Reading Spanish: By Way of an Essay

I first studied Spanish in junior high school. There were, as I remember, four languages you could select: French, Spanish, German, and Latin, the last of which was chosen by only a few top students. Spanish was assumed to be the easiest, and I had some slight connection to the language because my father had been stationed in Panama during the Second World War, but I don't think I could do more than count from one to ten when I began. (I was green enough that when I first came to class I thought there was someone there with a last name that sounded like "Hustead," that is, usted.) I learned the lessons along with the other students — I still remember bits and pieces of those first-year dialogues — and I got good grades, but as soon as I had fulfilled the requirements for a diploma I gave it up, not anticipating that it would be of any use in my future — which at that point was basically what I thought about all of my subjects, other than perhaps biology. I remember memorizing the names and most famous works of a few Spanish authors, but I don't remember reading anything literary except for bits of Pío Baroja's Las inquietudes de Shanti Andía and an anecdote by Ciro Alegría called "Hueso y pellejo" (Skin and Bones).

When I got to college I took French for a while, since that corresponded more to the writers I was reading then, then I dropped out for a couple of years and went to live in Manhattan, reading and book-buying on my own. Though the Latin American literary "boom" was already old news at the time, the major writers were still around and American publishers had discovered that their work was marketable. I don't remember exactly what got me started on contemporary Latin American literature. It may have been a friend's copy of an anthology entitled Doors and Mirrors: Fiction and Poetry from Spanish America, or it may have been hearing good things about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was already interested by late 1976, which is when I bought a copy of García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch when it appeared in translation in the US. At some point I started, very haltingly, trying to work through some of the literature in the original. I think I began with a volume of stories that had an English version on the facing page, and in spite of my previous exposure it took me a while to develop a useful reading knowledge of Spanish. Eventually I went back to college and focused on the language and its contemporary literature, and wrote a bachelor's thesis on Cortázar that I would probably wince to read now.

I've used the language in various ways since then, but above all for the simple joy of reading it. My understanding of the grammar is solid, but there remain persistent gaps in my vocabulary depending on the author and the subject matter. If I want to read something badly enough I will read it without a crib, but I don't object to having a translation at hand for occasional reference (and out of curiosity — i.e., How would you translate that phrase?)

Unless the material is more didactic than literary, my usual practice involves reading books in Spanish twice. The first reading allows me to decode anything I can't immediately understand, to look up unfamiliar words, etc., as well as to rush to the end to find out how the story comes out. The second reading, begun as soon as I finish the first, is entirely different in character. Having deciphered the author's words and gotten a sense of the structure of the book, I can simply indulge in the pleasure of understanding the text and appreciating the author's style and inventiveness — all of the things, in effect, that can't be readily summarized or transferred to another form.

Which leads, of course, to the question of whether those things can be translated. To that, I'd have to say that the answer is yes and no. There are very good translators around; people like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman have done wonders with twentieth-century Hispanic literature, and glancing back and forth between versions I'm impressed by how well most things do in fact carry over. There will always be some issues; in García Márquez's brilliant short novel Del amor y otros demonios, for example, the same word — rabia — means both "rabies" and "fury," and there is no easy way in English to convey that potentially significant point. (In the novel, an adolescent girl is bitten by a rabid dog, but the nature of her real affliction is very much for the reader to determine.)

But to me one of the advantages of reading a book in another language is that it forces me to work harder. I can't let my concentration wander and skip a few pages. I have to read, page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word, and engage in the miraculous process of moving meaning from mind to mind by way of text.

Lifespans

The former Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski died on February 20th at the age of eighty-nine. Mazeroski, who retired as a player in 1972, was only a middling hitter, but he was a standout defensive player who still holds the all-time record for turning the most career double plays at his position. The moment he will always be most remembered for, though, came at the plate: with the underdog Pirates batting against the New York Yankees in the bottom of the ninth inning in the decisive seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he belted a home run over the left-field fence, breaking a 9-9 tie and giving his team the game and the series. It's considered one of the greatest games in baseball history.

As famous as that moment was, I wouldn't bother to mention it except that it forms one of my earliest imaginary memories, certainly the first related to baseball or, for that matter, to anything outside of home and family. I say "imaginary" because I suspect that, given my age at the time (four), I would have been at best only vaguely aware of what was happening, and I only think I recall it because it was reinforced by repeated retellings after the fact. My parents weren't big sports fans, but since the Yankees were involved I'm sure they had the game on, and it's likely that I was in the room. The first baseball games I have definite memories of watching came four years later, in the 1964 series in which the ascendant St. Louis Cardinals put an end to the Yankee dynasty, at least for the next decade or so.

