by Ilan Stavans
25. Gene H. Bell-Villada, “A Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez,” Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002: 22.
26. Gustavo Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides: García Márquez en “El Universal.” Cartagena: El Universal, 1995.
27. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, translated by Randolph Hogan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986: v.
28. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: vii.
29. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: vii .
30. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: ix . The reportage belongs to what has come to be known as the “Robinsonade” genre, i.e., narratives about shipwrecks and/or island survivors. It’s a reference, obviously, to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), but the shelf is ample enough to include a predecessor: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), as well as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759). The genre is a favorite of contemporary authors such as William Golding (Lord of the Flies, 1954), J. M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986), José Saramago (The Stone Raft, 1986), Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before, 1994), and Yan Martel’s Life of Pi (2001).
31. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973: 317.
32. John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991: 493–494.
4 New Horizons
1. Gabriel García Márquez, “La desgracia de ser escritor joven,” published on September 9, 1981, in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 195–198.
2. Harley D. Oberhelman, “William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez: Two Nobel Laureates,” in Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez, edited by George R. McMurray. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987: 78–79.
3. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 97.
4. Claudia Dreifus, “Interview; Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy (February 1983). Reprinted in Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2006: 97.
5. Gabriel García Márquez: “Polonia: verdades que duelen,” published on December 30, 1981, in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 255–258.
6. Jacques Gilard, Obra periodística, vol. 4: De Europa y América: 53.
7. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 97.
8. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 97.
9. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 181, 187.
10. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 375.
11. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Aquellos tiempos con Gabo. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2000: 79.
12. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 397.
13. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 99.
14. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 99.
15. Carlos Fuentes: “An Interview with John King,” in On Modern Latin American Fiction, edited by John King. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987: 136–154.
16. Claudia Dreifus, “Interview; Gabriel García Márquez”: 97.
5 Lo real maravilloso
1. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: xv.
2. García Márquez, No One Writes the Colonel, translated by Gregory Rabassa, included in Collected Novellas. New York: Harper & Row, 1990: 127.
3. Quoted from the Introduction to Rubén Darío: Selected Writings, edited by Ilan Stavans. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005: xxx.
4. In a series of lectures delivered at the Universidad Veracruzana in 1972, and published first in the journal Texto crítico (nos. 31–31, January–August 1985) and in book form as La narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez: Edificación de un arte nacional y popular (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1991), the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, among other topics, discussed the way García Márquez, like the short-story writer Horacio Quiroga, accommodated himself to pre-established models, imported from abroad, but also related to the amount of space a periodical might allow him to shape his narratives.
5. Mario Vargas Llosa, “El jubileo de Carmen Balcells,” in El País (Madrid), no. 1750, (August 20, 2000).
6. Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes the Colonel: 126–127.
7. Dasso Saldívar, García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 1997: 412.
8. José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History, translated by Gregory Kolovakos. New York: Columbia University Press-Center for Inter-American Relations, 1977: 56.
9. José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: 57–58.
10. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: xi.
11. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Preface to the Second Volume,” in The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, 2 vols., edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, with the assistance of Thomas Colchie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977: vol. 2, xiv.
12. Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen malerei. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925.
13. See the introduction by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris in their book Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995: 3–4.
14. Alejo Carpentier, “Prologue: The Kingdom of This World,” reprinted in The Oxford Book of Modern Latin American Essays, edited by Ilan Stavans. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1997: 194–198.
15. Luis Leal, “Magic Realism,” in A Luis Leal Reader, edited by Ilan Stavans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007: 324.
16. Gabriel García Márquez, In Evil Hour, translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Avon Books, 1980: 47.
17. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Discontents. New York: New Directions, 2005: 103.
6 The Silver Screen
1. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, “Gabriel García Márquez, or the Lost Chord,” in Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper & Row, 1967: 310.
2. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: 317.
3. García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 83–84.
4. Álvaro Mutis, Diary of Lecumberri: A Poet Behind Bars, translated by Jesse H. Lytle, Hopscotch: A Cultural Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1999): 2–37.
5. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 433, 437.
6. Gabriel García Márquez, “La odisea literaria de un manuscrito,” published in El País (Madrid), July 15, 2001.
7. In chapter nineteen of One Hundred Years of Solitude (pages 386–387), the author inserted a prank in which he made reference to his two children: Gastón, a lover of planes, and Amaranta Úrsula “began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute. She spoke to him of Macondo as the brightest and most peaceful town on earth, and of an enormous house, scented with oregano, where she wanted to live until old age with a royal husband and two strong sons who would be called Rodrigo and Gonzalo, never Aureliano and José Arcadio.”
8. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973: 321.
9. Susana Cato, “Soap Operas are Wonderful. I’ve Always Wanted to Write One,” in Gene H. Bel-Villada, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez: 150.
10. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, edited José Carlos González Boixo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983: 179.
