Just as García Márquez was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Latin American literary “Boom” was coalescing as a global phenomenon. Mario Vargas Llosa, the youngest of the group (born in 1936) but one of the most energetic, had published his collection of stories Los jefes in 1959. He followed that with two novels that established him as a major voice in the Spanish-speaking world: La ciudad y los perros (1963), known in English as The Time of the Hero, and The Green House (1966). Vargas Llosa had exchanged some correspondence with García Márquez prior to 1967. At this time, they still had not met.
In 1967, Carlos Fuentes published an important novel as well: A Change of Skin, an experimental exercise à la the French nouveau roman, in which a group of friends travel from Mexico City to Veracruz during Holy Week in a Volkswagen. The novel stirred interest among readers in Spain. It was Fuentes who served as a bridge between García Márquez and a number of other Latin American authors who would be the principal players of El Boom.
Its leading voice, who had heard about García Márquez from numerous sources but had not met him personally, was the exiled Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Born in Brussels in 1914, Cortázar wrote some of the best short stories of the twentieth century, including those in the collections Blow Up, End of the Game, and We Loved Glenda So Much. His experimental essays in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds and his translations (he rendered an enormous amount of Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre into Spanish) made him highly influential. His novels, especially Hopscotch, published in 1963—four years before One Hundred Years of Solitude—was an early cornerstone of El Boom and is said to have helped pave the way for the consolidation of Latin American literature worldwide as tradition of its own. Cortázar died in Paris in 1984 and is buried in Montparnasse.
Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar, along with a loose cadre of others, including Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay, 1909– 1994), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil, 1908–1967), José Lezama Lima (Cuba, 1910–1976), Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, 1914–1999), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917–2005), José Donoso (Chile, 1924–1996), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba, 1929–2005), Manuel Puig (Argentina, 1932–1990), and, later, women such as Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina, born in 1938) and Isabel Allende (Chile, born in 1942), produced avant-garde work about Latin America that awakened readers beyond their national borders to the political, social, economic, and religious reality of a continent defined by the ghosts of colonialism centuries after it had entered modernity.1 El Boom was as much an aesthetic phenomenon as it was a commercial endeavor. From Barcelona—which considered itself the literary capital of the Spanish-speaking world, especially when it came to the acquisition, production, and distribution of commercial books—came an infusion of refreshing, provocative ideas that were ingrained on a heterogeneous yet hungry readership in the vast Hispanic world.
Bursting with references to García Márquez’s early literary influences, One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with echoes of other Latin American writers and their fiction. In chapter ten, there is an outburst of rabbits, a clear homage to Julio Cortázar’s story “Letters to Mother.” Elsewhere, there are characters in Macondo who perform in front of a passing train, just as Cortázar’s protagonists had done in “End of Game.” The important Latin American figure, baroque Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, is mentioned, as are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.
In and of itself, the rezeptiongeschichte of García Márquez’s book is intriguing. Toward the middle of April 1967, Francisco Porrúa of Editorial Sudamericana phoned Tomás Eloy Martínez “in an exalted voice,” asking him to come immediately to his house and read an extraordinary book. Porrúa said: “It’s so exhilarant—in Spanish, delirante—that I don’t know if the author is a genius or is crazy.”2 Years later, Martínez recollected that it was raining heavily that day. “On the sidewalk of the street where Porrúa lived there were some loose pavers. Trying not to stumble, I got soaked. The long hallway that went from the apartment entrance to the studio was carpeted with rows of papers that appeared to be inviting the guest to clean his shoes. That’s what I did: I stepped on them. They were the originals of One Hundred Years of Solitude that Porrúa, excited with his reading, had left on the floor. Fortunately, the shoe prints didn’t erase any of those sentences that readers of García Márquez continue to repeat devotedly, as if they were prayers.”3
Martínez recalled that the following day he and Porrúa invited García Márquez to Buenos Aires to be part of a three-member committee that Editorial Sudamericana and the weekly Primera Plana, of which Martínez was in charge, organized annually to judge a literary prize. In the June issue, the cover of Primera Plana was dedicated to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which it described, interestingly, as “la gran novela de América,” the great American novel—not as the great Latin American novel but as the great novel of the Americas, regardless of language. The cover story was written by Martínez himself and is arguably the very first, or one of the first, enthusiastic reviews of the novel ever to appear.
The colophon of the Editorial Sudamericana edition, on page 352, contained the following information: the edición príncipe, first edition, was printed on May 30, 1967, by Talleres Gráficos de la Compañía Impresora Argentina, at Calle Alsina No. 2049, in Buenos Aires. A few days later, the novel appeared in bookstores and on newspaper stands throughout the city. It was placed alongside other titles published by Emecé and Minotauro, with whom Sundamericana shared distribution. The publishing house didn’t do any publicity, which makes its instant success all the more astonishing.