Mazeroski's death came just eight days after the death of his longtime teammate, the brilliant relief pitcher Roy Face, who was ninety-seven. I have no statistics to back this up, but longevity seemed to favor that 1960 Bucs team; as I write starting pitcher Vernon Law is alive, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday, as is outfielder Bob Skinner, who is ninety-four. Bill Virdon, another outfielder, made it to ninety, and pitcher Bob Friend to eighty-eight. Who knows how old the great Roberto Clemente might have lived to be, if he hadn't died in a plane crash in 1972? (The champion of that series in this regard, though, was in the opposing bullpen: Yankee relief pitcher Bobby Shantz, alive as of this writing at the age of one hundred. He would play for the Pirates in 1961.)

Remember that Mazeroski's home run came during what was still the Eisenhower administration; JFK's triumph over Nixon that November, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dealey Plaza, all of that still lay ahead. They say that life is short, and sometimes it really is (and tragically so), but at the same time it's astonishing to contemplate all that can happen in the span of a single life.

Patriarch

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers concocted a plan for a volume in which each participant would undertake a literary treatment of one of the larger-than-life political figures — dictator, caudillo, or what have you — from the annals of his or her respective native country. Despite a good deal of initial enthusiasm, the volume never came off, but García Márquez (Colombia) had already decided who he wanted to write about, and described his choice in a letter to Carlos Fuentes:

My candidate is General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, aristocrat, former officer under Bolívar, who assumed the presidency four times. To be sure, he had much in common with your Santa Anna. Don Tomás was completely crazy, and nevertheless he was a great man: the first liberal to intercede against the dictatorial fever of the Liberator, and, of course, he ended up a dictator in his turn. He had his entire jaw reconstructed from silver, he dressed, in his second period, like the kings of France, and he was cruel, arbitrary, truly progressive, and a very fine writer. He expelled the Jesuits from the country, headed by his own brother, who was archbishop primate of Bogotá. In his full decadence, crazy and alcoholic, he walked around with his old cutlass chasing the boys who made fun of him through the streets. He complained to the president, and as the latter paid no attention to him, he kicked him out of the palace and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief for the third time. In short, he belongs to the great line of the fathers of the country.

García Márquez, who was living in Mexico City at the time, may have misremembered some of the details. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera did have a brother, Manuel José Mosquera, who was an archbishop, but the latter was already dead when Tomás expelled the Jesuits (in 1863 or 1864), and had left the country in 1852, under pressure, in an earlier wave of anticlericalism. But whether true or not, the image of the old soldier with his prosthetic jaw brandishing his sword to chase away impertinent boys, and taking the government into his hands when he couldn't get satisfaction, must have been too garciamarquesco to pass up.

Image: Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, looking a little jaundiced, portrait from the Museo Nacional de Colombia. The text of the letter from García Márquez to Carlos Fuentes is from Las cartas del Boom (translation mine).

Echoes of the Boom

Two recent publishing events revisit the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary "Boom" of the 1960s, in particular highlighting the four novelists — Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) — who are widely regarded as the movement's seminal figures. Las cartas del Boom (Alfaguara, 2023) collects the correspondence exchanged between the the fab four, as the editors call them, during the years of literary ferment when they were reinventing the modern novel. Regarding the importance of the volume, in the words of the editors:

To find an example parallel to Las cartas del Boom, and exaggerating only a bit (there are more languages involved), one would have to imagine Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner engaging in an intense correspondence in the decade of the 1920s concerning literature and politics, including the sometimes instantaneous reactions to the works of each one.

The vagaries of preservation affected what could be included. Cortázar wrote countless letters but preserved few of the many that he must have received, García Márquez periodically destroyed letters (as well as his own working notes and manuscripts), and only Fuentes kept copies of most of his outgoing correspondence. The letters begin, haltingly, in the late 1950s and dwindle to a trickle in the 1970s, in part because two of the writers (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) were by then no longer on speaking terms, but also no doubt because greater reliance on the telephone had made written correspondence less essential. Many of the letters from Cortázar to Fuentes printed here were not included in the monumental five-volume edition of the former's letters because of restrictions from the Fuentes estate that have now been lifted.

Las cartas del Boom has been translated into several languages but not, thus far, into English. The good news on that front involves a related event: Archipelago Books — which seems to be able to undertake translation projects that few other publishers are interested in handling — will be releasing the first installment of a generous two-volume selection of Cortázar's correspondence, Letters from Julio, in September 2026. The translators are Anne McLean and Sarah Moses.

The University of Oregon hosts a blog with more information on the Boom correspondence.

