A conversation with Rolando Hinojosa

Bilingual Review, Sept-Dec, 2000 by Philip K. Jason

Rolando Hinojosa was born in 1929 in Mercedes, Texas, a Rio Grande Valley town not far from the Mexican border. Having served two years in the army during the late 1940s, he was called back in 1950 to serve in Korea with a reconnaissance unit. Later he attended the University of Texas, earning a B.A. in Spanish literature. After working as a high school teacher and data processor, he earned an M.A. from New Mexico. Highlands University and then a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Professor Hinojosa-Smith (his name in academe) has taught and held administrative posts at several colleges and universities. He is currently the Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Hinojosa has been honored with the Texas Institute of Letters Lifetime Achievement Award as well as several awards for individual tides written both in Spanish and English. He is best known for his Klail City Death Trip series, which comprises over a dozen novels that explore the lives of the Anglo and Mexican American citizens of a border community. Hinojosa's works have been translated into several languages, and he is read and studied worldwide, though most of the criticism about his work is by U.S. Latino or Latina and European scholars. He may be the only writer in any language who has written both a novel and a book-length poetry sequence about the Korean War.

The interview was conducted via E-mail in 1999.

PKJ: Korean Love Songs (KLS) was first published in 1978, and The Useless Servants (TUS) in 1993. These works, then, followed by many years their source experiences. When did you first realize that you would write about your time in Korea?

RH: Korea is mentioned in my first work, Estampas del Valley otras obras (1973) and in a bilingual edition of the same book called Sketches of the Valley and Other Works. An English rendition entitled The Valley was published in 1983. I mentioned it again in Klail City y sus alrededores (Havana, 1976). I did an English rendition of it and titled it Klail City in 1986. Korea appears in each work in some form or other, but nothing as sustained as in KLS and TUS.

In 1976 I read Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and this led me to write a third work expressly on Korea. It didn't go anywhere. I tried Spanish, and that didn't work. I then tried to translate what I had. Again nothing. I decided to reread Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, and from there I went to Siegried Sassoon's prose and poetry. I also looked at the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg and David Jones, and finally some created by Wilfred Owens. I realized I'd tried to write in the wrong language and in the wrong genre. Narrative verse was the ticket, and KLS came as a result of all that.

PKJ: Regarding Korean Love Songs, did the poems in this sequence tumble out in a rush (as Keith Wilson says his Graves Registry poems did), or were they developed over a long period of time?

RH: Yes, it came gushing out. The rewriting was a pleasure, as is all rewriting for me. The Useless Servants started out as a sort of journal; I thought it whiny, and I think I spent some eighteen months on it until I stopped. The handwritten manuscript sat around for a year before I went back to it. A journal format was the way due to its first person point of view, which is immediate and personal.

PKJ: Is there a factual journal that lies behind the fictional journal? Did you keep a journal while in Korea that became the basis for Rafe's journal several decades later?

RH: No, I didn't keep a journal. I imagine that since the scenes were so vivid (horrifying is a better word) and the emotions so many I didn't want to keep a journal then and there. As I have already mentioned, I did discuss Korea in my first and second novels. As for the third, that's an interesting piece of business. The first two settled the place and the people, their relationships, the history of the place--all the necessary furniture for the writing of a series, as I saw it.

Because I also wanted to show Mexican Americans and their different socioeconomic classes, I presented them in as many occupations and professions as I could. I mentioned Korea to show that the military had been another experience (as had the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, etc.) of this population.

Since the first two novels had won a national prize and an international prize, and since I had written them in Spanish, I decided to write the third one in Spanish as well, and that it would show a group of youngsters in Korea.

PKJ: Was The Useless Servants, like Korean Love Songs, originally written in English?

RH: I started the book [that became KLS] in Spanish. Lost some seven months writing it in Spanish and it didn't work. I threw it away. Frustrated, I went back to reading Graves. I realized I'd made two mistakes: First, army life was led in English, not Spanish; so I had chosen an inappropriate language. Second, the genre was wrong as well. A novel wouldn't do it. Remembering Emerson's dictum of poetry being the force of few words, I saw that narrative prose in verse form was the answer. I then decided to write the work in English, but I'd use Spanish syllabification--not the iambic meters--in the work. That was it for Korean Love Songs, but Korea is mentioned again in subsequent parts of the series. In Rites and Witnesses, for example, I intercalated conversations among the two parts, the Rites and the Witnesses, and so on with the other novels.