bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Tango :A poem of exile and the porteño's nostalgia for Buenos Aires
Authors: Costantini Humberto 
Published: October 2007

Humberto Costantini was born in Buenos Aires in 1924. He has published six volumes of short stories and three of poetry, and until his exile from Argentina in 1977 was a regular contributor to the Buenos Aire's newspaper Clarin and most of the country's literary magazines. In 1967 and 1970 collections of his stories won the Buenos Aires Municipal Literary Prize, one of the country's most prestigious awards, while a more recent story won the 1979 Casa de las Americas award (given by an international jury in Havana, Cuba). Several of his stories have been dramatised for theatre and cinema. A leading member of the Argentinian Writers' Association, which was well known for its opposition to the military government which took power in March 1976, Costantini received frequent death-threats after the coup. Close friends, also members of the Writers' Association, such as Rodolfo Walsh (see Index on Censorship 5/1977) and Haroldo Conti (Index on Censorship (6/1981), disappeared after abduction by para-military squads. In early 1977, believing that his own arrest was imminent, Humberto Costantini left Buenos Aires for exile in Mexico. He now presents a daily television programme on Mexican television about Latin American writers. The poem we publish here (slightly shortened, with the author's permission) is about exile. It is also about the attitudes and prejudices of that very particular South American character, the porteño male, the cocky but melancholic native of Buenos Aires. Many of the self-mocking references, among them plays on porteño and Mexican slang and ironic quotations from Argentinian tangos, will sadly be lost to the English-language reader. But some explanations can be given. Above all, tango is much more than a dance rhythm or a kind of song. It is an attitude and an ambience which this poem both draws on and mocks. A gringa is a North American woman (a female gringo) and gringuita its diminutive, while che is the characteristic Argentinian interpolation meaning ‘man’. Ahorita is a particularly northern Latin American usage which literally means ‘now’, but in fact is used when the speaker has no intention of acting immediately. Yerba is mate tea, the Argentinian national drink, while a corridor is a Mexican ballad. There are several renderings of Spanish spoken with a Northern American accent: ‘Vamose a comer oonos taquitos’ (vamos a comer unos taquitos) = let's go and eat some tacos; ‘musayo de Antropolgeea’ (museo de antropologia) = museum of anthropology; ‘floores para el bulin’ (flores para el bulin) = flowers for the room (a bulin is literally a ‘love-nest’). Tu tienes que saber means ‘you must know’, no es verdad means ‘is not true’, and El alma que canta (‘The songful soul’) is an Argentinian magazine which publishes lyrics of tangos and other popular songs. There are also many places referred to in the poem, both in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.
Ruth First
Authors: Segal Ronald 
Published: October 2007

Ruth First, Director of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Mozambique, was killed by a letter bomb in her office on 17 August 1982: the final act of censorship on a lifetime of active opposition to apartheid and other forms of social injustice in South Africa. Born in Johannesburg in 1925, she was a student of social science at Witwatersrand University when she joined the Communist Party and founded a multi-racial students' group. During the great African mine strike of 1946 she was among a handful of whites who assisted the strikers. In 1947, despite risk of police harassment, she helped to expose farm labour conditions on the Bethal potato farms, writing investigative articles which led directly to a month-long boycott of potatoes organised by the Congress Alliance, headed by the African National Congress. Soon afterwards she was appointed Johannesburg editor of three radical South African investigative papers: the Guardian, the Clarion, and New Age, each in turn banned by the government. With her husband Joe Slovo, an Advocate, and with Fatima Meer (see outside back cover), she was one of the 156 people accused but acquitted in the Treason Trial of 1956. In the early 1960s she visited South West Africa (Namibia) and wrote a searing expose of apartheid in that territory which was, and remains, under United Nations mandate but is run by South Africa. The book resulted in tighter government restrictions on her activities, prohibiting any publication of her work and forbidding her from even entering newspaper offices. In 1963 she was detained and held for 117 days, much of it in solitary confinement. Shortly after her release from prison, when it was obvious that she would be rearrested, she left South Africa. During her years of exile in England, she wrote The Barrel of a Gun, a study of African coups, and a portrait of Libya entitled The Elusive Revolution. She lectured in sociology for several years at Durham University. In 1978 she returned to Africa, to take up the post in Mozambique which she held at the time of her death. As head of an international research team, she was helping to initiate plans for the new Mozambique: economic and socio-political development projects which promised to make Mozambique economically independent of South Africa. It seems she became a target in South Africa's apparent programme of destabilising its black neighbours. Ruth First's book, 117 days, an account of her confinement and interrogation under the South African 90-day detention law, was first published in 1965. It was republished by Penguin Books in November 1982, with a new preface by Ronald Segal, which we reprint below:
Mnazi: The Struggle for the Coconut Tree
Authors: Abdalla Abdilatif 
Published: October 2007

