Since January, I’ve been on an unpaid leave, working full time as I finally fulfill a 35-year-old dream. In my senior year of college, I began translating fiction by the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979) from Spanish into English. Cold Tales, my collection of 43 of Piñera’s stories, was published in 1988 and René’s Flesh, my translation of his most famous novel was published the following year. However, both books have been out of print for over two decades and are quite hard to find.
This past fall, I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate 23 additional stories by Piñera. In addition, the literary publisher New York Review Books committed to publish my revised and expanded edition of Cold Tales, containing a total of 66 stories, and my revision of René’s Flesh. Here’s “Belisario,” one of the additional stories to be included in the new Cold Tales. And here are two pages of my revision of Piñera’s novel:
This past March, thanks to the support of the CLA Dean’s Professional Development Fund, I was able to travel to Havana for the first time in 35 years, this time accompanied by Piñera’s grandniece, María Victoria Rubio. During this six-day trip, I met with various Cuban authors and critics who work on Piñera’s writing, including the theater director Norge Espinosa and the essayist and professor Víctor Fowler Calzada.
And, thanks to Piñera’s grandniece, I got full access to Piñera’s papers in the National Library in Havana.
Mark and María Victoria, looking through Virgilio Piñera’s papers at the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana, Cuba
I was also able to meet with Piñera’s nephew, the marvelous composer Juan Piñera, for the first time since 1989.
And finally, between my trips to the library and meetings with Cuban authors, I was able to walk around the El Vedado neighborhood and La Habana Vieja (Old Havana) and take some local transportation. Here are a few shots of the city—faded, severely under resourced due to the 62-year-old U.S. embargo of Cuba, but still elegant:
