WILL FORRESTER: Pilar and Lisa – we’ve just heard you both read, in the Spanish and the English, from The Bitch. Pilar – could I ask you about dogs? What draws you so much to them?

PILAR QUINTANA: That’s a very good question. When I was growing up, in Colombia, people didn’t have close relationships with animals. Dogs were used on farms, or to bark and keep houses safe. Cats were for hunting mice. But that has changed over time: now, dogs and cats are family. People have birthday parties for them, and when they die it’s a family death.

When I lived in Colombia’s Pacific Coast – in the jungle – I had pets. It was difficult. In the jungle, animals are less tame than in the city, where I had lived easily with cats. My relationships with animals on the Pacific Coast were complex: pets would get lost, walk out into the wild, get sick. I suffered when they died.

I wanted to explore that as a literary theme, particularly the relationship between a woman and an animal – a woman who couldn’t have children, who adopted a puppy instead. This is something that has happened to a lot with people around me – family, neighbours, and in particular one of my closest friends. This is something that hasn’t been explored before, at least in Colombian literature.

WF: Thank you, Pilar. And I think we’ll come onto some more questions around motherhood and animals. I’d like to ask you about some other books – books about dogs, but written by men [holds up J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace]. But first, Lisa, I wanted to ask you about translating these person-dog relationships. How did context and language intersect in translating The Bitch?

LISA DILLMAN: That’s a really interesting question. I’d say, in terms of language, it was fairly like-for-like translation. But in terms of the ideas of dog ownership that Pilar just discussed, things were more complex. In The Bitch, we have a character who really wants to love a dog, but exists in an environment in which that’s not the way dogs are treated. It’s a question of sentimentalisation. Where I live, people take their dogs to Doggy Day Care; yesterday, I spoke to a student whose mother had taken their cat to a psychic. So there’s a clash of mentalities to translate – but Pilar’s prose is so spare, that clash somehow became more surmountable.

WF: You mention ideas of sentimentality, and there’s a question from Jill Nicholls in relation to this that I’d like to go to.

JILL NICHOLLS: Thank you. I love the unsentimental descriptions of nature in the book – of the sea where the child is killed, of the jungle, of the ants that make Damaris stand on a plastic chair as they ‘clean’ the house. I wondered if you have personal experience of an environment like that, Pilar?

PQ: Yes, I lived on Colombia’s Pacific Coast for nine years. I lived on a bluff – where my ex-husband and I built our house with our own hands. I think The Bitch is the result of my time there.

Even for many Colombians, the Pacific Coast is an unknown place. When Colombians think of the sea, they think of the Caribbean Sea. Even if they live in Cali, three hours from the Pacific Coast, the sea is still the Caribbean Sea. So I had to be descriptive and sensitive to the place, even for local readers. Sometimes Colombians do know the area, but, if they do, they know it with a lot of prejudice. It’s a poor area, with a large black community. And I wanted to show something other than a preconception of the region.

JN: You certainly did.

WF: Thank you, both. Could I please go to Rebekah Zammit for a related question on nature?

REBEKAH ZAMMIT: Thanks. Pilar, with a growing awareness of the natural world and its needs – as well as the needs of women and those who experience violence – what can a reader draw out of The Bitch and apply to their own reality?

PQ: Well, Damaris is born in an isolated area. In my country, if you are from the city, you have certain privileges. People on the Pacific Coast lack opportunity. And not only is Damaris born in isolation, but she’s also born poor and black. She has systemic racism, misogyny and classism against her, and she suffers the violences that come with that.

What’s sad for me, as a Colombian, is that she’s not a fictional character. She represents the everyday life of many women on the Pacific Coast. When I decided I was going to write about a Pacific Coast woman who couldn’t have kids – but wanted to – I had to be careful in showing how complex systemic violence is for people in the region.

RZ: And what can we as readers do for people like Damaris?

PQ: Be aware of them. In Colombia, our racial issues are different than in the UK or the US. So many of us are mixed. From as early as I can remember, I was told that I had Spanish – white – blood, indigenous blood, and black blood. And this is true. In Colombia, I have what in the United States or in England would be white privilege. But when I’m out of Colombia, I’m told I’m black, or brown.

It’s not just readers in the UK or US; I’ve had many readers in Colombia say the book has made them aware of how racism works in the Pacific Coast, and for that I’m glad.

WF: Lisa, I want to ask you about translating that complex racial context into the Anglophone, particularly from a US context. You’re based in Georgia – you’re speaking to us from Georgia – and that’s a very urgent context at the moment as well. What was it like translating this nuanced, localised conception of race?

LD: It was fascinating and difficult. It was something of which I was very conscious, and about which I spoke to Pilar on several occasions. Because the book is very spare, it’s a very minimalist but very direct address to race. There were certain elements that a Colombian audience would understand that an Anglophone audience wouldn’t – like simply being from a certain place signifying a character as black.

Something else I was acutely aware of was the words used or not used around race. Early on, Rogelio, Damaris’s husband, is described in Spanish as, literally, ‘a black man, big and muscly, who always looks pissed off’ – and, at this this point, Anglophone readers might not yet have surmised that Damaris herself is black. In translation – linguistically and contextually – this could be taken in a vein that was not originally intended, and as signifying something that the original did not signify. And so there were small but conscious and concrete lexical moves I made to temper that – for example, changing the order of a list of adjectives.

PQ: I didn’t realise that people didn’t know Damaris was black. A Colombian gets it from the first line – she’s from the Pacific Coast, from a fisherman’s village, so she’s obviously black. Lisa told me that this wouldn’t be obvious to people who weren’t Colombian or Latin American, and that she’d like to handle this in a nuanced way.

LD: To add to that briefly: I didn’t want to add textual markers beyond those in the original that made it overly clear to Anglophone readers that Damaris was black. I think it’s important to question our perspectives – to interrogate any default presumption of whiteness. Why should we automatically presume someone is white? I didn’t want to make overt moves to clarify Damaris as black, because it’s important to complicate those presumptions.

WF: This speaks to a question from Samantha Schnee – Samantha, could I pass over to you please.

SAMANTHA SCHNEE: I’d like to ask Lisa a little bit more about the challenges you faced during translation, and, as Pilar is fluent in English, how closely you worked together.

LD: Race, as discussed, was definitely a challenge. Another was the specificity of the jungle. I’d find myself using Google Images to try to picture it, but, even then, I didn’t have the necessary lexicon to describe it adequately. Pilar was very generous in sending me photos and describing the context; for instance, there are different types of palm that would be used by craftspeople in the tourist town in the book – one for baskets, one for satchels – and Pilar’s generosity was very helpful in conveying this in the English.

It was important for me not to generalise. The reality of this book is intensely located in Colombia’s Pacific Coast, and it was critical to convey that specificity. I left as much Spanish in as I could, and I was very fortunate to have a wonderful editor in Lydia Unsworth who allowed that, and who obliged my refusal to italicise Spanish words.

WF: Pilar – how did you find working with Lisa in this way? This is the first of your works that has been translated into English. How was that experience?

PQ: I loved it. It made me realise quite how many of the words I use are Colombian Spanish, and don’t work outside Colombia. It also made me realise how differently class and race interrelate (and sometimes don’t) in Colombia, compared to other contexts.

As a writer, when a book is finished, published, it is very difficult to judge my own work. It’s not mine anymore. I don’t want to read it anymore. But the wonderful thing about being translated by Lisa was that I came to it again as a reader. And I liked it. Lisa made me like me work, and for that I am very grateful. She did something magical: she made me be able to read my work with new eyes, and like what I saw.

MAUREEN FREELY: That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard a writer say about their translator.

WF: It’s lovely to have you both here, talking to us together. Could I pass to Yvonne Battle-Felton, please, for your two questions.

YVONNE BATTLE-FELTON: Thank you. Firstly, how did Colombian and Pacific Coast readers respond to the book?

PQ: I was afraid of how they would react, because it portrays the area in all its complexities. There was a woman from the community, who now lives in Argentina, whose mother gave her the book. She wrote to me and said Thank you. I am living in this cold place, and you brought me back to my town. I walked my beach again. And I saw my father again. I loved that.

