Dante, Bruno, Vico, S.Nob: The Wake in Mexico

The inaugural issue of the avant-garde arts magazine S.Nob, published in June 1962 in Mexico City, featured a translation of the first page of Finnegans Wake. The translation, which featured two full pages of notes on the text, was the work of the magazine's editor, Salvador Elizondo, a young poet and cinema buff whose magazine served as a digest of recent experimental art and literature from Europe and the Americas. At once a critical survey, a critical guide, and a gesture of appropriation, Elizondo's annotated translation of the Wake's first page presents a microcosm of Joycean interpretation and contributes to the productive excess of this field. For this very reason, Elizondo's "Primera Página" serves as a constitutive gesture for the avant-garde group congregated around S.Nob, whose ranks featured European artists such as Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna as well as Latin-American artists and authors such as Elizondo, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Juan Garcia Ponce, and Alejandro Jodorowsky-Prullansky. As demonstrated in the magazine's pages, Joycean avant-gardes such as the S.Nob group are as invested in rethinking the genealogies and mythic histories compiled in and by the Wake, as they are in standing at the forefront of the unfolding history of the immediate present.