Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

Etiqueta Negra + 1: New York's n+1 lit journal speaks Spanish
February 4, 2008

For those who have given up on Peru’s Etiqueta Negra website, here’s a message of hope. On the homepage of New York’s literary journal n+1’s website, there’s a very sincere apology letter from EN 's associate editor Daniel Alarcón. It seems that as they were redesigning EN’s site, the system crashed due to inexplicable technical reasons, erasing all their content and redesign plans. Pobrecitos.  “We really couldn’t believe our misfortune,” writes Alarcón, “Even though we are all Peruvian, and should be accustomed to this by now.”

Etiqueta Negra’s content fuses the tweed-jacket charm of a university journal with the gloss of a Vanity Fair issue for the Spanish- speaking diaspora thirsty for edgier and hipper content from their region. Aside from its shorter pieces on art and culture, the magazine aims at bringing back an older style of Latin American journalism known as the crónica (chronicle), pieces that report and take time to reflect the subject matter and are written in a more creative non-fiction prose style. For this, they received praise from U.S. journalists like Susan Orlean and Jon Lee Anderson and with it, an interested new readership who hoped that they could appreciate its web content if getting their hands on a hard copy wasn’t doable. Alarcón laments, “All of our plans for 2008 were predicated on this new site—we were going to offer, for example, subscriptions in the U.S. and Mexico, as well as online subscriptions and free, web-only content. Now, all of this evaporated.” But the good news is that there will be a temporary solution for your EN reading fix this February.

Thanks to good ol’ fashioned high-minded camaraderie with their hermanos down in Lima, the n+1 editors have offered temporary shelter in cyberspace to some of EN’s recent articles. And since EN is intended for Spanish-language readers, n+1 will be featuring pieces by Leonardo Halberkorn, Daniel Titinger and Alejandra Costamagna in español this month, until translations into English are available. The arrangement was kicked off with Ku-Fu with a Monkey, a first person narrative by Alarcón about accidentally punching a Chinese monkey, available in a bilingual format for those who don’t read Spanish. This comment did come with a bit of finger-waving by Alarcón who wrote in parenthesis “though you really should be able to read Spanish.”

While the experimental NY journal has never shied away from publishing works in translation to their credit, according to n+1 editor Marco Roth, Spanish will also be the first language, other than English, that the journal will be publishing content in. Muy bien. I’ll forever be tempted to call them n+uno. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on February 4, 2008 | Comments (1)