YB-F: That’s wonderful. I was thinking, when you mentioned your friends who longed for motherhood and transferred that love onto a dog, whether any of those friends have read the book? Did they recognise themselves in it?

PQ: The close friend whom I mentioned always knows about my writing. But I didn’t tell her this time – it was too difficult. When The Bitch was published, she asked what it was about, and I said: ‘Well, I have a confession to make. It’s about a woman who can’t have kids and adopts a puppy’. She wanted to read it, and I told her she didn’t. Then I was in Frankfurt, and I met up with her, and she said she really was ready to read it. She did, and she told me it made her cry a great deal but that she loved it. She’s a very generous person.

WF: I’d like to finish with an anonymous question.

ANONYMOUS: How much have the tumultuous politics globally, and on a local level, affected your writing and translating? Do they feed in unconsciously?

PQ: Well, I’m going to say something terrible. I’ve decided to bury my head in the sand. Because every day, for so long, there has been anguish. So I decided I couldn’t watch the news anymore; I could only do what I could do around me.

There are many immigrants from Venezuela where I live, and they are suffering greatly. There are pregnant mothers with babies going hungry on the street. And, though I know that giving food isn’t going to solve this, it is what I can do from where I live. So I do a shopping trip for myself, and then I do a second shopping trip for those suffering around me. This is what I am able to do.

LD: It’s a really good question. I’m not sure that I know the answer. It has certainly affected my psyche every day for the past four years, and that has ratcheted up recently. With the murder by police of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other unarmed black people; and with being in Atlanta; and with the voice of white supremacy coming out of the White House, it has been stifling and anxiety-inducing.

I don’t know precisely how it has affected my translating, but it has affected everything. When my home state, Georgia, turned blue last week, it felt like a weight had been lifted. I know it won’t be plain sailing, but I’m hoping to begin easing out of the tension and constraint.

Pilar Quintana is a Colombian author. She debuted with Cosquillas en la lengua in 2003, and published Coleccionistas de polvos raros in 2007, the same year the Hay Festival selected her as one of the most promising young authors of Latin America. Her latest novel, The Bitch, won the prestigious Colombian Biblioteca de Narrativa Prize, and was selected for several Best Books of 2017 lists, as well as being chosen as one of the most valuable objects to preserve for future generations in a marble time capsule in Bogotá. The Bitch is the first of her works to be translated into English.

Lisa Dillman (USA) lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she translates Spanish, Catalan and Latin American writers and teaches at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Such Small Hands (winner of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award) by Andrés Barba; Signs Preceding the End of the World (winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award), Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies (shortlisted for the 2018 Dublin Literary Award) by Yuri Herrera, and Breathing Through the Wound and A Million Drops, by Víctor del Árbol.

Chaired by Will Forrester, Editor.

Pilar Quintana photo credit: Danilo Costa

The post On the Pacific Coast: The English PEN Membership Interview Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman appeared first on English PEN.

Adult men were distant beings who floated slightly above the ground, speaking in a primitive – and generally malign – language which it was best to ignore. Until you were seven, maybe eight, the masculine figure represented that dark and silent authority that the older women took care to instill in our fertile young heads.

We were not allowed to get too close to men. They weren’t to be trusted. We weren’t supposed to show them even a glimpse of our naked skin because – due to God knows what strange kind of anomaly – they could react like beasts and gobble you up in one mouthful.

After a certain age, the threat was expressed in the form of efficient euphemisms. ‘A man is a man’, our mothers would declare, in a tone that was both mournful and threatening, to which we were supposed to ascribe multiple meanings, all of them dubious and dangerous. What did this phrase mean exactly? And how to find out, when the point of a euphemism is that it needs no explanation?

I was always amazed by how deeply aware the female population was about the lack of evolution – in intellectual terms – of their male counterparts. I would hear my mother and aunts whisper about men with a certain condescension, and about women with unwarranted poison: ‘If she offers herself to him, poor soul has to react’. Men were weak-willed beings with no capacity for judgement who, when faced with the smallest provocation, would display their claws, lash out blows and bury their lethal fangs. Poor souls. It was best not to provoke them.

