Dog literature in Latin America?

[Lorraine]

I'm an author/photographer in the final stages of my forth book entitled Los Mutts. http://LosMutts. Like my previous book Cairo Cats, (CAIRO CATS - Egypt's Enduring Legacy (http://CairoCats.com) and CAIRO CATS - Egypt's Enduring Legacy (http://CairoCats.com/Inside.htm) ) through photographs juxtaposed with verse, prose, lyric and film extracts, I'm
showing the dog throughout Latin America. I'm wondering if any of you know of any people/sources who might have knowledge about the dog in Latin literature, especially modern. You would of course receive credit/acknowledgment for helping.

What I'm using are only 'short' excerpts of work to give the reader a hint of
Latin American culture.

Can anyone help???
best, Lorraine

[Daniel del Real]

Hi Lorraine
Your project looks really nice, congratulations! Unfortunately being a Latin American my self I just can't remember any dog in modern literature.
Anyway, I'll keep that in mind to check if I get anything.

[Lorraine]

Maybe I can help trigger a memory??? ;-)

Guillermo Arriaga is a director of Amores Perros, but it was also a book.


El perro del cerro y la rana de la sabana is the Spanish-language translation of Ana Mar?a Machado's book for children that in English means "The Dog of the Hill and the Frog of the Plains."

I don't have either, but maybe someone does?

[Stewart]

Adolfo Bioy Casares' Asleep In The Sun (http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=3672), maybe?


Lucio, a normal man in a normal (nosy) city neighborhood with normal problems with his wife (not the easiest person to get along with) and family and job (he lost it) finds he has a much bigger problem: his wife is a dog. At first, it doesn't seem like such a problem, because the German shepherd inhabiting his wife's body is actually a good deal more agreeable than his wife herself, now occupying the body of the same German shepherd in a mental hospital run by scientists who, it appears, have designs on the whole neighborhood. But then Lucio has a sense, however confused, of what's right, which is an even bigger problem yet.

[Lorraine]

Now that sounds like an odd read!!! The problem I'm having is my Spanish is very poor and I'm in a remote part of Chile with no English language books. What I need is the same thing I had for my book Cairo Cats - a scholar perhaps who's an avid lover of dogs!

[beelzebubbles]

Hi Lorraine, I liked your lovely cat pictures.

I suggest you get in touch with a librarian, maybe one from your alma mater, the New York Public Library or one in Chile. Most libraries can be reached through the internet for a consultation and they could either provide you with suitable quotes or think of a way of getting them.

[Backwords]

Title : Los perros rom?nticos - Bolano

[Lorraine]

beelzebubbles, that's a wonderful idea. I'll try that today.

DIRTY, POORLY DRESSED is the poem I'll be using from Los perros rom?nticos - Bolano. Or rather the first bit which is:

On the dogs? path, my soul came upon
my heart. Shattered, but alive,
dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love.
On the dogs? path, there where no one wants to go.
A path that only poets travel
when they have nothing left to do.
But I still had so many things to do!

Lorraine

[Daniel del Real]

La Ciudad y los Perros, Mario Vargas Llosa

[Lorraine]

Thank you Daniel. Found lots of poems today and contacted university library research, so we'll see what transpires!

[beelzebubbles]

A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

[Lorraine]

Thank you, I too found this yesterday! I've discovered the copyright holder is:
copyright ? 1978 by the Estate of Pablo Neruda
However, I can't find by googling, how to contact them for permissions. Anyone have ideas on this? Getting this info for my last book Cairo Cats was so much easier!
Nothing from Library research yet...

Lorraine

[beelzebubbles]

See who publishes the hard copy of the poem. Either they or the library may be able to help you out. If one library drags its heels, try another. i have had the best success with online queries using the services of my alma mater, Temple University in Philadelphia. Try them. The library is called the Paley Library at Temple University.

[Lorraine]

Thank you for both tips! Will persevere tomorrow. You're being most helpful.
Lorraine

[kpjayan]

Lorraine,

I The Supreme, of Augusto Roa Bastos has a chapter of conversation between El Supremo and his dog Sultan from page 369 onwards ( Dalkey Archive Publication). You may want to check that..

[Lorraine]

kpjayan, this looks like very heavy reading indeed! Don't have enough time to order this gem, so I'm looking for chunks of this chapter on-line. If you happen to come across a pdf file etc, can you let me know please as I'm not having a lot of luck? Much appreciated!
Thank you for the tip!
best, Lorraine

[Settembrini]

What I need is the same thing I had for my book Cairo Cats - a scholar perhaps who's an avid lover of dogs!

I know many Latinamericans scholar's books about horses, but very few about dogs. Perhaps the thing is that the dogs in Latin America aren't as important as the cats in Egypt.
You should take a look to Perrolog?a, a book wrote in 1923 by Ricardo Monner Sans, which search about the dog topic in the proverbs and refrains.

EDIT: I just remembered two (old) books. One is El perro cimarr?n de la pampa argentina (1932) wrote by Angel Cabrera which is about wild dogs, and the other is El Perro Negro en el folklore (1953) wrote by Rafael Jijena Sanchez which is about the legends of dogs in the rural areas of Argentina.
El alma de los perros is a fiction of a dog who is a kind of Jesus Christ wrote by J. J. Soiza Reilly -emulating Jack London's stories about dogs-; I think that work won't be useful to you. Los perros hambrientos (1939) is a novel written by Ciro Alegr?a, a peruvian writer, which talks about poor country people, but includes subplots about dogs.

[Lorraine]

Settembrini, this is great info! Sorry I haven't checked here in a few weeks. I know about the book by Rafael Jijena Sanchez, and have a few stories from here, but can't use any more about black dogs! The other ones I'll check.
Thank you so much!
Lorraine

[Bubba]

"Cacos y canes" ("Thieves and Dogs") is an excellent story by the Peruvian Julio R. Ribeyro. The two dogs of the story are Rintintin I and his successor Rintintin II.