March 7–14, 1996
20 questions
Background:
Isabel Allende, born in Peru in 1942, was raised in Chile, working there as a journalist until the U.S.-supported military coup overthrew the government in 1973. Considered dangerous by the Chilean government due to her familial connections — she is the niece of Salvatore Allende, the socialist president who was killed during the coup — she took exile in Venezuela in 1976, moving to the United States in 1987. She now lives with her second husband in San Francisco.
Her first novel, written in 1981, began as a letter to her grandfather, who had decided to die and stopped eating; the letter developed intoTheHouse of Spirits, a political history of Chile and a personal history of her family, written in the vein of magic realism. Bille August transformed it into a movie in 1994, casting Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep and Winona Ryder.
Allende did not consider herself a "writer" until after her third novel, Eva Luna, which rages at the injustice of an authoritarian and patriarchal culture. Her latest novel, Paula, was written at the bedside of her daughter, who lapsed into a coma when she was 27 and died over a year later of an enzyme deficiency. Writing, Allende attests, is her salvation, and has indeed helped her through periods of emotional torment. She keeps pictures of her grandparents and her daughter around her to be close to their spirits, which live within her heart as well as her literature.
A movie version of her second novel, Of Love and Shadows, is planned to be released in L.A. on May 1, starring a Latin cast, with Antonio Banderas as the protagonist. Allende is presently working on a new book, which she says will take a couple of years to write, due to her busy schedule.
Do you view yourself as part of the Latino community in the U.S.?
I identify with the community, with their fears and joys, their difficulties, with the fact that being Latin in this society is very difficult. Most of the time Latins are very badly treated, even now. Most of them, especially in California and in other parts of the border are illegal, they are very poor, they have no political power and I identify with that because I have been an immigrant for the last 25 years of my life. I know how it feels.
What do you think about the movement to make English the U.S. official language?
I think that it's okay to have one official language like English, but you cannot deny that there are many other languages that are spoken in the United States, and that very large communities do use those languages and you can't ignore that. Chinese and Spanish are good examples.
You once said you no longer considered yourself Chilean. Where do you consider home?
I consider myself Latin American. I think that my home is in the United States but by culture, because of my past, I am Latin American. I don't say Chilean anymore because I have lived most of my life not in Chile but in other countries. I lived 13 years in Venezuela. I have lived in Bolivia, in Argentina, in Peru... in many places. So I feel more and more that my stories are Latin American stories, more than Chilean.
Do you write with a Latin American audience in mind?
No. I do think of one person. I try to tell the story to one person in a kind of quiet voice, the way I speak with my mother in the kitchen. Sometimes I think of a young woman, sometimes I think of my mother, but it's always one person. It's easier for me to think that one person is my companion in this strange journey that literature is.
Do you ever plan on translating your own work, or perhaps writing in English?
No, not really. I write from the womb, not from the mind. I don't process my writing very much in a rational way, so I really need to do it in my own language. I dream in my language, I do mathematics, I remember numbers, I can do the spelling only in Spanish. It's very hard for me to write fiction in English. I can write a speech, but not fiction.
Has living in the U.S. changed your writing voice at all?
Yes. It has changed many things... The fact that I have to speak in English most of the time... English is a very pragmatic and wonderful, practical language. In English you can turn anything into a verb. You can replace three baroque adjectives with one good noun. That is difficult to do in Spanish. And that clarity of the language, that flexibility, I think has changed my way of writing very much, because I find myself often writing in Spanish with the form of the phrases or the grammar of the English language.
What difficulties have you experienced in translating?
When you translate something, you have to adapt it to another culture. Let me give you an example that I give often: "destiny.""Destino" is something that we use in Spanish all the time. It's in our songs, in our culture, for us it's like luck or like fate, because we're a fatalistic culture. We don't use the word in any dramatic way. It's part of the language. In English, because people feel that they are self-made, that they can control their lives, there's a more pragmatic approach to life. The word "destiny" is loaded. You have to be very careful when you use the word "destiny" in English; you have to often change the whole meaning of the sentence because it wouldn't work in English. "Love" is another thing that you have to adapt, not just translate. In Spanish we have a large vocabulary for "love," love scenes, eroticism, sex, you know the Latin lover... but when you translate these words into English, they sound weird.
Do you know the end of a story before you begin?
The story always betrays me. I have a plan, and then the characters go their own ways and it's impossible for me to control them. By the middle of the story they are completely different from what I thought they would be. And very often I have a plan for the ending, but halfway through I realize that I am heading in a totally different direction.
Dreams are important to your writings...
Yes, I know now that every time I am writing I start having dreams of babies. So the baby's always the book. And whatever happens in my dream to the baby is usually happening to my writing in real life. And if I can just pay attention, identify the problem in the dream, the problem with the baby, for example I dreamed that the baby's crying with the voice of an old man, then when I wake up I can apply that knowledge to the writing because I realize that something is wrong with the book. Probably I know it deep in my heart, but I have not brought it to a conscious level, and the dream reveals that.
One of my favorite quotes from Paula is "I suppose it is from the feeling of loneliness the questions arise that lead one to write, and that books are conceived in search of answers." What questions plague you the most, and what kind of answers have you found?
There are all sorts of big questions and small questions. I feel that if I am able as a writer to tap into the collective questions about who we are, why we are here... what is solidarity? what is love? why are we so afraid of diversity? of other people? why are we so isolated? All those questions, big and small, add up. If I can tap into the questions that everybody's asking, and ask those same questions in my writing, then I have achieved something, just by asking the same questions, even if I never get the answers.
Isabel Allende will give a lecture at the Free Library on Thursday, March 14, as part of the library's Rebuilding the Future series. There will be a free simulcast of her lecture in the East Gallery of the Central Library.