Week-end en Guatemala
I’ve just signed a contract with Verso Books to translate this wonderful book, Week-end en Guatemala, by Miguel Ángel Asturias (Weekend in Guatemala in my translation). Written in the immediate aftermath of the US-sponsored overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the book conveys the white-hot fury set off by these events that would fuel Guatemala’s civil war, and Latin American’s Cold War, for decades to come.
When Asturias won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967, publishers considered translating this book to introduce an English-speaking audience to his work. Given the Cold War, Asturias’s dubious politics as critic of US imperialism, and his recent winning of the Lenin Prize from the Soviet Union, this book was considered too hot to touch. Instead, Americans were introduced to El Señor President and Hombres de Maiz, as well as the less critically well-received Banana Trilogy.
Week-end is a perfect distillation of Asturias’s style, displaying his strident anti-imperialism alongside his well-known (and controversial) indigenism that has brought criticism from Guatemala’s Maya population for claiming to speak for them. While still characterized by Asturias’s fanciful depiction of indigenous people, Week-end makes the indigenous population the heroes of the story, who rise up and overthrow the US-installed government in the name of democracy. While much has changed since Asturias wrote this book, his description of indigenous resistance bears striking similarities to the 2023 indigenous rebellion that protected Guatemala’s fragile democracy from elite attempts to subvert the will of the country’s indigenous population.