The publication day was set for May 30, but the original cover, which García Márquez had asked his friend the painter Vicente Rojo to design, was late. Rojo had not received the manuscript in time, so the first edition was printed with another cover. Ultimately, Rojo’s cover, which was used for a subsequent edition and became an icon in Latin America when the novel sold millions, would be as recognizable as the novel itself. It is a simple geometrical design that includes what appear to be lottery motifs (four bells, four moons, three stars within squarish octagons); according to some, the design approximates a children’s game played in the banana region of Colombia’s coast, where the novel takes place.4
Rojo’s design is in sharp contrast to the covers of the first edition and subsequent foreign editions, including the American translation published in 1970. These covers, awash in greens and yellows, showcase sunken boats in a jungle landscape or an assortment of parrots, prostitutes, and generals. The imagery showcases the erotic, mythical nature of the plot as perceived outside Latin America. This type of design successfully marketed the novel and—especially for audiences in Europe—became synonymous with the literary themes of El Boom.
Rojo’s cover was somewhat controversial. Just like other prepublication readers, the artist fell in love with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Amazed by its baroque style, he had purposely taken the opposite approach in his design, which, in essence, was uncomplicated. He preferred for the reader to encounter the novel’s labyrinthine quality directly. The font he used for the author’s name, title (in a slightly larger point size), and publisher was in all capitals and appeared slightly distressed. At the last minute, Rojo opted to invert the E of SOLEDAD, for no apparent reason. That inversion generated much debate. The E looked as if perceived through a mirror. Did the design contain a hidden meaning through which one could unravel the mysteries in the storyline? According to one biographer, Editorial Sudamericana received a number of letters from booksellers complaining that it looked like a typographical error that needed to be corrected in a future edition. Some actually made the correction themselves.5
After much delay, the novel’s publication was rescheduled to Monday, June 5. The date didn’t carry the weight that it did in New York publishing: for publicity departments, it’s the target date for reviews and other media to come out. In Buenos Aires, it was simply the moment the book was made available to readers. On June 5, Argentine newspapers (including the principal ones, La Nación, Clarín, and La Razón) devoted their headlines to the conflict in the Middle East. The Israeli army, led by Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, had invaded the Sinai desert, which is Egyptian territory, through the Gaza Strip. There was enormous tension in the air. Jordan and Syria were ready to join other Arab countries in opposition to the Zionist attack.6
The book sold about 800 copies in the first week, which, according to Martínez, was unusual for a novel by an unknown author. The following week that number tripled, largely due to the Primera Plana cover story. The first two printings—approximately 11,000 copies—sold out in a month. By the time García Márquez arrived in Buenos Aires, his novel had been on the best-seller list for a month and a half.7 Martínez remembers that García Márquez’s plane landed at 2:30 A.M. He and Porrúa “were the only people in the airport, tormented by the inclement cold of that end of winter. We saw him descend with his indescribable plaid jacket, in which sparkling reds were intertwined with electrifying blues. He was accompanied by a gorgeous woman, of big oriental eyes, that looked like a Colombian-coast version of Queen Nefertiti. It was his wife, Mercedes Barcha.” According to Martínez, the two were ravenously hungry. “They pretended to look at the rising sun coming out against the infinite Pampa, near a bonfire where beef was cooking. And that’s how it was. Dawn surprised us in a restaurant on the banks of the River Plate in which García Márquez entertained waiters with endless stories. Neither he nor I have forgotten the name of that fonda, which no longer exists. It was called Angelito el insólito, the astounding little angel. García Márquez left us hypnotized and exhausted that sunrise. It was the first time Porrúa and I saw the tropic in the act of exploding.”
Martínez’s recollection of those days is an invaluable source that allows us to determine the moment in which García Márquez’s life changed forever. His description of the Colombians’ stay in Buenos Aires ranges from equanimity to exhilaration. “García Márquez and Mercedes spent two or three days in an unfair state of anonymity,” he recalled. Argentine readers devoured the novel by the millions but “had forgotten the photograph on the cover of Primera Plana and, thus, didn’t recognize him on the street.” That soon changed. On the third morning, the García Márquezes were having breakfast on Avenida Santa Fe when they saw a housewife, coming back from the market with shopping bags of lettuce and fresh tomatoes, pass by with a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. According to Martínez,
That same night we went to the theater. At the Di Tella cultural center the play Los siameses, one of the best plays by the Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, had its debut. We went into the theater a few minutes before the curtain went up, with the room lights still on. García Márquez and Mercedes appeared to be disoriented by the parade of needless leather and shining feathers. I was following closely only three steps away. They were about to sit down when an unknown person screamed “Bravo! Bravo!” and started applauding. A woman added, “For your novel, García Márquez!” Once his name was uttered, the entire theater stood up and ignited in a long ovation. In that precise moment, I felt as if fame was descending from heaven, as if a living creature.
