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Eduardo Galeano

Voices of Time: A Life in Stories Hardcover – May 2, 2006

by Eduardo Galeano (Author), Mark Fried (Translator)

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A striking mosaic of memories, observations, and legends that together reveal the author's own story and a grand, compassionate vision of life itself

In this kaleidoscope of reflections, renowned South American author Eduardo Galeano ranges widely, from childhood to love, music, plants, fear, indignity, and indignation. In the signal style of his bestselling and much-admired Memory of Fire trilogy--brief fragments that build steadily into an organic whole--Galeano offers a rich, wry history of his life and times that is both calmly philosophical and fiercely political.

Beginning with blue algae, the earliest of life forms, these 333 vignettes alight on the Galeano family's immigration to Uruguay in the early twentieth century, the fate of love letters intercepted by a military dictatorship, abuses by the rich and powerful, the latest military outrages, and the author's own encounters with all manner of living matter, including generals, bums, dissidents, soccer stars, ducks, and trees. Out of these meditations emerges neither anger nor bitterness, but a celebration of a blessed life in a harsh world.

Poetic and passionate, scathing and lyrical, delivered with Galeano's inimitable mix of gentle comedy and fierce moral judgment, Voices of Time is a deeply personal statement from a great and beloved writer.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Metropolitan Books
Publication date

May 2, 2006
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0805077677
ISBN-13

978-0805077674
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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

This Uruguayan writer has a way of producing stories reminiscent of folktales, testimonials, and reflections, and of stitching them together into vast historical tapestries, a technique seen to greatest effect in his trilogy "Memory of Fire." The current collection, subtitled "A Life in Stories," includes excursions into the Mayan concept of time, Peruvian cave paintings, and child laborers in Pakistan, and features walk-on appearances by Hernán Cortés, Diego Maradona, and Michael Jackson. Galeano can be fierce and defiant, as when he inveighs against the I.M.F., the World Bank, and assorted dictators, but there is always something celebratory to his style. Evoking the call of poets and singers, and the mysterious voices of wind, moon, trees, and dreams, Galeano remains, first and foremost, a wonder-struck raconteur.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

About the Author

Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America's most admired writers, as well as a distinguished journalist and historian. Winner of the first Lannan Foundation
Cultural Freedom Prize in 1998, he is the author of Upside Down (0-312-42031-5), the Memory of Fire trilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award), Open Veins of Latin America, and many other works. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.

From The Washington Post

Some of the reflections -- both cosmic and personal -- in Eduardo Galeano's Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried; Metropolitan, $25) consume as much as two pages, but most of are shorter, and some are nearly as compact as haiku. An entry might draw upon mythology. In "A Dictionary of Colors," Galeano explains the rationale behind the plumage chosen for self-decoration by Indians living along the Paraguay River: "The macaw's red feathers call down the rain, and his yellow ones summon good news. And the sad gray feathers of the rhea give verve to the human song."

But an entry in this idiosyncratic collection of musings could just as well be a meditation on modern events. "First Music" focuses on astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson as they stood on a ridge in the Appalachians one night in 1964, "trying to capture radio waves emitted by who knows which impossibly far-off galaxy." They kept hearing a buzz that hurt their ears, but only later did they figure out the momentous cause: "the very blast that began time and space and the planets and everything else" -- that is, the Big Bang. Galeano crowns the vignette with a poetic fillip: "I'd venture to say that the echo still resounded in the air because it wanted us to hear it, since we little Earth people are also echoes of that long-ago cry of the newborn universe."

Eduardo Galeano is one of South America's most distinguished literary figures, best known for his brilliant Memory of Fire trilogy, a fictionalized history of Latin America that won him the 1989 American Book Award. He is also a journalist and historian, renowned for his probing criticism.

But his work can be charming, too. Some of the pieces in Voices of Time seem like throwbacks to Art Linkletter's "Kids Say the Darnedest Things" franchise -- except that Galeano's kids are verbally brilliant rather than cutesy. In "Curious People," a 9-year-old boy wonders, "If God made himself, how did he make his back?" In "The Teacher," a 6th grader in Montevideo confides to a visitor after everyone in her entire class has been given an award -- that "she loved her teacher . . . loved him very very very much, because he'd taught her not to be afraid of being wrong."

The World in Bite Sizes
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Time Tells
We are made of time.

We are its feet and its voice.

The feet of time walk in our shoes.

Sooner or later, we all know, the winds of time will erase the tracks.

Passage of nothing, steps of no one? The voices of time tell of the voyage.

The Voyage
Oriol Vall, who works with newborns at a hospital in Barcelona, says that the first human gesture is the embrace. After coming into the world, at the beginning of their days, babies wave their arms as if seeking someone.

