Island in the Sky
Selected Prose and Poetry
of
Salvador Salazar Arrué
(Salarrué)
Translations from the Spanish by Janet N. Gold
Introduction
His roots went
deep in the volcanic soil of Cuscatlán and his soul had wings that took him to
the far reaches of imagination. From the
meeting and mingling of these two ways of being and perceiving comes his
originality.
His name was Salvador
Salazar Arrué, but when, as a young man of 18 or 19, he began to fashion his
artistic persona, he joined the three names into one and began to sign his work
as Salarrué. He was born in 1899 in
Sonsonate, a small town in rural El Salvador in a region with a strong indigenous
presence. His mother was of Spanish and
Indian blood, his father the son of a Basque immigrant. His childhood was unremarkable, except that
he seldom saw his father and he and his brother were raised in a household of
women. They were poor though not
indigent but it was Salarrué's good fortune to have some wealthy and
politically influential relatives who helped him get a scholarship from the
Salvadoran government that allowed him to study art at the Corcoran Academy in
Washington, D.C. from 1917-1919. Upon returning to El Salvador he worked as a
writer and illustrator for various literary journals and married Zelie Lardé, a
Salvadoran primitivist painter, in 1923.
Their home was an enchanted world where creative expression was
encouraged and all three of their daughters were talented artists, writers and
performers. Salarrué spent most of his
years in El Salvador, except for the period from 1917-1919 when he was studying
in Washington, D.C. and from 1946-1957 when he served as cultural attaché to the
Salvadoran Embassy and lived in New York City.
He saw himself primarily as a writer, artist and student of esoteric
philosophies and declined any jobs that he felt were incompatible with his
vocation, the result being that he and his family lived an extremely frugal
life and often were barely able to make ends meet.
An acknowledged
master of the Latin American short story, Salarrué is best known for Cuentos de barro (1933; Stories of Clay), in which he
recreates with realism and compassion the rural Salvadoran world he knew and
loved. These stories figure
significantly in the development of costumbrismo
in Central America and have been praised for their skillful portrayal of the
indigenous population of El Salvador.
Yet while these stories certainly are part of the both beloved and
maligned tradition of costumbrismo literature
so popular in Latin America at the turn of the century, they do not, as is
often the case with this genre, paint an innocent picture of rural simplicity,
but rather face clearly the psychological, spiritual and material complexities
and contradictions of their characters.
One of Salarrué's
early works, O' Yarkandal (1929), is
among his most delightful and unique literary creations. It is a collection of stories that defy
classification, but that resemble legends, fairy tales, creation myths and
archetypal dream scenes. They reflect
his interest in multiple spheres of consciousness and demonstrate his penchant
for fantasy. He himself illustrated the
book with paintings that reproduce visually a "remote empire" where
one encounters cities of winged men, islands adrift in unknown seas, strange
perfumes and gardens perennially in bloom, whose the first man and woman were
born from the egg of a bird known as Alm-a (soul). O' Yarkandal is a book of pure creation and experimentation for
which Salarrué invented even a language, bilsac.
His sensual delight in language, whether
the idiosyncratic speech of rural Salvadorans or the invented speech of the
inhabitants of his imagination, is one of the characteristics of his prose that
make it identifiable and memorable.
Salarrué's
enjoyment of language combines in a unique way with his sense of humor in Cuentos de cipotes (Kids' Stories),
stories that are not for children, he explains in the prologue, but by
children, more specifically, by the child in him. They are small, silly stories,
at once ingenuous, wise and candid, that speak like kids, full of
mispronunciations, malapropisms, riddles, rhymes and invented language. The
first edition (1961) was illustrated by his wife, Zelie Lardé, while the second
edition (1971) was illustrated by his daughter Maya.
Salarrué also
wrote stories and novels that some critics have called cosmopolitan, but that
might be described as urban-esoteric. Drawing on his experiences during his
residence in New York and Washington, D.C., he created tales in sophisticated
urban settings that form the background for esoteric adventures in a world of international
travel, art galleries and elegant mansions on Riverside Drive.