Three days later I lost track of them. Secretaries were needed for the phone calls trying to reach them to be screened and to move him to another hotel so that readers would allow him to rest. The one before last time I crossed paths with him in Buenos Aires was in order to point to him on a map a secret corner in the park of Palermo were he could finally kiss Mercedes without being interrupted. The last time was at the airport, when the two were returning to their home in Mexico City, overwhelmed with flowers. He was covered with the kind of glory that since then has become his second skin.8
García Márquez’s experience in Buenos Aires in June 1967 was the beginning of a new chapter in his life. It was there where he acquired his newfound fame, but the shock of becoming a public figure overnight didn’t sit well with him. His natural shyness, his sense that privacy was something to be protected, had been challenged by the insatiable hunger of readers eager to learn as much as possible about his life: his family, his past, his craft as a writer, and the inception of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The García Márquezes returned to Mexico, but they did not stay for long. They moved to Barcelona, where the writer hoped to find a suitable, quiet environment in which to write another novel he already had in mind, about a Latin American dictator. It would be called The Autumn of the Patriarch. Its plot would fit into what has come to be known in El Boom as “la novela del dictador,” long narratives with tyrants as the protagonist. Aside from García Márquez’s novel, which would be published in 1975, there are Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente (Guatemala, 1946), Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme (Paraguay, 1974), Alejo Carpentier’s Reason of State (Cuba, 1974), Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tale (Argentina, 1983), Tomás Eloy Martínez’s The Perón Novel (Argentina, 1985), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (Peru, 2000).9
In 1967, Pablo Neruda met García Márquez during the poet’s brief stay in Barcelona.10 In Fin del mundo, a collection of Neruda’s poetry from 1968 and 1969, he includes, in section X, a bouquet of five pieces that functions as a personal chronicle of the enormous interest El Boom writers were generating worldwide. Neruda praises Julio Cortázar, César Vallejo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Otero, Augusto Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, and others. But García Márquez is the only one about whom Neruda writes an entire poem, a section within the series, never rendered into English. In the thirteen-line poem, Neruda sings to the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The poem is simply called “García Márquez.”
The poem, although simple, records the epoch-making events of his age. Although it includes some imagery that may evoke the Buendía saga, it isn’t concrete enough to allow the reader to understand Neruda’s vision of the novel itself—beyond that he celebrates it as being extraordinarily vivid in its depictions of the life of the indigent in Colombia.
There are photographs of Neruda and García Márquez in Barcelona, accompanied by, among others, Carlos Fuentes and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the latter responsible for the 1966 biography of Pablo Neruda, El viajero inmóvil [The Unitinerant Traveler]. It isn’t difficult to understand the empathy between Neruda and García Márquez. The latter sometimes said unflattering things about the former—for instance, that Neruda was loyal to his wife Matilde, rather than faithful—but he admired the Nobel laureate and nurtured affection for him as a person. In 1992, García Márquez said:
Pablo Neruda . . . devoted a morning with us to major book hunting in second-hand bookshops. He walked among the crowds like an invalid elephant, with a childish interest in the internal mechanisms of every single thing. The world, to him, seemed like an immense wind-up toy . . . I have never met anyone closer to the idea we have of a refined gluttonous Renaissance Pope . . . Matilde, his wife, put a bib on him which looked more like something out of a barber’s shop than a dining-room. But it was the only way to stop him from bathing himself in sauces. That day . . . was a typical example. He ate three whole lobsters, pulling them apart with a surgeon’s mastery, and at the same time devoured everyone else’s wishes with his eyes, and picked at a bit of everyone’s, with a delight in eating that was contagious: Galician clams, Cantabrian barnacles, Alicante prawns . . . And all the while, just like the French, all he talked about was other exquisite dishes, especially the prehistoric seafood of Chile which he carried with him in his heart.11
With the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude having established him as the commanding leader of El Boom, García Márquez spent the next three years trying to satisfy the growing interest of his international public. This entailed responding to interviewers, participating in public dialogues, and taking care of his literary affairs.
