For company, I virtually never had need of another’s physical presence. When I was little I talked to myself because I am a Gemini. Not yet out of childhood I had already begun to write poems. What was the result of my first falling in love? The production of an intimate diary which was first intended as an instrument to bring the object of my love closer but which ended by utterly substituting for and supplanting it.

Given the despairing way in which Castellanos almost always wrote about herself, there is a widespread belief that her death in 1974 in Tel Aviv was an act of suicide. Instead it was the result of one of her many idiosyncrasies—her utter mechanical ineptitude. On August 7,1974, while trying to plug a lamp into a socket at the embassy residence, she died of electrocution. She was forty-nine years old.

Had The Book of Lamentations been published in English at any other time until very recently, it would have been necessary to start this introduction by explaining that Chiapas, a state bordering on Guatemala, is one of Mexico’s poorest, that the majority of its three and a half million people are descendants of the Maya, who built fantastic limestone cides in the middle of the jungle more than a thousand years ago, and who today are largely illiterate, impoverished and enraged. But newspaper readers around the world know all this now, thanks to the uprising that started in the former capital of Chiapas—referred to by its old name, Ciudad Real, in this novel—on January 1, 1994. On that day, thousands of Maya campesinos, including descendants of the very same field workers who lived on the Castellanos estate, declared war on the Mexican government. They called themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, after General Emiliano Zapata, who led campesino troops into battle eighty years ago and gave the Mexican Revolution its distinctly agrarian cast. The new Zapatistas’ rebellion was a throwback both to a long-gone Mexican agricultural past and to a more recent form of struggle—guerrillas for socialism—that had seemed exhausted in this hemisphere. That the uprising should have happened at all, much less endure so stubbornly against all odds, struck millions of people as astonishing. But the rebellion should not have come as a surprise to anyone in Mexico who had read The Book of Lamentations.