Under these circumstances, it was very hard to build healthy, honest relationships with someone from the opposite sex. It was like imagining that a tame pet could befriend a famished predator. As a result, we girls waged constant inner battles. If you liked a boy, a loud mental warning would dissuade you from talking to him. We grew up amid contradiction.

We grew up fearful and confused. But we grew up and, among other things, growing up means gaining independence. As you do that, you begin to write your own story that eventually superimposes itself on the one of your upbringing.

For years – and in some cases, forever – that superimposition only happens within you. We were weaving together our individuality with scraps of intimate secrets as innocent as they were unspeakable. And yet, outside us, the official story kept on being replicated: ‘Watch out: a man is a man’.

Those mixed messages from childhood continued in our teenage years, and they would also come from women, but not the kind we knew. These were women who were part of certain circles, equally hypocritical, but a lot more cynical. I remember the cousin of a friend – a girl older than us who lived in another city – giving us a lesson one afternoon. We locked ourselves up in my friend’s bedroom, still wearing our school uniforms, and listened to her with religious attention: ‘You have to get close, show a little but not too much, allow them to touch you, but never give anything away.’ Or: ‘You have to leave them wanting more, let them crawl to you and beg you for more.’ Beyond leading them on in this way, we had to remember the most important thing: always demand something in return. ‘Something’, in my Caribbean adolescence, could go from a teddy bear to a handbag to sailing to a private island with all your girlfriends. Ah, right, so this was what sex was about: a poker game, trading in favours, a secret key that belonged to us girls. ‘Sounds difficult’, I said to my friend that afternoon once her cousin had gone, leaving us in perplexity, lying on her bed, staring at a constellation of doubts on the ceiling.

Men’s role seemed a lot simpler. United in their inability to control their own instincts, they were limited to merely reacting. They were there, without having to move a finger: expectant, waiting. Whereas we girls had to cautiously approach them, quietly tame them, constantly measuring our limitations, being careful to provoke them just the right amount, careful not to give too much away. In the sum of those strategic decisions lay the secret wisdom of our female gender.

They say that what is planted in a child’s mind grows strong and deep roots that are hard to dig up. I could never think of sex as a key that would bring me benefits because I was basically consumed by guilt all the time. Even when as an adult I was able to enjoy a normal, uncomplicated sex life, there was always a tiny part of me that would feel like there was something not right in that exchange. Is he taking advantage of me? Is he going to think I’m too easy? Is he like this with all the others? I would ask myself all of those questions which, in today’s light, I find absurd but also humiliating. Why think of myself as a cherry that, if bitten and abandoned, will rot away? Because of a flaw in my childhood, obviously.

The worst thing was realising that among my female friends we would still, in one way or another, lie to each other.

What you did with your boyfriend was always more than you dared confess to others. There was a part of the story that you had to leave out because of fear or shame but, above all, because you’d rather lose an eye than lose your reputation. What if in the end, just like we’d always been told, that was actually the most valuable thing we possessed?

I truly believe in making radical – albeit always painful – changes to our most deeply-rooted ideas. I think it is harder to change behaviours, because many of the behaviours we incorporate are unthinking (they come imbued in those ideas we thought we had eradicated from our minds). For an organism to get rid of the poison in its body, it needs to undergo a kind of dialysis. In my case, the first thing I did was to create some distance, to face that dubious scenario with a different perspective and accept that, however much you hate it, you still carry some of it in you. I accepted also that the outcome of growing up in the midst of coded messages around sex, of learning the art of speaking in euphemisms, lying gracefully and manipulating, was the formation of a hypersensitive awareness to similar behaviours. Even more so when that behaviour comes from within. I don’t allow myself to be self-indulgent. I live with a whip in hand, ready to detect the toxins leftover from my upbringing. I feel I have made some progress as far as I am concerned: I have been able to change. My next ambition is a bit grander. Now that I have children, I aim to change an entire generation. Wish me luck.

Margarita García Robayo grew up in Colombia and now lives in Buenos Aires. She is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays and several collections of short stories, including Cosas peores (Worse Things), which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her books have been published in Latin America as well as in Spain, and have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Fish Soup (translated by Charlotte Combe, Charco Press, 2018), a collection of novellas and short stories, brings her work into English for the first time.