In August 1967, he met Vargas Llosa for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, specifically in Maiquetía, where Simón Bolívar International Airport is located, a few miles from La Guajira. Caracas had recently suffered an earthquake. Vargas Llosa was coming from London, where he had been teaching, to receive the Premio Rómulo Gallegos for his novel La casa verde. García Márquez was arriving from Mexico, to participate in the XIII Congreso Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. In his book García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, published by Barral in Barcelona four years later, Vargas Llosa wrote that their airplanes landed almost at the same time. “That’s the first time we saw each other’s faces. I remember his very well that night: distraught as a result of the fear of flying—of which he is viscerally scared—uncomfortable with the photographers and journalists that were cornering him. We became friends and spent the next two weeks together, which was the time the conference lasted, in that Caracas which, with dignity, buried its dead and swept the debris from the earthquake. The very recent success of One Hundred Years of Solitude had turned him into a popular character; and he enjoyed the role: his colorful shirts blinded the brainy professor during the plenary sessions; he told journalists, with a stone face like his Tía Petra’s, that his novels were written by his wife but he signed them because they were very bad and Mercedes didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility; asked by television if Rómulo Gallegos was a great novelist, he meditated and responded: ‘In Canaima there is a description of a rooster that is quite good.’ But behind all those games there is a personality increasingly fed up with his role as a star. There is a shy person for whom it is torture to speak in front of a microphone or in public. On August 7, he was unable to refuse participating in a seminar at the Ateneo in Caracas, titled ‘The Novelists and the Critics,’ in which he was scheduled to deliver a fifteen-minute talk about his own work. We are sitting together, and before his time came, he infected me with his infinite terror: he was ashen, his hands were sweaty, he smoked like a chimney. He spoke while seated, at a speed during the first few seconds that made us all be at the edge of our seat, and finally pulled off a story that brought down the house.”12
From Caracas, García Márquez traveled to Bogotá and continued to Lima, where he’d been invited by the Universidad de Ingeniería to talk about his life and work. He then visited Buenos Aires for the Premio Primera Plana, went to Colombia, and returned with his family to Barcelona, where they lived. He told Daniel Samper: “There is no day in which I don’t get calls from two or three editors or the same amount of journalists. Since my wife is the one who answers the phone, she has to say that I’m not in. If this is glory, it’s a piece of crap. (No, you better don’t state that because that line in printed form will look ridiculous.) But it’s true. One doesn’t even know who one’s friends are. So I’ll start by saying that I won’t give any more interviews because I’m up to my eyeballs. I came to Barcelona because I thought that here no one would know me but the problem is the same. At first I said: no more radio or television but I’ll say yes to the printed media because they are my colleagues. But no more printed media either. The journalists come, we end up getting drunk together until two o’clock in the morning and they end up leaving what I said out in their reportage. Also, I never go over what they write. In the last two years, every published statement of mine is nonsense.”13
Elsewhere, García Márquez said, “I was once asked, I can’t remember where, how my life differed before and after that book, and I said that after it ‘there are four hundred more people.’ That’s to say before the book I had my friends, but now there are enormous numbers of people who want to see me and talk to me—journalists, academics, readers. It’s strange . . . most of my readers aren’t interested in asking questions, they only want to talk about the book. That’s very flattering if you consider case by case, but added up they begin to be a problem in one’s life. I would like to please them all, but as that’s impossible I have to act meanly . . . you see? For instance, by saying I’m leaving town when all I’m really doing is changing hotels. That’s how vedettes behave, something I always hated, and I don’t want to play the vedette. There is, besides, a problem of conscience when deceiving people and dodging them. All the same I have to lead my own life, so the moment comes when I tell lies. Well, that can be boiled down to a cruder phrase . . . I say, ‘I’ve had it to the balls with García Márquez!’”14
His El Boom colleagues were simultaneously in awe and envious of his ascent to stardom. In his personal history of the period, José Donoso argued that from 1967 on, things had obviously changed for the region. It was no longer a backwater forgotten by the rest of the world. Donoso stated that “the triumph at the level of commotion and scandal of García Márquez’s novel—and I must clarify that the ‘scandal’ is a product, above all, of how unbearable it is to some people that a book of such literary quality can be an unprecedented public success—has made it the only novel whose sales may justifiably be called ‘substantial.’ And only as of 1969 could the Colombian novelist enjoy the ‘luxury’ of living where and how he wants and of writing when he wants, besides taking pleasure in imposing his own conditions on the publishers and the movie producers who surround him.”15
By 1969, García Márquez managed to keep the hoopla at bay, at least to some degree. Finally able to give up screenwriting and freelancing to become a professional writer, his biggest challenge was to establish a routine. He told Rita Guibert, an Argentine journalist compiling a book of conversations with seven Latin American writers, that he always woke up very early, “at about six in the morning. I read the paper in bed, drink my coffee while I listen to music on the radio, and about nine—after the boys have gone to school—I sit down to write.” He wrote without any interruption “until half past two, which is when the boys come home and noise begins in the house. I haven’t answered the telephone all morning . . . my wife has been filtering calls. We have lunch between half past two and three.”