In addition, New Directions — another indispensable publisher — has published a revised translation of José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, incorporating portions of the novel that were excised from the original US version. The New York Review of Books has a review. While he isn't included in Las cartas del Boom (his correspondence with Fuentes has been published separately) Donoso was another key figure in the movement and The Obscene Bird of Night is regarded as his major work. I've had a copy of the old Knopf edition on my shelves for close to fifty years; one of these days I'll have to get around to reading it.

Update: There is a thorough and thoughtful review (in English) of Las cartas del Boom in New Left Review. It can be accessed at either of the links below:

A Bolivarian Republic of Letters?
A Bolivarian Republic of Letters? (PDF)

Monochrome

The city is behind me. In daylight, with no lights visible, the wind and the breakers cutting off all sound, one might think it uninhabited, but it isn't, it's just temporarily of no importance. The tall spires on its summit, rigid and precise, seem sketched by a draftsman's pencil with no concern for anything but the laws of geometry. Along the seawall a few sheets of newspaper take wing among scattered indifferent gulls, then fall, dispirited, huddling against unlit streetlamps and refuse cans.

Even where I stand, separated from the water's edge by a plateau of impenetrable rock a hundred yards across, I feel the cold mist against my face. The sun wanders out from cloud cover briefly, illuminating patches of wet stone scattered with fragmentary strands of seaweed, then loses heart and disappears. As the tide crests its bore surges into the mouth of the great river, annihilating its flow in a deafening battle of waters. Its accumulating force is terrible to contemplate.

There are no ships visible in the offing; if any there are, steaming their way miles out, they are hidden by waves and low clouds. The grand beacon, sunk into an exposed shelf of rock just up the coast, blinks metronomically, untended, unseen. I shudder and hoist up my overcoat, then turn my back on the sea and go home.

Good kids

Scenes from a student-led anti-ICE demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, February 3, 2026. The demonstration began with a scheduled walk-out from classes.

A local news article quoted one of the leaders, high school senior Lyla Caldwell:

“I’ve seen that ICE is going into schools and waiting outside of schools to take teenagers,” Caldwell said. “If they’re going to make it the place, we’re going to make it the place. It’s wrong.”

Judging by the number of passing drivers who honked and waved, community support seemed to be strong. I overheard one woman say, I think approvingly, "They seem to be having a good time." And they were — for a good cause.

Tales Told Twice

In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that appeared, among other places, in the newspaper El País in Spain. His biographer, Gerald Martin, says that these pieces amounted to "a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary." Some of the material in those columns was, in fact, later reworked into the pages of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.

In one of these columns ("Ghosts of the Road," August 19th, 1981) he relates an incident that was said to have happened some fifteen years before. García Márquez and his family were traveling from Barcelona to southern France, when an unexplained sudden intuition made him slow down in advance of a curve. Several cars whizzed by him, and he remembers in particular one "healthy-looking Dutch woman" driving a van.

After passing us in perfect order, the three cars disappeared around the curve, but we found them again an instant later one on top of another, in a pile of smoking wreckage, embedded in an out-of-control truck in an oncoming lane. The only survivor was the Dutch couple's six-month-old baby.

García Márquez connects the incident with another that supposedly happened "on May 20 on the Paris-Montpellier freeway": three young people pick up a woman who hails them from the roadside. After they drive for several miles, the woman, in terror, warns them of a dangerous curve ahead — and then simply vanishes. No accident occurs, but the young people report the mysterous disappearance to the police. The case is never resolved. García Márquez speculates that, after the accident he witnessed, the spirit of the Dutch woman might linger on the highway to warn future travellers of the danger ahead.

The tale of the "vanishing hitchhiker," is, of course, a well-known and well-travelled one, with many documented variants; it provided the title for Jan Brunvand's 1981 study of urban legends.

García Márquez briefly revisited the purported Paris-Montpellier incident in a column the following year entitled "Tales of the Road." In that piece he also touches on reports of a similarly eerie kind of occurence: a silent figure is seen sitting inside a car, apparently smoking a cigarette; the figure is later revealed to have been a corpse, posed to look like a living passenger to avoid the paperwork and fees associated with transporting a dead body from one jurisdiction to another. In one variant that García Márquez mentions a grandmother who dies during a beach vacation is wrapped up in a carpet and stowed on the roof rack of a car, which is then stolen when the family takes a brief break.

I recognized the gist of the corpse passenger story immediately: Cortázar had outlined a very similar tale in A Cetain Lucas a few years earlier (see my related post). It's possible that García Márquez had read Cortázar's version, or heard something like it directly from him (they were friends), but it seems more likely that both writers drew on urban legends that had been circulating for years and may well still be circulating to this day.

A selection of García Márquez's syndicated columns can be found in the posthumous collection The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings.