Jorge Hernandez Background

Mexican Author

Jorge F. Hernandez
Focus Author for:
2016 BIG READ for New Orleans

 

Journalist and fiction writer Jorge F. Hernandez will lead discussions on Mexican short fiction throughout New Orleans as part of the 2016 Words & Music festival. Hernandez edited and helped translate the story collection Sun, Stone and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories, a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection. Thanks to a grant from the organization, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society will provide copies of the book to New Orleans high schoolers and adults, bringing the community together for several events to study the importance of Mexican fiction.

Sun, Stone and Shadows is a superb reunion of the best Mexican writers of the first half of the twentieth century,” says Hernandez. “It is the first anthology of Mexican short stories that includes women authors, and it underlines the basic lines of the imaginative forms with which we tend to blend reality and fiction.”

This blending is, to Hernandez, distinctly Mexican. It coincides with a strong sense of place, which in turn morphs into an inextricable sense of time. It is this grounding in time and place that, perhaps counterintuitively, leads to the influx of surrealism and fantasy found in some Mexican fiction.

“Place and time combine in our bloodstream and in the unleashed liberty of imagining constant links between them as if they were tunnels of time travel or vehicles of instant journeys,” Hernandez says. “We are marked by death, as well as a certain magic of hope. We are prone to strictly respect the music of letters and the coloring of verse inherited by centuries of cultural magic.”

There is, then, perhaps no better place than New Orleans to host a study of the Mexican storytelling aesthetic. Steeped in its own history of death, of natural and manmade disaster, of magic and hope against dire odds, New Orleanians may be particularly able to connect with Mexican writers.

“New Orleans has been a place of constant reunion,” says Hernandez. “It has overcome the worst turmoil of racism and natural disaster, thanks to that blending solidarity inherited from the crossroads where Jazz was born, as well as all the Carribean culture of food and dance, letters and silence that revolved around its waters.”

Colonization and revolution in Mexico provides a parallel to the history of New Orleans. It also forms the generational structure of Hernandez’s collection. The writers of Sun, Stone and Shadows are geographically diverse, representing many regions of Mexico. The time in which they wrote, however, is more focused. Most of the stories were written during the first half of the 20th century, and more than half during the 1950s and 1960s. According to Hernandez, this pre-globalization era featured writers who were distinctly Mexican.

“After drafting a long list I decided to cut the line with authors born before 1939,” Hernandez explains. “After that year, the world was impregnated in gunpowder and the remains of the Mexican Revolution spun into a funnel that would slowly wind down to a crucial spill in 1968. The literature that blossomed from then on pertains to another generation.”

Hernandez belongs to that post-Revolution generation, and his own writing is strongly influenced by the writers who are sampled in the story collection. They became his heroes, as they are the heroes of many contemporary Mexican writers.

“My generation inherited the grandeur and elevated stature of true genius,” he says. “I am very fortunate to have met and established not only friendship, but true apprenticeship directly with Carlos Fuentes (who a I met as a child in D.C.), Octavio Paz (who invited me to publish in Vuelta), Gabriel García Márquez (with whom I shared a deep ordeal in cancer and true love for his sons and grandchildren), Alvaro Mutis, José Emilio Pacheco, Salvador Elizondo—most, but not all, are included in the anthology.”

Part of the BIG READ program’s mission is to bring together diverse audiences in a community. The community-wide reading and discussion of Sun, Stone, and Shadows will reach out not only to New Orleans’ growing Latin American community, but to a wide demographic of New Orleanians who may be unfamiliar with these writers due to the predominance of American authors. Mexican writers, Hernandez notes, are often overshadowed by their neighbors to the north.

“To be a Mexican writer entails the geographic defiance of sleeping next to an elephant—American culture and literature,” he explains. “Whenever the huge trunk moves or snores, the neighbor loses his share of the blanket.”