“If I’ve been to bed late the night before,” García Márquez added, “I take a siesta until four in the afternoon. From that time until six I read and listen to music—I always listen to music, except when I’m writing because I pay more attention to it than to what I’m writing. Then I go out and have coffee with someone I have a date with and in the evening friends always come to the house. That seems to be an ideal state of things for a professional writer, the culmination of all he’s been aiming at. But, as you find out once you get there, it’s sterile. I realized that I’d become involved in a completely sterile existence—absolutely the opposite of the life I led when I was a reporter . . . Yes, there’s a natural tendency—when you have solved a series of material problems—to become bourgeois and shut yourself in an ivory tower, but I have an urge, and also an instinct, to escape from that situation—a sort of tug-of-war is going on inside me.”16
One Hundred Years of Solitude was translated into dozens of languages, but García Márquez was unhappy with the Russian edition. The translation by Valeri Stolbov was censored by the Soviet regime and a number of supposedly erotic episodes were eliminated. Stolbov defended the deletions as “unimportant,” stressing that the structural bulk of the narrative remained intact and that Soviet readers were able to access García Márquez’s novel just like anybody else in the world. When asked in 1979 by a journalist how an essential ingredient in the Colombian writer’s universe could be eliminated, the Russian translator answered: “Yes, it’s true, we cannot divorce the erotic element, something profoundly human, of García Márquez’s oeuvre. But I want to be clear that we didn’t have a censoring spirit; had we had one, we wouldn’t have published the book altogether. One must take into consideration that the novel had the largest printing ever in the history of the world. In the Socialist world itself, three and a half million copies represent something altogether inconceivable, such as the ‘black market.’” Stolbov added that the novel was being sold on the Moscow streets for far more than its retail price in bookstores.17
Arguably, the most prominent translation is that of Gregory Rabassa into English. But it is crucial to understand the cultural climate in which it arrived. In the October 1968 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Lionel Trilling—the famed professor of English at Columbia University, whose work on Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, and Henry James made him one of the most influential literary critics of his time (he was the first Jew to get tenure in the English Department at Columbia)—responded to a question from student David Shapiro about teaching old and new literary works from Latin America and Africa. “Well, Mr. Shapiro, I’ve read this Latin American literature. It has, I think one might say, an anthropological interest.”18 This type of condescension was typical among educated readers, despite the fact that a number of influential books from Latin America were already available in English. To the old boys’ club, the region was synonymous with primitivism and backwardness.
The end of the sixties marked the apogee of the Beat Revolution. There was a sense that the rigid educational system that had defined the United States for generations needed to change. But the period was first and foremost about racial equality. The struggle for civil rights for blacks manifested in marches, boycotts, strikes, and building takeovers. Leading literary voices, such as Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, called for a new way of looking at things. Their interest in pre-Columbian and Oriental religions was tangible in their work. For many, the discovery of Latin American literature was a door to another reality, one ignored by the intellectual and political establishment. The magic realism of García Márquez allowed American readers to appreciate how the Spanish-speaking countries to the south evolved in parallel to the United States.
The late sixties also saw the rise of the Chicano Movement—led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reies López Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and others—which brought to the nation’s attention the plight of itinerant farm workers in the Southwestern states, especially Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and California. The image of the mexicano in the media at the time was of an illiterate mestizo picking lettuce, strawberries, and oranges in the fields. Hence Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that the culture was lacking in sophistication. As a professor, he supported a literary canon defined by the European masters, from the ancient Greeks such as Sophocles to early twentieth-century greats such as Kafka, Proust, and—among Trilling’s favorites—Isaac Babel, the Russian author of short stories in the mode of Maupassant. To him, Latin American novels didn’t belong in the classroom as serious literature capable of exploring universal themes and motifs.
García Márquez’s first work to appear in English was No One Writes to the Colonel in 1968, which included “Big Mama’s Funeral.” For the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Julio Cortázar recommended Gregory Rabassa to García Márquez. But Rabassa was busy working on Guatemalan Nobel Prize laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias’s “banana trilogy” for Delacorte: Mulata (in Spanish Mulata de tal, written in 1963, translated in 1967), Strong Wind (Viento fuerte, 1950, English 1969) and The Green Pope (El papa verde, 1954, English 1971). Cortázar, whose novel Hopscotch had been translated by Rabassa in 1966 for Pantheon and for which Rabassa received the National Book Award, advised García Márquez to wait. As a general rule, Rabassa did not read a novel before he translated it, to allow the thrill of discovery to inspire his work. One Hundred Years of Solitude was an exception. “People who had read the novel in Spanish were talking about it intelligently, sometimes not so intelligently, but always with a kind of awe. I suppose that this should have scared me off, but in manners of translation and a few other things I don’t frighten easily and I was ready to take it on.”19
In the article “Los pobres traductores buenos” (Poor Good Translators) syndicated in 1982, García Márquez discussed the art of translation. He began by invoking the Italian maxim: Traduttore, traditore. He explained that when one reads an author one likes in a language that isn’t the reader’s native tongue, one experiences the urge to translate. “It’s explainable,” he argues, “because one of the pleasures of reading—as is the case of music—is the need to share it with friends.” García Márquez said he understood Marcel Proust’s desire to translate into French a writer who was very different from him: English–speaking John Ruskin. He claimed he would have liked to translate two French writers, André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “both of whom, by the way, don’t enjoy a high estimation by their contemporaries in France.” But he never went beyond the sheer desire.
