Wednesday, July 6. 2005
Garcia Marquez I may not agree with his politics but as a writer, he may be one of the best. Like the rumba and the merengue, the murals of Rivera and the poetry of Neruda, Latin Americans give the world so much pleasure. Read the interview here:
An interview with Gabriel García Márquez
| GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
GENE H. BELL-VILLADA, Translator | TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following interview was conducted in 1977 for publication in El Manifiesto—a now-defunct Colombian leftist journal. Chatting with the magazine’s staff writers, García Márquez opens up remarkably and bares his most nostalgic and personal side, even swearing on occasion. (The author can be surprisingly, spontaneously foul-mouthed when in the right company.) And he's unusually frank about his spotty education, his days of poverty, his youthful days residing in brothels, and his having been accidentally cured of boils by putting No One Writes to the Colonel to paper. Naturally the conversation brims with Hispanic references: the Romancero (Spain's medieval ballad tradition), the vallenato (a native music genre from Valledupar, consisting of narrative songs with accompanying accordion, percussion, and bass), Rafael Escalona (the most celebrated writer and singer of vallenatos), Caribbean crooners such as Daniel Santos, and the Colombian literary classic El carnero (literally "The Ram"—a fanciful mock-chronicle from the Colonial era). He reflects on the decisive impact that Kafka had on his development, and admits to how much he needed to work at not being like Faulkner when he drafted Leaf Storm. Finally, he notes the colloquial, Caribbean flavor of The Autumn of the Patriarch—a trait much valued and savored by Hispanic readers of that book. The interview appears here for the first time in English and will be included in my edition of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi in December 2005. — Gene H. Bell-Villada
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Read the interview: lick here: The Virginia Quarterly Review - Journey Back to the SourceAn interview with Gabriel García Márquez
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