Literary Birthday – 28 September – Rosario Ferré
Rosario Ferré was born on 28 September 1938 and died on 18 February 2016.
Rosario Ferré Quotes
- Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn’t have them, it’s our duty to invent them.
- Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons: Emily Bronté wrote to confirm the revolutionary nature of passion; Virginia Woolf wrote to exorcise her terror of madness and death; Joan Didion writes to discover what and how she thinks; Clarice Lispector discovered in her writing a reason to love and be loved. In my case, writing is simultaneously a constructive and a destructive urge, a possibility for growth and change.
- A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.
- Meagre in land but great in heart, generous port, gap, breach, porthole, trapdoor of impossible hopes, ubiquitous as an air mail stamp, ghostly as the snapshot crumpled in a migrant’s pocket when he boards the jet that will take him to the lettuce fields in California, Puerto Rico is the oxymoron of Costa Rica, dollar-licked by North America and language locked with South America, but above and beyond all else: pier, beachhead, anchorage of dreams. The myth of paradise confounds but consoles us. Puerto Ricans are never sure the island exists, precisely because we’re always about to leave it. Our ports defy us, turns us into a population of travelling snails, roaming the world with our home on our back.
- Sometimes it’s necessary to believe in love, even if it doesn’t exist…
- I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernst Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world.
- Death is a woman, and for that reason she’s courageous and just, and never makes distinctions between mortals; she’ll crush the ignorant, the arrogant, and the wise alike under her icy foot.
Rosario Ferré was a Puerto Rican short-story writer, novelist, critic, and professor, and one of the leading women authors in contemporary Latin America. She received the ‘Liberatur Prix’ award from the Frankfurt Book Fair for Kristallzucker, the German translation of Maldito Amor. She wrote the bulk of her work in her native Spanish, but in 1995 she published her first English novel, House on the Lagoon. In 1998 Ferré published the English-language novel Eccentric Neighborhoods, about two Puerto Rican families during the first half of the 20th century, and in 2001 she released Flight of the Swan, about a stranded Russian ballet company caught up in Puerto Rico’s independence movement. In 1997, she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Brown University. Ferré was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2004.
Source for image: tv.cuny.edu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rosario_Ferre_on_Charlando_con_Cervantes_(1995).jpg
by Amanda Patterson
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