Interview with Rodrigo Garcia

Patrick McDonald interviews Colombian director Rodrigo Garcia, Gabriel García Márquez' son.

HC: We as a culture and society owe a great debt of gratitude to your father for his remarkable and essential perspective. As his son, what was your initial reaction when you first discovered his works and how do you apply it to your own writing sensibility?

RG: I’ve always liked his books, obviously. I started reading his stuff in my late teens. With respect to the influence, I feel the real influence comes from growing up in that literary world and living in the literary environment, more than the books themselves. I don’t see much of an overlap, thematically, between his books and my movies, and that is probably better. You’re always revealing something about yourself when you write, not particulars about facts usually or necessarily, but you get to know a person by absorbing their work.

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Roque Dalton

Homage to Roque Dalton in El Salvador (in Spanish)

Ojos Rojos (Red Eyes)

 This documentary directed by Juan Pablo Sallato, Ismael Larraín and Juan Ignacio Sabatini, his beating all box office records in Chile.



Here's the official Ojos Rojos site for more information.

Roberto Bolaño: By Night in Chile

Michael Tyson Murphy reviews Roberto Bolaño's "By Night in Chile"

For me in our reading so far, “A Night in Chile” is most resonant with Azuela’s “The Underdogs” in its overt and complex statements about a particular historical situation and its participants, real and fictional (though certainly, Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” and Carpentier’s “The Chase” must be included).

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Edith Grossman: Why Translation Matters

Anne Chudobiak reviews Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters.

Grossman illustrates the power of this phenomenon, which she calls "multilingual fertilization," with a timeline of the modern novel. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, creating "the form and shape of modern fiction." It was almost immediately translated into English, where it changed the course of English literature, influencing writers, directly or indirectly, all the way to Faulkner, whose "sonorous, eloquent baroque style" is described as having "Cervantean resonances." These resonances apparently "felt familiar to Spanish-speaking readers," easing Faulkner's passage into Latin America during the post-Second-World-War era, where he was very popular in translation. García Márquez, who was such a big fan that he and his young family travelled through the American South by Greyhound in 1961 as a kind of artistic pilgrimage, incorporated some of Faulkner's techniques - Cervantean and otherwise - into his own writing. His novels were, in turn, translated into English, exerting a major influence on such big-name English-language authors as "Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, and Michael Chabon."

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Edith Grossman is a distinguished, prize-winning translator of major works by leading contemporary writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Álvaro Mutis.

Interview with Isabel Allende

John Timpane interviews Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende, as the world knows, writes her novels in Spanish. She looks translations over, but has "total faith in my translators."

So what, asks the unsuspecting, defenseless interviewer, can she do in Spanish that she can't do in English?

"Love!" she cries. "My husband would find me ridiculous if I tried to pant in English." Then she unleashes a big laugh in all languages.

A jest like that, against type, pointed, seasoned with good humor, holds the key to Allende, 67, one of the most popular writers in the world.

Her new novel, "Island Beneath the Sea" (Harper, $26.99), manages, like many Allende books, to frustrate easy classification.

It begins on the island that became home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Its main figure, Zarite, is born to an African slave who tries to kill her baby (to save her from a terrible life) and does kill herself. Known as Tete, the girl grows up as the slave of French sugarcane magnate Toulouse Valmorain.

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Piedra de Sol

Reed Johnson reviews the theatrical production of Octavio Paz's "Piedra de Sol"(Sunstone).

In addition to writing poetry, Paz, who died in 1998, was a tireless essayist, launched a leading literary journal, and served as Mexico's ambassador to India. He's perhaps best known for his 1950 philosophical treatise about Mexican identity, "The Labyrinth of Solitude."

"I would say that this is the greatest poem of Paz," Morett said in her ebulliently accented English. "So it's going to be an encounter with the figure of a man who was a poet, but at the same time he was a traveler of cultures, of worlds. So in this poem, or also in this production, we are trying to connect with those moments, with that culture."

That culture, Morett said, is centered on the massive circular Aztec sculpture that has come to be known as the Piedra de Sol. Unearthed from the ruins of the former Aztec capital that became present-day Mexico City, it was initially construed by archaeologists to be a calendar, but actually may have functioned as part of a sacrificial altar.

Sacrifice, including self-sacrifice, is a key image in Paz's poem. But the metaphor suggests not merely physical violence but rather the opening-up of the self, the shedding of old identities and the adoption of new ones.

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Carmen Laforet

RBA (Spain) has just published a biography of Carmen Laforet, "Una mujer en fuga" (A woman on the run).

El “enigma Laforet”. Una mujer en fuga ¿hacia dónde? Anna Caballé e Israel Rolón se preguntan qué le llevó al silencio de Bartleby y la huida perpetua. En 1987, Rolón conoció a la escritora en la universidad de Georgetown. La vio rechazar el atril de la conferencia ex cátedra. Carmen Laforet, 66 años: “Con el pelo gris y abundante manchas oscuras en la piel, sin asomo de maquillaje, y un sencillo conjunto de falda y suéter de punto, también gris…” Le intrigó aquella mujer lacónica, “mostrando una actitud indiferente, y al mismo tiempo agotada, hacia sus propias novelas”. La profesora Caballé, la recuerda en la Menéndez Pelayo, agosto del 82; la misma impresión. Una mujer tímida que habla de su obra con un hilo de voz como si no fuera con ella… El manuscrito de “Nada” y la relación epistolar con Ramón J. Sender (el hombre que la amó sinceramente desde la distancia sin ser correspondido) fueron los primeros documentos de esa “mujer en fuga” que dejó como rastro más de seiscientas cartas que sus biógrafos han estudiado durante una década. Entre sus amistades, la tenista Lilí Álvarez que ejerció sobre ella una influencia religiosa y una ambigüedad sexual que Laforet mantuvo siempre oculta; o la autora de “Celia”, Elena Fortún. “Laforet buscó siempre, a lo largo de su vida, la figura materna que no tuvo”, apunta Caballé.

