Fantastic Metropolis

Gabriel Mesa: You are a well-known writer, not only in Argentina but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. In the United States readers are beginning to know you due to the release of your book Kalpa Imperial by Small Beer Press, which was the main motivation for this interview. First of all let me congratulate you, as is this is an important event for those who are lovers not only of the fantastic but of Latin American literature generally. For our U.S. audience, could you give us a brief summary of your career as a writer?

Angélica Gorodischer: Thank you for your congratulations. As far as my career is concerned, at the age of seven I decided that I would be a writer. I had been reading a great deal since the age of five, and as we all know, writers are born from readers. My house was full of books, and books were my toys and my refuge. But then life arrives and smacks you on the head and you have to go to elementary school (“at the age of seven I had to interrupt my education to go to school,” as they say George Bernard Shaw said), then to high school, study languages, fight with your mother and your father and with the world in general, have a few boyfriends (preferably not all at the same time), go to college, marry, have children, etc. Until at the age of 30, the worst time to do these things, since I had a husband, three small children, a house, a garden, a dog, a cat and a job (as a librarian) outside of the house, I said it’s now or never and I started to write professionally. I won a crime fiction contest, and another contest with a book of short stories. I found in my life generous editors (Daniel Divinsky, Paco Porrúa, Jorge Sánchez) that published me even though I was an unknown. I did well. And one day I discovered science fiction, and I said, this is what I want to do. And I did, over the course of four or five books. I’ve written and published 20 books so far, not necessarily all SF, but the mark that SF leaves on a writer is very deep, and you definitely can’t say that I am a “realist” writer. I’ve written about all kinds of things and every one of my books is very different from the others, which delights me. You can say that I have carved a style out of all my various resources, out of being different in every book.

Gabriel Mesa: Looking back, what significance does Kalpa Imperial have to you in your career as a writer?

Angélica Gorodischer: I don’t know if the book is good or bad, that’s something I can’t judge, but I think it has a richness of language and many concepts that fold in on each another. I started out with the desire to write the Western version of The Thousand and One Nights, which was really quite pretentious of me. But Kalpa was what came out, and it tempted me even more as I wrote each story. A critic friend of mine says that it is “a manual for the good ruler.” I like that.

Gabriel Mesa: The translation of Kalpa Imperial was carried out by Ursula Le Guin, who is one of the most important writers of fantastic literature in the United States. What motivated Le Guin to work on this project, given that translation is obviously not her primary vocation? And how was your experience working with her?

Angélica Gorodischer: Ursula Le Guin and I met in 1988 when I was in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. They took us to Portland and I said, “I want to meet Ursula Le Guin!” And we met at a table in front of a marvelous bookstore, over cups of coffee, very Argentine-style. Since then we’ve sent each other letters and photographs and cards. She’s worked many times on translations, with Diana Bellessi, for example, who is one of our greatest poets. And for me, the fact that we would keep in touch word for word over Kalpa was the source of a very deep joy.