domingo, 6 de agosto de 2023
martes, 20 de junio de 2023
A propósito de las cartas del Boom
En Bitácora de vuelo reproduzco el artículo de Confabulario.
viernes, 12 de mayo de 2023
De un poeta laureado
El 12 mayo de 1937, con motivo de la coronación de George VI, John Masefield —el poeta laureado de Inglaterra— leyó un discurso donde el único nombre propio mencionado era el de Marilla Waite Freeman. La historia de la amistad de Marilla y Masefield nos permite apreciar las dimensiones de la mujer biblioteca.
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Marilla Waite Freeman en Memphis
sábado, 6 de mayo de 2023
Volveremos a vernos con García Márquez
He tenido el honor de ser instrumental en la decisión de la familia de García Márquez de publicar su novela póstuma, "En agosto nos vemos". El Diario de Madrid me invitó a contar la historia detrás de la noticia que sorprendió al mundo el pasado 28 de abril.
sábado, 15 de abril de 2023
Caribbean Troubadour
This Saturday, April 15, goes on the market in a hardcover edition and e-book Caribbean Troubadour, my first book in English. Published by Lexington Books (a division of Rowman & Littlefield), this book may interest all readers of Gabriel García Márquez and Latin American literature. If you have librarian friends (or a friend of a library), I’d appreciate it if you suggested they purchase it. I reproduce here excerpts from the introduction and the acknowledgments section.
Follow this link for more information about this book
Este 15 de abril sale al mercado en edición de pasta dura y libro electrónico Caribbean Troubadour, mi primer libro en inglés. Editado por Lexington Books (una división de Rowman & Littlefield), este libro puede ser de interés para todos los lectores de Gabriel García Márquez y de la literatura latinoamericana. Si tienen amigos bibliotecarios (o bibliotecas amigas), les agradezco que les recomienden su adquisición. Reproduzco aquí fragmentos de la introducción y de la sección de agradecimientos.
Sigue este enlace para más información sobre este libro
I started reading García Márquez when I was twelve years old, and almost half a century later I still have a vivid memory of the atmosphere of Leaf Storm. Outside of my school assignments, I had already read a couple of novels, one by Mark Twain and the other by Jules Verne, but García Márquez’s book made me feel closer to the characters and their background. I felt the warmth, the smells of the little Caribbean town in which the story took place. I identified myself with the little boy who was trying to understand the world of the adults and the rituals of death. The fact that the novel was originally written in Spanish, that the author of the novel was born in my own country, and that he still was alive, contributed to the excitement of that reading experience. Until then, I had the vague idea that one requirement to be a writer was to be dead.
I hadn’t finished reading Leaf Storm when I heard the news that García Márquez had just published a new novel. I was the first to check out The Autumn of the Patriarch in my high school library in Medellín, Colombia, but I couldn’t get past the second page. From that first reading, my memory just preserved the image of a group of cows on a balcony, eating the curtains of the presidential palace.
I decided to study journalism because I wanted to be a writer, and somewhere I had read that García Márquez became a writer through his experience as a news reporter. In college we read the op-ed articles he published in the newspaper El Universal of Cartagena de Indias, and I told my classmates— half jokingly—that I would be a journalist in El Universal, to begin where García Márquez began. To cut a long story short, a couple of years after graduating I was sitting in the newsroom of El Universal of Cartagena de Indias, fulfilling my own prophecy.
After the fictional town of Macondo disappeared in a cataclysm at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a stylized version of Cartagena de Indias called “the city of viceroys” became the setting for two of his novels and several short stories. Cartagena de Indias played a central role at the beginnings of García Márquez’s writing career. Although he lived in other Colombian cities (Barranquilla and Bogotá), and then in Italy, France, Venezuela, the United States, Spain, and Mexico, he always gravitated around Cartagena de Indias. His parents and most of his siblings moved to live there in the early 1950s. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he built the house of his dreams in Cartagena. In Cartagena he wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. There he was a protagonist and had a positive influence on the International Film Festival (his famous “black notebook” gave him access to great writers and film directors, and everyone gladly accepted Gabo’s invitation to be part of the festival). There he established in 1995 his Ibero-American School of Journalism (Fundación para un nuevo periodismo iberoamericano, FNPI). As we will see in the chapter devoted to that city, Cartagena was, for García Márquez, like Fermina Daza was for his character Florentino Ariza, who “set out to gain fame and fortune to deserve her.”