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Interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Breandain O'Shea interviews Spanish author Carlo Ruiz Zafón.

Deutsche Welle: How have Spanish and Catalan literature influenced your writing?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon: I look at literature as one big thing. I never think of it as coming from the English tradition, or the French tradition, or the Catalan tradition, or the Russian tradition. To me, literature itself is a country, and that's what I am interested in. So, I never thought of myself as being influenced by one side or the other.
I am interested in specific authors; in good writing in general, wherever it may come from. And in that sense, I am very interested in writers from (different) countries. I know that there are people who tend to be very political about that, or tend to see schools of thought - but it's not the way I think.
For me, there's good writing and bad writing. And I am interested in good writing.

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Juan Carlos Onetti

Jonathan Blitzer on Juan Carlos Onetti.

Born in 1909 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Onetti was one of the most idiosyncratic and virtuosic Latin American writers of the twentieth century. His readers in Spanish know this. In his later decades, after years of writing in relative obscurity, he earned a reputation as a quirky, cosmopolitan Modernist--a South American Faulkner who also enjoyed an aesthetic kinship with Borges and Céline (an unlikely pairing that only Onetti could provoke). In 1980 Onetti won the Premio Cervantes. He also became known as a writer's writer. Mario Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño, Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortázar and Antonio Muñoz Molina are among his admirers, all of them better-known (and very different) masters who have acknowledged, always in intensely personal terms, the debt they owe Onetti. Bolaño, who attempted to interview Onetti in Mexico in 1975, once joked that he was himself a terrible writer by comparison. Vargas Llosa, for his part, said no other modern writer has grasped the human need for fiction "with more force or originality" than Onetti.

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Reading the spanish originals

Josef Braun on passing the language barrier, reading in Spanish.

Part of my motivation for reading in Spanish, besides not wanting to feel like a moron, stems from my interest in authors whose works haven't been translated into English. Books in English translation are pathetically rare these days, with only a handful of Spanish-language authors winning the literary sweepstakes that allows them to have their work reach an English readership. It seems just more salt in the wound that the latest author to be regarded as a hot property in English-reading countries is a dead guy. Roberto Bolaño has been receiving generous and totally justified attention by English-readers, thanks in large part to New Directions and the recommendations of certain members of the cross-cultural literati, such as Francisco Goldman. But he's still only one great writer among many, and it will take a long time to get all of his work into English. If you're impatient and really want to delve into Bolaño—or Horacio Castellanos Moya, or Cesar Aira, to name but the most recent benefactors of New Directions' persistence—you need to find this stuff in Spanish, and Mexico is one book-loving country, a place where you can find people selling Borges, or Gabriel García Márquez, or Julio Cortázar or at least Isabel Allende, outside of every subway station. If only Canadian booksellers were so discerning!

In any case, I found myself on the hunt for writers who haven't been translated into English at all, as far as I know. I picked up Sergio González Rodríguez's Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert), a highly caustic work of investigative journalism of enormous importance, concerning the infernal epidemic of female slayings in Ciudad Juarez—González Rodríguez was a friend and advisor to Bolaño, who by his own admission couldn't have written 2666 without González Rodríguez's assistance. It's a book I'm both desperate and kind of dreading to read but, fairly dense in its prose, I'll need to save for later. I picked up a volume of Francisco Tario's stories entitled Algunas Noches, Algunos Fantasmas (Certain Nights, Certain Phantoms), which seemed promising in its concision and simplicity, yet nonetheless frustrated me with its allusive turns of phrase and occasional use of antiquated terms. Strangely, the book's biographical introduction was a breeze. This struck me as an interesting development. Could it be that non-fiction, or at least non-fiction of a more digestible sort than Huesos en el desierto, was the way to go for this impatient novice?

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Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935-1975)

Roque Dalton  was executed in El Salvador 35 years ago on may 10th 1975.

Dolor Antiguo

Sólo has visto dolor en tu llegada.


Dolor en los cañales explotados
sobre el dolor de tus hermanos;
dolor en las palabras en secreto,
dolor
en las lagunas y los pájaros;
dolor en la palabra incomprensible del caporal estraño,
dolor en sus patadas, en sus insultos, en sus manos ladronas.


Dolor en las mujeres y las piedras,
dolor en el crepúsculo, en el sol calcinante,
en la ficticia aurora cotidiana;
dolor en cada metro de nagüilla, en cada tecomate,
en cada par de caites abrumados;
dolor en cada rostro, en cada nueva música,
en cada cordillera de sucesos;
dolor entronizado en las aradas, en las milpas ajenas,
en los candentes pechos de tu pueblo
y en los ojos con lágrimas mirando
sus solitarias manos.