juan rulfo and the way he’d look at you kirmen uribe
I “Mexico: Juan Rulfo Fótografo” 2001 We like Juan Rulfo. We like his vision of the world. This writer born in Jalisco spent many years working for the giant Goodrich-Euskadi. He only ever got around to writing two books. He wrote the first one, a book of short stories called “Lautada Sutan”, in 1953 when he was twenty-five years old. It didn’t exactly sell like hotcakes. The second book was a novel called “Pedro Paramo” in 1955. The book did amazingly well sales wise and this unknown writer soon became famous. Some other writers at the time reckoned it was merely a stroke of luck that someone as quiet and everyday as Rulfo could come up with the book he did.
He wrote two books and never published another one because he didn’t see the necessity. He became silent for ever after. The Catalan writer Enrique Vila-Matas reports Juan Rulfo as saying the following in Caracas in 1974:
Why don’t I write anymore? Why, because Uncle Celerino has gone and died on me. He used to tell me stories. Many are the hours we spent deep in conversation with each other. He was a terrible liar. Every single thing he told was a lie, all lies, and, of course, this means that I never wrote anything but lies myself.
During his many years of work and travel into the heart of Mexico he became interested in photography.
In his travel notes and portraits, he tells us of the incredibly harsh living conditions suffered by the people in the West of Mexico. In the recently published version of “Pedro Paramo”, translated to the Basque by Juan Garcia, some of a talk given by Blanco Aginaga makes its way into the book. Blanco recalls a certain incident that happened while they were in Madrid:
We had a record by UNAM in the house. “Luvina” was on one side and “Diles que no me maten” was on the other. Rulfo read both stories and sometimes we’d put them on. The effect the record had on the listener was always that same incredibly striking sensation. But what was most extraordinary was that every time we put the record on, our illiterate housekeeper Mari Carmen Burgos, from a small village somewhere in Avila, would lean against the door to the room totally and absolutely captivated by the recording. One day I returned home earlier than usual and found that she had put the record on and was, yet again, totally enthralled by she was hearing. I decided to ask her just why she liked those stories so much, I mean the stories were a land far from her own. “Heavens no –she said to me–, there not from far away at all! My hometown is exactly the same! The feeding of the animals, the dust, death, the silence, everybody so alone. The poor devils. Just like in the village I come from.
Nobody has ever come up with a better definition of Rulfo’s work than that cleaning lady from Avila.
He wrote two books and never published another one because he didn’t see the necessity. He became silent for ever after. The Catalan writer Enrique Vila-Matas reports Juan Rulfo as saying the following in Caracas in 1974:
Why don’t I write anymore? Why, because Uncle Celerino has gone and died on me. He used to tell me stories. Many are the hours we spent deep in conversation with each other. He was a terrible liar. Every single thing he told was a lie, all lies, and, of course, this means that I never wrote anything but lies myself.
During his many years of work and travel into the heart of Mexico he became interested in photography.
In his travel notes and portraits, he tells us of the incredibly harsh living conditions suffered by the people in the West of Mexico. In the recently published version of “Pedro Paramo”, translated to the Basque by Juan Garcia, some of a talk given by Blanco Aginaga makes its way into the book. Blanco recalls a certain incident that happened while they were in Madrid:
We had a record by UNAM in the house. “Luvina” was on one side and “Diles que no me maten” was on the other. Rulfo read both stories and sometimes we’d put them on. The effect the record had on the listener was always that same incredibly striking sensation. But what was most extraordinary was that every time we put the record on, our illiterate housekeeper Mari Carmen Burgos, from a small village somewhere in Avila, would lean against the door to the room totally and absolutely captivated by the recording. One day I returned home earlier than usual and found that she had put the record on and was, yet again, totally enthralled by she was hearing. I decided to ask her just why she liked those stories so much, I mean the stories were a land far from her own. “Heavens no –she said to me–, there not from far away at all! My hometown is exactly the same! The feeding of the animals, the dust, death, the silence, everybody so alone. The poor devils. Just like in the village I come from.
Nobody has ever come up with a better definition of Rulfo’s work than that cleaning lady from Avila.
