Manuel Abreu Adorno - In this, his quintessential first book comprised of twelve short stories, Abreu Adorno explores the dimensions of life through the perspective of different social classes, through the use of revolutionary narrative techniques, and by bringing to light what might otherwise escape our notice

Manuel Abreu Adorno, And the Hippies Came. Trans. by Rafael Franco Steeves. 7Vientos, 2012.

Written by Manuel Abreu Adorno and originally published in 1978, And the Hippies Came / Llegaron los hippies has been released as a “flip” version that reads through to the middle in Spanish, and when flipped over, reads through to the middle in English. The twelve stories included in this masterpiece were translated by Rafael Franco Steeves, a Puerto Rican author who has pub¬lished two books and various other stories and translations. This is the first time that this cult-classic has been made available in English.
To read And the Hippies Came is to find yourself surrounded by names and places that became history, but it will also surprise you with the sheer force of its stories and conflicts. Julio Cortázar, famed Argentine writer and essayist, praised Abreu Adorno’s work, specifically, this, his first book. Until now Abreu Adorno had been a forgotten genius.
There was a pulse of pop culture in Abreu Adorno’s pen that gave immediacy to everything he wrote, and makes the fact that he has been lost to memory since his departure from this world that much more inexplicable and inexcusable.
In this, his quintessential first book comprised of twelve short stories, Abreu Adorno explores the dimensions of life through the perspective of different social classes, through the use of revolutionary narrative techniques, and by bringing to light what might otherwise escape our notice.

Kids these days. They think they’ve invented everything. The McOndo writers and Crack Generation, who so proudly buck the Magic Realist tendencies of García Márquez, who seek to find a place within Latin American letters sans spirits . . . they’ve got their heads in the right place even if their books aren’t always the best. But, having read the stories of Manuel Abreu Adorno, I have to wonder if the Crack and McOndo groups know that their battle was won in 1978.
And the Hippies Came, the collected stories of Abreu Adorno (not to be confused with the other Adorno, who is far less fun to read), is, as the translator’s forward tell us, a neglected classic, a book that resonated with readers upon impact and caught the attention of Julio Cortázar. No wonder: the book is daring, fun, utterly readable, and—why not, let’s use the term—postmodern.
Abreu Adorno’s stories, most of them one part of a conversation, boast a striking immediacy, so much that the experimentation of tales such as “to please ourselves” effectively draws the reader along through a string of references, piled up without punctuation, to an inevitable conclusion. The pop culture mingled with literary playfulness is surely what captivated initial readers, fusing music with literature and echoing the tastes of readers who love Oulipo and the Beats as well as the Allman Brothers and Arsenio Rodríguez. Riffing off of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Abreu Adorno presents us with “the truth about farrah fawcett majors,” a deconstruction and reconstruction of a sentence that reveals a number of ideas within one very famous source. “what they said to each other for twenty-five dollars” narrates a conversation between a Spanish-speaking prostitute and her john, a CIA agent, neither speaking in the other’s tongue, the Spanish here un-translated in order to effectively communicate the distance between these characters. But the jewel in the crown may be the title story, which celebrates the arrival of a rock festival on the beach of Vega Baja along the lines of Woodstock, an event that promises music, sex, and LSD—but also brings horror:

“I came and saw how some local boys beat up some blonde kids. I came and saw how some stole from the tents of others. I came and saw naked girls everywhere. I came and saw people were smoking and singing . . . . I came and saw colors multiply before my eyes. I came and saw a group of local boys masturbating behind some palm trees. I came and found out they had raped several girls. I came and I was told how some kid had been stabbed that afternoon.”

Perhaps it is a disservice to highlight the grim moments of the story, but I feel the tale best exemplifies the reality behind the hippie illusion, the manner in which American celebrity manifests when exported, and the clash of dominant and subjugated cultures. This was the late 70s, well after the idealism of the hippies was shown to be, at best, a mixed bag. And for the shores of Vega Baja in tiny Puerto Rico, such a grand spectacle of American joyful excess could only end with an equal dose of pain.

