Argentine journalist, Vanina Redondi, asks Peter Robertson, publisher and president of Interlitq, five questions.

September 1, 2014. The interview took place in Buenos Aires.

Left - Vanina Redondi

It is encouraging to see that Interlitq is still publishing, after it went down, with Issue 16.

Yes, the review was in abeyance for a year and a half. Inevitably, we lost quite a lot of ground over that period. But, finally, Interlitq was resurrected, and we have made it to 21 issues now, and are currently working on Issue 22.

Would you say that the specific problems you faced then are history?

I take the review one issue at a time. To date we have not been successful in terms of funding, and so the review is always teetering on the brink, as it were. There are no guarantees of anything these days. That said, I am buoyed up by the increasing web traffic, so far as the Interlitq blog is concerned, where I publish every day. Irrespective of the future for Interlitq, I hope it is the case that the review has, since it was founded seven years ago, made its contribution to literature, however small.

It is interesting to see that in the blog you write increasingly, on a daily basis, about psychoanalysis, and in Spanish.

How could I possibly be immune, having lived in Buenos Aires for 14 years! The porteño culture is suffused with psychoanalytic concepts. And now  we have got to the point where our largest readership vis-à-vis the Interlitq blog comes from Argentina—interesting for an international review—followed by the USA.

If you continue to publish, do you see the review developing along the same lines?

I think that one must innovate continuously if one is to be alive. I like to believe that we have some interesting new developments to incorporate, but we must first overcome a number of hurdles, and then implement these forward-looking changes.

Finally, and on another note, on the 18^th of September, the Scots will vote on whether to become independent. Since this issue is highly topical, may I ask you whether, as a Scot, you have any personal view?

I have been out of touch for so long, with my daily life far away. The tensions between Scotland and England have been long-running. And, from a literary perspective, I am not convinced that Dr Johnson’s sharp-edged commentaries on the Scots are purely jocular. On a personal note, I can only imagine how my life would have turned out had I, as a young man, followed in the footsteps of my step-uncle Ames, a brilliant law student and later the City Chamberlain of Edinburgh, to St Andrews University. But, weaned on the novels of E. M. Forster, I went south, and that is quite a different story. Often I think that the Scots, and myself included, pay a high price for such displacement—a theme explored in James Kennaway’s fiction. For all their virtues, the English would appear to be unnerved by a Scot who would not be at home in Trainspotting.