Translated by Carolina Orloff.

Margarita will join Sharlene Teo and Sarvat Hasin for an event with English PEN at the Free Word Centre on 30 October. Find out more.

The post We grew up fearful and confused appeared first on English PEN.

The Year 1977

The gulls walked along the beach

inscribing track marks in the sand.

Then once again flew out to sea

and left their track marks in the sand.

How brutally it fell, that year, the tragedy!

Then came the water,

sea-spray, silk,

and washed away the tracks. Inland

the palm trees, mangos,

acacias

from the collection of poems Mangrove

My brother Juan was killed with a shotgun by the manager of his farm in the gulf of Urabá, in northern Colombia, one night in April 1977. He died at thirty-six. Juan and I had a close friendship; my affection for him was boundless. Words cannot measure the grief I felt at his death.

At the time, I was twenty-six years old, and I had been writing more or less regularly for eight years. I was working on a book of short stories I never tried to publish, a collection of poems that also remained unpublished and a short novel which ultimately did not work and which, years later, I rewrote and published as a long short story. I had developed a certain aptitude for seeing the literary possibilities in those events that we call real and perhaps this is why I quickly realised that Juan’s death had the qualities of a tragedy. The aesthetic qualities, I mean. That was all it took.

Although I was devastated by his death, I studied it coldly, as a craftsman might study a fallen tree and calculate the size and shape of the canoe that might be made from it. Obviously, I had qualms before I started to write the novel, since it meant exploiting family tragedy to create literature; nevertheless I started to write.

Thirty-six years have passed since Juan’s death; thirty-one since In the Beginning was the Sea was first published. After so much time, it is difficult to know which details in the novel are taken from life and which are incidents or places that I had to imagine, invent, or infer from other events in order that the novel could take form and become real. With the passing years, the facts which, though simple, had been difficult to comprehend even at that time, in that place, gradually disintegrated and crumbled, losing their reality. The novel, by contrast, has survived – kept alive by readers – and it could be said that it is more truthful or more real than the events that prompted it.

Over the years many people read the novel, which was regularly reprinted. Perhaps it will continue to find readers for some years yet and come to be the sole trace of what happened on that night in April 1977 on a beautiful beach hemmed in by sea and forest just south of Panama.

The novel was my attempt to prevent everything being swept away by the wind. I no longer have any qualms of conscience about having written it. Now, it seems obvious to me that literary works stem, and have always stemmed, from memories, whether recent or remote, whether our own or those of others. Where else could they originate?

I believe that it is impossible for human beings to fashion out of whole cloth – still less to create – that only nature, or God, can create and we are left to work with what already exists: recreating, reinventing, that is to say recalling it in all its horror and its harmony.

It is our safeguard against death.

The post Writing, recreating, surviving appeared first on English PEN.

Translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis

It is no hyperbole, brought on by the sadness we feel, to state that García Márquez was one of the last giants of the twentieth century, the kind of writer who doesn’t seem to exist any more, his works combining at least two elements that are hard to reconcile in today’s world: a boundless popularity among readers and at the same time enormous acclaim from the literary and academic establishment. Today, it would be almost impossible to imagine a phenomenon like One Hundred Years of Solitude, with sixty million copies sold in less than fifty years (more than a million a year), and at the same time read and respected in the highest circles, the object of thousands of doctoral theses, and reaching a universal audience: in India alone it has been translated into 24 languages. Today, celebrity can go one of two ways: either writers are popular, but scorned by critics and academics, or else they are cult figures, loved by the critical establishment, but condemned to minimal sales. The phenomenon of García Márquez is that he combined the sales figures of a Fifty Shades of Grey with the reputation and cult status of a David Foster Wallace or a Roberto Bolaño.

Through his novels and stories, Gabriel García Márquez gave literary form to a world, the world of the Caribbean, and did so with such universality, force and talent that for decades his books became the stereotypical image of the whole of Latin America in the rest of the world. There can be no doubt that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most important literary work in Spanish since Don Quixote. In it, both the world and the language are born again, revealing themselves with such force that Hispanic culture came back into the limelight. Spanish had not had such prominence in the world since Cervantes, and its literature had not been at the forefront of Western culture.

