Burning ground

“Here we speak, and the words get hot in our mouths because of the heat outside, and they dry out on our tongues until we’re breathless.”

Thus begins the journey of "Chão em Chamas" (Burning Ground), which guides the reader through the arid landscape of the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. Set in this place of Juan Rulfo's early childhood, the writings collected here shift between the rawness of realism and the fantasy inherent in Latin American existence.

The creation of this book was a pilgrimage in itself. Rulfo's first short stories were published in the literary magazines Pan and América, and thanks to their quality, the author received a grant from the Mexican Writers' Center, whereupon he wrote seven more stories, and thus published the first version of Chão em Chamas in 1953. Still not satisfied, Rulfo imposed further revisions, additions, and cuts on the book, both of excerpts and of short stories, until, in 1970, it took on a final form—this version being considered for the current Brazilian edition. In the words of his friend and translator Eric Nepomuceno: "Juan Rulfo was obsessed with the cut, the final polish, the drying of a text until it was reduced to the most rigorous precision."

Such care and precision are so carefully crafted that they almost go unnoticed by the reader. The stories in "Chão em Chamas" (Chalão em Chamas) are replete with traces of orality, of introspection into the harsh, rugged, yet enchanting environment of Jalisco. Considered a regionalist work, the Mexican reality can echo Brazilian reality and echo the universal human condition while simultaneously reflecting on particular Latin American dramas. Death, land conflicts, love, illness, sexuality, poverty, faith, violence, injustice, and indignation are some of the themes that Rulfo's characters—brutal, passionate, or melancholic men and women—lead the reader through, mingling amid the deserts and rains of the immense plateau.

Burning Ground is the first and only collection of short stories by Juan Rulfo, this major Mexican writer, referenced by names such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag.

A seemingly simple work, yet undoubtedly deeply disconcerting. Within its formal unity lies a great diversity of languages, registers, and tones with which Rulfo addresses the problem of a multifaceted violence—sometimes unleashed, sometimes insidious—so naturalized that it is no longer recognized as such.