Jorge Volpi: “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to provoke fear, they could have been Edgar Allan Poe characters”

He died at the age of 40 in an unclear manner. The latest theories suggest that he may have died as a result of... electoral fraud. He was found on a Baltimore street in a terrible situation in front of a tavern and wearing clothes that were not his. They did not suit him, and he was careful about his appearance. The tavern was used as a voting station in that cold autumn of 1849. And in those days when there was no voter registration, where they were visually recognizable, there were bandits who dedicated themselves to kidnapping vulnerable people, confining them, getting them drunk or drugging them and making them vote again and again by changing their clothes. Added to the tuberculosis he suffered from, this would have caused him to die a few days later.

A theory that could well have been a good argument for some of his macabre and ironic stories, stories that despite having died at only 40 years old made him a master of storytelling and terror, a trunk from which many others derive: he is Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949), the author of The Fall of the House of Usher , The Masque of the Red Death , Ligeia or The Pit and the Pendulum , some of the titles that make up the new annotated and complete edition of his Complete Stories , published by the leading publisher of Spanish stories, Páginas de Espuma.

“In an era marked by fear of the future or by the fear provoked by Trump, his stories resonate even more”

A novelty that is, above all, a daring move: the publisher itself had launched Poe’s complete stories almost twenty years ago in their best-known translation, that of Julio Cortázar, from 1956, but the editor Juan Casamayor believed that “every classic author deserves a contemporary edition.” And that a new one was necessary that would bring the language of his stories – as well as bringing the lines that Cortázar decided not to translate and, even, eliminating those that he decided to include with his own hand – closer to the language and thought of today. To readers who have learned Poe’s lesson through his many descendants, which go back to Black Mirror .

The chosen person for the new translation was Rafael Accorinti, who had recently dealt with the literary essays of Virginia Woolf and who says that he has tried “to renew the enchantment of Poe in contemporary readers.” “The translation that Cortázar made in his day was fundamental,” he explains, but he recalls that it did not necessarily fit the orality of what was translated. “His translation of Poe is very poetic, lyrical... and it sounds different in English, but each translation has its time and is part of the literary biography of a classic writer.”

“He died at the age of 40 and that is why his universe remains attractive to young readers of any age”

A classic whose readers today read it after having received it in a thousand ways. “Poe has pollinated literature, he has created genres. The detective story, horror, and within horror the idea of ​​the haunted house with The Fall of the House of Usher . And science fiction. John Collier belongs to the Poe genealogy and was the screenwriter of The Twilight Zone . Today's kids have seen Black Mirror , but they should know that it comes from there and its genealogy has to do with Poe. Without him we wouldn't have the stories of many authors, from Saki to Lovecraft, passing through Stephen King and of course reaching Mariana Enriquez and Mónica Ojeda. And in science fiction Ray Bradbury is also in the line of Poe, as could be Philip K. Dick,” says the writer Fernando Iwasaki, co-editor of this edition in which each story is commented by authors such as Manuel Vilas, Alejandro Zambra or María Fasce. And which has a double prologue by Mariana Enríquez and Patricia Esteban Erlés.

Iwasaki also points out that “Poe died at just 40 years old and we think that is one of the reasons why his world, his vision, his universe continues to be so attractive to young readers of any age.” “At the same time, he is writing at a time when the construction of love or generosity, kindness, in literature, is reaching a point of darkness. When the attention of literature from the 19th century onwards begins to turn towards the sinister, the dark, the disturbing, the terrifying, the unusual, which reaches down to our days when all of that is already entertainment, spectacle.”

Master of storytelling and horror, Lovecraft, Stephen King and Mariana Enriquez descend from his line

In this sense, he reflects that “young people who approach this edition today have a completely different relationship with evil than we had. Young readers today have an idea of ​​evil, of the sinister, of the dark, that they have been imbibed since their earliest childhood. When I read Poe at 14 in Lima, I felt that I was approaching an author on the margins and today it is part of a mainstream where evil occupies an important place, it is a spectacle, it is part of political discourse, of daily life.”

The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi, the other co-editor of the book, recalled that “Carlos Fuentes always said that one of the wonders of literature was that not only the ancients influence the moderns, that not only a book published in the past influences the books published in the present, but that the books of the present influence the books of the past, and that is what could happen to us with this new edition. Many of the readers will be young people who have come to horror through Mariana Enriquez or Stephen King, and that current view will influence the way they will read Poe’s texts, seeing them as if they were contemporary and perhaps discovering that the germ of everything they are finding now was already here.”

And he points out that “a time like the one we are living in, marked particularly by fear of the future, of global warming, of artificial intelligence, by the fear that figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, who could have been Poe characters, are trying to provoke throughout the world, can make these stories acquire an even greater resonance, even politically.”