García Márquez confessed to translating, slowly, the Cantos by Giacomo Leopardi, “but I do it in hiding, away from others and in my very few free hours, with complete awareness that this will not be a road to glory for either me or Leopardi. I do it as one of those bathroom pastimes Jesuit priests describe as solitary pleasures. For now the attempt has been sufficient to make me realize how difficult, and how consuming, it is to fight for the same bread with professional translators.” Toward the end of the article, García Márquez discussed the various translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the languages he was able to understand. “I don’t recognize myself in any of them, only in Spanish.”
But he celebrated Gregory Rabassa. He once called him “the best Latin American writer in the English language.” Of Rabassa, García Márquez said: “I’ve read some of the books translated into English [by him] and I must recognize that I found some passages that I liked more than in the original. The impression one gets of Rabassa’s translations is that he memorized the book in Spanish and then writes it in its entirety in English: his fidelity is more complex than simple literality. He never includes a footnoted explanation, which is the less valid and most frequented strategy of bad translators. In this sense, the most notable example is of the Brazilian translator of one of my books, who gave a footnoted explanation to the word astromelia: imaginary flower invented by García Márquez. The worse thing is that later on I forget that astromelias not only exist, as everyone knows in the Caribbean, but that their name is Portuguese.”20
The story of Rabassa’s masterful rendition begins with Cass Canfield Jr. at Harper & Row in New York, the son of Cass Canfield, one of the company’s founders. As a young acquisition editor, Canfield Jr. was interested in Latin American writers. There was buzz in the American publishing industry about the new crop from Latin America. A long-time professor at the City University of New York, Rabassa made the mistake of accepting from Cass Canfield Jr. a work for hire agreement for his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.21 It’s “quite heartening for me as a lover of good literature” to see the success of the novel, which has gone through endless reprints, but it’s “saddening to me as a translator.”
Rabassa’s contract wasn’t unique. It was common for translators to be paid a flat fee and not receive royalties, unless it was for a translation of the Greek classics. Nowadays, many translators have royalties written into their contracts. In retrospect, Rabassa considered it akin to “spreading manure on a suburban lawn.”22 Canfield fought to get Rabassa royalties for the first paperback, but that dried up rather quickly for concrete reasons: Harper & Row had a long-standing contract with Carmen Barcells Literary Agency to publish García Márquez on a regular basis. But after García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the agency, according to Canfield, wanted to amend the old contracts, which is not an accepted practice in the industry.
Although García Márquez was a best-selling author, Canfield and others at Harper & Row were adamant against the change. They offered a higher bid for García Márquez’s most recent novel, The General in His Labyrinth, translated not by Rabassa but by Edith Grossman. The page proofs had already been produced when Carmen Balcells decided to move her author to another New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. García Márquez’s previous books remained with Harper & Row, but the complication prevented royalties from being paid.23 “There is something on occasion from the Book-of-the-Month Club,” Rabassa has said, “but in general, as far as I’m concerned, the book might just as well be in the public domain . . . Let me stop whining, though. It’s too prevalent among translators as, like so many famished locusts, they pounce hungrily on the hors d’oeuvres at literary affairs. We must take what small comfort we can doing something honorable in a world of imposters, pretenders, and bourgeois tradesmen, as old Prince François so aptly put it in The Fallen Sparrow.”
