Vol. xxxi #2
September, 2010
The Guinea Pig's Stories
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tlf news |
Vol. xxxi #2 |
September, 2010 |
The Guinea Pig's Stories | |||
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teatro la fragua has never been exclusively a children's theatre, but that aspect has been a major emphasis from the beginning. (In our first year of operations in Olanchito in 1979 we staged a version of Kipling's Just So Stories). In general we have found that a good piece of children's theatre -- that is, a piece that does not talk down to the kids, but which does simplify and clarify the action -- is a piece that is valid for all audiences. (Disney Studios have made their fortune betting on this). Thus much of our work we classify as being for a family audience. We started our work in children's theatre with a Nobel Prize winner, Rudyard Kipling (the 1907 prize); we continue the tradition this year with another, Miguel Angel Asturias, awarded the 1967 prize "for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America". Asturias is the only Central American who has won the prize. Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974) was born in Guatemala and spent his childhood and adolescence in his native country. He studied at a public high school and later took a law degree at the University of San Carlos. His thesis on "The Social Problem of the Indian" was published in 1923. After he finished his law studies, he founded with fellow students the Popular University of Guatemala, whose aim was to offer courses to those who could not afford to attend the national university. In 1923 he left for Europe, intending to study political economy in England. He spent a few months in London and then went to Paris, where he was to stay for ten years. At the Sorbonne he attended the lectures on the religions of the Mayas by Professor Georges Raynaud, whose disciple he became. Also, as correspondent for several important Latin American newspapers, he travelled in all the Western European countries, in the Middle East, in Greece, and in Egypt. In 1928 Asturias returned for a short time to Guatemala, where he lectured at the Popular University. He then went back to Paris, where he finished his Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala), 1930. Published in Madrid, the book was almost immediately translated into French and received a prize for the best Spanish-American book published in France, the first of a long string of prizes. During his stay in Paris from 1923 to 1933, Asturias wrote his novel El Señor Presidente (The President), which slashed at the social evil and malignant corruption to which an insensitive dictator dooms his people. Because of its political implications Asturias was unable to publish the book when, in 1933, he returned to Guatemala, which at the time was ruled by the dictator Jorge Ubico. The original version remained unpublished for thirteen years. The fall of Ubico's regime in 1944 brought to the presidency Professor Juan José Arévalo, who immediately appointed Asturias cultural attaché to the Guatemalan Embassy in Mexico, where the first edition of El Señor Presidente appeared in 1946. In late 1947, Asturias went to Argentina as cultural attaché to the Guatemalan Embassy and, two years later, obtained a ministerial post. While in Buenos Aires, he published Sien de alondra (Temple of the Lark), 1949, an anthology of his poems written between 1918 and 1948. Hombres de Maíz (Men of Corn, also 1949) depicts a rebellion by a remote tribe of Indians and their annihilation by the army. The novel plunges deep into the magic world view of Indians. Asturias used in it his knowledge of pre-Columbian literature and told the story in the form of a myth. Asturias was in Paris in 1952-53, and was ambassador to San Salvador in 1953-54. During the 50's he published a trilogy of novels and a collection of short stories about the presence of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. When the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán fell in 1954, Asturias's career in the diplomatic corps ended for a while. He was banished by the right-wing forces of Carlos Castillo Armas, never to live in Guatemala again. Asturias went into exile in Argentina, where he remained until 1962. In that year Argentinian policy forced him into exile again. Asturias moved to Italy as a cultural exchange programme member. In 1966 a new president appointed him Guatemalan ambassador to France. In 1967 came the Nobel Prize. Asturias spent his final years in Madrid, where he died on a lecture tour on June 9, 1974. Asturias is not known for his children's literature. In fact, almost the opposite: El Señor Presidente has a nightmare quality to it, and although the Mayan legends which he employs in much of his writing often have a child-like quality about them, he surrounds them with a surrealistic context which is a precursor of the magical realism of the contemporary "boom" of Latin American novelists. But in 1947 Asturias found himself separated from his two young sons, he in Guatemala and the boys in Mexico with their mother. He sent them every week a typewritten letter accompanied by a story. Asturias referred to the younger son, Miguel Angel, as his "cuyito" or "little guinea pig". From that nick-name comes the title of the collection, Los Cuentos del Cuyito, which wasn't published until 2000. All five stories are fables whose central characters are animals: various bird species in four of the stories, frogs in the fifth. No human characters appear. The Guinea Pig's Stories look like normal prose on the page. But as soon as you read them aloud, you discover a soaring poetical language of rhymes and alliterations and a loose but very well-defined verse structure. The Guinea Pig's Stories are the latest addition to teatro la fragua's repertory. The stories are published in a small edition in Guatemala; our hope with the staging of them is that we can share them with a far larger number of children than would ever be able to buy the book and read them on their own. We use the text almost unaltered -- just a bit of tweaking here and there to make it more playable. And we hope in this way to give kids a sense of first-rate literature which springs from the same roots as they do. (Most of the biographical data on Asturias is taken from the Nobel Prize web page.) |