Interview with Gonzalo Márquez Cristo

Nathalie Handal interviews Colombian poet, editor, and writer Gonzalo Márquez Cristo. An interview about his city Bogotá.

I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million people where chaos is opposed to a great life force that keeps you from succumbing. One graffiti emblematic of the seventies, written by an anonymous hand in a salsa bar said: “el país se derrumba y nosotros de rumba” (The country is falling apart and we are celebrating).But it is this playful and delirious state founded by the nocturnal exorcism of dance and celebration that collectively frees the harsh reality of a people who have not solved the most basic experiential problems. Bogotá, therefore, to many sensitive people, is a city built during the night and destroyed with the wound of dawn.

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Silvina Ocampo: The Golden Hare

Andrea Rosenberg translated Silvina Ocampo's The Golden Hare and writes about it.

I knew I had to translate “The Golden Hare,” Silvina Ocampo’s mysterious fable, as soon as I read the first few sentences. Now often published separately as a children’s book in Argentina, it is the first story in Ocampo’s 1959 collection La furia (The Fury). Silvina, the less famous and more ethereal of Argentina’s most renowned literary siblings, is perhaps best known in the United States (if she is known at all) for her associations with other more prominent literary figures—she was Victoria Ocampo’s sister, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s wife, Jorge Luis Borges’s close friend—but she was a prizewinning poet and short-story writer in her own right and published more than two dozen collections of short narrative and poetry during her lifetime, as well as a novel and a play. She was also, to my great delight, a prolific translator, bringing such writers as Dickinson, Melville, and Poe into Spanish.

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And the full story is also available here.

Related Posts:
Mariana Enriquez on Silvina Ocampo

Gabriel García Márquez: Clandestine in Chile

Jo Littler reviews Gabriel García Márquez' Clandestine in Chile.

Márquez has had parallel careers as journalist and screenwriter alongside his more prominent role as Nobel prizewinning novelist. This book brings these strands together as Márquez tells us about the exiled film director Miguel Littín's experience of returning to Chile in 1985, under a false identity, to record life under Pinochet's dictatorship. Littín had only narrowly escaped with his life 12 years earlier, when the socialist president Salvador Allende was brutally ousted by a US-backed military coup and many of his supporters were rounded up and murdered.

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Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Ilan Stavans: Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years
Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Press Round Up

Here's a very limited list of articles and reactions on Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize.
Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Nobel de littérature : Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel da Literatura para Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el ganador es… ¡Mario Vargas Llosa!
La fête à Vargas Llosa
Le Nobel 2010 s'appelle Vargas Llosa
Le prix Nobel de littérature décerné à Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian Vargas Llosa wins literature Nobel
Nobel de littérature 2010 : Mario Vargas Llosa, éternel révolté
Le prix Nobel de littérature 2010 attribué au Péruvien Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: a worthy Nobel prize for literature winner?
Nobel : la surprise Vargas llosa
Le Nobel à Mario Vargas Llosa
Y el Nobel de Literatura es para… Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa: an unclassifiable Nobel winner
Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o should have won the Nobel prize for literature
Mario Vargas Llosa's work and life push boundaries
A Storyteller Enthralled by the Power of Art
Mario, el fuego que nunca se apaga
Waiting for Luggage With Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa surprised and delighted by Nobel prize win
Vargas Llosa wins Nobel literature prize
Vargas Llosa: Nobel Goes for Well-Known Name
Mario Vargas Llosa: Five essential novels
Mario Vargas Llosa, Premio Nobel de Literatura 2010
Mario Vargas Llosa Wins the Nobel
A look at Mario Vargas Llosa
'Cartographer of Power' Vargas Llosa A Phenomenal Choice for Nobel
Vargas Llosa, l'insoumis

Audio from Mario Vargas Llosa's press conference

Click to hear the New York Times audio clips.