The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading

editor's note:

On Monday, April 15, 2019, at the Mandell Jewish Community Center in West Hartford, Connecticut, Eduardo Halfon was awarded the 2018 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the English translation of his novel Duelo. The English version, titled Mourning, was cotranslated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn; both translators were also in attendance at the award ceremony—the first time that these three had appeared together at a public event.

The Wallant Award was established in 1963 by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford to honor the memory of the late writer Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker. This prize—one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States—is presented annually to a Jewish writer whose published creative work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew. Following the presentation of the award, Professor Avinoam Patt from the University of Hartford moderated a conversation between the author and his translators.

Eduardo Halfon began the discussion by recounting an earlier interview—one in which the conversation began with an unusual question: What are the two books that you've never read which have influenced you the most?

eduardo halfon:

My first thought was, That's got to be the dumbest question I've ever heard. And then, my second thought was, No, that is the smartest question I've ever heard, or the best. And I immediately knew the answer. Two books, actually. The two books which have influenced me the most, and which I've never read. One: The Popul Vuh—the cultural narrative of the Mayan people. I am Guatemalan. I am from their land. This narrative comes from the K'iche, the people of the Mayan highlands. It is their Bible, their oral tradition, their history. Never read it. And two: the Torah. Never read it. Besides the phonetically memorized part for my bar mitzvah, I've never read the Torah. I've never read The Popul Vuh and I've never read the Torah. I don't want to. I refuse to. Yet I know that those are the two main pillars of my house. Everything I am rests on those two pillars. My Jewish identity. And my Guatemalan identity: I was born there, I spent my childhood there, I moved when I was ten to Florida—that's why my English is. . . my English—but I'm from Guatemala. My family's still there. My house, then, is built on those two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one's house.

________

So, Mourning—a difficult book to summarize.¹ It's a book about names. It's a book about mourning, as the title suggests, but the title in English is very tricky. It's not the same as the title in Spanish. The title in Spanish is Duelo, which has three meanings: duelo can mean "mourning," but duelo can also mean "duel," as in combat, and it can also mean "pain," dolor, yo duelo, "I hurt." These three ideas are very present in the book: the one book where finally, or ultimately, or profoundly, these two parts of my identity, the Guatemalan and the Jewish, come together. This is a very Guatemalan book—it's about going back to Guatemala—and it's also a very Jewish book. In sum, a search for what these identities mean for me: What does it mean to be Guatemalan, and what does it mean to be Jewish?

I think most of what I write stems from those two questions. And I don't have an answer for either of them. That's why I write, because I don't have an answer, or because I long for an answer. I straddle these words—Guatemalan, Jewish—and that comes through. It's almost like living in a permanent diaspora, away from a homeland and away from a religion and away from...