It would be
impossible to describe or deeply comprehend the work of Salarrué without
reference to theosophy, an eclectic system of belief popularized in the late
19th and early 20th centuries that strives for a synthesis, through both reason
and intuition, of the essential truths of religions, science and philosophy,
with an ethics of universal brotherhood and social responsibility. Among the
esoteric principles of theosophy are the belief in astral spheres within which
one moves by desire and will, reincarnation, and the essential unity of all
life. Salarrué, like many other writers, educators and politicians of Latin America
during the time, was drawn to this vision of an evolving universe guided by the
dynamic interplay of the seemingly contradictory and opposing forces of
masculine and feminine, yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil. He
remained faithful throughout his life to his quest for an ever more profound
comprehension of the nature of the universe. This spiritual quest permeates his
entire oeuvre, both his writing and
his painting, at times explicitly, at times as an implicit world view.
Salarrué was a
bohemian, an eccentric, an artist and a lifelong student of the ancient wisdom,
a man of letters who sometimes went to cocktail parties with ambassadors and
sometimes was so poor he traded his paintings for art supplies. He was a writer
with his feet firmly planted in his homeland and his head in the clouds. Yet for all his eccentricity, he was an
active and influential figure in Salvadoran and Central American art and
literature.
Salarrué died at
his home in Planes de Renderos, on the outskirts of San Salvador, on November
22, 1975. His wife had died the previous
year. His daughters Olga and Aída were
living with their families in New Jersey and Mexico City, respectively. His daughter Maya, who never married, continued
to live alone in the family home until her death in 1995. She resented the intrusions on her privacy of
scholars and journalists who sought to interview her or gain access to her
father's unpublished manuscripts, which remained locked in his upstairs study
until 1993, when she allowed Salvadoran artist Ricardo Aguilar to remove her
father's papers and personal effects.
In November of
2001 I met Ricardo and he invited me to examine the Salarrué papers. Among the first editions, photographs, unpublished manuscripts, correspondence and
personal effects, I unearthed an extraordinary collection of over 150 letters
written to Salarrrué by Leonora Nichols, a woman from New York with whom he had
a love affair for many years. My
subsequent research, centered on the correspondence, revealed a man of mystery
and complexity who was a careful observer of human speech and behavior yet who
lived in an inner world of dreams, imagination and transcendence. Reminded of a description I had once heard of
him as "one who goes through life with his eyes open but dreaming," I
became intrigued with the challenge of penetrating his mystery by studying his
creative expression and learning more about his life.
During much of his
lifetime, Salarrué was a much loved and respected writer and artist in El
Salvador whose work was known throughout Central and South America. Early critical commentary tended to focus on
his telluric and socially realistic stories, while his urbane, esoteric and
fantastic writings received less attention. In his later years, when the
intellectual and artistic climate of his country favored explicit political
engagement, those texts imbued with his unique spiritual mysticism came to be
seen by some as escapist and even irrelevant, although others praised him not only for his mastery of the
short story, but also for his humanity.
Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta described him, in his poem entitled
"Salarrué," as a "Teacher of tenderness/in a country of
war". Perhaps it is a sign that his
country is trying to put the years of war behind it that his presence can once
again be felt in El Salvador. It is as if his spirit has returned to plant the
seeds of spirituality and creativity in his native land. In 1999 the Ministry of Culture published a
three-volume edition of his complete narrative with an excellent study by
Salvadoran scholar Ricardo Roque Baldovinos that offers a fresh perspective on
both his regionalist as well as his more experimental writing. And the Salarrué
Family Foundation deposited his papers with the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen
(Museum of the Word and Image) in San Salvador in 2003, thus guaranteeing that
future scholars will have access to this wealth of cultural documents.
With the exception
of a bilingual edition of Cuentos de
barro (Tales of Clay) by Nelson López Rojas, published by Editorial
Universidad Don Bosco in 2011, very little of his work has been translated into
English, probably because of the difficulties presented by his use of
colloquial and vernacular speech. Notwithstanding
this challenge, I have translated selections from his short stories, poems,
fragments from novels, essays and a selection from an unpublished
autobiographical narrative. I have
arranged them in the following broad thematic clusters that I believe reflect
his passions and talents more authentically than would a chronological ordering.
I.
This Country of Mine
II.
The Child in Me
III. Lord of Enchantment
IV.
The Woman in Me
IV.
The Soul of Stones
V.
The Man and His Words
I hope you enjoy these glimpses into the world of one of Central
America’s most beloved and original writers.
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