Isabel Allende, a Chilean-American writer who’s received Chile’s National Literature Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 by President Barack Obama, has been called “the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”. Born in 1942, her novels are often based on her experiences and historical events, paying tribute to the lives of women. When Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in a military coup in 1973, Allende eventually found her name on a “wanted list”; she fled to Venezuela where she stayed for thirteen years. Eventually, she was granted United States citizenship in 1993, having lived in California since 1989.
Her well-known works include La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) and La ciudad de las bestias (City of the Beasts). However, it was her novel Largo pétalo de mar (A Long Petal of the Sea) that introduced me to Allende’s writing. The title is taken from a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda, who’s considered Chile’s national poet and who died during Pinochet’s coup d’état of the nation (with many suspecting the government’s involvement in his death): he describes Chile as a “long petal of the sea and wine and snow / with a belt of black and white foam”.
I’ve read both the Spanish and English versions and her smooth prose remains powerful regardless of language; however, perhaps because the novel was originally written in Spanish, I find that the Spanish version consistently flows in an almost poetic manner. From the very beginning, the lengthy, descriptive language fleshes out a battle-scarred Spain in the throes of the Spanish Civil War, developing the themes of war, exile, migration, and identity alongside the protagonists who must navigate from Spain to France to Chile to Venezuela.
Although my column focuses heavily on translation (translation practice, theory, organizations, and so forth), I wanted to begin exploring the topic of global literature. In today’s political climate, where English and Western literature are (metaphorically and legally) being placed on a higher pedestal, multiculturalism and global literature are necessary to draw the fine line between mere unfamiliarity and willful ignorance. In Largo pétalo de mar, language and literature (in both Spanish and English) aren’t discussed as much as issues of conflict and class; nonetheless, reading and absorbing the universality of these topics highlights the very basic (yet very necessary) lesson that we all share humanity. The bombs that fell on Spain in the 1930s are no different from the bombs that have fallen, are falling, and will fall anywhere else: devastation is universal. The more people realize this common fact, the more open-minded and well-versed the world will be.