 So each of us is going to say a few things from our personal perspective on 100 years of solitude, and then we might have some questions for each other, and then we'll invite you to join the conversation with your questions and comments. So let's start with Ramon Saldivar at the other end of the table and take it away. Thank you, Stephen. Well, first of all, I'm delighted to see you here this evening. This is going to be a fun conversation. I hope you have lots of questions and comments because Garcia Marcos is the kind of author that really, you know, requires communities to read him together, you know, because no one reader alone can understand it all or can take it in. There's it's too broad, too rich, too many wonderful things happening. Before I get into that, though, I want to say where did Ricardo go? Thank you very much, Ricardo. What a pleasure to finally meet you after many times that we've communicated over email over the years, and it's a pleasure to be here and to see the wonderful things that you're doing. And to my fellow panelists, all of whom I have admired, and it's a pleasure to meet you in person. Okay, so Garcia Marcos. So, you know, as Ricardo was saying and Stephen were saying, we each come at 100 years of solitude from various different perspectives and, you know, and mine is, you know, the more boring one, I'm sure, of the panelists tonight. I'm a literature professor, you know, we lead, you know, very narrow lives because we live our lives in our books. And that's one way to look at it. Another way is that maybe I live the richest life of anyone in this book, in this room, because I live in those books. But Garcia Marcos has always been that way for me. I remember the very first time that I read him, and how it captivated me. And I read him in a moment in my life where, you know, all of the external difficulties of everyday life were pressing on me. And it was a moment where I was so unsure about what I wanted to do with my, you know, the pathways opening up to me. And as I thought about Garcia Marcos and enjoyed the pleasure of just hearing his voice in Spanish and in English, it convinced me yet again that, you know, as a young man, I had made a decision that was the right one for me. That thinking and talking and working on literature and the ideas that literature offers was a good thing. And I've never regretted it. But, okay, so now the boring part. So I'm going to tell you about my encounters with Garcia Marcos and why things stand out for me and why I think they're important. One of the ways that Garcia Marcos has often talked about, and Ricardo very rightly pointed it out in his introductory comments, and Stephen too, of course, the immense impact that he has had on world literature, on writers following him. One of my very best friends these days, I'm very proud to say someone who I admire and I think and work with sometimes is Juno Diaz. And Juno certainly points to Garcia Marcos as one of the major influences in his career. But it's not just Juno. And it's not just the generation that Juno Diaz represents, but really from the time that Garcia Marcos himself first emerged as a voice of major significance in the world in the 1960s and 70s. He has had a profound impact, not just in Latin America, not just in the Americas, but in Europe, in Africa, in Asia as well. And that's a kind of impact that few writers can have. So I think our panelists are going to say something about that. I hope they do. But I wanted to turn that around a little bit. I want to look in a different direction, not so much the impact undoubtedly true that he has had Garcia Marcos all of his works, but in particular Sienaños on world literature. But I wanted to look at what influenced him. Where did he come from? What led him to that moment when he locked himself in that room and locked and clicked the key and produced this magnificent world-changing piece of work that had come entirely from the nether. And obviously, it didn't. There were influences. And one real clue of where it came from for me was an essay that I read by Garcia Marcos once translated in English. He says something that I think is very pithy, very clear and very specific. He says, I know of no good literature that serves to praise established values. And in a way, that sort of sums up what Garcia Marcos is after. No good literature serves to praise established values. I have always found in good literature the tendency to destroy the established, the accepted, and to contribute to the creation of new societies. So it's not that he's a destroyer. That's not what you want to get from that sentence. It's the creation of new societies. But of course, those two things go hand in hand. That there is a relationship between getting rid of something old and building something new. It's almost like you have to clear the ground and furrow it before something else will sprout. And I think Garcia Marcos was very conscious of that. Well, I want to begin. And when I continue my comments, I just sort of playing out a little bit. So as I said, I'm a literature professor here. So here comes my literary critic side. So Garcia Marcos is writing about creation, about the processes of creativity, and in particular about the way those ideas about creation emerge within history. Why in certain communities and certain moments of time does something dramatic happen that changes the course of history? Because we know that it does. That the world proceeds by incremental, sometimes imperceptible, small changes. But sometimes it reaches a moment of great explosion, where those small changes lead to something that is a dramatic difference from what came before. And I think that's what Garcia Marcos is writing about. History, order, the weight of tradition in the past, the way the past repeats itself. It doesn't simply lie there passively in our memories. It's actively working and eating away at us and shaping us into something new. I think that's what he's writing about as well. And finally, because remember, as I said, he's concerned with destruction and creation. He's concerned about the way in which we work at our freedom. Freedom is never just given to us. It is something that we have to construct, create, and in some ways, be worthy of. And so it's about revolution and the way in which revolution means the changes that constitute the necessary growth in each of our own individual lives. It doesn't have to mean the great catastrophic and world historical movements of nations against nations. It certainly can mean that too. That's how new societies do emerge. But I think for Garcia Marcos, as importantly as that, it's those kinds of battles and conflicts that are worked out and resolved within each of our souls that constitutes the very basic quality of history itself. And I think that's what his books are about. So I said that I would give you just one moment about my encounter with Garcia Marcos and who and what influenced him. For me, that first reading of that first sentence of the novel did it all. And it was at that moment that I realized that that's what literature is about. You have to have that moment that grabs you and you're in. And it grabs you in many different ways and for many different reasons. For me, that moment was one of revelation about the way the past works. It's past, but it's not past. It's future oriented and it will work into the future in ways that we can't even imagine. And in the future, we'll get there and the past will come alive again. And with that moment, for me, it reminded me of one other American writer that influences on Garcia Marcos that I promised that I would say something about. And that was, of course, William Faulkner. Faulkner who writes