I have been thinking a lot about grief, about mourning. Unsure what to do with it, I have done nothing. I have also been working on a project about José Revueltas and came across the following piece, beautiful, if flawed, which I felt called to translate. Perhaps someone else’s words, from some other time, can do better than mine in speaking to the present moment. I don’t know. Yet here they are.

These were written in Mexico in 1968. In July of that year, a massive student movement erupted, shutting down numerous universities and bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets. A movement that was crushed with overwhelming force on October 2, when the army and a paramilitary battalion opened fire on a student gathering in the Three Cultures Plaza in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, killing hundreds.

José Revueltas, a self-taught professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), was involved in the movement from the very start. An award-winning novelist and heterodox communist militant with, I propose, more anarchistic leanings than he would care to admit, Revueltas was painted by the Mexican state as the intellectual leader of the student movement. At the time that he wrote this, he was underground, moving from house to house in Mexico City. He would be arrested on November 16, 1968, charged with innumerable crimes, and become a political prisoner for the fourth time in his life, released from Lecumberri Prison as part of an amnesty in 1971. These words were initially written in his journal, then published in two outlets in 1969. They can be found in the 1978 text México 68: juventud y revolución, on pages 79-83, as Un fantasma recorre México.

A specter is haunting Mexico
By José Revueltas
Translated by Scott Campbell

I begin writing these notes in an ample room, orderly, in some house somewhere in the city, today, Tuesday, October 29. A house, a refuge of a friend who I will call Cronos. Cronos smiles with his eyes, he’s a wry and very good person. He’s left me alone to write. To write… The very act of writing is strange, uncanny. One doesn’t know what it means, what is this thing of joining together words, in a world, in an unbreathable emptiness where they all appear to have been broken and not daring to say what happened, what they mean: it’s not the horror but this emptiness, this orphanhood, so many dead that they surround us. In reality, I started making notes in the beginning of May, before the Movement. One day or another I’ll reconstruct them, in the ever-new light – new every minute, every hour – of this dizzying, changing, intangible life, where something that had an enormous or distressing importance in the moment, later appears unreal to us, dreamy, implausibly lived, as if we ourselves were our own story, our own distant tale told by other people.