The Words & Music festival’s BIG READ events seek to shine light on America’s Mexican neighbors, featuring writers from all regions of the country. Hernandez refers to four cardinal points of Mexican geography—the mountains and shores, the plains and cities, dry and hot areas, and areas that are windy and tropical. Echoing the landscape, Mexican fiction writers have moved in concentric circles of influence. They have given and received from authors writing in English—including William Faulkner.

“Cervantes appears to have been a reader of Shakespeare, and vice-versa, although there is no proof of their coincidence,” Hernandez says. “Centuries later, Faulkner read Don Quixote every year and his novels became a deep influence in the work of Gabo García Márquez and Fuentes, among others. The windmills of imagination and magical realism flew back North, and now in this fortunately global sphere of unleashed stories and ideas, both our cultures have been enhanced, confirmed, multiplied, replicated and blended without abandoning the basic saliva of their authenticity.”

One of the translator’s most important and difficult jobs is to preserve that authenticity while bringing an author’s work successfully from one language to another. Hernandez and the other translators who worked on Sun, Stone and Shadows took a fresh look at the work, updating old translations into contemporary English.

“Stone, Stone and Shadows revealed that many translations go out of date,” Hernandez says. “It became neccesary to update many of the stories that had been previously translated from Spanish into a form of English that no longer prevails. Going either way, translation between our languages also proves that we must underline keen differences as well as astounding similarities with much care and detail, thorougly respecting the intention of the author in the original and digesting its meaning in the other language.”

The anthology is divided by theme. The first section, titled “The Fantastic Unreal,” includes the work of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Salvador Elizondo, and Francisco Tario. The stories move from the unreal to the real in the book’s second section, “Scenes from Mexican Reality,” featuring Juan de la Cabada, Jose Revueltas, Francisco Rojas Gonzalez, and Elena Garro. “The Tangible Past” includes work by Alfonso Reyes, Juan Rulfo, Martin Luis Guzmn, and Edmundo Valades. From the past to the present, the collection moves into contemporary Mexico with “The Unexpected in Everyday, Urban Life,” featuring Ines Arrendondo, Rosario Castellanos, Efren Hernandez, and Jorge Ibarguengoitia. Finally, “Intimate Imagination” concludes the collection with work from Juan Jose Arreola, Juan Garcia Ponce, Sergio Pitol, and Jose Emilio Pacheco.

Hernandez was born in Mexico City, where his father was a member of the Mexican Foreign Services. The family traveled to Germany and settled in Washington, D.C., where Hernandez grew up. He has published five short story collections, five nonfiction collections, and is currently finishing a novel in English. A bullfighter in his earlier life, Hernandez now lives in Madrid and writes for the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

“I don’t consider myself a full-flung journalist,” he says, “in honor of the many Mexican journalists who have risked their lives exercising true and honest jounalism in a country where they are constantly threatened and killed for covering the shadows and horrors of organized crime and corruption.”

Hernandez also has written a weekly newspaper column for the Mexican newspaper Milenio for 15 years. He worked on Sun, Stone and Shadows while he was an editor at the prestigious Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing house in Mexico. He is currently a tutor of creative writing at Fundacion para las Letras Mexicanas, A.C.

“The only thing that can save us—as persons, people, countries or planet—is in books, in reading books, be it on electronic screens or paper,” he says. “If we read each other we can ask and answer, we can dialogue and move, we can breathe and rescue each other’s dreams and memory.”

Hernandez will present Sun, Stone and Shadows at several events co-sponsored by Words & Music and other community organizations, including an
on-campus event at Tulane University in cooperation with the Latin American While tailored primarily for a student audience, the event is free and open to the public. A second event will be held for high school students and teachers, while additional events will target developing writers and the general reading public. Each event will conclude with a question-and-answer session with Hernandez. Additional events focusing on the literature of the authors included in Sun, Stone, and Shadows will be held in the weeks before the festival begins.

The 2016 Words & Music festival is scheduled for Nov. 9-13. For more information about Sun, Stone and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories, including a reader’s guide and teacher’s guide, go to http://www.neabigread.org/books/sunstoneandshadows/.