Rabassa’s first challenge was the title. “A simple declarative title Cien años de soledad should offer no trouble whatever,” he argued later in his book If This Be Treason.24 “Think again. We can pass de and años, they stand up fine, even though años would have to go if we opted for century, because that’s what a hundred years comprise. I turned that option down rather quickly. Cien is our first problem because in Spanish it bears no article so that the word can waver between one hundred and a hundred. There is no hint in the title as to which it should be in English . . . I viewed the extent of time involved as something quite specific, as in a prophecy, something definite, a countdown, not just any old hundred years. What is troublesome, of course, is that both interpretations are conjoined subconsciously for the reader of the Spanish . . . But an English speaker reading the Spanish will have to decide subconsciously which meaning is there. They cannot be melded in his mind. I was convinced and I still am that Gabo meant in the sense of one as this meaning is closer to the feel of the novel. Also, there was no cavil on his part over the title in English.”25
Rabassa took great care with the names in the novel. “In order to avoid confusion between father and son (although confusion is subtly encouraged throughout the book) I had to make sure that the old patriarch was always José Arcadio Buendía, never any truncated version, much the way that Charlie Brown is never called anything but Charlie Brown in Peanuts. There is some kind of personal essence that must be preserved as we handle names and as the novel progresses this essence becomes clear and the names go on unchanged and exude this essence while taking on new accretion. When I was growing up the president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he always put it, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, not to mention FDR. It rubs against a nerve today when I hear him called simply Franklin Roosevelt. Part of his essence has been left out, making him akin to Franklin Pierce, God save us! What if we went about speaking of John Whittier, Henry Longfellow, Oliver Holmes? Gabo had wise reasons for keeping the name José Arcadio Buendía intact, singling him out in distinction from his son, who was simply José Arcadio, with no surname ever mentioned, and from his great-grandson José Arcadio Segundo. In this last case I chose to keep the Spanish word for second, it being understood as a cognate, thinking that José Arcadio II or José Arcadio the Second sounded too royal or too highfalutin.”26
The question of how to translate the first line of the novel made Rabassa think. “Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.” Rabassa claimed, “People go on repeating this all the time (in English) and I can only hope that I have got them saying what it means. I wrote: ‘many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ There are variant possibilities. In the British army it would have been a ‘firing party,’ which I rather like, but I was writing for American readers. Había de could have been would (How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?), but I think was to has a better feel to it. I chose remember over recall because I feel that it conveys a deeper memory. Remote might have aroused thoughts of such inappropriate things as remote control and robots. Also, I liked distant when used with time. I think Dr. Einstein would have approved. The real problem for choice was with conocer and I have come to know that my selection has set a great many Professor Horrendo all aflutter. It got to the point that my wife Clem had to defend my choice (hers too) against one such worthy in a seminar in which she was participating. The word seen straight means to know a person or thing for the first time, to meet someone, to be familiar with something. What is happening here is a first-time meeting, or learning. It can also mean to know something more deeply than saber, to know from experience. García Márquez has used the Spanish word here with all its connotations. But to know ice just won’t do in English. It implies, ‘How do you do, ice?’ It could be ‘to experience ice.’ The first is foolish, the second is silly. When you get to know something for the first time, you’ve discovered it. Only after that can you come to know it in the full sense. I could have said ‘to make the acquaintance with ice,’ but that, too, sounds nutty, with its implication of tipping one’s hat or giving a handshake. I stand by what I put down in this important opening sentence.”27
García Márquez wasn’t fluent enough in English to be of useful help to Rabassa when choosing variants. Rabassa communicated with him a number of times, by mail, to ask about the flora and fauna of the Caribbean and of Colombia in particular, and for other precise matters.28 The first edition published by Editorial Sudamericana didn’t contain a family tree. It was García Márquez’s intention to allow the reader to experience some confusion about the characters, as well as time and place. Rabassa claims that the editors at Harper & Row asked him to create a family tree for the English translation. “At the time I thought it was a good idea, something to help readers keep all the characters straight and to let them see the complex interrelationships. Later on, after the book had come out, I had second thoughts. If García Márquez had wanted such a table he would have put one in the first Spanish edition.”
Rabassa speculated that the fusion and confusion were meant to be part of the novel, revealing how all members of our species must look to apes or horses, which may have trouble distinguishing among us. “This idea also ties in with the repetition of Christian names in the family, so that distinction is of little import after six or seven generations and a hundred years, when memory dissolves and all who went before become what Turgenev called ‘gray people.’ It’s puzzling, or is it, since it was put together by academics, that the fine footnoted Spanish edition in the Cátedra series also carries a genealogical table at the beginning.”29
There was enormous buzz in New York about García Márquez’s novel. Arguably the most important review of One Hundred Years of Solitude in English was by John Leonard in the March 3, 1970, issue of the New York Times daily. Leonard started by saying that the reader emerges “from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire.” He continued: “A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turn angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendía family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendías (inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride a biological tri-cycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.”