and thinks and argues about many similar things, including the famous quote attributed to Faulkner always, where he says, the past is not past. It's not even dead. It's still with us. And I think Garcia Marcos is especially Sienaños de Soledad is an extended, careful, inspired meditation on the way in which the past is who we are. But the past is not passively gone. It is what propels us into the future. So as treatment of the past in all of his novels, I think is Faulknerian in a very dramatic way. Now, that's not to say that Garcia Marcos isn't Garcia Marcos, that he's really just another version of Faulkner, not at all, because of course, those are two writers writing in two very different historical moments. But what links them, I think, is the element that is probably the most obvious and the easiest piece for us to ignore. And that is that Garcia Marcos and William Faulkner, especially in a novel like, say, Absalom, Absalom, or The Sound and the Fury, and especially in a work like Sienaños de Soledad, what we have is the playing out of what it means to be an American, not a U.S. person, but someone of the new world, of the new societies created on this continent, new societies created out of the destruction of old and the incorporation of the traditions of the past in a way that keeps them alive. Faulkner in his own way is thinking through those issues for North American experiences and Garcia Marcos for the experiences of the South. And in that way, I think we have this extraordinary conversation that helps define who we are in a continental and even hemispheric sense. So when Garcia Marcos represents and thinks about the past, he's not talking only about a local past. He's talking about the elements that unite us from Alaska through the Pacific Northwest, into the Southwest, through Central America, into Peru and Ecuador and Bolivia, and all the way through to Tierra del Fuego. It is that commonality of construction and destruction, of creativity and the keeping alive of history and creating new worlds, new worlds that are part of who we are today, even though they may seem to have passed. So that's the take that I offer you tonight. There is much, much more that I could say and including what I wish I could say is how much I miss Barack Obama every day. That was actually a wonderful introduction, I think, to what 100 Years of Solitude means and how it sort of came into the world. I first read Garcia Marcos when I was in junior high and the first book I read was 100 Years of Solitude. It was a gift to me from my dad and I still remember that it was a South American edition and it was a soft cover and it was well worn and was used when he bought it quite clearly. Who knows where he picked it up? Probably Chicago and the South Side and one of the bookstores in the Mexican neighborhood. What you have to understand is that my dad was a very anti-communist, very exuberantly anti-castro Cuban refugee. So for him to walk into my room and hand me 100 Years of Solitude was a leap of various miles really. It was a pretty big deal and when he came in, I still remember the words because he had used almost the exact same phrase about Alejo Carpentier. He handed me the book and he said, as you can imagine this coming from my dad, I wasn't really enthused about reading this book. I actually kind of put it aside, okay, it's fine, don't worry, slip it under my bed and didn't really, honestly, I didn't get to it for months because it came from my dad, the anti-comy. I wasn't really sure what kind of propaganda this was that he had just handed me. When I finally got around to it and I don't know what actually provoked me to open it, I do remember that my first reading of it. I stayed up really late that I just couldn't output it down and it was a really obsessive kind of reading for several days. At that point, I think it's important for me to say a couple of things about my management of Spanish. I came to the United States when I was six and a half years old and all of my formal education has been in English. I speak really fluent accent with Spanish because my father was obsessed with the idea that we would one day go back to Cuba and because we would one day go back to Cuba, we would have to learn to read and write and function in Spanish to be able to take on the tasks of citizenship in some new utopian democracy. I was the oldest, so my brother got spared all of the experiments that he enacted with me, but one of the experiments, of course, was to keep my literacy in Spanish alive and that happened through readings. Rarely did I get a whole book. It would usually be like a story or series of articles or something like that, but what I often found as a kid without formal education in Spanish who functioned in English almost all the time. I came home and flipped on American TV. I was listening to American Rock and Roll. I was in school entirely with American English speaking, English monolingual classmates. Was that a lot of the Spanish seemed very florid and very impenetrable to me. I was not put off so much by the language itself but by the style. One thing that happened when I began to read Hundred Years of Solitude is that I immediately noticed the difference in the language. If you actually look at the text, the sentences are so short by Latin American standards. They are really remarkably economical. Paragraphs actually end before the page. It's true. Years later, I would hear or read, Garcia Marcos say that he'd read the English translation by Gregory Robasa and that he thought it was better in English than it was in Spanish. As somebody who has become a translator, I think one of the reasons why that may be so is because in a weird way, the language follows a construction that more closely, I think, appeals to the English hearing ear than the normal Spanish or the typical, not normal, but typical Spanish language kind of stuff that we were used to. To be clear, I've never really read Hundred Years of Solitude in English. I've only read, we're kind of going back and forth about this. I thought I was going to read it for this panel but I just couldn't bring myself to it. I've only read bits and pieces of it in English but I treasure it in Spanish because I feel like when I started to read Hundred Years of Solitude and I entered into this world, I really entered Latin American literature and my love for Latin American literature really began. I think for me, what I take away from the book is that the book was a way to talk about history, which is very, very important to me because our history in Latin America is so screwed up and the way we tell our history is screwed up and the way that our history is told here in this country tends to be even more screwed up. One of the ways that Garcia-Marques sort of approaches history in this book is by saying, history is actually what happens to us and the things that we are told, the family sagas that we are told are also a part of history and so it was a way to enter into it and learn the history understanding that some parts of Hundred Years of Solitude were actually only like three steps removed metaphorically from real events and really terrible things that happened but also to read it as a cautionary tale of what would continue to happen if we didn't break certain patterns because as Ramon was pointing out, things get repeated a lot in Hundred Years of Solitude and in the end you end up thinking we have to change this, this has to change for us to be able to like claims in a different way to our countries, our nations in Latin America. These days when I think of Garcia-Marques as his influence I think of it more as sort of like the way Cubans and Cuba think about Fidel, you know you don't actually name him anymore you know he's just there you know how in Cuba nobody actually says Fidel they just go and everybody knows what you mean. I feel that way about Garcia-Marques it's like you know he's just he's so has so permeated the consciousness I think of Latin American literature that I think even people who don't realize they're being influenced by Garcia-Marques are actually being influenced by Garcia-Marques. I think like when you talk about Juno if I remember correctly it was pointed out to him that he sounded and had ideas that seemed very marquisian and then he went and said oh yeah wait a minute and then he kind of got drenched in it and then that influence became closer and more deliberate and more conscious. I think also this new generation has a tendency to reject a lot of the magical realism but not the issues reject the magic reject a lot of the tone of 100 years of solitude but not the issues we're still battling the same issues which is sort of unfortunate. One thing that I noticed when in sort of rereading it for for this panel and then I'll pass it on to Scott is that the tone of the book is always surprising to me when I pick it back up everything that happens in 100 years of solitude is terrible I mean it is just one terrible horrible thing after another but the tone is warm very human and there's just a dash of awe that sort of permeates everything I mean that opening line about the ice really pays off beautifully when they see the ice when they actually go to discover the ice so to speak and Wendy's response is this is the greatest invention of the century you know and of course it was to him you know what a and it's so amazing because for us ice is so quotidian right and growing up in the Midwest for me ice was not only quotidian but you know horrible it was really hard to look at it with any wonder when somebody had to go out and dig the car out but that I think is really gone from Latin American literature our tone is much more ironic and dry and sort of raw but that is that is I think also one of the miracles of 100 years of solitude that as he's telling these terrible terrible terrible things the voice is always sort of full of wonder wow well thank you to Aki and Ramon sorry Achi and Ramon for those remarks that's hard to follow up with and thanks to Stephen for the great introduction and of course thank you to Ricardo and Litquake for bringing this whole panel together this is a wonderful book and it's great to see so many people out to hear about and talk about it and be a part of you know keeping it going and alive so kind of following on what Ramon said this is a huge book with so much in it and I couldn't really choose just one way to go here so instead of just talking about one thing or two things in this book I decided to put together six short takes on 100 years of solitude and that's what I'm going to give you right now I wrote this all out and I'm going to do my best not to read this to you because that would be painful for both of us but we're gonna see how that goes so number one 100 years of solitude is the discovery of history so when we first meet Makondo it's kind of in this state of Edenic purity the residents don't die they don't seem to age it's very cut off from the rest of the world as you might recall Jose Arcadia Buendia discovers that the earth is round which shocks and scandalizes his wife Ursula who does not believe him they're they're rediscovering things that humans have known for centuries and they're kind of just very cut off and I kind of picture it way up in the Andes away from civilization as it's known elsewhere in the world and all that stuff it's just kind of a state of self-sufficiency and even the tragedies in in Makondo in the beginning like for instance the plague of Insomnia they pass through more as these timeless mythical events than catastrophes that really exist in kind of a historical framework I just kind of picture them as you know abiding and weathering all of these events that are happening but you know no one ever dies nothing ever really changes just whatever but then this all changes once the town is discovered and comes to exist within the cultural history of Colombia and the rest of Latin America and as you go forward in the book more and more the sense of modernized time begins to creep in Makondo ceases to be this little self-sufficient island it becomes part of the history of Colombia uh Jose Arcadia's son goes off and becomes a revolutionary and it begins to interact with the rest of the nation the rest of the continent and as this happened it begins to participate in the creation of history and it becomes part of this narrative this historical narrative this kind of global historical story that we're telling that really binds us all says number one number two the first sentence which you guys already talked about the first sentence and you're gonna do that so it's unforgettable as already been said in Gregory Robosa's English translation it is many years later as he faced the firing squad Colonel Orleano Bundia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice and I think that the book's peculiar way of moving through its story is right here the way that Garcia Marquez is constantly looking constantly looking forward and backward in the narration all at once how this massive story creates its own end points only to reveal that they're not really end points but points of synthesis as you as you may recall if you've read the book Colonel Orleano doesn't die in the firing squad that's mentioned in the opening sentence even though if you do read that opening sentence you get the impression he's gonna die there in fact that firing squad opens up a whole new era in his life and the book does this constantly it's constantly foretelling events and then once you get there you realize this isn't the end it's just a new chapter which again very historical the way that works and this first sentence also communicates a sentiment that we're going to see all the time throughout this book that these personal moments in life can be on the same plane as these historical revelations and you have a young boy discovering ice put side by side with this revolutionary who becomes the most infamous person in his nation's history as so far as resolutionaries go facing a firing squad and these two things are kind of equated right there in that sentence and you see that all the time throughout this book the the personal and historical kind of being placed on an equal playing field so number three 100 years is family saga so by the time Gabriel Garcia Marquez came along the family saga was a pretty antiquated form I would say that it belongs to the 19th century and you get all these gigantic novels like middle marshes just go down the line of families and I would say that it kind of reaches its end with budden books the great novel by Thomas Mond the book they say that he won the Nobel Prize for more or less that book was published in 1901 and I feel like it's kind of this endpoint like now we've finished with the family saga we can start to discover what the modernist novel is going to look like we can have like Joyce and Virginia Woolf and people like that but then after some 50 some years of modernist experimentation mid-century writers began to develop to rediscover the family saga in their own form and reinvest it with a post-modern energy so for instance goons or grasses the tin drum which tells the story of these generations of people kind of culminating in this very strange narrator and I would say 100 years of solitude is also a family saga and you know right here in in my edition you have the whole family which is very helpful because everybody has the same name and yes names people there's lots of names of the world so anyway but it tells the mythology of four generations of the Buendias and it blurs the line between the personal the prophetic and the historical while also smashing together different concepts of time you don't just have the historical time you have the mythological time you have the personal time and they're all kind of blurred in these out this family saga but I also feel like 100 years is a bit of a throwback I think it actually resembles man's bud and brooks quite closely in many ways if you've read bud and brooks you know that it tells the story of a decline of a family you know fairly early on that this family is going to come to a demise you're going to reach the end of the line of this family coterminus what the end of the book and that family comes to represent the end of a historical order it's kind of the end of the the empire and the the beginning of new kind of more modern ways of organizing a country is this bud and brooks clan is supplanted by other families and I feel like the same thing is happening in 100 years where by the end of the book the Buendias has come to an end but it's clearly not the end of history there's this whole historical framework that they become a part of and you know that that's going to keep going on even though the the pig tailed sun dies as the last of the clan number four characters as commentators I was I was reading this book again as I was preparing for this panel and as I was reading it this time I noticed finally that throughout this novel Garcia Marquez has his characters kind of throw in line so there will be these long paragraphs of things that are happening narration and then there would just be this one little line from somebody that kind of punctuates it and I thought hmm it's almost like they're sports commentators they're kind of giving you this commentary about what's going on as Garcia Marquez narrates in that third person omniscient and I feel like in this way Garcia Marquez makes them into both um participants and observers individuals who are both creating the narrative kind of living the narrative and seeing what happens but also standing above it giving you kind of insight and the global viewpoint into what's going on and that kind of adds a certain three-dimensionality to the storytelling for me and I also think that it contributes to a strange feeling that I get when I read this book which is that it's kind of walking the line between myth and history that these characters are both human individuals but also something like demigods at once number five 100 years as circle um so 100 years of solitude kind of swerves through its plot in what I feel is a hook shaped movement uh Garcia Marquez again and again he'll kind of run out forward and then he'll kind of hook around and go back to before we started and then he'll kind of run out backward that way and he'll hook around and then we'll be forward again and we'll be just a little bit further than when we originally began and as you read this as I read this book I felt like it's constantly has this figure eight movement where we're going backwards and we're going forwards and it's a very kind of slow halting circular kind of progression but that's how we're moving forward through this book uh just to return to the first sentence you can see how it exemplifies this many years later as he faced the firing squad colonel oriano bundia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice so we we run out into the future to the firing squad and then we hook back around to his childhood and I feel like more and more as you read this book you see that's how it's moving um and that's not even the time of the beginning that that is not the time of the being you're absolutely right uh but but though though this book is circular it's it's not perfectly circular we we don't go around and come back to where we begin we're going in more of a spiral it's it's very Hegelian like this uh and I feel like things are being repeated history is repeating itself but there is there this history that repeats is subjected to the historical forces that are always kind of pushing it forward uh and last number six 100 years as literary big bang uh 100 years was not the first magic magical realist novel and nor is it the biggest one it's but it is the most widely beloved it's estimated to have sold some 45 million copies worldwide and who knows how many more readers it's accumulated through borrowing from friends lending from the library and of course outright deft and and a funny a funny commentary on this before the panel ricardo was talking to us and he said that all together throughout the sarah and cisco public library branches there are 70 copies of this book and he said if I remember correctly he said 60 of them are currently circulating which is amazing a book that's 50 years old and it's still circulating that many copies so i'm sure 45 million is a conservative estimate of this book's readers but it is a book that's big enough to house all of these readers and it has many many many books inside of it in just a paragraph garcia marquez can give you everything you need to have a novel of your own in just two lines of dialogue he'll give you two lives this is a book that's really brimming with novels it was faked feakened enough to see the generation of literature from an entire continent and it was also so brilliant that here we are now 50 years later still finding things to say about it thank you so informal survey how many of you have read this book in spanish and how many have read uh Gregory Robassa's translation okay um because i want to talk about the the medium through which most of us have received this book which is uh Gregory Robassa's uh phenomenal rendering of it in english um and to to place a little bit of emphasis on the translator as the as the medium who has given us this amazing version of this book the book was first published in spanish in 1967 the english translation came out in a hardback book in 1970 i think i read the paperback probably in 1972 which coincidentally was when i was first beginning to experiment with the possibility of my own uh work as a translator the reason for that or one of the reasons that i started writing translations i have i'm not of a latino background i'm not a i didn't i wasn't raised speaking two languages i studied spanish in high school it came easily to me while i was getting bees and everything else i got as in spanish so i i i learned the fundamentals pretty well and when i was reading uh translations the few translations that were available of spanish and latin american poetry in 1972 i mean there were basically two poets that you ever heard of who still are the you know sort of overwhelmingly dominant uh spanish language poets in translation that is garcia lorca and paulo neruda uh so there were some versions of of lorca neruda that were circulating and and they were not the only books that were available in translation but they were the ones most readily available and when i was reading the translations of these books of the of the poetry of these of these poets and i was looking at the spanish on the left hand side and looking at the english on the right hand side i mean these were famous poets who i considered very uh i mean i gave them great authority over literature because i was just a kid i mean i was in my in my early 20s uh middle early to middle 20s and um but i was i just it didn't sound right to me in english uh and so i started experimenting with my own versions of these poems and trying to render what i heard in the spanish so this is the time of my in my personal life when i'm discovering translation as a as an art that is not in which the translator is not just like a stenographer for what the author said the translator is actually recreating the new text so it's in this moment of my life that i pick up 100 years of solitude uh translated by gregory robassa and the prose in english it almost made my head explode it was it was so it was so phenomenally written in english and i of course noticed that it would i mean i knew it was a translation and i'm thinking this is what translation is this this translation is a is a potentially um captivating creative art it's not just a sort of a substitute for reading the original or a or a a kind of pointing in the direction of the original it's an actually a recreation of the book and of course as achi said garcía marquez famously remarked that the the the robassa robassa's version was more um you know was was better read uh than than the spanish but for me reading gregory robassa's version of this book was probably the most inspiring example i mean certainly at the time the most inspiring example i had ever seen of of of literary translation and it really um the difference between the the the natural fluency and the natural sense of invention that was going on in the in the english um just really put to shame the the translations of all these american poets who are in english poets who are translating uh nebrew dan lorca so i thought wow this is really um this is translation is much more than what i see going on in the translation of poetry so that that was a real revelation for me now a few years ago robassa published a memoir which some of you may know called if this be treason translation and its discontents and it's not a book of translation theory it's a it's a it's sort of an anecdotal account of his working with with various different authors and different books that he had translated um and he says he uses as as an example of the kinds of choices that he had to make uh beginning with the the title sienaños de soledad um sienaños can be a century it can be a hundred years or it can be 100 years those are at least three of the possibilities uh and then soledad you know can be solitude it can be loneliness it can be variations on on that word translators often use uh dictionaries of synonyms to find uh english just the possible equivalents the possible suggestive resonances of of different words so robassa talks in in this memoir about how he decided to to uh make 100 years of solitude the title of the book rather than say a century of loneliness or a hundred years of loneliness or a hundred years of solitude he said he said he didn't want a hundred years because that it's not just any old hundred years it's like a very specific uh period of time and he felt that solitude had a lot more uh resonance than loneliness um and these are the kinds of choices that i mean this is just the title and he also talks about the uh his his choice of the verb in uh in the at the end of the first sentence word the the phrase is uh conocer el hielo and uh as most of you who have studied spanish know uh conocer it typically means to be acquainted with or to know a person um but or to be introduced to someone so he went through all these possibilities and then you know i i think it was just like a light bulb went on in in his head and it occurred to him that discover was the right word now uh the critic that robassa famously calls professor horrendo which is the that the scholar who reviews your your translation um in some big publication and points out all the the errors uh or you know he'll he'll fixate on on one word and and as evidence that you don't really understand spanish you know which is a typical error of language experts in understanding what translation is because the the the the creativity involved in selecting the word discover which is it works so fabulously well in english uh is something that only uh an artist rather than a uh a language scholar would would come up with so so robassa became a hero of mine uh for this book and then subsequently i mean the first uh uh book he translated from of latin american literature and the thing that launched him on his career as a translator was uh julio courtassar's hopscotch which he came to translate quite by accident because he like walked out of his house in one direction instead of the other one day and he ran into somebody i i maybe it was an editor who was looking for a translator for courtassar's book hopscotch uh which in some ways is an even more seminal uh work of latin american fiction than than garcia marquez uh so his robassus translation of hopscotch masterpiece robassus translation of uh what i think is one of the greatest latin american novels uh uh conversation in the cathedral by mario vargas yosa amazing amazing english writing in that book uh and these three books i think are just classics of of literary translation as well as classics of literature so i want to acknowledge the fact that most of us have gotten this book by way of gregory robassa and he totally rose to the occasion and you know i think gave it to us in terms as close to the experience of reading the original in spanish uh that we could hope for for those of us who i mean i read spanish but i'm lazy and and uh you know a lot of times i'll read translations especially fiction um okay so that that was one important important personal uh uh impact this book has had upon me um i want to talk a little bit about the popularity of this book because it is not only a classic work of literary genius but it's you know monumental international bestseller which doesn't frequently happen i mean this is really unusual for a book of such high literary ambition to to have so many millions of readers and i know uh my sister-in-law who was uh a returning uh she went she went back to to college later in life and she was uh i think she was uh summa cum laude at the college she went to she was like in her fifties when she got her b.a in in english and and she's a big reader and you know a reader of not highly literary books but kind of bestselling type books well she told me sometime in the 70s she was reading uh 100 years of solitude she was extremely impatient with uh with the author like why couldn't he just like tell a story in a straightforward way why were all these what were all these digressions and all these ridiculous things happening and and she struck me as a as a more typical reader you know literate but not highly literary uh so it's all the more astonishing to me that this book has sort of overcome the resistance of readers of conventional fiction you know the kind of bestseller type readers and you know become a bestseller itself and i i mean it's very inspiring in that respect in the sense that um it shows that you don't have to i mean four novelists of whom achi is the only real novelist on this panel i've published one novel but it was only because it was a book i had to write otherwise i'm i like the short forms um but but it's it it revealed that you cannot compromise your your intellectual creative literary values in order to you know attract a popular audience you can actually if you if you if you go far enough with your uh creative imagination you can reach a lot of people that that uh you shouldn't be discouraged from from trying to reach a big audience with a book of the highest literary value so in the last thing that is of interest to me since i'm also a journalist um is that garcia marquez of course uh started out as a newspaper reporter uh wrote journalism for most of his life even after his fame as a as a fiction writer uh published a good deal of reportage and nonfiction uh and in these uh some interviews i have read with him