Among the Kiswahili-speaking peoples of the coast of Kenya and other East African countries, written literature is a many centuries-long tradition, and poetry the most popular form. Abdilatif Abdalla was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1946; his grandfather and elder brother were poets, and he himself won a reputation as a poet when he was 16, with Utenzi wa Maisha ya Nabii Adam na Hawa (‘Epic poem on the life of Adam and Eve’). Three years' imprisonment in solitary confinement in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison (see ‘Culture of Fear and Silence’), resulted in a second book, Sauti ya Dhiki (‘Voice of Agony’): a chronicle of 40 poems, written on small pieces of toilet paper — he was allowed neither books nor notebooks — and secretly smuggled out by sympathetic guards. On its publication in 1974, Abdilatif was hailed as the ‘youngest major poet-politician in East Africa’, who might ‘well be on his way to becoming the greatest Swahili poet of the independence era’, and the book was awarded the Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Since his release from prison in 1972, Abdilatif has not risked working in Kenya again. For several years he headed the Literature and Publications Section of the Institute of Swahili Research at the University of Dar es Salaam, edited Mulika (a literary journal) and co-edited the Kiswahili journal. Since 1979 he has lived and worked in London. The poems of Sauti ya Dhiki are, like all Kiswahili poetry, written in stanzas of strict rhythmic and rhyming patterns. They meet demands of Swahili poetics recommended both by tradition and by contemporary experts. No English translation can mirror the highly crafted form, nor match the rich cultural references of the words. It seems more important to attempt to reproduce the liveliness and colloquial quality than to attempt an equivalent of the form and language. In content too the poems of Sauti ya Dhiki continue the tradition of Kiswahili poetry, much of which has been progressive, nationalist and anti-colonialist: urging struggle against Portuguese forces in the 17th century, Omani forces in the 18th century, the British colonialists in the early 19th century, and the ruling élite of post-independence Kenya. The dialogue between two brothers in ‘Mnazi: The Struggle for the Coconut Tree’ articulates the betrayal felt by many Kenyans of the uhuru (freedom, i.e. post-independence) generation: while their largely self-elected rulers prosper, the majority of people seem poorer and less free than under colonialism.
Interview with Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga
Authors: Rocha Jan 
Published: October 2007

Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga is a tiny, slightly-built man with a husky voice and a sense of humour; a fervently religious man who burns with indignation when he talks about injustice, and shines with compassion when he talks about the sufferings of his people. He is also a poet, whose verses on liberation, the poor and the guerrilla struggles of Latin America have been translated into many languages. Now 55, Casaldaliga was born into an ultra-right wing Catholic family in Catalonia. In 1952 he became a priest in the Claretian order, inspired to a great extent by an uncle — also a priest - who was murdered by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. In 1968, following Vatican II and the Church's new ‘option for the poor’, Casaldaliga came to Brazil to take charge of a vast abandoned region on the edge of the Amazon, the Prelacy of São Felix do Araguaia. He found a land where ‘money and a .38 pistol were the rule of law’. Huge cattle farms, many owned by transnational companies, drove peasant farmers off their land, and employed labourers in slave conditions. There were no schools or hospitals, and Casaldaliga and the priest who arrived– with him soon discovered ‘the multiple, devastating presence of illness and death’. He recalls that, ‘In our first week in São Felix four children died and were carried past our house down to the cemetery in cardboard boxes which looked like shoeboxes. We were to bury so many children there – each family loses three or four dead infants – and so many adults, dead or killed, many without even a coffin, and some without even a name’. But in these people, exploited and cheated by the rich and powerful, and ‘swept backwards and forwards by the tide of poverty’ Casaldaliga saw the people of God. In 1970 he published a pastoral letter denouncing feudalism and slavery. Immediately banned by the authorities, this was the first warcry in a battle which continues today. Men have been hired to kill him, and attempts have been made to expel him from the country (see Index/Index 2/1981). The Prelacy has been invaded by the military, and priests and lay-workers have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. Another priest was shot dead beside him when they tried to stop police torturing two women. A systematic campaign of lies and distortion is waged against him on the official radio and TV. He is hated by the landowners and by the military. For years he has expected assassination. One cannot help being reminded of the life of Jesus Christ.
Three poems
Authors: Ke Mang 
Published: October 2007

Mang Ke, born in 1950, was a Young Pioneer (the Chinese Communist Party youth organisation) when he was fifteen. He started to write poetry when he was twenty. During the Peking Spring of 1978-9 when there was some liberalisation in the arts and literature, he and Bei Da founded Jintian (‘Today’), a literary magazine. It carried many poems by unknown young Chinese writers, especially the collection entitled A New Poetry. By mid 1979, most of the leaders of the Peking Spring had been arrested and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’. Jintian was banned at the end of 1980 and members of the group dispersed and went ‘underground’. The following are some of Mang Ke's poems from a collection called Jiumeng (‘Old Dream’), written in 1980.
Slit lips and other poems
Authors: al-Qasim Samih 
Published: October 2007