While I was working for El Universal, between 1990 and 1998, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing García Márquez, who used to visit the city at least twice a year. In 1994, García Márquez published Of Love and Other Demons, his novel set in the eighteenth century Cartagena de Indias, then a prominent Spanish colonial seaport where different worldviews collided. In the foreword to the novel, García Márquez mentioned a particular event that supposedly occurred on October 26, 1949, when he worked as a reporter for El Universal. That was the starting point for me to write and publish, a year later, A Bouquet of Forget-Me-Nots (Un ramo de nomeolvides, 1995), a book about García Márquez’s beginnings as a writer and journalist in El Universal (1948–1950). The book included testimonies by García Márquez and his friends at the early stages of his writing career, as well as a selection of recovered texts written by him at the time and published without his signature. Some of those recovered texts are included—and published for the first time in English—in the second part of this book.
In December 1997, I had the opportunity to be García Márquez’s pupil in a workshop on Narrative Journalism offered by his school of journalism in Barranquilla, Colombia. That was the last time I met him personally. Soon after, I received a scholarship from Rutgers University to complete my master and doctoral degrees in literature. Since then, I have approached García Márquez works from a more academic perspective. Over more than two decades, as a graduate student and university professor I have taught, researched, and written extensively about García Márquez’s life and works, and have reflected about the themes and deeper structures of his books.
There were many circumstances along the way, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I am what I am (an exile from Medellín, one of the most dangerous cities of the world in the last century, who is now a university professor in the United States), and my life has been what it has been, because after reading Leaf Storm I did not stop reading its author’s books nor did I stop following with interest the events of his life. In the field of literary studies there is often controversy about the importance the life of an author can have for the understanding of his work. I have no doubts about it: the work matters because it is the expression of a person, and I never get tired of wanting to know about people I care about.
Born in 1927, a small and decadent town of the Colombian Caribbean, the vital trajectory of the “son of the telegrapher” is as awe inspiring as his own stories. By the end of his writing career, García Márquez was considered “the most prominent living writer in the Spanish language.”1 His relevance has not faded after his death, in 2014. In addition to the value of his literary works and the reputation associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature, García Márquez made multiple contributions to the journalism and the film industry in Latin America. He was a public figure at the international level. There seems to be no doubt that we will keep talking about his life and works the same way we talk about Shakespeare or Cervantes. For those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, the years after his passing have been a period of balances, of panoramic perspectives, in which his life begins to show a definite contour.
This book reflects the multiple perspectives from which I have approached the life and works of Gabriel García Márquez: as a regular reader, as an aspiring writer, as a journalist, as a biographer, as a scholar and, even, as his apprentice. Some chapters have the more rigorous and detached tone that we usually find in academic works; some others have a more personal approach. The variety of languages accounts for the relationship between life, work, and context. My intention is to offer a better understanding of the origins, creative practices, and prevailing themes in García Márquez’s fictional and nonfictional works. My general purpose is to contribute to the knowledge—in the English-speaking world—of one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, not only from the scholar’s point of view, but also from the perspective of someone who can give direct testimonial accounts, and who shares his cultural and historical background.
And from the “Acknowledgments” (De la sección de agradecimientos):
The author gratefully acknowledges the newspaper El Universal, of Cartagena de Indias, for permission to reproduce in translation a series of unsigned text attributed to García Márquez; the Manuscripts Division of the Rare Books and Special Collections section, Firestone Library, Princeton University, for access to the Carlos Fuentes Papers; the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, for access to the Gabriel García Márquez Collection; to Carlos Alemán Zabaleta, for giving me a copy and allowing me to reproduce García Márquez’s letter of 1950 addressed to him; to Silvana de Faria, for her permission to publish here the text of the interview included in chapter 9; to María Alejandra Villamizar, Katia D’Artigues, Alexandra Cuervo, and Manolo Sarmiento, for permission to include their picture with García Márquez.
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the School of Liberal Arts and the Provost Office of the State University of New York, college at Oneonta, for their financial support during his research for chapters 10 and 12; and to the friends who contributed to this work in many ways over the years: Øysten Schjetne, Judith Nieto, Jaime Abello Banfi, Julio Aguilar, Gerardo Martínez, Julio César Posada, Magola Sánchez, Darío Gallo, and Óscar Collazos. My special gratitude to Sarah Donovan for her insightful observations and contributions to a manuscript that was so in need of improvement.
jueves, 9 de febrero de 2023
The Return of G. K. Chesterton
Imagine What Exists
and other recovered texts
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From the editor´s note:
Between 2017 and 2019 I worked in the translation into Spanish of a selection of essays on literature by G. K. Chesterton. For the task, I explored the collections of Chesterton’s papers available at the British Library, the G. K. Chesterton Library (then located at Oxford), and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, in Austin. As Chesterton’s creative output would suggest, the number of unpublished materials (poems, short stories, essays, and even his characteristic doodles) was impressive. For years, I contemplated the idea of editing a volume with a selection of those materials and, if you have this book in your hands, my procrastination has finally ended.
