La Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE) otorgó su Premio Nacional “Enrique Anderson Imbert 2022″ a la destacada escritora puertorriqueña Giannina Braschi.
Es la primera vez que la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española honra a un escritor puertorriqueño. Este galardón anual tiene por finalidad reconocer la trayectoria de vida profesional de quienes han contribuido, durante varias décadas, con sus estudios, trabajos y obras al conocimiento y difusión de la lengua, las letras y las culturas hispánicas en los Estados Unidos.
“El jurado premió, por unanimidad, a Giannina Braschi, cuya trayectoria exhibe una riqueza de facetas que excede cualquier denominación simplificadora”, comentó el director de la ANLE, Carlos E. Paldao, en declaraciones escritas.
“Su fértil trayectoria académica que, desde una destacada investigación profesional de clásicos del mundo hispánico, arriba a un espectacular trabajo como reconocida y galardonada creadora que la sitúa entre las voces más innovadoras e influyentes de las letras hispánicas en los Estados Unidos. Su contribución a la difusión de la cultura y literaturas hispánicas desde la perspectiva más vanguardista y renovadora, ha impactado la impronta no solo hispánica sino angloparlante dada la proyección que en destacadas traducciones han tenido algunas de sus obras que representan la riqueza del idioma llevada a nuevos retos tanto lingüísticos como narrativos al enlazar géneros literarios y peripecias del idioma en una hábil intersección en consonancia con nuevas formas de expresión de las que es pionera”, sostuvo Paldao.
Al ser informada del resultado del certamen, Braschi declaró: “Me siento muy feliz y orgullosa de ganar el Premio Nacional de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Es muy significativo para mí recibir esta buena noticia en el aniversario de la vida de Cervantes”.
“Empecé mi proyecto literario con Cervantes. Cuando tenía 22 años escribí el ensayo ‘Cinco personajes fugaces en el camino de Don Quijote’ sobre los ideales quijotescos: el amor, la poesía, las armas, la libertad y la justicia. El ensayo comienza así: ‘Don Quijote-Alonso Quijano el viejo: criatura doble, cascabel, con una coraza externa que aprisiona un núcleo íntimo, siempre agitado y vivaz’. Considero este ensayo el comienzo de mi obra”, narró la escritora.
Braschi destacó que se encuentra terminando su nuevo libro titulado “Putinoika,” un término acuñado por mí para definir la era de Putin y de Trump.
“Antes teníamos Perestroika. Ahora tenemos Putinoika. Antes teníamos Ángeles en América como decía Tony Kushner. Ahora tenemos Putinas en América. Ya sea que escriba en español, espánglish, o inglés o ya sea que escriba en diferentes géneros literarios, siempre tengo en mi cabeza y en mi corazón los ideales quijotescos. Me siento muy feliz y honrada con el Premio Enrique Anderson Imbert. ¡Gracias, ANLE!”, afirmó Braschi.
EL NUEVO DIA
Braschi (1953), oriunda de San Juan, durante su juventud viajó a Madrid, Roma, Florencia, Londres y Rouen con el propósito de estudiar literatura y filosofía, antes de asentarse en la ciudad de Nueva York a finales de los años 70 donde actualmente reside.
Tras obtener su doctorado en Literaturas Hispánicas por la Universidad Estatal de Nueva York en Stony Brook (1980) impartió clases de literatura en Rutgers University, City University of New York y Colgate University, entre otras instituciones académicas.
Su obra es un aporte imprescindible para el avance, consolidación y expansión de la lengua y cultura hispánicas en los Estados Unidos. La escritora ocupa un lugar destacado en el terreno intelectual latino-estadounidense, por su compromiso crítico al colonialismo estadounidense y por alternar el uso del español, espánglish e inglés en su obra, entre otros temas. Es autora de obras como “El imperio de los sueños” (1988), en la que se mezcla poesía, prosa y teatro sobre su relación socio-política, cultural y lingüística con la ciudad de Nueva York; Yo-Yo Boing!” (1998), escrita en espánglish sobre temas como el racismo, el colonialismo, la independencia de Puerto Rico o la violencia doméstica; y United States of Banana (2011), una tragicomedia posmoderna en la que se mezcla novela, drama y poesía sobre la caída del imperio americano.
Su obra tiene una gran proyección nacional y panhispánica, y está siendo parte de investigaciones y estudios en programas doctorales nacionales e internacionales. De hecho, existe ya una extensa bibliografía crítica, siendo el libro más reciente el editado por Frederick Luis Aldama y Tess O’Dwyer, Poets, Philosophers, Lovers. On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Recientemente la puertorriqueña fue la ponente principal en el congreso Wastelands organizado por la European Association of American Studies en Madrid (2022).
Además, su obra ha inspirado otras adaptaciones culturales, desde las composiciones musicales del compositor puertorriqueño Gabriel Bouche Caro hasta la versión en cómic de su novela United States of Banana por el dibujante sueco Joakim Lindengren.
Obtuvo el Premio Cambiemos por parte de la revista española Cambio 16.
“La decisión de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española de otorgar el Premio Enrique Anderson Imbert 2022 a Giannina Braschi, no solo acrecienta el reconocimiento internacional de esta destacada escritora puertorriqueña, sino que marca un hito de apertura panhispánica hacia una Obra que cuestiona, con calculada precisión y sin clichés ideológicos, las fronteras de los géneros y las lenguas para articular una visión polifónica, filosófica y poética de la comedia trágica de la globalidad postmoderna. Cervantes, cuya memoria se reverencia esta semana, habría mirado con simpatía la decisión del jurado. ¡Enhorabuena, Giannina Braschi!”
José Luis Vega, director de la Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española.
Volume 42, Number 6, September/October 2021, pp. 21-22
“This is a welcome and well-conceived volume on the extraordinary work of Giannina Braschi, a Puerto Rican writer and consummate New Yorker whose creative decolonizing of aesthetics and culture deserves sustained critical engagement.”
Braschi is best known for three works in particular. El imperio de los sueños (1988 — re-translated into English by Tess O’Dwyer as Empire of Dreams [2011]), is a feast of experimentation, a genre-defying exploration of a poetic dream world connected, sometimes, by New York City as well as by Braschi’s capacious reading of poetry in history. Spanish, like New York, is stretched and remade in Braschi’s poetry as she animates every character, jumping in and out of identities in a crazy whirl highly evocative of the kinesis of the Big Apple (including little bits of Macy’s, Shakespeare, and the Beatles). A second path-breaking work is Braschi’s Spanglish novel, Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), which understands the Latinx experience of the city as hybrid, contested, and bi-linguistically explosive (variations on the two “I”s of the title, and the clash between them). The third work in this informal trilogy of tribulation is a novel written primarily in English. United States of Banana (2011) is not all over the place for the sake of accumulation (as seen in capitalism, imperialism, and colonization) but seeks to articulate a counter narrative, a calling to account of US adventures (in Puerto Rico, most obviously) that wonders aloud whether the rhetoric of freedom symbolized by Lady Liberty might best be freely refigured by imagined characters, including Braschi in the novel, who sense that the unstable state of language does not automatically secure a united state in its name. By turns playful and polemical, Braschi’s writing troubles genres not least to question the formulations of identity meant to fill them.
It is a testimony to the editors and contributors of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers that they are able to convey the energy, wit, and aesthetic nuance of Braschi’s timely interventions.
AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW
In his introduction to the volume, Frederick Luis Aldama comments on the range of Braschi’s artistic expression, in performance, poetry, and fiction, as well as her critical works that span the genuflections of modernity and its afterlives. Aldama usefully links Braschi’s work to a number of pertinent cultural genealogies, including the Nuyorican scene of the Eighties, contemporary Latinx “canon benders” like Machado, Acevedo, and Ayala, queer and feminist matrices that include Peri Rossi, Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector, Gertrude Stein, and Marguerite Duras, and, most importantly, a Puerto Rican anti-colonial culture, a “symbolic aspiration” as Acosta Cruz terms it, that casts doubt on the baleful benevolence of the United States towards its putative “territory” to the south. Aldama also raises the issue of “translanguaging,” a translation problematic that undoes the either/or code-switching of Spanish and English in favor of a kind of hybrid heuristics. All languages are sites of rearticulation (that is what makes them languages) but their combined and uneven relations with one another are historically concrete, and Braschi channels and lives that vibrant specificity.
The book is divided into three parts, with the first five essays addressing Braschi’s challenging approach to cultural forms through Latinx identity. One of the difficulties of reading Braschi is that she insistently sanctions peripeteia and the discursive reverie of peripatetics, so critics are tempted to “yo-yo boing!” their approaches as a mark of acknowledgement and solidarity. This is not necessarily a bad reflex, of course, (in criticism, as in art and translation, one must take on the “mystery of things”) but generally the artist is better at it and this is another reason to appreciate the current volume, since its contributors do not allow the “liquidity” of Braschi’s work, as Moreno-Fernandez puts it, to drown their own, and thus they illuminate the event of writing in both. There is much discussion of language on edge in this section, which goes to the heart of Braschi’s bold linguistic interventions. While sometimes it may be difficult to distinguish translanguaging, translingualism, interlingualism, bilingualism, and multilingualism, the profusion of terms points both to the linguistic experimentation at stake and to the complexity of Braschi’s identifications.
Individual essays underline the difficult positioning of Braschi’s writing. Maritza Stanchich, for instance, carefully unpacks the significance of Braschi’s major works (a veritable “this trilogy that is not one”) and links them to a global poetics of dissent in Latinx writing. Yet, as Stanchich acknowledges, this is not a standard disruption of cultural hegemony from below, since Braschi’s inspirations are also drawn from European avant gardes, traditions not simply outside a logic of Enlightenment in the West, just as she does not shy from Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, or Plutarch (her decolonial modes do not sanction gestural separatism). The “big bang” that Stanchich ascribes to Braschi is not about the purity of origin so much as it is the realization of agonistic hybridity, the creativity in translingual crosstalk. True, individual languages are themselves dialogic, and Jacques Derrida reminds us having two languages does not in itself sublate monolingualism, but as Part One of this volume attests, Braschi is a brilliant exponent of Latinx defamiliarization, both of normative identity and of the states they are deemed to inhabit. For Braschi, decolonization is not a laundry list of attributes, or a display of knowing citation.
It is a scene of cultural and political struggle where the capacity to imagine is the truth of change.
The second section of the book focuses on Braschi’s consummate abilities in voicing, both in the Bakhtinian sense of polyphony as a complex authorial braid of subjective speech, and in a sometimes unnerving, and deliberately so, ability to occupy different characters in a concatenation of vetriloquizing selves. These dimensions of voicing are highlighted in Cristina Garragos’s essay “Giannina and Braschi”, where the division in names is not a sign of split personality but is instead a ground of hybridization as such. Much of Braschi’s stylistic verve is termed postmodern and, in true postmodern style, Braschi distances herself from the association (such disavowal is, by the way, also to be found in postcolonial canons). Of polyphonic voicing, Elizabeth Lowry asks in her essay, “How can Braschi account for such conflicting identifications?” and in general, Braschi plays the contradictions rather than attempt to overcome them. States can also perform polyphony (cf. directives and policies on multiculturalism and “inclusion”) so Braschi’s slippery subjectivity (whether in Spanish, Spanglish, or English) imaginatively engages the subject of change, say, Puerto Rican identity, as a material challenge of history.
In her essay, Daniela Daniele usefully points out that Braschi often meets this challenge through riotous invocations of great literature (James Joyce, Antonin Artaud, William Shakespeare, etc.) and, while I am less sure this makes of “gamification” a concept, Braschi’s playfulness certainly includes an internal polemic regarding the terms of canonicity. The third part of the volume includes discussions of intermediality and radicalism in Braschi’s work and further accentuates the multi- dimensionality of her aesthetic interventions (including adaptations by others of her writing). Dorian Lugo Bertran details how Braschi extends generic imbrication through a kind of intermedial and intertextual referentiality. This is another way in which playfulness becomes a carnivalizing practice of excess and critique. Braschi is indefatigable in showing how the edges of genre and form can thematize the politics of affiliation and expression. Much of this comes down to the chaotic surfaces and multi-modal aesthetics of United States of Banana, the novel that is the subject of over half of the essays in the collection. The emphasis is well-deserved because in this text Braschi boldly takes the position that the “fictions” of US territoriality necessitate a counter-discourse of decoloniality, one which, rather than assume struggle is a professional parade of virtue validation, dreams of Puerto Rican island identity as unassimilable, as radically inconsistent with the logic of a US-derived plebiscito.
In the interview with Rolando Perez that ends the volume, Braschi affirms the nature of this poetic license, and indeed the power of poetry itself, novelized. That kind of enigmatic flourish is typical of Braschi and makes her Latinx poetics difficult, both as hard to understand and as uncontrollable. It is a tribute to the editors and contributors to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers that they maintain the contradictory tenor of Braschi’s oeuvre because in those contradictions she yet offers a belief in being without borders (“ninguno tenga una frontera”) which is reason enough to take this work and hers more seriously.
Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (1992), Oscillate Wildly (1999), Imaginary States (2003), The Long Space (2009), and Labor in Culture (2017). His next book is on seriality and social change.
The American Book Review is an award-winning, internationally distributed publication that appears six times a year. It specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women’s presses. For over thirty years, ABR has been a staple of the literary world.In November 2006, the editorial aspects of ABR moved from Illinois State University to the University of Houston-Victoria under the editorship of Dr. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher of ABR, and UHV Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences. The production elements of ABR were also transferred in September 2007, making UHV the American Book Review’s single host.Founded in 1977 by novelist Ronald Sukenick,
ABR was designed to offer a unique model for reviewing books, one edited by writers themselves in an effort to reproduce the interest they took in their peers’ works of fiction, poetry, and criticism. This collective approach remained intact while responsibility for producing the journal was assumed by the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1987, then by Illinois State University in 1995, and now by the University of Houston-Victoria.
“Empire of Dreams is a masterpiece, brilliantly translated. Braschi writes as an accomplished cosmopolitan heiress to the traditions of Lorca, Neruda, Mistral, and Márquez.”— Alicia Ostriker (Chancellor, Academy of American Poets)
“A classic of Latin American Postmodern Literature.” (NBC Latino)
“Braschi writes with a strong poetic tradition behind her, and from her erudite standpoint she forges an odd mixture of poetry, prose, drama, and a little of what could be considered music. She imbues her text with jollity and a brilliant energy that stretches its audience from lovers of modernism to seekers of a broadened artistry of language.” — Carolyn Kuebler (Review of Contemporary Fiction)
“Braschi is a Spanish Arthur Rimbaud, reinventing surrealism, creating a maze of characters—clowns, shepherds, magicians, madmen, witches and artists who perform their fantasies in the city streets. In substantial ways, Braschi is the brightest new voice in her generation writing in the Spanish language. Empire of Dreams has been called a modern classic.”— Willis Barnstone and Tony Barnstone (Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: From Antiquity to Present)
“Good poets write great poems. Great poets create a new language. Giannina Braschi is a brilliant artist who has invented a syntax that reveals how we think, suffer, and take delight in the twenty-first century. Though the tone can be playful, her work has deep roots in the subversive side of classical literature. The scale is epic.” — Dennis Nurkse (Poet Laureate Brooklyn)
“The three parts of this collection—Assault on Time, Profane Comedy, and The Intimate Diary of Solitude—allude in different ways to the play of language, life as a grand theater, and the solitude of big cities…As with any empire, there are invasions, conquests, and colonization of territories in Empire of Dreams.”—Laura Loustau (Chapman University)
“The Big Apple seems to be the central thematic axis. However, this is a bohemian space with allusions to the Quartier Latin, the barrios chinos of Barcelona and Seville, the Borgesian labyrinths of Buenos Aires, San Juan’s colonial architecture, and loci from literatures and societies of the past and present… In a pastiche of virtual reality, this rendition of New York is a poetic world invaded by parodies of bucolic voices from the Spanish literary past.” — María Mercedes Carrión (Emory University)
“Braschi invites us into a world in which objects, places, and elements are animated, a world in which the profane comedy of literature is staged in an entirely new way. Empire of Dreams is an absolute joy-ride!” — Jean Franco (Columbia University)
“This striking collection of brief, evocative prose pieces describes moments of experience and their contingencies…at times with humorous gusto. As translated by O’Dwyer, her rhythmic, energetic prose is challenging yet accessible.” — (Publishers Weekly)
“Revelation-ary! You get the feeling that every single word is touching the inside of your own senses. Connecting them to the world. For the first time. Revealing something you didn’t know you have always experienced. Enlarging the mind of the future.” — Ann Jäderlund (Swedish poet and playwright)
“A surge of deep emotion runs through anyone who listens to or reads Giannina Braschi because she writes the most compelling work—the dramatic, philosophical, humorous and always unpredictable in its experimental form. Braschi enlighten us with her passionate energy.” — Pia Tafdrup (Danish poet)
“Empire of Dreams is a modern classic, informed with all of the major concerns of our contemporary culture.” —Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (Fordham University)
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Giannina Braschi 