne, he proposes that Latin-American culture departs, traditionally, from the Baroque: philosophy, architecture, music, literature. The writer can employ different methods, from linear, to playing with time, to writing a ‘novel within a novel’ (for example Don Quixote by Cervantes). When he enquired after this, they answered him, “We have done you a great favour.” “A great favour?” “Yes, a great favour: we have eliminated all the sex and politics scenes from the book.” And in front of what must have been Fuentes’ astonished look, they added, “We know what the Russian public like, You don’t.”Ī novel is defined by its way of utilising time.

Surprisingly, he noticed that the Russian version had only 120. Fuentes shares with us the occasion when he traveled to Russia during the sixties to present the translated version of Artemio Cruz, a novel which in its original version sports 400 pages. Given that writers can only control the translations up to a certain extent, because it is not feasible to speak all the languages on this planet, they are obliged to accept facts as they are.

What does Fuentes generally think about the translations of his work? He comments that they represent unexpected events in the life of a writer, almost comparable to “finding out one has an illegitimate child.” They are, nevertheless, as translations, books in themselves, and each book is born again in its foreign version. Its English version, translated by Kristina Cordero and published by Bloomsbury, has just come out in the UK. The Eagle’s Throne was first published in Spanish in 2002. The stage receives all kinds of questions: shy, excited, interesting, many well thought out: The end of the presentation belongs to the audience.

The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes