Amor y Cohetes

I remember as a teen Love and Rockets was one of the few (the only?) places I felt at home. Young chicano punk/goth rockers surrounded by Spanglish, mechanics, wrestlers, and dinosaurs, permeated with an unexpressed left-working class sensibility I remembered from DF. Like seeing a young punk walk from car to car in the Metro selling copies of El Machete with the same twangy sing-song as the kids selling chiclets.


Makes sense that Hopey and Maggie are now in their forties. They must have been in their twenties when I was reading their exploits, and I could only fantasize about living on my own with a poster of Ape Sex on the wall, but I'm glad they're still around.

I came across Love & Rockets searching for an article I read today lamenting the dearth of foreign literature translated into English.

330 works of foreign literature — or a little more than 2 percent of the estimated total of 15,000 titles released — have been published in the United States so far this year.

That apparent dearth of literature in translation in the United States was the subject of controversial remarks by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize, a week before the prize did not go to an American.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” Mr. Engdahl said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

It has been a long time since I have seriously participated in the big dialogue of literature, about as long since I have read Love & Rockets. I have the collected works of Saramago, in Spanish, stacked on my shelves. Better get cracking.