Dominating Figures

Via the Literary Saloon, I read:

Several of the authors have spent a considerable amount of time in New York and Lago, who has been here the longest (some two decades), began by noting that despite a strong Spanish presence in the US there still is a shocking lack of knowledge and awareness of Spanish-language literature here. Reviewers and readers, he complained, expect a certain pattern from Spanish and Latin American fiction — but expectations of a particular style or kind of fiction seem to be an issue in Spain and Latin America, too. Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez noted that for decades Colombian authors found it almost impossible to get around the overwhelming figure of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. No country, he suggested, has had such a dominant literary figure, and the effect was in many respects stifling, as readers came to expect everything to follow in that same magical realism-mode.

It’s interesting to speculate why Latin American literature has been dominated by a few major figures while literature of other regions has avoided this. I don’t really have a good reason why.

Though I do think that, whatever the reason, this dominance has transferred over to U.S. readers of Latin American fiction. Actually, if you look back you’ll find that a lot of the major Latin American writers beyond Garcia Marquez or Borges were at one point translated into English, but then quickly went out of print.

I’m hoping this changes, as there seems to be a lot of genuine interest right now for "discovering" new Latin American writers. Of course, a pessimist might predict that in 5 – 10 years all these new translations will have gone out of print.

But a fact such as this one tends to lead me toward pessimism:

Lago complained bitterly about how American publishers go about publishing (and considering) translations, noting that the fact that no one in the major houses seems to be able to read these works in the original is a major hurdle and problem.

We’re not talking about Nahuatl here. This is Spanish. If true, it’s astonishing that no one in the major houses can read a novel in Spanish.

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