NOTE TO THE READERS

All these stories were originally written in Asturian. And all of them were written in New York, the city where I've lived for the last ten years and where I first learned to recognize and accept not only my vocation as a writer but also the socio-cultural and linguistic aspects of my identity. It had never before occurred to me to write in Asturian; it surely never would have occurred to me had I kept living in Asturias, in the land where speaking this language was the mark that gave you away—your belonging to the disparaged world of the peasants, and the least educated and least favored social classes. I needed a kind of emotional and physical distance from my birthplace in order to be able to write about the rural world in which I had been raised, and to be able to recuperate, at the same time, an image of this world that avoided both idealizing and mocking it. Since I left to study at an Avilés institute at age fourteen, I have been bothered by the mistaken idea that people in cities tend to have of the country, an image that doesn't admit happy mediums and that sees small villages as the paradises they are not, or as examples of an ideological backwardness that doesn't fit them either. In essence, these villages don't differ much from any other inhabited space, and if any particular feeling defines them, it should be understood that this too is determined by the historical situation of the moment.

So I Won't Forget is made up of eighteen stories linked by a series of vignettes, in whose anecdotes one can recognize an entire century of Spanish history redefined by the emotional prism of three generations of women: Those born at the beginning of the twentieth-century whose lot it was to confront the realities of war, hunger, and material poverty; those who had to adapt to the repression of Franco's dictatorship, always at the expense of seeing their emotional space reduced; and those who, born in the last years of Franquismo or in the first years of democracy—among whom I include myself—made the most of the advantages their mothers and grandmothers offered them and dared to question, for the first time, part of the same values they had inherited. With the exception of the vignettes that link the stories—in which the same voice of a woman born at the beginning of the twentieth century describes with great serenity her life, marked as it was by hunger and scarcity - the other narratives are organized according to the rhythm of memory and reminiscence, without being too conscious of the historical moment in which each of them takes place. It's true that the anecdotes help to temporally locate the stories, but it's also true that sometimes it's not so easy to tell, since although each story can be read independently, together they create a kind of choral narrative that gives shape to a century of collective memory. The temporal location of the stories presents fewer difficulties when they are focused on the most recent generation of women who began to break with the models traditionally transmitted from mother to daughter and began to articulate emotions and desires that their ancestors had felt themselves obliged to ignore or manipulate. This is what happens in "Advice", the first story in the book, and the first that I wrote in Asturian. In any case, what's new about this generation, and what is different about this story isn't so much the expression of emotions that are little accepted and socially legitimized—a daughter who ends up talking about her [romantic] relationship with a friend—but the possibility of sharing that with her mother, even if it is in a tone of reproach, and the interest in initiating a dialogue that would not have taken place before, which is why this story is the only one in the book with an identifiable interlocutor.

The stories are written in the first person, with the idea of preserving the oral tone of the stories and of giving priority to the voice and point of view of these women who have always lacked a space for public expression. It's obvious that there is an explicit interest on my part to recognize the prominence they never had and to validate voices that I myself carry inside and with whom, on the deepest emotional level, I identify. If I make no concessions to a third person narrative voice, it's because in reality I don't need to, because it seems to me to be more of a waste than a good move, and because it has turned out to be easier, more comfortable, and more legitimate for me to create a narrative from within than from without.

Translating this book into Spanish was not difficult from a technical point of view. Spanish is the language that I use daily in my professional and private lives, and which I now end up defending and prioritizing when faced with the English that, depending upon the situation, I need. It was something I did with a certain amount of pleasure and with the intention that these stories—which are not exclusively Asturian, nor rural, nor about women—could find their way to a greater number of readers, since it's true that I will never be able to sufficiently thank the Hispanic-New Yorker audience that listened to and accepted these stories before anyone did in Asturian. The greatest challenge in the translation was to shift into Spanish the oral register that I had always lived in and heard in Asturian, and which I couldn't seem to recognize and accept in a language different from that of the original. I want to thank Sonia and Jacqueline, who helped me to clearly define the particular characteristics of Spanish and Asturian, who calmed me by showing their pleasure with the results, and above all, who encouraged me from the beginning to translate these stories into a language that, luckily, is also my own.

New York, December 2004