Entre Rios Trilogy

Perla Suez was born in Córdoba, Argentina. She began her literary career publishing novels and short stories for children, and was the founding director of CEDILIJ (Centro de Difusión e Investigación de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil), a center for children’s literature in Córdoba. Her novel Memorias de Vladimir (Alfaguara, 1992) was awarded the White Ravens Prize, and has been published in several subsequent editions, most recently in 2019 by the Editorial Comunicarte. In 2000, she made her debut in the realm of adult fiction with the publication of Letargo, which was a finalist for the prestigious 2001 Rómulo Gallegos Prize. In 2008, Trilogía de Entre Ríos was awarded the Primer Premio Internacional Grinzane Covour. In 2007, Suez won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel La pasajera (Editorial Norma, 2008), which was translated to English as Dreaming of the Delta. In 2013, she received the Argentine National Novel Prize for Humo rojo (Editorial Edhasa, 2012). In 2015, her novel El país del diablo received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize, and in 2020, the XX Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for the best novel written in Spanish in Latin America and Spain. In 2019, White Pine Press published the translation of the novel as The Devil’s Country.Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville. Her many translations include: The Entre Ríos Trilogy (U of New Mexico P, 2006; 1st ed.) and Dreaming of the Delta (U Texas Tech P, 2014), four novels by Perla Suez. Her translation Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana María Shua (White Pine P, 2008) is a bilingual illustrated anthology of microfictions. She is the recipient of a 2006 NEA Literature Fellowship for the translation of Alberto Ruy-Sánchez’s novel The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth (White Pine Press, 2009). In 2014, White Pine Press published her translation Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez. In 2019, White Pine Press published her translation of Perla Suez’s novel The Devil’s Country, and in 2020, her translation of Mempo Giardinelli’s novel Bruno Fólner’s Last Tango.

“A mesmerizing narrative of life in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos where many Jews from Eastern Europe settled at the turn of the 20th century. Perla Suez narrates with passion and audacity life in this region, where violence and identity are intertwined with love and the possibilities of belonging in a foreign land.” —Marjorie Agosin “Memory, personal and collective, is the engine behind The Entre Ríos Trilogy. Perla Suez returns mercilessly to traumatic moments in Argentine Jewish history: the immigration at the end of the nineteenth century, the pogrom in 1919 known as Semana trágica, the quest of the grandchildren of immigrants to find a home, and the perfunctory nature of anti-Semitism. Figuratively, Suez is a descendant of Gerchunoff: a dreamer, a language wizard.” — Ilán Stavans “Suez’s minimalist narratives have profound traces in the other side of the tapestry of what, in the end, is still very much a powerful and significant presence of Jews in Argentina. Indeed, Suez’s three novels are exercises in reading those backside traces. They are, in the best feminist tradition, stories told from women’s point of view in the attempt to bring forth the way in which social history, so often forged consciously and unthinkingly by men oblivious to women’s participation in it, impacts on women’s consciousness. The fact that the consciousness of Suez’s characters is that of humble peasant girls or young women only makes them that much more eloquent: stream-of-conscious narrative, oblique witnessing, barely perceptive understanding are all features of these three texts, while at the same time Suez is able to transmit the literal burden of history – Argentine history, Jewish history, Argentine-Jewish history – of each of her characters, both in the first person and in the third person experiences. This is a superb account of women’s lives that are important in their public obscurity, and Buchanan’s translation is flawless.” —David William Foster“Buchanan’s masterful translation succeeds in capturing the author’s careful pacing of the text, economy of language, and the lyrical nature of her writing. As a trilogy, the novellas offer a powerful resistance against the socio-cultural invisibility of the Jewish immigrant populations, as well as a significant contribution to the literature of marginalization and exile.” —Karen Wooley Martin