Roberto Castillo Sandoval is a Chilean essayist, novelist, and translator. His works include Antípodas (Cuarto Propio, 2014), a translation of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener into Spanish (Hueders, 2017), and a novel, Muriendo por la dulce patria mía (Libros del Laurel, 2017). He teaches Spanish and Comparative Literature at Haverford College. Los muertos del año, an anthology of fictional obituaries and Wakefield, a translation of stories by Hawthorne, will be published by Hueders in 2019. He is at work translating Poe into Spanish. An excerpt from his story “The Laws of Motion” can be found here. It appears in the May/June 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Laws of Motion”?
I have no idea where the story came from, but I do remember being in a sort of joyful trance when I wrote the first pages. Part of the excitement was my awareness of writing fiction in English. I’ve lived in the US for forty years, but until that moment I didn’t feel authorized to write fiction in this language. I’m guessing then that part of the initial impetus came from having spent a lot of time translating English fiction into Spanish in recent years. I did a new version of Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener published in 2017, a short collection of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, soon to be published, and I’m in the process of translating a selection of Poe’s classic stories. Before that, more as a personal project than anything else, I translated dozens of contemporary short stories, mostly American, and a few poems. Translation demands an intimate, intensive contact with the language being translated, and that must have played a behind-the-curtains role in the genesis of this story.
As a Latin American immigrant in times of rising xenophobia, it’s very rewarding to be able to make a strong claim of ownership on both of my languages, and to declare that English is also my home.
The sense of time in this story feels remarkably malleable: some moments, like the initial collision, stretch out for a long time, and then you must catch the reader up on the events that are happening beyond your two main characters. Can you talk a little bit about your playful approach to time in this piece?
I didn’t set out to do anything with time in this story. When I finished writing, however, I realized that time and memory function—and malfunction—in tandem throughout the narration, in the sense that time becomes the reactant that reveals memory’s ephemeral nature as well as time’s own instability. I see the narrator and Philip Glass as partners, in a sense, as time-travelers and memory gatherers, much like those “anniversarians” who populate Cimbrone and congregate around the Villa’s swimming pool. The narrator attempts to make sense of his return to the Villa Cimbrone, which for him is mainly a place of loss, specifically of lost love. Philip Glass enables and disrupts those attempts, much in the way, I guess, that Sancho Panza enables and disrupts Don Quixote’s madness. Crashing into Philip Glass reminds the narrator that loss is not only absence. Loss is presence, it’s physical, you run into it. The key difference between the narrator and the musician (the root of the collision?) is that perhaps Philip Glass is able to deal with the problems of time and memory through his art, through signs. His music functions as a lens to see and to understand the world, to adapt to it, to survive the implacable laws of time and motion. Art, music, all signs, inscribe meaning into phenomena—the experience of time in particular—in ways that underscore time’s fragile, fugitive, mysterious, repetitive, and unavoidably playful nature. The clash between an artist and a self-described “glorified technician” or a “turner of dials” may also reveal the limitations of art. But I don’t know. I’m speaking here only as a reader. None of this entered my mind at all while writing the story. I was much more concerned with craftmanship, things like narrative structure, flow, sound, and rhythm.
I could also account for my approach to time in this story by my connection to the Latin American literary tradition, in which time is constantly being refuted, reversed, denied, and always in a process of reassessment, as in Borges or in Julio Cortázar, (whose story “Blow Up” makes a cameo in my piece, as I recently realized).
Why did you choose to include Phillip Glass in this story? Can you talk a little bit about what it’s like to write about a fictional version of a real celebrity?
I have some experience writing fictional versions of real celebrities: I wrote a novel on the boxer Arturo Godoy, who fought Joe Louis in 1940; he is a Chilean national hero, a mythical figure. Just like Godoy did in that book, Philip Glass gave me no choice, he just showed up. This may sound like a cliché (the character who “talks” to the writer) but it’s true in both of these cases.
Now, there’s a sliver of fact at the genesis of this fiction. Ravello is the ancestral village of my wife’s family—her parents emigrated to Chile in the 1950s—and when I was visiting there one summer, on my way to see Villa Cimbrone, I actually bumped into Philip Glass. It was a very minor thing, we apologized to each other, and that was that—he headed down to Ravello and I went up the path to the villa. “That guy really looked like Philip Glass,” I thought, and I was able to confirm later that he was in town for the annual Ravello summer music festival. I happen to be a fanatic of his work; I have always been intrigued by his originality, by what he is capable of doing with time, both in the technical, musical sense—the array of tempi he manages to conjure up and sustain—and in the more general sense of the perceptions of time that you experience while listening to his work. The narrator’s disquisition about repetition and faith are related to questions prompted in my mind by Philip Glass’s music. I find his work to be so evocative and playful, movingly beautiful, and always formally innovative. As I was writing, I kept wondering what the real Philip Glass would think of the story if he read it, and I hoped he would understand that the Philip Glass in “The Laws of Motion” functions much the same way as the figure of Albert Einstein does in his opera Einstein on the Beach. I especially hoped that he wouldn’t mind the narrator’s mocking his New York accent or his fantasy of pushing him off a cliff.
Can you share more about the Italian setting, especially the significance of the Villa Cimbrone?
I had heard and read about the beauty of the Amalfi Coast, but when I was there for the first time I realized that nothing had prepared me for the multidimensional, encompassing quality of that beauty, for the synesthetic effect the whole landscape has on you when you’re physically there. Your sense of space gets altered with the interaction between different planes and distances, the light, the harmony between human-made objects and the various natural settings. You can see this in M.C. Escher’s famous lithograph of Atrani. Because of twists and turns of fate, Cimbrone itself happens to be managed by my wife’s aunt and her children, so the place itself is full of family stories—as a child, my sister-in-law fell in the medieval well while playing hide-and-seek, and was found, unharmed, hours later, etc.—, all this in addition to the tales about the famous people who have spent time in Cimbrone: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, who eloped there with Stokowski, just to name a few. Gore Vidal, who lived in Ravello, considered Cimbrone’s belvedere, the Terrace of Infinity, to be the most beautiful spot he’d seen in all his travels. Because it’s at the top of a very high vertical cliff, you can get the mesmerizing, disorienting sensation that the Tyrrhenian sea and the sky become one. In the context of a story like “The Laws of Motion,” the view from the Terrazzo dell’infinito becomes a more forbidding, immeasurable representation of time, with the evanescent traces of human activity in the wakes of ships that crisscross it, the smoke spirals of fighter planes that plummet from it in flames, the ghosts of people from the past who linger on it, and who do not recognize you.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
I’m an immigrant, part of the Chilean diaspora. The themes in my novel Muriendo por la dulce patria mía (1998 and 2017) and in my essays and chronicles contained in Antípodas (2014) may suggest that nothing in my life is non-writing-related, and that I make sense of the world mainly through reading, writing, and translating, for better or for worse.