Other doctors, who work with people who have already lived their lives, say that the aged, at the end of their days, die trying to raise their arms.

And that's it, that's all, no matter how hard we strive or how many words we pile on. Everything comes down to this: between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs.

Witnesses
The professor and the journalist walk in the garden.

The professor, Jean-Marie Pelt, stops, points, and says, "Allow me to introduce you to our grandparents."

The journalist, Jacques Girardon, crouches down and finds a ball of foam peeking out from the blades of grass.

The ball is a town of microscopic blue algae. On very humid days, the blue algae allow themselves to be seen. They look like a wad of spit. The French journalist wrinkles his nose; the origin of life isn't what we might call attractive, but from that spittle, from that mess, come all of us who have legs or roots or wings.

Before there was a before, when the world was barely a baby, without color or sound, there was blue algae. Streaming oxygen, they gave color to the sea and the sky. Then one fine day, a day that lasted millions of years, some blue algae decided to turn green. And bit by tiny bit, the green algae begat lichens, mushrooms, mold, medusas, and all the color and sound that came later, as did we, to unsettle the sea and the land.

Other blue algae preferred to carry on as they were.

And still are.

From the distant world that was, they observe the world that is.

What they think of it we do not know.

Greeneries
When the sea became the sea, the land was still nothing but naked rock.

Then lichens, born of the sea, made meadows. They invaded the kingdom of stone, conquered it, turned it green.

That happened in the yesterday of yesterdays, and it is still going on. Lichens live where no one lives: on the frozen steppe, in the burning desert, on the peaks of the highest mountains.

Lichens live only as long as the marriage lasts between an alga and her son, the mushroom. If the marriage breaks up, the lichens break down.

Sometimes, fighting and disagreements lead the alga and mushroom to part. She complains that he keeps her hidden from the light. He says she makes him sick, feeding him sugar day and night.

Footprints
A couple was walking across the savannah in East Africa at the beginning of the rainy season. The woman and the man still looked a lot like apes, truth be told, although they were standing upright and had no tails.

A nearby volcano, now called Sadiman, was belching ash. The rain of ash preserved the couple's footprints, from that moment through time. Beneath their gray blanket, the tracks remained intact. Those footprints show that this Eve and that Adam had been walking side by side; at a certain point she stopped, turned away, and took a few steps on her own. Then she returned to the path they shared.

The world's oldest human footprints left traces of doubt. A few years have gone by. The doubt remains.

Copyright © 2006 by Eduardo Galeano
Translation copyright © 2006 by Mark Fried

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (May 2, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805077677
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805077674
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,155,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #90,653 in Memoirs (Books)

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Eduardo Galeano

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Eduardo Hughes Galeano (Spanish pronunciation: [eˈðwarðo ɣaleˈano]; 3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015) was a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters" and "a literary giant of the Latin American left".

Galeano's best-known works are Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) and Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1982–6). "I'm a writer," the author once said of himself, ""obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia."

Author Isabelle Allende, who said her copy of Galeano's book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, called Open Veins of Latin America, "a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling."

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Donostia Kultura [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Glenn Russell

The finest homes in Miami are built of trash

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2015

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The feet of time walk in our shoes. Green alga dance. The rivers break all the rules. The flow of history on a planetary scale; the flow of events and happenings from country to country, city to city, town to town, person to person, animal to animal and plant to plant. 333 half-of-one-page laser-sharp observations and mini-stories from Eduardo Galeano, among the foremost masters of Latin American literature. Here are several of my favorites:

Time Plays Games

It is said that once upon a time two friends were admiring a painting. The work of art, by who knows who, was from China, a field of flowers at harvest time.
One of the friends, who knows why?, fixed his gaze on a figure in the painting, one of many women with baskets gathering poppies. She wore her hair loose, flowing over her shoulders.
At last she returned his gaze, let her basket fall, held out her arms, and, who knows how, carried him off.
He let himself be taken, who knows where, and with that woman he spent nights and days, who knows how many, until a gust of wind picked him up and returned him to the room where his friend remained standing before the painting.
So brief was that eternity that the friend had not noticed his absence. And neither had he noticed that woman, one of many women in the painting gathering poppies in their baskets, now wore her hair tied at the back of her neck.

Labor

At dawn Doña Tota walked into a hospital in the barrio of Lanus. She was carrying a child in her belly. In the entranceway she found a star, in the form of a brooch, lying on the floor.
The star sparkled on one side, but not the other. That happens whenever stars fall to earth and lay in the dirt. On one side they glow silver, invoking the nights of the world; on the other side, they’re just tin.
Gripped in her fist, that star of silver and tin accompanied Doña Tota in labor.
The newborn was named Diego Armando Maradona.

