Adios Ayacucho seguido de el Oro de Moscu y otros peligros que acechan a los adolescentes en sus primeros pasos hacia la vida adulta

Discoveries

by Julio Ortega

Two novellas, "Ayacucho, Goodbye" (translated by Edith Grossman) and "Moscow's Gold" (translated by Alita Kelley).

Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Escritor, crítico peruano y profesor de la Universidad de Brown en Estados Unidos. Autor de "Una poética del cambio" (1992), "El principio radical de lo nuevo" (1997), "Trasatlantic Translations" (2006) y "Rubén Darío y la lectura mutua" (2004), entre otros textos. De su trabajo más reciente destaca "El hacer poético" (2011) en colaboración con María Ramírez Ribes.

Reviews

[Jon-Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little bit too transparently allegorical and polemic for my tastes.

A better criticism could be that linking the then-current problems in Peru to the Pizarro innovation is just way too easy. But maybe not. In the US, it's not exaggeration to say that our foundational sin—slavery—is at least lurking behind almost all of our major political issues, even if the proximate cause is different. It might not be accurate in a documentary sense, but in a national mythos sense, it is. If landing at Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Rock landing on us is the essential conflict of America from a literary point of view, then it's certainly not a stretch to say the events at Cajamarca were that for Peru.