One Hundred Years of Solitude

"He’s a delicious man, he says those kind of things all the time. Which takes nothing away from Gregory’s translation, of course. I have read One Hundred Years of Solitude in both Spanish and English, and I was so struck by what Rabassa was able to accomplish that it was the final argument to confirm some changes I made in my own life. I had initially wanted to study baroque poetry in Spanish. I was very enamoured of Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. I moved over into 20th century Latin American literature not long before I read this translation by Rabassa. But it was the immediacy of the translation and the brilliance of the novel which convinced me that I had made the right choice. That of course takes nothing away from 17th century Spanish poetry, but for me it was a good place to go. It was my first inkling that translation could be an art form of great value. Rabassa has accomplished something utterly terrific in his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude . This novel, which was revolutionary in its structure and its use of imagination, is now absolutely compelling in English as well as in Spanish. On the assumption that most people who have been influenced by García Márquez in the English speaking world have been influenced through Rabassa’s translation, it had a huge effect on novel writing in English. Writers like Toni Morrison , for example, or Salman Rushdie. Certainly in the English speaking world. I would never have said it that way, but you’re absolutely right. Well it’s true. One of the great gifts that translation gives us is the ability to read widely, and for young authors to be influenced by writers who originally wrote in a different language. To that extent, the translator is as important as the author. I’ve spoken before about the influence of William Faulkner on a lot of Latin American writers, and particularly on García Márquez. García Márquez says in his memoir that he learned to write by reading Faulkner, and describes him as a great teacher. He was, of course, reading Faulkner in Spanish translation. Faulkner himself claimed that he read Don Quixote once a year – something which Carlos Fuentes also claims to do – and most likely in English. So Cervantes had an influence on Faulkner through translation, Faulkner had an influence on García Márquez through translation, and García Márquez had an influence on Toni Morrison through translation. In other words, there is a tradition that is passed on from one generation of writers to the next, and the medium of this all is translation. I have never learnt the answer to that question. I think Rabassa may have been ill – he had some heart problems. But my editor never told me. I asked him once, and told him, “I’m going to ask you this question only once.” He fudged the answer and I dropped it. So I don’t know how it happened."

"Absolutely. Borges never published, for example, many more than four or five pages at a time, and his narrators tend to navigate that more abstract world of literature and ideas. Whereas what García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers. For me this is the place where the western, rational, realist mind collides with a much more oral, popular culture. What magical realism does is narrate events from a popular world view, but within a novel, which is a western rationalist form. So a young woman can ascend to heaven clutching sheets because that it how people want to remember her disappearance. García Márquez is so good at this but it is a very difficult act to follow. Many people have tried to emulate his style, not very successfully. And the term “magical realism” is often used sloppily by western critics to patronise so-called “third world” literature."

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is a saga. It’s the story of a family, from the couple that had the first kids to the end of the family, which is also the end of times. When you read reviews of One Hundred Years of Solitude, they’ll say it’s the story of Latin America—and perhaps it is. But, essentially, it’s the story of a town from when it is founded until it finishes its history. That’s what he says, and I’ve wondered many times how much is based on his own story and how much it is embellished. We all grew up hearing stories of ghosts and fantastic stories about things that happen in the countryside. For us, it’s just anecdotes, but he takes those and makes literature out of them. I remember when my book, The Bitch, came out in France, I was surprised to read in a review, that it was a book of magical realism like Gabriel García Márquez. I was like, ‘What? I’m very realistic in my writing!’ But there is an indigenous doctor in the book, what I think you call a witch doctor in Europe. For us, it’s not that I go to witch doctors. But, in the countryside, every day people go to witch doctors, because they don’t have hospitals, and that’s the only healthcare they can get. That’s regular, everyday life. It’s reality. I’m not making it up. There is, but that’s also reality. I was born in Cali, which is a hot weather city here in Colombia. We don’t have seasons—or we have two seasons, which are the wet season and the wettest season. We have dry spells, but mostly we have rain. It’s raining all the time. In Cali, I lived very near my school and my classmates would say, ‘Let’s go to the jungle.’ The jungle was my apartment because my mother had so many plants there that you felt you were in the jungle. And that’s not particular to my mother. It’s not weird. In Cali, many people live in their apartments with their windows open and lots of plants. You see birds everywhere. I remember reading in a bird guide that a person birdwatching in Canada for a whole day would see the same number of species that a person in Cali will see in 15 minutes waiting for the bus. That’s our reality. Nature is all around. Perhaps what is characteristic of me is that I note it. Some Colombian writers do not write about it because it is so obvious that you take it for granted and you don’t see it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"This book put a bit of a sheen on Wilbur [Smith] because it is so beautifully written. I just loved all the different aspects of it. There is such inventive language and concepts, and the whole magical realism thing really appeals to me. There is humour as well, and you don’t get that much humour in old Wilbur to be fair! In this book there are seven generations of a family with a very definite beginning and end. It begins with José Arcadio Buendía, who founds the town of Macondo in the Latin American jungle, and the book follows his family over the next 100 years. Each member of the family has pretty obscure things happening to them right up until the extraordinary and brilliant finale. Even though it is a fictional novel , it enabled me to look at family history from a much more stimulating perspective, with family traits cascading down through the generations."