11. Martin Kaplan, “Review of Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories,” New Republic, 179 (August 26, 1978): 46.
12. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers: 317.
7 Sleepless in Macondo
1. Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, Foreword to the Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980: xi.
2. Ilan Stavans, “García Márquez’s Total Novel,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 15, 2007).
3. Edna Van der Walde: “El macondismo como latinoamericanismo,” Cuadernos Americanos, vol. 12, no. 1, January–February 1998: 223–37.
4. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio: 479.
5. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava: 53.
6. Gabriel García Márquez, “‘La casa de los Buendía’: Apuntes para una novela,” listed in Obra periodística, vol. 1: Textos costeños: 63.
7. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 350.
8. The symbol has further echoes: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s seventeenth-century play Los empeños de una casa uses the image, as does Federico García Lorca, La casa de Bernarda Alba. Borges’s story “La casa de Asterión,” Gilberto Freyre’s anthropological study Casa grande, Cortázar’s story “Casa tomada,” and José Donoso’s Casa de campo. The symbol is also ubiquitous among Latino writers, starting with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
9. Peter H. Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez”: 185.
10. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 426–427.
11. Pete Hamill, “Love and Solitude”: 131.
12. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, La llama y el hielo. Barcelona: Planeta, 1984: 110–111.
13. Eligio García Márquez, Tras las claves de Melquíades: Historia de “Cien años de soledad.” Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2001: 88–91.
14. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio: 77.
15. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale: 19.
16. Claudia Dreifus, “Playboy Interview: Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy magazine, (February 1983): 65–77, 172–178, reprinted in Bell-Villada, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez: 123.
17. Miguel Fernández-Bermejo, La soledad de Gabriel García Márquez. Barcelona: Planeta, 1972. This portion of the interview appeared in Triunfo (Madrid), vol. 25, no. 44 (November 1971): 12–18. Reprinted in García Márquez habla de García Márquez, edited by Alfonso Rentería Mantilla. Bogotá: Rentería Editores, 1979: 49–64. The piece is featured as “And Now, Two hundred Years of Solitude,” by Ernesto González Bermejo, included in Bell-Villada, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez: 12.
18. Dreifus interview, in Bell-Villada, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez: 122.
19. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: 316–317.
20. Carlos Fuentes, “García Márquez: Cien años de soledad.” “La Cultura en México,” literary supplement of Siempre! (Mexico), no. 679 (June 29, 1966).
21. Eduardo García Aguilar, Celebraciones y otros fantasmas: Una biografía intelectual de Álvaro Mutis. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1993: 109–110.
22. José Miguel Oviedo, “Cuarenta, ochenta y cien años,” in El arte de leer a García Márquez, edited by Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2007: 261.
23. Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: 346.
24. Gabriel García Márquez, “La odisea literaria de un manus crito,” published in El País (Madrid), July 15, 2001.
25. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: Conversations with Latin American Writers: 324–325.
26. Luis Harss was not to follow his instinct. In the Prologue, Harss and Dohmann stated: “Our selection of authors lays no claim to infallibility or exclusiveness. There is a bad habit everywhere nowadays of glorifying certain figures at the expense of others. Our book tried neither to magnify nor to belittle. Of course there is judgment implicit in every choice. But we insist that ours is personal, and has no wish to be final.” Into the Mainstream: 34. Of all the authors included, García Márquez was, arguably, the writer who became the biggest revelation to Harss. According to Tomás Eloy Martínez in his syndicated essay “¿Qué se hizo de Luis Harss?” Diario de las Américas (February 9, 2008), Harss had only read some short stories by García Márquez as well as In Evil Hour when approximately seventy pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which García Márquez had begun to circulate, reached his hands, although he didn’t exactly remember who sent them to him. Harss did remember showing them to Paco Porrúa, the editor in the publishing house Sudamericana. Curiously, after working on an edition of Ricardo Güiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra and a translation of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz’s poem First Dream, Harss, born in 1936 and at one time Latin America’s most visible cultural chronicler, settled in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and beginning the mid-eighties onward all but ceased to produce engaging cultural reflections.
27. Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009: 303–304.
8 Convergences
1. The list of active participants in El Boom has always been the subject of contention. Some literary historians would hesitate to include writers like Onetti, Guimarães Rosa, and Lezama Lima, born before 1910. Even Juan Rulfo, born in 1917, doesn’t make the cut for them. Yet this rule doesn’t apply to Cortázar, who, although born in 1914, always presented himself in a youthful manner. Others instead would broaden the parameters to such an extent as to incorporate Borges, who was born in 1899, as well as Miguel Angel Asturias, the Guatemalan writer also born that year. There are also critics who refuse to look at age as the qualifier. To make their argument they point at Cortázar, who although born in 1914, always presented himself as youthful through his passion for jazz, experimentalism, and a Beatnik-like approach to literature. It is important to emphasize the extent to which El Boom, at least during its initial years, was an all boys’ club.