The work and experience of a Palestinian poet living in Israel Samih al-Qasim is a poet who lives and works in Haifa. Born in 1939, his first collection of poems appeared in 1958. His second book, Songs of the Alleys (1965), was ‘full of empty pages. The censors cut whole poems, parts of poems, or individual lines’ (see the interview with him and Emile Habibi in Index 4/1982). In 1967 while in prison during the Six Day War he joined the Israeli Communist Party. He decided not to submit his next work Waiting for the Thunderbird (1968) to the censor and he was arrested. The poems which follow are from an anthology Three Arab Poets ( Samih al-Qasim, Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish) to be published in 1984 by Saqi Books. They are preceded by a short interview. This was given on 18 June 1983 when Samih al-Qasim was one of several writers who took part in a series of readings entitled ‘Voices at Curfew’. The interviewer is the Yemeni writer Abdullah al-Udhari.
Iran under the Party of God
Authors: Sa'edi Gholam Hoseyn 
Published: October 2007

A personal account of the first years of the revolution and its attack on culture, by one of Iran's leading writers Gholam Hoseyn Sa'edi, born in 1935, is one of the best-known contemporary Iranian writers. Trained as a psychiatrist, he later devoted most of his time to writing. His novels, short stories, plays and filmscripts were often censored by the authorities under the Shah. He was arrested and badly beaten up many times by Savak, the Shah's secret police. His latest detention was in 1974 when he was held for over a year and badly tortured (see Index 1/1978). After the fall of the Shah in 1979, Gholam Hoseyn Sa'edi, like many of his fellow intellectuals, gave enthusiastic support to the revolution. He later became disillusioned with it and went into hiding for nearly a year before he was able to go abroad in May 1982. The following is his personal account of cultural and intellectual life in Tehran during the early days of the ‘Islamic Revolution’ under the Party of God and Ministry of Guidance. The article first appeared in Alef-Bâ, a Persian-language magazine founded by Sa'edi and his friends in Paris.
Return from sleeplessness
Authors: Soriano Osvaldo 
Published: October 2007

After seven years in exile, an Argentinian writer flies back and records his feelings as he discovers the strangeness and familiarity of Buenos Aires In October 1983, Argentina held presidential and parliamentary elections after more than seven years of military dictatorship. Since 1976, many thousands of Argentinians have been forced into exile by the repressive policies of the military ‘Process of National Re-organisation’. Among these was the novelist Osvaldo Soriano, whose two books Triste, Solitario y Final and No Habrá más Penas ni Olvido were first published in France (in 1978 and 1980). The military regime in Argentina began to crumble after the disastrous 1982 Malvinas/Falklands adventure and the blatant failure of their economic management. As the democratic forces regrouped for the elections, Soriano, like many other exiles, returned to discover a familiar but strange Argentina, struggling to overcome the nightmares of the previous seven years.
Keeping the university alive
Authors: Parada Miguel Angel 
Published: October 2007

The campus was shut down with the loss of 22 lives. The death squads are murdering students or teachers at the rate of one a week; yet 17,000 students are still being taught Miguel Angel Parada, the rector of El Salvador's national university, visited London at the end of 1983 as part of an international tour to increase awareness of the plight of his university and of education at all levels in El Salvador. The university campus was occupied by the army on 26 June 1980, when 22 people were killed. They are still there, even after a government decree stipulating that it should be returned to the university authorities. Despite the occupation, Dr Parada and his colleagues offer courses to 17,000 students in rented premises throughout the city of El Salvador. Dr Parada's own position is particularly hazardous. His predecessor, Félix Ulloa Martínez, was murdered. He himself was arrested in 1981 when troops burst into a university administrative meeting and detained 20 members of the council. The kidnapping and murder of students and university teachers has continued unabated through 1983 (see box), the latest victim being Dr Enelson Escobar, a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, whose tortured body was found on 8 December 1983. His name, like that of Dr Parada, was on a list published by the Ejercito Secreto Anticomunista (ESA, the ‘Secret Anti-Communist Army’) of people with ‘subversive connections’. In spite of the dangers, likely to increase still further as the March 1984 elections approach, Dr Parada remains outspoken in his defence of the university as the promoter of education in its widest sense, and the ‘defender of rational, critical thought in a country turned over to barbarism’.
Journalists in Chile
Authors: Portales Pablo 
Published: October 2007

