How is This a Translation Issue?

True enough, but this happens regardless of whether we’re reading translations or books produced within our own nations.

This attitude remains even today. Ask many otherwise well-read people about Latin American literature, and they’re likely to respond with something along the lines of, “Oh, I love Magical Realism.” Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet learned this in an unfortunate way when he visited the International Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s. One of his stories was rejected by The Iowa Review on the basis that it wasn’t “Latin American enough.” Heaven forbid his story might very well have taken place in Los Estados Unidos. The experience provoked Fuguet and friend Sergio Gómez to curate the McCondo anthology — McDonald’s meets Macondo — a collection of 19 writers from Latin America and Spain seeking to represent an aesthetic that better represented modern day realities in their countries. Likewise, in 1996, a cohort of Mexican authors published The Crack Manifesto, a battle cry for Latin American writers to break with the pervading Magical Realism and return to the complex styles of Borges and Cortazár. When we consider that the McCondo and Crack Movements were still necessary 30 years after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, we can begin to see just how large one aesthetic can loom.

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