he talks about uh journalism as kind of anchoring him in reality and giving the the the imagination his imagination a kind of grounding that kept it from sort of going out of out of orbit so there's this tension in in his work in in this book in particular but in a lot of his other books too history has already been mentioned as an important element and um but there's this interesting tension between fact between really cold hard facts and the the wildest flights of imagination and i think it's the synthesis of those two elements that that gives his his this book and his other books their power because it's not just some sort of airy fantasy it is it is imagination wedded to history to facts and that can be a very powerful combination and a great model for anyone writing today in english to be able to incorporate the reality of our time uh without um merely replicating it or complaining about it but transforming it through uh uh through the power of the imagination and and garcia marquez who was a very political person uh and and hula kurtasar who's somebody i know a little bit better because i've translated his poetry also spoke of this um as as kind of public uh leftists in latin american literature they were constantly being uh being hounded by political people to be more didactic in their in their work and to be more polemical in their work and i've noticed both garcia marquez and hula o kurtasar spoke of like the most radical thing you can do as a writer is to is to write and write well and write with uh with great imagination that that just directly addressing the political reality of your time is not enough because there's plenty of uh there's plenty of newspaper columnists who can do that you know so to to invent to reinvent reality is is one of the highest uh uh roles of the uh of the the fiction writer so i'll leave it at that and uh does anyone up here have uh things you want to add or subtract or or ask or should we just yeah let's oh we're we're here to hear what you have to say too so if anyone has any questions comments uh arguments uh we we are here to hear them oh sorry i think we could hear that because they had they had such a um a good attitude towards what was happening or not a good attitude that i'm not expressing it well but there wasn't a lot of moaning and groaning so i didn't notice it and then when i read it the second time i thought is this the same book anyway that's what i had to say now i had a very similar reaction when i read it again as an adult and it was a years later when i read it i rediscovered so many things about it that really just uh you know flew right by me uh the first time even though the first time i also had to contend with having to converse with my dad about it so i was forced to go back and recognize a lot of these things but even even you know that every every time i read it i feel like i get something else from and i think it's rich that way i think it's it's one of the the wonderful things about it you know i can't remember now who it was but there was one critic who uh bitched and moaned about how there was so much on every page that you know it was sort of like your sister-in-law you know like just there's too much there's just too much it's just overwhelming um and i think that can be true but i think that's also part of you know the the fabulousness of the book that there is so much that you can keep you know harvesting from it i like very much what you said as well you know just to add to what achi said because um you know not only is every reading that you do differently you know i think you know just because you change the book hasn't changed you change but the other pieces that you have the memory of the first reading you know and that's sort of interacting with what's happening to you right now and so it's you know you have this sort of interesting shadow of you and the book as well as the real you and the book interacting and that and garcia marcus i think in particular plays with that anyone else uh i find that i enjoy so much reading him i i find that the horror is almost an entertainment yeah yeah well what you're enjoying i think and this happens in you know in a lot of literature and and i think it's one of the ways in which if we survive the current era it could result in some really amazing literature because what i know i know i don't think i don't think it's likely to happen immediately but i know one of the things that i notice in my own work is like the worst uh things are going on in my life the more i have to somehow transform them into something else and i think that this is a a principle of of of artistic invention you know that you have to turn the difficulties of existence into something more bearable and one way to do that is through art and you know specifically in this case and the way literature may be more directly than certain other arts especially something like music addresses directly the content of or can address the content of the time you know even if you're writing a a story about people who have no you know there's no uh direct chronicling of of the historical moment the history in which they are living affects their individual lives their private lives in a way that just permeates them and you know this is what artists do they take everything that's floating around in the culture and they turn it into something very specific um so i think that's the reason that we i you don't feel guilty about enjoying reading you know in fact i i think that um you know that's one of the the the salubrious uh aspects of literature is that it can give us unbearable information in a way that is that is bearable and and it makes it uh it and it turns it into something else and this is that you know i think this is really one of the jobs at the of the artist as i was uh as i was reading it i i noticed exactly what you're talking about that that almost sense of cruelty that uh Garcia Marquez is almost taking a malicious pleasure in doing what he does to the characters and and for me that really kind of created um the sense of doom that i feel throughout the book that every time somebody in the blendia clan tries to get ahead or is having success in life and things are going well or there's some kind of optimism or aspiration you know that it's going to come back around and there's going to be something that happens on the other side and that doesn't happen to all the characters in this book there's the people from the columbian government who start to participate in the life of the town and they're fine or or they're they're people from the the banana plantation to come to have business and their aspirations result in profit for them but but in the macondo people um there's that kind of sense of doom that so who is going to end up the wrong way for them and and i feel like that that sense of cruelty is a part of that they're almost you know Garcia Marquez is this godlike figure and i'm going to show them they're they're going to know what the world is really like and he does show up at the end of the novel just ever so briefly as sort of like saying and i have been a witness to this it's it's another way in which he plays with reality and yeah with stuff but i mean it's i think it's it's also part of like i'm kind of dicking with you well he he admits that a lot of this a lot of the the episodes in the book are uh are based on stories that were told to him by his grandmother or his aunt so it's not as if i mean it's the magical realism is he he doesn't uh he doesn't make any distinction between magic magic and realism in fact there's a little passage in this uh in this one of these interviews here he says um i was able to write 100 years of solitude