There is a rich tradition of Welsh writers exploring Latin America, and Richard Gwyn, a poet and translator, is the latest to produce a blend of memoir, cultural travel and political history. His book has had a long gestation with parts dating from 2011 followed by intermittent travel across the region since.
Gwyn’s discursive journeys take him through many countries, delivering readings at festivals and recruiting the work of poets for an anthology. He walks in the rainforests of southern Chile and travels to a town in Colombia on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. “I felt attracted to a place,” he states, “where certain moods and music and works of art and literature led me ... somewhere dark and mysterious, tinged with the prospect of danger.”
As he meditates on national belonging, he ranges over how a sense of identity has affected Latin America through colonialism, exploitation of natural resources, military occupation and dictatorships. His quest leads him from the revolutionary fervour of Nicaragua – a country where he believes poets are often regarded as spokespeople for a better future – to gang violence in Mexico, victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and a search for Che Guevara’s birthplace in Rosario.
On a journey into the mountains of Patagonia he reflects on Bruce Chatwin’s visit in the mid-1970s to an expatriate Welsh community living in the foothills of the Andes. He refers to Chatwin’s controversial travel book portraying a community that deemed his work patronising, and which Gwyn calls “a calumnious and dishonest assault on the sensibilities of Patagonians”.
In Valparaiso a pack of feral dogs follows him through the streets, making him feel like “some lone caped warrior, or the lead singer of a heavy metal band, with my thuggish canine bodyguard now spread around me”. Gwyn has an inquisitive spirit, although his writing is protracted, especially when describing long plane journeys; the book would have benefited from tighter editing.
But his knowledge of the region’s writers is indubitable and he invokes authors such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Manuel Roca. The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003, is a ghostly leitmotif. His opening epigraph describes Latin America as: “A savage, impoverished, violent insane asylum.”