Another important aspect of the work of García Márquez was his own life. Born in Aracataca, a poor, unremarkable town in the Caribbean region of Colombia, he became one of the most famous people in the world. Presidents, businessmen, actors, sports personalities, even the Pope hoped to have an appointment with him, to meet him and listen to him talk. The arc of his life was one of the most extraordinary imaginable. ‘My luck was badly distributed,’ he said, referring to the fact that up until the age of forty he had neither success nor money and had to do many different jobs to support his family, until he achieved worldwide fame and everything that went with it. ‘Being famous,’ he said once, ‘is like having a birthday every day.’ Like most intellectuals in the 1960s, García Márquez was a Communist and thought that Cuba represented the hope of freedom and independence for the whole continent. He was Fidel Castro’s closest friend and staunchest supporter, which earned him a great deal of criticism. He was also a friend of Felipe González and often took part in his political campaigns, and of Francois Mitterrand, who, in awarding him the Legion d’Honneur, said, ‘Vous appartenez au monde que j’aime,’ which brought tears to García Márquez’s eyes. He was a friend of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and it was during his term of office that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was just 54. On one occasion he was shut up in the Vatican library with Pope Paul VI and they had to call security. He was also a friend of Bill Clinton, who said on the occasion of García Márquez’s eightieth birthday: ‘One hundred years of solitude is the most important novel ever written, in any language, on the New World.’

I met him for the first time in 1995, at a literary festival in Biarritz. After a photo session in his hotel, the Argentinean photographer Daniel Mordzinski invited him over to a table where a group of writers he was anxious to meet were sitting. I was there, along with Jean-Claude Izzo, José Manuel Fajardo and Luis Sepúlveda. García Márquez greeted each one warmly, and when he came to me he said, ‘I’ve been reading your work.’ The following week he called me and we talked for about two hours. Recently I came across a similar episode in the memoirs of Salman Rushdie, in which he tells of a phone conversation with García Márquez. ‘Gabo! It’s like calling a god a pet name,’ says Rushdie. I felt the same and that’s the reason I never called him ‘Gabo’.  Later I saw him in Bogotá, and worked with him on a book of memoirs by the chief of the National Police. From then on, I met him in a number of countries, especially Colombia, Spain and Mexico. I became a diplomat thanks to his recommending me to the Colombian Foreign Ministry, but my fondest memory of him is a story he told me in 2011, during a lunch with Carlos Fuentes and other guests at the San Ángel Inn. ‘Which part of the world are you in now?’ he asked me. I said India, and asked him if he had ever been there. He said yes. ‘Fidel once asked me to go with him to a meeting of the Non-Aligned Nations in New Delhi,’ he said, ‘and when we landed at the airport I decided to stay on the plane in order not to disturb the protocol. Suddenly, I looked through the window and saw Indira Gandhi getting off the presidential rostrum and coming up the steps of the plane. When she entered the plane she cried, ‘Where’s García Márquez?’ From that time on, we were inseparable. She spoke French, and by the third day I felt as if Indira had been born in Aracataca. She invited me to go on a tour of India, organized by her, and I accepted. She said she would be in touch.’ García Márquez’s face clouded over, his eyes filled with tears, and he said, ‘Then I heard the news that she had been assassinated, and that was why I promised I’d never go to India again.’

In the final years of his life, it was Mercedes Barcha de García, to whom he was married for sixty years, who took care of everything. She was a woman of remarkable character and strength, a true first lady: ‘The only person I know who can tell Fidel Castro off,’ García Márquez would say of her.

In an interview he gave when he turned seventy, he said that he would give everything, his books and his millions of readers, to have another forty years of life. ‘To do what?’ the journalist asked, and he replied, ‘To start all over again.’

The post To start all over again appeared first on English PEN.

You wrote this book and many others when you lived away from Colombia. Do you live there now? Do you need that distance to write about your country and why?