Leonard placed García Márquez’s achievement in the context of world literature. “Family chronicle, then, and political tour de force, and metaphysical speculation, and, intentionally, a cathedral of words, perceptions and legends that amounts to the declaration of a state of mind: solitude being one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that that terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, must be rediscovered and forgotten again, endlessly. With a single bound Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either.” Leonard concluded with a single word: “Dazzling.”30
On March 8, 1970, in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Kiely wrote a flat, unintelligent appraisal. Kiely seemed trapped in an understanding of fantasia based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “To speak of a land of enchantment, even in reference to a contemporary novel, is to conjure up images of elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains. Along with the midgets and fairies, one can expect marvelous feats and moral portents, but not much humor and almost certainly no sex. The idea, it would seem, is to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.” But Kiely suggested that this approach is not shared by García Márquez, “who has created in One Hundred Years of Solitude an enchanted place that does everything but coy . . . Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life . . . This is the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.” Kiely concluded, “Stew is too modest an image with which to describe the wit and power of this lusty fantasia, but if the strong savor banishes visions of twinkle toes, it has served a purpose.”31
V. S. Pritchett, in the New Yorker, let his admiration spill forth: “the history of the Buendía family and their women in three or four generations is written as a hearsay report on the growth of the little Colombian town; it comes to life because it is continuously leaping out of fact into the mythical and the myth is comic. One obvious analogy is to Rabelais. It is suggested, for example, that Aureliano Segundo’s sexual orgies with his concubine are so enjoyable that his own livestock catch the fever. Animals and birds are unable to stand by and do nothing.” For Pritchett the story was a social history “but not as it is found in books but as it muddles its way forward and backward among the sins of family life and the accidents of trade.” He thought that One Hundred Years of Solitude denied interpretation. “One could say that a little Arcady was created but was ruined by the ‘Promethean ideas’ that came into the head of its daring founder. Or that little lost towns have their moment—as civilizations do—and are then obliterated.”32
By mid-month, Time magazine ran an anonymous piece that sang the novel’s praises. “Gabriel García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. ‘Nothing interesting has happened to me since,’ he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a whole individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind . . . Reduced to essence, the exotic Buendías become immediate—yet mythically compelling like Tolstoy’s Rostov family, or the doomed scions of Faulkner’s Sartoris. But One Hundred Years of Solitude is more than a family chronicle. The author is really at work on an imaginative spiritual history of any and all Latin American communities. In the process, he fondly reveals more about the Latin soul than all Oscar Lewis’s selective eavesdroppings does.”33
García Márquez’s reaction to these reviews, according to Cass Canfield Jr., was ecstatic. In time, he learned to temper his response to readers. About criticism, García Márquez stated: “Critics for me are the biggest example of what intellectualism is. First of all, they have a theory of what a writer should be. The try to get the writer to fit their model, and if he doesn’t fit, they still try to get him in by force . . . I really have no interest in what critics think of me; nor have I read criticism in many years. They have claimed for themselves the task of being intermediaries between the author and the reader. I’ve always tried to be a very clear and precise writer, trying to reach the reader directly without having to go through the critic.”34 García Márquez’s dismissal of what critics said about him and his books runs deeper. Not only did he mistrust their instincts but he resented their pretentious philosophizing. Yet his own statements, then and later, distill a sense of false modesty, even pomposity, making him seem arrogant and aloof. It could be, of course, that his success fosters undiminished envy, for which he is penalized.
An example of this attitude is clear in an interview he gave years later to Raymond Leslie Williams. “There’s no doubt that the author’s vision of his or her books is very different from the vision of the critic or of the reader . . .” he stated. “Readers don’t tell you why they liked the books, nor do they know why, but you feel that they really liked them. Of course, there are also people who say they don’t like the books, but in general my readers seem to be swept away. And my books are sold in enormous quantities, which interests me, because that means that they are read by a broad public. They are read by elevator operators, nurses, doctors, presidents. This gives me a tremendous security, while the critics always leave the writers with a spark of insecurity. Even the most serious and praiseful critics can go off on a track you hadn’t suspected, leaving you wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. Besides, I understand the critics very little. I’m not exactly sure what they are saying or what they think.” He wanted to go back to the source, to be truthful to the art of story-telling. In the same interview, García Márquez added: “Everything comes from inside or is in my subconscious or is the natural result of an ideological position or comes from raw experience that I haven’t analyzed, which I try to use in all innocence. I think I’m quite innocent in writing.”35
Hollywood quickly became interested in a screen adaptation. In a newspaper column many years later, García Márquez wrote about all the invitations he had received throughout the years to turn the novel into a movie. He described a request by Anthony Quinn, offered during a dinner party around 1977, to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude into a fifty-hour TV series. He quotes Quinn as saying, “I offered him a million dollars and he didn’t want them, because García Márquez is a Communist, and he doesn’t want anyone to know he has received a million dollars. Because afterwards, once the dinner was over, he came and told me: How could you offer me that money in public? Some other time you can offer it to me without any witnesses nearby.” The story is more complicated. Quinn had arrived in Mexico City with the offer, which he announced to the media before he presented it to García Márquez. The Colombian told the media that he would do it not for one but for two million, one for him “and the other for the Latin American revolution.” To which Quinn responded, “I’ll give him one million. The second million he can get it from someone else.” Anthony Quinn’s offer wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last. Some years before, a consortium of North American and European producers had offered García Márquez two million dollars. There were rumors, apparently unfounded, that Francis Ford Coppola, who directed The Godfather series, was also interested in an adaptation.36
Still in his forties, García Márquez was at his apex. He was considered a living treasure, and he occupied a place on the shelf of world literature.