Final year Languages and Cultures student John White has seen his translation of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s classical short story ‘El llano en llamas’ (‘The Fields on Fire’) published in 91st Meridian. The journal is published by the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa.

John first encountered ‘El llano en llamas’ during the second-year culture core module for Hispanic Studies. During his IPY in Mexico at the Centro Académico para la Memoria de Nuestra América he finetuned his sensibilities for Mexican Spanish and its – often locally grounded – pace, speech rhythms and imagery.

Born and raised in Oldham near Manchester, John noticed that the vernacular that Rulfo captures in the narrative voice and direct speech of the story’s narrator and characters, resembles the vernacular spoken around Oldham in pace, rhythm, and imagery. The perspective and mentality expressed in the story is that of rural mestizo peasant populations in Mexico, who have been dispossessed of their means of survival (the land), deceived and cheated by those in power when it came to promises of restoring it to them, and who have seen their modes of speech demeaned and derided, and their way of life typecast as ‘backward’. Those historical experiences resonate transatlantically with those of working class populations in Northern England, like those in Oldham – a cultural affinity that has shaped language.

DeLC congratulates John for his excellent creative linguistic and cultural translation of a highly complex, classical literary text.