Yes, I do feel that I need the distance, or needed it in order to start dealing with my country in fiction. It took me six years of living abroad to understand how to write about Colombia, and I’ve said elsewhere that the problem was solved through distance, both geographical and chronological. It’s hard to say why, but I do know that in 1996, when I left Colombia, my city had just been through a long decade of harrowing violence, and one of the consequences of those years was, for me, a sort of alienation. My imagination (my literary imagination) rejected my country, or rather was rejected by it. That changed over the years of living abroad.

Antonio sounds like a voice of his generation. Do you feel that your generation is lost in some ways because of the Colombian drug wars and the violence that ruled Colombia and Bogota for so many years?

No, I don’t think my generation is lost, but my last novel is in part an exploration of that question: how did those years of extreme violence shape us? How were our lives affected by the fact of being born at the same time as the drug trade? My generation was born in the early 70s, as the first planes with marijuana left Colombia for the United States. We grew up at the same time as the cartels. Does that have an effect on you? These questions became important for me.

Bogota seems to me one of the main characters in your novel. Do you feel as strongly about that city as Antonio?

I feel strongly about the city that lives in my memory. It’s not the whole city, but a sort of enclave in which I moved during my university years: the city centre, where some of the most important events in the history of my country took place, was also the area where I spent most of my time as an adult, before leaving Colombia in 1996. The city of the book is the city I remember. It might not be the city that exists right now. But that doesn’t really matter.

What is, for you, the role of novels when dealing with the past?

Well, novels do tend to be places where we remember things that would otherwise be forgotten. Literature tends to do this: to resist the world’s tendency to move on, to forget. Whether it’s our individual past or that collective past we call history, the novel preserves things. Furthermore, we all know how the passing of time makes us see historical events in a general, collective light. When novels deal with the past, those events recover their particular, individual quality: they become, once again, things that happened to individuals.

Do you believe that the role of the writer is to ‘bear witness’ and to explore traumatic events? Do you see this attempt to get to the dark places of one’s memory as healing or destructive?

I don’t believe writers have a role. Writing fiction is a very strange thing to dedicate your life to, and the motivations are diverse and not always conscious. I can speak about me and only me, and say that my motivation is simple: to understand. WG Sebald, a writer who is important for me, says somewhere that “memory is the moral backbone of literature”. And I agree: remembering is a moral act.

Antonio jeopardises his family life to find out the truth about Ricardo. He does not ultimately find out why Ricardo was killed. Why did you decide to leave the ending open?

Because the other option would have changed the genre of the book: in the Colombia of the 90s, finding out the reasons for a murder would have been almost like science fiction.

Ricardo Laverde is introduced to the drug trade by a volunteer from American Peace Corps. Is that role of Peace Corps in starting the drug trade a fact or pure speculation?

It was one of those unspoken truths that exist in every society. I grew up “knowing” (please notice the inverted commas) about those episodes, but I wasn’t able to find the proof while writing the novel. Of course, novels are not just about things as they happened, I thought, but also about things as they might have happened. So I decided my novel could be the place where that piece of unspoken truth could be spoken. After publication of the book, all the witnesses I needed, all the people who saw it happen just as I tell it, came up to me to confirm that things did happened as they are told in the novel. Which gave me a strange satisfaction, even if I insist on the novelist’s privilege of imagining probable realities as much as factual ones.

What is happening in Colombian literature at the moment? Which Colombian writers would you like to see introduced to the British audience?

There’s an extraordinary writer, a contemporary and a friend of García Márquez, who died in the 70s. His name is Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and he wrote two short books, a novel and a short story collection, which deserve to be known all over the world. I should also mention R.H. Moreno-Durán, author of two or three of the best Colombian novels of the last decades. He died in 2004.

About the author

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. He was nominated as one of the Bogotá 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation. His previous books include The Informers, which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Secret History of Costaguana, which won the Qwerty prize in Barcelona. His books have been published in fifteen languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.

About the editor

Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

Additional Information

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America, he is known as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically, intellectually and politically active climate for which mid-century Colombia has become known.  His books in English are currently out of print.

Rafael Humberto Moreno-Duran  (1945 – 2005 ) was a novelist , short story writer,  essayist and playwright. He is considered one of the most important 20th century Colombian writers.   Books in English are not available.