2. John King, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta. Buenos Aires: AsuntoImpresoEdiciones and Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 2007: 13. The translation is mine.
3. John King, El Di Tella: 13.
4. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 453.
5. Dasso Saldívar, El viaje a la semilla: 454.
6. Eligio García Márquez, Tras las claves de Melquíades: 14–15.
7. John King, El Di Tella: 14.
8. John King, El Di Tella: 14–15.
9. Another one of García Márquez’s novels, The General in His Labyrinth (1989), about Simón Bolívar’s last days, which used as an inspiration a short story by Álvaro Mutis called “El último rostro,” is also considered to be part of this canon.
10. Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. London: Bloomsbury, 2004: 351.
11. Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: 352.
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio: 80–81.
13. Daniel Samper, “El novelista García Márquez no volverá a escribir,” El Tiempo [Bogotá] (December 22, 1968): 5.
14. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: 310–311.
15. José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History: 56.
16. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: 311–312.
17. Alfonso Rentería Mantilla, “En Moscú con el traductor de “Cien años . . .” in García Márquez habla de García Márquez, edited by Alfonso Rentería Mantilla. Bogotá: Rentería Editores, 1979: 129.
18. Quoted in Robert G. Mead, Jr. in “For Sustenance: Hope,” Saturday Review, December 12, 1968: 26.
19. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 94.
20. Gabriel García Márquez, “Los peores traductores buenos,” published on July 21, 1982. Reprinted in Notas de prensa: 1980–1984. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1991: 372–373.
21. Gregory Rabassa, interview with the author, New York, April 2003.
22. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 93.
23. Cass Canfield, Jr., interview with the author, New York, March 2003.
24. Gregory Rabassa, interview with the author, Amherst, MA, November 1999.
25. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 95–96.
26. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 99.
27. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 97–98. Rabassa argues that was could
have been would. But could it? I’ve always been struck by the use of tense in the first sentence: why use the imperfect pluperfect, había de recordar, and not the conditional pluperfect, habría de recordar? Is it an error? Or is García Márquez deliberately employing a Colombian modality of the conjugation? Why the imperfect and not the conditional of haber? The answer has to do with the varieties of the Spanish language in Latin America, where the conditional perfect is often replaced by the pluperfect. Thus, people say “Si hubiera tenido dinero, había ido al teatro,” rather than habría ido, and, also, “Si hubiera sido rico, me había comprado un yate,” instead of me habría comprado. In the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez is most probably imitating, consciously or otherwise, the parlance of Colombia’s eastern rural region. See Ilan Stavans, “Gabo y la ‘r, ’” El Diario (New York), April 28, 2009.
28. Gregory Rabassa, interview with the author, April 2003.
29. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: 99–100. It is important to note that there have been some “correctives” offered to Rabassa’s translation. Gene Dilmore, in his essay “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Some Translation Corrections,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 11, num. 2 (July 1984): 311–314, states that upon reading the Spanish original, he “found that several somewhat puzzling or even contradictory phrases were not, as I had assumed, sheer quirkness on the part of García Márquez, but were simply slips of the translation.” Some of these are, to be sure, subjective, for example “Lordy!” instead of “Fantastic!” (Harper & Row hardcover edition, 1970, page 26), or else belabored, like “‘Jesus Christ,’ he explained” instead of “‘Shit,’ he explained” (page 121). Others seem to me less questionable, as is the case of “that poverty was the servitude of love” instead of “that poverty was the servant of love” (page 345). Dilmore concludes with this statement: “Perhaps, with these few citations. The only remaining problem with the Colombian master’s novel will be the insistence of book stores on filing it under “M.” Gene Dilmore: “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Some Translation Corrections,” 314. Chester S. Halka, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Two Additional Translation Corrections,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 24, num. 1 (Autumn, 2000): 173–175, offers two further correctives. The most enlightening of them involved a reference to the title phrase of the novel and becomes clear in the following exmplanation: “When Aureliano Segundo, at age twelve, becomes interested in the literature in Melquíades’ room, he tries to decipher the manuscripts left by the gypsy. We are told that “Melquíades talked to him about the world, tried to infuse him with the old wisdom, but refuse to translate the manuscripts. ‘No one must know their meaning until he has reached one hundred years of age,’ he explained.” In the Spanish, however, it is clear that it is the manuscript, and not the translator, that must reach one hundred years of age before they can be deciphered. The same quotation in the Spanish original reads: “Melquíades le hablaba del mundo, trataba de infundirle su vieja sabiduría, pero se negó a traducir los manuscritos. ‘Nadie debe conocer su sentido mientras no hayan cumplido cien años,’ explicó.” The plural “hayan” can refer only manuscritos, which is plural, and not to nadie, which is singular (and is, therefore, in proper agreement with its third person, singular verb, “debe”). Chester S. Halka: “One Hundred Years of Solitude: Two Additional Translation Corrections”: 173–174.