simply by looking at reality our reality without the limitations which rationalists and Stalinists through the ages have tried to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand um our reality is it in itself out of all proportion um you know so so and i've heard other latin american writers say this magical realism is really just realism you know in a tropical setting because things become you know look what just happened in portorico you know is that real or what um it i mean if you read that in a novel that you know whole nation was flattened you would think well this couldn't possibly happen but you know it does um we had a question over here hello i was just thanking them for their words that's been great um i like many of you i first read the book when i was i think 18 or 19 and besides making my brain do a complete back flip my brain was still malleable at that point college age it sent me on a whole different trajectory i ended up majoring in latin american literature and just going in a completely different direction but what i actually wanted to ask is if any of you know about the book that garcia marquez was writing when he died uh in agosto nos vemos i've found bits and pieces of it online in spanish and i'm kind of working my way through it but wonder if any of you know what has become of it if it is translated into english um and how you would translate the title but i've i've read a little bit about it and what i understand is i don't think it's even published in spanish right yeah i i don't know if it's considered a complete manuscript or if you know if there are kind of legal ways to publish it at this point so i i don't know maybe maybe my esteemed fellow panelists know a little bit more and i would translate it as something like we'll see each other in august see you in august see it yeah well maybe yeah either way i would i actually don't think the estate has given permission for that publication i could be wrong about that but i think that's what i heard from wendig era was very close to ira to versions that have appeared in press and i yeah but um my guess is that it will appear at some point at some point exactly like all the hemmingway stuff that came later but right exactly who would have thought that we would have a new hemmingway novel you know in the last in in in the 21st century so if they do appear did you have a question yes which to me is one of the most powerful endings of any uh any book i've read and i felt as in the last few pages is that i just was going faster and faster and sort of falling in this spiral as though i was going down in a whirlpool or falling into a bottomless pit or something and then you come to that final sentence and what you said really made me think about this this sort of circle of history where you know he basically is sort of you know almost quoting the the thing about if you're ignorant of history you're going to be condemned to repeat it over and over and over again well um i feel like decay is a very kind of strong element throughout the whole book and it's interesting there are a couple of characters in this book who are writers there is of course colonel oreliano who writes all this poetry but which is then burned and nobody ever reads that and there's another character late in the novel i believe he's the catalonian shopkeeper if i'm remembering correctly who who writes all of this stuff and it kind of ends up lost and destroyed and he makes this remark you know well that's the fate of all literature anyway and and that really is the fate of all literature except for books like this that somehow manage to still be read decades later but but i kind of feel like you know that's that's just kind of the forces of history and everything's going to be forgotten and everybody will kind of be forgotten at some point and it's just this kind of poetic resolution again uh you have a you go back to to the cruelty aspect you have all these people trying to build something in the end Garcia Marquez is like i'm just gonna sweep it all away with this hurricane force wind and i think you know that's that's one of the lessons this book teaches us and yet i feel like the ending is just another opening to tell you the truth i don't i feel like you know after everybody's forgotten and all of the decay that it just creates an opportunity for all of this to be rediscovered again i mean the truth of the matter is that macondo is built and you know taken apart a bunch of times in the book that you know things are constantly being sort of remade you know the house is remade how many times in this book you know and you know very important things within the house are made and remade the laboratory is you know destroyed a bunch of times and then brought back and the the fishes and the burial shroud right i mean you know i i i think that in you know it's about i i i do i find the ending to not be a closed ending at all i for i read it as an open as just you know we begin again you know somebody will come and won't be a buen dia obviously because the line has has you know died out but somebody will come and we'll rediscover this and we'll tell this story again or some version of it again you know bits and pieces of this will continue and you know in real life that has happened i mean a lot of these characters in siena news is really that have come back in many different novels both named and not so named um and so it just keeps kind of growing and growing it it ended but not really now i i i feel it very very much the way it actually does that um you know the the ending of that novel is very different from other things that we we can read today for instance where apocalyptic literature and you know the end of the world is so prevalent in movies and on television and literature and there and there are many good reasons why people are feeling that way so one one one thing one thing that we would we we might be tempted to believe that that's what this book is doing but it's not because it's not a universal apocalypse that we're seeing it's one specific particular population you know you know those who are condemned or you know i forget the exact translation in english um but um but more than more than the ending is an opening i believe that is signaled and this is where you know when i when in my comments i was asking us to think about the way in which writers also speak with other writers and read other writers and for me that's a moment of borges you know where you know we were in the garden of working paths and the ending that feels so so much like a climactic and full ending in fact really just opens up other possibilities and you know um that it has to do with writing and deciphering of writing and understanding what writing contains is also part of that same openness so i think garcía marquez wants to have it both ways you know the the doom of ending but the possibility of something else so i think you know one of the things about this book is true the story is to remember that they they found this town with you know with a terrible mistaken conception they think they're surrounded by water and they're not you know when they actually try to go find water they can't find it it goes on forever you know um i of course assume that he is playing off of virilio piñera with the malitas inconstancia de aguas por todas partes you know the cursed circumstance of water everywhere um because he was very influenced by the vanguardista movement in cuba um and how that sort of played out um so the mistake still has to be contended with you know that the the error the the original sin if you want to call it you know still has to be contended with you know the united states has its original sin and