The Sound of Things Falling is translated by Anne McLean. Annehas translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás Eloy Martínez. She has twice won the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction: for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 (which also won her the Valle Inclán Award), and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009. She lives in Toronto.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A – Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling appeared first on English PEN.

The main character of the tale is, as I’ve said, the poet Ivo Machado, born in the Azores islands. What here concerns us most is his everyday identity as air traffic controller; one of those persons in the control tower of the airports who guide planes across the roads of the sky.

Here’s the story.

When Ivo was a young man of twenty-five – in the mid-eighties – he controlled flights in the airport of Santa María, the largest island of the Azores archipelago, in the mid-Atlantic, and equidistant between Europe and North America.

One night when he arrived at his post the boss said to him: “Today you’ll guide only one plane”.

Ivo was surprised, as the norm was to direct a dozen aeroplanes. So the boss explained:

“It’s a special case – an English pilot who’s flying a Second World  War British bomber to Florida for a plane collector who bought it at an auction in London. He made a touchdown here and is continuing towards Canada, as the machine is somewhat limited, but he ran into a storm, had to fly in zigzag, and now he’s got little fuel left – not enough to get to Canada, nor to turn back. He’s going to fall into the sea.”

And with that, he passed the headphones to Ivo.

“Try to calm him down; he’s very nervous. Tell him that a Canadian rescue squad in launches and helicopters is heading to the estimated point of his fall.”

Ivo put on the headphones and began to talk to the pilot, who was very nervous indeed. The first thing he wanted to know was the temperature of the water, and if there were sharks.  Ivo reassured him; there were not. Then they launched into a personal conversation, which is something very unusual between a control tower and an aviator.

The English pilot asked Ivo about his life, his likes and dislikes, and feelings. Ivo said that he was a poet, and the Englishman asked him to recite something from memory. Fortunately my friend remembered some poems of Pablo Neruda, Tagore, and Aimé Césaire. He recited, and so some time passed as they talked about sonnets of life and death and some verses that Ivo remembered of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where a man was also battling against the fury of the universe.

Time went by, and the aviator, now much calmer, asked Ivo to recite some of his own verses. So with an enormous effort, Ivo translated some of his poems to the Englishman – for him alone, a lone pilot in an old bomber, fighting a violent storm in the middle of the night and the ocean, the sharpest and most terrifying image of solitude.

“There’s a deep sadness and certain disenchantment in your poems”, said the aviator, and they talked of life, and dreams and of the fragility of things, and of course of the future – until the fatal moment came, the fuel gauge arrow hit red and the bomber plane fell into the sea.

When this happened, the control tower supervisor told Ivo to go home. After such an experience, he said, it would not be good for Ivo to direct other planes.

The next day, my friend knew the end of the story. The rescue squad found the plane intact, floating on the waves, but the pilot was dead. On impact with the water part of the cabin structure came loose, hitting him on the neck.

“That man died peacefully”, Ivo says to me, “and for that reason I can continue to write poetry.”

Months later, the IATA investigated the accident and Ivo had to hear, before a jury, the recording of his conversation with the pilot. They congratulated him. It was the only time in the history of aviation where a control tower frequency was saturated with poetry…

“I still dream of his voice”, Ivo tells me, and I understand. I also think that we should always write in this mode: as if all our words were for a lone pilot, fighting in the middle of the night, against a violent storm.

About the author

Santiago Gamboa was born in Bogotá, Colombia. His debut novel, Páginas de vuelta (1995), established him as one of the most innovative voices in Colombian literature. He has since published seven novels and two collections of short stories. His journalism appears regularly in El Tiempo (Colombia) and Cromos, and he is a regular contributor to Radio France International. Previously Colombia’s  cultural attaché in New Delhi, he currently lives in Rome. His latest novel is Necropolis, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis and published by Europa Editions.

Additional information

Ivo Machado is a Portuguese poet, born in Terceria, in the Azores, in 1958. His work has been translated into Spanish, English, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian and Bosnian.

Find out more about Europa Editions.

Colombiage celebrates contemporary Colombian art – www.colombiage.com.

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