The Remains - Margo Glantz

. .

Résumé :
The way you hold a cello, the way light lands on a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could: a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora Garcia as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora's life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composter, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar thins, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Ellen Jones's new, masterful translation of Glantz's classic novel, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, 'Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.'

Biographie:

Margo Glantz fused Yiddish literature, Mexican culture, and French tradition to create experimental new works of literature. Glanz graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1953 and earned a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Mexico to teach literature and theater history at UNAM. A prolific essayist, she is best known for her 1987 autobiography Las genealog?as (The Genealogies), which blended her experiences of growing up Jewish in Catholic Mexico with her parents' immigrant experiences. She also wrote fiction and nonfiction that shed new light on the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz. Among her many honours, she won the Magda Donato Prize for Las genealog?as and received a Rockefeller Grant (1996) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998).She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Universidad Aut?noma Metropolitana (2005), the Universidad Aut?noma de Nuevo Le?n (2010), and the Universidad Nacional Aut?noma de M?xico (2011). Glantz was awarded the 2004 National Prize for Sciences and the prestigious FIL Prize in 2010. She received Chile's Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award in 2015.

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iv?n de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas was published in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine, Slug and The London Magazine .