latin america has very different original sin um and so and we we still have to contend with that that that open wound is still open it's still we're still bleeding from that just one i'm given that any first reading will then affect and impact any further readings would you recommend the first reading to be in spanish or in english if you had the ability to read either or both right i've read it in both and you know i've loved it in both and for but you're right in because you know my memories of each one are therefore slightly different i think that you should read it first wherever you're going to feel it most powerfully no that's a cheat answer actually i think it's a good answer it's a good i think i actually think it's a good answer because if you're going to be struggling right then you shouldn't because this is a book you want to surrender to and if you're going to be going if you have to read it with a dictionary next to you then don't don't don't do that so that would be my question which one should i read it in first i've read books in spanish first and books in english first and i find i don't often go back and read it in the other language so if you only have one reading which would you do well read the original i mean by all means you know if your spanish is good enough yeah read the original yeah yeah i think we have time for one more question it's not a question it's a comment because you brought something about puerto rico i'm from puerto rico and this book i i'm one of the ones that read it when i was very young and i decided that i didn't want to read it again because i know that i have changed and that book was so important in my life as the point that i'm from a very small town that is i'm from two small towns that are macondos and when i move here and people ask me where are you from i say i'm from puerto rico but we're in puerto rico when i'm from a town like macondo when i have the first coca cola when i was in the 80s when we got the first coca cola and the first burger king i don't remember when but some i just want to bring something that ashi broad is about the it's a way to talk about latin america his story his story is what happened to us i think it was you ashi and that's you know every day that i have been reading what is going on to puerto rico that's been very painful for us that we are here this book come to me every every day because it looks like it's magic some things i cannot believe what's happening there but it's it's real and the last point that i want to bring is i always have been first i hear ones that gabriel garcía marquez say that if he knew about puerto rico before he wrote the book he was he would have been thinking about puerto rico when he was writing the book but sometime i live with this contradiction of coming from a macondo town and like it's so many things that i bring that i have because i come from a town like macondo but also hating some other parts of me or not wanted to change or trying to open to other things that come because that are in me because i come from a town like macondo and it's a kind of contradiction just a comment there's one more there's one more question over here we we have another couple of minutes uh is there somebody uh yeah this guy right here in the second row this grandfather figure now in latin american literature and and i'm wondering if if you could say some of the some of your favorite literature that has been spawned from this book or favorite authors you know well i i i mentioned one and you know and this you know remember that that influences of this sort are always complicated because they don't always take what you would take and and and sometimes they take things that they don't want to do but i think for me it has to be giuno dies yeah of the contemporary writers and and as aci said of course if you ask giuno you know how much have you been influenced by garcía marcos he probably would say none at all but the reality is that of course he has you know he would be joking when he said that but you know um so i would say that um what's interesting about that is that there have been generations now of writers that have been profoundly influenced by garcía marcos writers from the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s and now into contemporary time it continues to happen yeah but i i do think you mean um the brief and wondrous life of oscar well right right yeah because i mean other stuff by giuno doesn't fall under i agree i agree certainly i i mean oscar well yeah yeah um you know if i was going to name somebody i would name wendy guerra um she's a cuban writer um she wendy guerra gi u e r r a um so far she's only got um two books in english um everyone leaves which was published by um amazon and which i translated into english and a book a poetry called a cage within i don't remember the translator um and uh her new one is coming out in the i believe in in march or april um it's called revolution sunday i trend i just translated it for um melville house and um wendy was actually a student of garcía marcos she was in a workshop with him at san antonio de los baños in cuba where garcía marcos set up an art school and a film school um and um she became very very close to him um afterwards and traveled with him and um actually you know did transcribe transcription for him and uh stuff like that and uh she um she has been resisting his influence in a lot of her novels um there have been many novels in between everyone leaves which was the first one in revolution sunday which is the newest one but these are the ones that are coming out in english but in revolution sunday i think it finally she really embraces it in some very important uh ways i mean it's not a saga in the same way as this in any way but it's you can really feel it and in fact garcía marcos makes a very bizarre and sort of um really sad cameo uh in the book but anyway i don't know if melville house has it up on their website yet but um revolution sunday and wendy garra i'll go a slightly different direction with this we we have someone who was influenced by garcía marquez and didn't even know it we had a student of garcía marquez i'm going to say somebody who really tried to define himself in opposition to garcía marquez and the boom and and and all that it stood for because you know that this was a movement this was the biggest thing in land american literature this was uh sold to the american readers as this whole kind of enormous summation of land american books as we understood it and as the generations came after that people decided well that's not land american literature i'm gonna write land american literature and one of those people who really did that was uh roberto bilandio who whose whose prose is really very the opposite of garcía marquez it's almost well it's not pedestrian because it's uh it's so kind of rich and textured but it it looks pedestrian kind of on the surface of it and it's it's just not kind of the lush feeling that you get from garcía marquez and and he also talks quite a bit about politics but he really found his own way to discuss land american politics in his novels and is every bit as profound and prophetic as garcía marquez but it really is a very different way of bringing the political into the literary so i would encourage him uh you can read the south of detectives you can read by night in chile distant star those those are all wonderful books he also benefits from an extraordinary translator and asha wimmer just and and chris andris and chris andris that's right sorry well thank you very much uh for your attention your contributions and thank you to all the panelists and big hand big hand for our panelists thank you so much