Interview with the president of the Santiago branch of the Chilean Journalists Association A brutal disregard for freedom of expression has been one of the characteristics of the decade of military rule in Chile. By the end of 1983, discontent with General Augusto Pinochet's regime was increasingly widespread, with democratic opposition political forces regrouping and large numbers of people joining in monthly days of protest. In this interview, Pablo Portales, a journalist and secretary general of the Santiago branch of the Chilean Journalists' Association, details the restrictions and pressures that journalists have had to contend with over the past decade.
I Dreamt the Snow was Burning
Authors: Skármeta Antonio 
Published: October 2007

Extract from a novel by a Chilean exile Antonio Skármeta was born in the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta in 1940. He studied Philosophy, Literature, and Theatrical Direction at the University of Chile in Santiago and at Columbia University in New York. He left Chile for exile in West Germany in 1975, and now lives in Berlin. Skármeta is one of Chile's most successful novelists and short story and screenplay writers. His first collection of stories, El entusiasmo ( Enthusiasm') was published in Chile in 1967, while the second, Desnudo en el tejado ( ‘Naked on the Tiled Roof’) won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize two years later. He has written four novels apart from Soñé que la nieve ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow was Burning’). One of them, Chileno!, is for young people and deals with the life of a teenage Chilean exile in Berlin. Among his film credits are three films made with the German director, Peter Lilienthal. In 1983, Skármeta himself won a series of prizes, among them awards at the Festivals of Biarritz and Huelva, as director of Ardiente Paciencia (‘Burning Patience’), a film based on his own play about an imaginary incident in the life of Pablo Neruda. I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning was published in 1981. Described by one critic as a ‘ballad’, it deals with the fortunes of a group of residents of a Santiago boarding house in the last months of the Popular Unity government which was overthrown by General Pinochet's coup in September 1973. Among these characters are Arturo, an aspiring footballer, and Señor Lecaros, the ‘Small Gent’, a circusperformer who spends his time in a dreamworld. In the opening sequence of the novel the two meet while travelling to the capital, Santiago, from the south. With highly colloquial language (the Spanish-language original of the novel contains a lengthy glossary of ‘Chileanisms’ to aid the reader), the story traces the aspirations, illusions and fates of the residents, and their conscious or inadvertent involvement in the events of the time. (Two words of explanation. Momios or ‘mummies’ — of the Egyptian kind — means ‘reactionaries’, while ‘turks’ refers to the considerable Syrian-Lebanese community which owns shops and factories throughout Chile.) An English version of I Dreamt the Snow was Burning will be published in the USA, UK and Canada by Readers International, 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3.
A conversation with Graham Greene
Authors: Kyncl Karel 
Published: October 2007

‘No, it's not true,’ he said. He was sitting in a red chair by the window and raised his right hand in an energetic gesture to emphasise his reply. Looking at his hands, you wouldn't think they had produced literary works. They seem rather to be the hands of an old sculptor, damaged by life-long handling of stone, hands which contrast strangely with the features of his face, held on the Continent to be the typical face of a British intellectual. But maybe there is no contradiction here: a life spent forming ideas and literary characters possibly finds its expression in a soulful face and damaged hands. In Czechoslovakia, where I come from, his latest books circulate like samizdat publications — they depend on somebody returning ‘from abroad who manages to smuggle them through the border controls. For 15 years, his works have not been translated and his older books, already translated into Czech, have not been republished, although it would have been very lucrative for the publishing houses. An edition of 100,000 copies would vanish from the bookshops on the day of publication. So why isn't he published?
Barbed wire fox
Authors: Orłoś Kazimierz 
Published: October 2007

Short story by a Polish writer whose work can appear only in unofficial publications Born in 1935 in Warsaw, Kazimierz Orlos graduated in Law and worked for a time as a legal adviser before becoming an editor of Polish Radio. He lost his job when his first novel was published by the Instytut Literacky in Paris in 1973. He had already brought out three collections of short stories, having made his literary debut in 1961, and another novel followed in 1980. None of his work has appeared in Poland since the early seventies, but he has published in the unofficial quarterly Zapis, of which he was one of the editors. Our story is taken from Pustynia Gobi (‘The Gobi Desert’), a collection of his short stories published by Puls Publications in London in 1983.
Errata List
Authors: Scorza Manuel 
Published: October 2007

One of the last texts by a leading Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza, one of several Latin American writers to die in the tragic air crash at Madrid airport on 7 December 1983, was born in Lima in 1928. He was imprisoned and forced into exile during the 1950s for his political activity in favour of the Peruvian Indian population. In 1961 he again had to leave Peru after heading protests at the massacres of peasants in the Pasco region. His experiences led him to write a cycle of five novels which explore the epic struggle of the Indians of his country, of which the best known are Redoble por Rancas (‘Drums for Rancas,’ 1977, Secker & Warburg) and Historia de Garabombo el Invisible (‘The Story of Garabombo the Invisible’). Errata List was written three days before his death.