Mexican Writers on Writing (Writer's World Series) Book

This book was a great introduction to Latin American literature and variously excites the reader, writer, artist, activist, and intellectual within, though at different times. I was most drawn to the chapters from Jose Fernandez de Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento : "Be assured that it is better to profit by other men's disillusions than by your own."; Enrique Gonzalez Martinez's "The Death of the Swan?": "Critics tend to . . . cling to their first discovery . . . closing their eyes to inevitable and obvious evolution. But the poet persists in his task, hoping that . . . there was in his poems something previously unnoticed that broke the narrow mold in which his work had been imprisoned."; Octavio Paz's "Translation: The Literary and the Literal": "literal tranlation is [not] impossible, but that is not translation. . . . This is closer to the function of a dictionary . . . translation implies a transformation of the original. This transformation is . . . literary."; Rosario Castellanos's Selections discussing the discovery of a literary vocation as when: "instinct, blindly yet effectively,finds a response to sudden emergency [. . .] in which a person wagers everything on a single card . . . and wins."; and several others that draw you into the magic and importance of writing with a perspective that is refreshing in light of the same old stuffy . . . stuff that I've grown used to.

Not as good as I'd hoped...certainly worth reading but with a few exceptions, the essays were not memorable enough.