60
PARTISAN REVIEW
of recent immigration, they have the dialect problem , so that whenever
they go into proper Italian, there is always this sense of insecurity ,
because it is not the household language. That's why, in the written
language, they can fall into excesses since they are going into a cultural
field that doesn't exist in their kitchen sink .
Christ:
The nature of the language also presents problems. For example,
Spanish tends to glide on commas as if they were casters, while literary
English tends to be far more periodic.
Puig:
The translator , Suzanne Jill Levine , and I do a lot of rewriting after her
translation is finished. We feel the need for a cut or for a certain bridge
between sentences if I don't want a full stop. Marian Skedgell, our
editor , understood from the beginning that this was an experimental
authorship, so she put a stop to all editorial interference from the copy
desk . There were very few changes , almost none, in the last book.
Christ:
Previously you have shied away from discussing the political or
social implication of your work, yet politics and the social situation have
crept closer to the foreground in each of your books.
Puig:
Especially in the fourth novel which has just been sent to the printer.
In the past, I didn't want to talk about things that I wasn't sure about.
Now I see certain things more clearly.
Christ :
Isn't this clarity partly the result of your books' growing up, in the
sense that the first is focused on childhood, the second on late adoles–
cence and early adulthood and the third on adulthood?
Puig:
Yes, but that hasn't been voluntary. It is just that I've been slowly
coming to see things more clearly . I
had
to investigate my childhood
first.
Christ:
The sexual theme and the violence have been coming more to the
foreground too.
Puig:
In the first book, I was dealing with the oppression of women, with a
latent homosexual child growing up and I didn't wane to make any
judgment about those cases . I just wanted to describe them . I didn 't
understand why the women were like that or why the child was being
modeled into a homosexual. But lately I have seen the motivation . Now
I think I know.
Christ:
You mean the social motivation rather than the individual motiva–
tion with whi.ch you began?
Puig:
Yes. I see the social and political tensions more clearly . What helped
me mainly were all the liberation movements that have taken place
lately, in Argentina as well as here . The women 's liberation movement is
one of the most important things that ever happened . At first women
thought that they had to be weak, frail , in order to
be,
especially when