Geography

In Chicago everybody’s black. In New York, the midwinter sun bakes stones till they melt. In Brooklyn, anyone who reaches the age of thirty deserves a statue. The finest homes in Miami are built of trash. Hollywood is run by the rats.
Chicago, New York, Brooklyn, Miami, and Hollywood – these are the names of some of the barrios of Cité Solei, the most abject slum in the capital of Haiti.

Newscast

The entertainment industry thrives on the loneliness market.
The consoling industry thrives on the anguish market.
The security industry thrives on the fear market.
The lying industry thrives on the stupidity market.
How do they gauge their success? On the stock market.
The arms industry too. Their stock prices are the best new in every war.

The Tailor

He swore he would fly. He swore on all the buttonholes he’d ever opened and all the buttons he’d ever placed and all the suits and dresses and coats he’d ever measured, cut, basted, and sewn, stitch by stitch, day after day his entire life.
From then on, Reichelt the tailor spent his time sewing a pair of enormous bat wings. The wings folded so they’d fit in the grotty hold where he worked and lived.
At long last, after a huge effort, the elaborate cloth-covered framework of pipes and metal rods were ready.
The tailor spent the night unable to sleep, praying to God to give him a windy day. And in the morning, a gust morning in the year 1912, he climbed to the tip of the Eiffel Tower, spread his wings, and flew to his death.
(I saw a newsreel of this event back when I was 12 – this man standing with his wings spread and then a jump, quickly plummeting to the ground. I never will forget Here is the clip on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBN3xfGrx_U

And not only do we have Eduardo Galeano’s words of time, but the pages are peppered with small black-and-white images of timeless Peruvian art. Fantástico. This book reminds me that being alive is an unending celebration.

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Amazon Customer

I've never had a non-fiction book captivate me like this one has

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2016

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I've never had a non-fiction book captivate me like this one has. Galeano himself has said that he doesn't believe in borders. Reading this book shows that. His book reads like prose, poetry, and fantasy all while being a collection of factual instances compiled in a collection of vignettes. I can't wait to read some more of his works.

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Michael Gomel

Joyously renews and rebirths the sense of wonder

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2007

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So simple. yet so deep. Of the ordinary yet so dearly educating and inspiring. Each story but a page or less. Each story a lifetime. Each story connecting to each story. Life connecting to life. And such simple but poetic prose. I heard Eduardo Galleano speak on democracynow.org and never knew of him before. I bought this book soon after - what a Joy! Viva Galleano!

One person found this helpful

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Brian P Tanguay

A Delight

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 10, 2013

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This is a wonderful collection that needs to be read slowly so it can be savored. In a few words, Galeano captures the essence of whatever he's writing about. My only wish is that I could have read the collection in Spanish.

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asl444

Love the short stories- some are kind of like riddles.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 10, 2013

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Really keeps you thinking even as you zoom through the short stories. Very good choice of words and unique style of phrasing.

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Jim Mattice

A wonderful book in a journalistic style.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2013

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the human condition portrayed in a concise journalistic style.
It is like a series of vignettes about ourselves and the world.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 12, 2007

Verified Purchase

Arrived as promised. It was a gift, so I didn't read it. Though my friend was very pleased to receive it. It was a book he'd been looking for and wanted to have. I was able to find it on Amazon very quickly and the price was very reasonable!

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A Latin American Blogs

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 6, 2015

The author is a famous Uruguayan writer, one of the many Latin American writers who fled, or were driven from, their home countries for exile in Europe during right-wing dictatorships. (Galeano’s countryman, Juan Carlos Onetti also fled and I reviewed his great book, Let the Wind Speak). This book is a series of vignettes, almost like blog posts, although I doubt that Galeano did blog posts. He died in 2015, a week before I am posting this review. The stories come from all over the world, but mainly from Latin America and Spain. All of the vignettes fall into a few categories. Some are naturalist posts -- ants, flies, salmon – like we might read in a column in a Sunday paper, and they all have a moral lesson, like an Aesop’s fable. Many are terribly sad stories of Latin America’s downfallen – crushed by poverty and official oppression or indifference. A few are filled with vitriol for his right-wing political enemies, the Francos, the Pinochets and others. Some are simply fun – an odd twist or irony involving a Latin celebrity or a soccer game story. Like all collections of vignettes, they are best read a few at a time.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Dennis Wyatt

Lesson in time

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 16, 2020

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A lot to think about and asks questions

Donna from T'ranna

and many thanks to Galeano's translator

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 24, 2016

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Sad that Galeano isn't more widely read in the US. He is the voice of reason in an unreasonable political world.

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