Now that I’ve spoken about the steak, let’s talk about the sizzle: kudos to 7Vientos, the small press that resurrected this book. Published as a flip edition with the stories in their native Spanish along with the English translation, packaged with beautiful art printed directly on the hardcover, and loaded with author photos, the book feels like rock and roll albums used to feel in the days before iTunes. Kudos as well to Rafael Franco-Steeves for translating the book, a labor of love that has brought English speakers a neglected literary voice and reintroduced Spanish readers to a lost classic.- Vincent Francone

In the foreword to Manuel Abreu Adorno's posthumously-published novel No todas las suecas son rubias (Not all Swedes are blonde), globetrotting professor and crazy prolific writer Saúl Yurkievich celebrates the "distinctly Caribbean accent" of Adorno's work, the raw tenor of his talent, the strong appetite for recognition in a marketplace dominated by North American surnames. So it's only fitting that Adorno made his U.S. debut via local translating house 7Vientos, since it shares so many of these traits.
The Chicago-based independent publishing collective got its humble start when three newly unemployed professional editors decided to collaborate, according to Daniel Parra, who goes on to kid about the other four founding members: "friends and family with jobs, so they could pick up the tab." The seven literary-minded individuals took inspiration from "The Windy City" and named their editorial initiative 7Vientos (where "viento" = "wind" in Spanish).
7Vientos states its raison d'être as a venture to make previously untranslated Latin American texts available in English, and to translate into Spanish literature that is not widely available in Latin America. It accomplishes this by publishing what it calls "flip books," each text in its entirety in each language. Editor Parra explains:

"A flip book allowed us to print one book and reach twice as many readers. We hesitate to use the term "bilingual," it conjures images of books with facing-page translations, annotated and footnoted explanations of obscure terms or idioms, and what basically amounts to a distracting format. A "bilingual" book is something that is still firmly marketed toward the reader of one language; in the U.S., often that language is English."

7Vientos published its first such flip book last year: And the Hippies Came, a book of short stories by overlooked, underrated Puerto Rican maestro Manuel Abreu Adorno. The collective enlisted fellow puertorriqueño Rafael Franco-Steeves to translate Adorno's 1978 debut, which F-Steeves cites as a major precursor to McOndo (an urban, literary reaction to the magical realism of Macondo). Likewise, the twelve exceedingly brief, stylistically ambitious stories of Hippies prefigure the popularity of flash- or micro-fiction, each one a fleeting burst of affective genius. As Vincent Francone of Three Percent says: "The pop culture mingled with literary playfulness is surely what captivated initial readers, fusing music with literature and echoing the tastes of readers who love Oulipo and the Beats as well as the Allman Brothers and Arsenio Rodríguez."
Indeed, Adorno's prose propels each of the dozen stories headlong into inventive vibrancy, from the eponymous piece that employs page-length graphs and sentential repetition ("I came without hash or kif. I came to buy LSD. I came with no flute, no guitar. I came by bus from San Juan.") to an almost totally unpunctuated, stream-of-conscious catalogue of Latin American musical figures ("i'm talking about ray barreto who is younger than mongo although alright I'll concede you that point") to the frequent titular appearance of U.S. pop icons ("the truth about farrah fawcett majors" and "jesse james & billy the kid").
Both F-S and Parra credit the decision to translate and publish Hippies to a desire to see Adorno's work in wider circulation. To be sure, Adorno's life and writing have received little attention, save an extensive profile at Diálogo Digital, the online version of the University of Puerto Rico's community newspaper. We know he was born in 1955 in San Juan, graduated salutatorian from high school, and studied poetry at university in Río Piedras, before undertaking self-imposed exile in Europe, what he referred to as "the pilgrimage of all Latin American writers." In Paris, Adorno befriended Argentine surrealist Julio Cortázar until the latter's death in February 1984. Adorno returned to Puerto Rico, struggled to find outlets for his fiction, and died on October 29, eight months after Cortázar.
By returning Manuel Arbeu Adorno's work to print, 7Vientos has rescued at least one worthy work from likely oblivion. Together with Hippies, Adrono's oeuvre includes a book of poems (Sonido de lo Innombrable), and two novels (No todas las suecas son rubias and Elegía para Eleanor Rigby). Adorno saw only Hippies bound and sold in his lifetime, and Rigby remains unpublished. Perhaps 7Vientos will be the first to publish, let alone translate, Adorno's lost novel?

Perhaps. As of this writing, 7Vientos has published one other work of fiction, Saturnalia by award-winning Dominican performer and PhD candidate Rey Andújar, and there's talk of resurrecting a zine called Huevo Crudo ("Raw Egg"). I got word just this morning from Daniel "Danny" Parra himself, and the next offering from 7Vientos will be Malabarismos del tedio by Peruvian experimentalist Marco A. Escalante. Parra also discussed a third flip book for early 2014, "a bilingual edition containing two of the greatest works by Mario Bellatin never before published in English; Flowers and Illustrated Biography of Mishima." Here's looking forward to many future titles from 7Vientos. - Diego Báez