The texts here included are transcriptions from handwritten essays, notebooks and typescripts encompassing Chesterton’s creative life, since his early years as a member of the Junior Debating Club until weeks before his death. To the best of my knowledge, most of them have never been published. Only a few of the typescripts indicate original publications in newspapers, but none of those has been included in G. K. Chesterton’s collections. Since it is impossible to date most of them, I have opted for a thematic order, building up from excerpts, early writings, considerations on literature and specific authors to Chesterton’s most cherished themes: Catholicism, Distributism and a “Nonsense World.” Any markings or incidental information found in the originals are referenced in the endnotes.
A few comments on some of the texts:
It can be guessed that Chesterton wrote his essay on Walt Whitman in his early twenties (circa 1894), as a prologue to an edition of Whitman’s selected poems which most probably was never published.
“Father Brown in Hollywood” is a letter in which Chesterton expresses his thoughts and expectations about an imminent series of films, in the early 1930s, inspired by his famous priest-detective. The letter could be taken as a reference to appreciate posterior media representations of Father Brown, and to consider how close they are to Chesterton’s vision. In this and other texts without an original title, I have ventured to add descriptive titles.
The essay on Alice Meynell was a fortunate finding, at the Harry Ransom Center (where, by the way, the manuscript of The Man Who Was Thursday is safeguarded). Just a few weeks before, I had reread Chesterton’s Autobiography and found there an intriguing and most praising reference to Mrs. Meynell. This essay confirms Chesterton’s admiration for the today almost forgotten poet and essayist.
The longest essay here included, “By a Roman Convert,” was Chesterton answer to Mr. Arnold Lunn, who in 1924 had published a book criticizing Catholicism by commenting on some prominent converts, such as Cardinal Newman, Hillarie Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton’s answer offers an excellent overview of his religious and social ideas, and addresses and dismisses some of the charges some sectors of posterity keep using to impair his legacy. It is not a minor detail —perhaps not completely unrelated to Chesterton’s answer— the fact that Mr. Lunn eventually would convert to Catholicism.
In a few cases, I have reproduced incomplete essays, under the assumption that the surviving fragments are interesting enough. I have done my best effort to decipher Chesterton’s evolving and not always clear penmanship; and, in a couple of articles, I have tried to guess missing words. I have pointed also the very few occasions were guessing would be not only wild, but most probably inaccurate. In a moderate and, hopefully, respectful way I have adjusted punctuation when it seemed necessary. Regarding the images, they speak for themselves.
Table of content:
Editor’s note 9
IMAGINE
WHAT EXISTS (EXCERPTS FROM NOTEBOOKS) 13
POETRY OF
THE PRESENT DAY 27
A POET’S
HEART 31
THE SONGS
OF A NATION 33
EROS AND
PSYCHE, BY ROBERT BRIDGES 35
THE
SACREDNESS OF LIBRARIES 39
THE GREAT
TRANSLATION 45
THE CLEVER
MAN AND THE FAIRY TALES 51
THE SAVAGE
AS A POET 55
REALIST AND
THE UNREAL 67
THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SWORD 73
THE
DEFINITION OF THE DRAGON 77
WALT WHITMAN 83
THE BURNS
WE LOVE 103
WORDSWORTH 109
A BOOK FOR
A DESERT ISLAND 111
DICKENS AND
THACKERAY 117
STEVENSON
AND THE CULT OF VILLON 123
THE HUMOR
OF J. M. BARRIE 129
ALICE
MEYNELL 135
FATHER
BROWN GOES TO HOLLYWOOD 151
THE MORAL
IN MURDER STORIES 157
THE FREEDOM
OF MARRIAGE 163
ETIQUETTE
AND THE PROFESSORS 167
THE FLAMES
OF FREEDOM 173
BY A ROMAN
CONVERT 179
A NONSENSE
WORLD 205
THE THREE
FINGERS 213
Notes on
the Texts and Pictures 217
sábado, 21 de enero de 2023
Vidas de artistos
Vidas de artistos reune una serie de biografías
cortas publicadas originalmente en la revista virtual Cronopio. Habla de
personajes que tienen en común el anonimato, el olvido, la incomprensión o la
tragedia. Acostumbrados, como estamos, a pensar en el arte y la literatura en
términos de éxitos resonantes, me pareció oportuno mirar esas sombras donde es
posible encontrar entregas al misterio de la creación tanto o más admirables
que las de aquellos de quienes se ocupan los reflectores.
El título, un chiste que tal vez no todes entiendan, se lo debo
a Julio Cortázar. Está en una sección de su libro Un tal Lucas, de
donde he tomado un epígrafe que me sigue pareciendo uno de sus microcuentos más
logrados.
Vidas de artistos está disponible en Amazon.
domingo, 1 de enero de 2023
jueves, 22 de diciembre de 2022
jueves, 8 de diciembre de 2022
Bitácora alza el vuelo
Bitácora de vuelo sigue alzando el vuelo. Aquí un par de comentarios
a propósito de los narradores de fútbol.
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