An Interview with Juan Gabriel Vásquez

On the strength of his fiction alone, Juan Gabriel Vásquez now belongs in conversations about the literary legacy of writers like Julio Cortázar, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and, it must be said, William Faulkner. He is their artistic successor and more. Vásquez’s work explores the dangerous interplay of history, violence, and politics in the national consciousness of his homeland in Bogotá, Colombia. I first read his masterpiece The Sound of Things Falling and felt the presence of a prose style, guardedly intact with Anne McLean’s brilliant translation, of an agile mind, an analytical artist, rendering beauty, pain, and power in his stories. His work is accessible and erudite; his stories are heartbreaking and hopeful. Via his agency Casanovas & Lynch, Vásquez generously answered our questions below in an email exchange that took place mere days after the attempted insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Vásquez’s new book Songs for the Flames will be published by Riverhead in August of 2021.

S. TREMAINE NELSON (NWR)

Can literary translation lead to diplomacy or even peace?

Juan Gabriel Vásquez (JGV)

Probably not, but it can lead to the necessary prerequisites for diplomacy and peace: knowledge and understanding of the other. No meaningful grasp of another culture can occur without that door that is opened when we know the stories that matter to them. Translation makes them available to us. The stories that circulate in a society are in this sense more useful than any amount of statistics and data, and the best politicians are usually those who embrace this little piece of wisdom. This is why Obama’s intuition of foreign policy was always infinitely better than Trump’s oafish, bullish ignorance: Trump, that joke of a statesman, moved around in a place he didn’t understand (the world), and unsurprisingly broke many things and left a huge bill for others to pay.

NWR

Who would you like to see more widely read in the U.S. today?

JGV

Ricardo Piglia, the Argentinian author of at least two great novels and some of the best literary essays ever written in my language. He changed the way I read fiction, and hugely influenced my understanding of the mysterious place fiction has in society. I can think of no better compliment.

NWR

Who are the writers working in Spanish you would like to see become available in translation to English-speakers readers? JGV

Besides Piglia, whose presence in English is reduced to two novels that I know of, I’d like to see Leila Guerriero’s wonderful nonfiction. That should have happened a long time ago.

NWR

If, as Percy Shelley suggests, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” who are the poets embracing this role today?

JGV

Well, I’ve always quarreled with Shelley’s dictum. Legislators, really? I’d rather think of my favorite poets in terms different than something out of Congress. I’m an atheist, so instead of prayers I go to Milton or Shakespeare or Quevedo or Jorge Manrique for consolation, silent company or mild revelations about the human soul. This presence can be political also: poets can be a kind of moral conscience, particularly in places of conflict. Who are those voices today? Perhaps too many to name. This age is hostile to poetry for several reasons, but that doesn’t mean their influence has stopped.

NWR

Are there any contemporary writers experimenting with Form that you find yourself recommending to other writers?

JGV

Yes, but I’ve grown apart over the years from most experimenting, or rather from experiment for the sake of experiment. I’m horribly annoyed by empty gimmicks and impatient with gratuitous difficulties. In other words: I used to read The Sound and the Fury; now I read Light in August. I know Ulysses like an old neighborhood, but now I’d rather take a stroll around Dubliners. What I admire now are the writers who take this thing, the novel or the short story, and are able to push its boundaries a little further, allowing us to visit places we’d never been to before. You don’t need to go to war against punctuation to do that.

NWR

Gregory Rabassa was one of my mentors in New York: did you ever have the experience of meeting him or working with him? Or have you heard any good stories about him from any of the many writers he translated?

JGV

I never met him, no. But I remember reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in his translation when I was 20 and understanding things I had overlooked when I read it in the original Spanish. He was a master. You know, perhaps, that the first book he translated was Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a masterpiece of Latin American literature but exceedingly difficult. It was Cortázar who told García Márquez that he should wait until Rabassa was free to have One Hundred Years of Solitude translated. I think it made all the difference. Regarding the first question of this interview, I’d keep in mind these words from the very beginning of his memoir If This be Treason: “Treason against a culture will therefore be automatic as we betray its words and speech.” NWR

To that end, who are the translators working in Spanish or any language today that you find most exciting?

JGV

I’ve read all my Russians again in Pevear and Volokhonsky’s English translations. I love the translations, but also the essays that accompany them. I’m always deeply impressed by Miguel Sáenz’s translations from the German, and reading Sebald or Bernhard in his voice is a pleasure. Since we’re here in America, I should say that it’s a privilege to have my work translated by the great Anne McLean. I’ve read works by Julio Cortázar or García Márquez in the English translation just to see how she does things.

NWR

Critics have compared your early short fiction to the work of Northwest Review contributor Raymond Carver: how familiar are you with Carver’s work and would you agree with comparisons that align the style of your early fiction with his?

JGV

I read and reread his stories — that volume called Where I’m Calling From, in particular — when I was writing my first book, Lovers on all Saints’ Day. A certain generation of American practitioners was very present during those days: Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford were there, too. I don’t know exactly what lessons each of them taught me, but the early work of any writer is a cocktail of revelations, enthusiasms, loyalties that you look back to with nostalgia. I’m about to publish my second book of stories in America, Songs for the Flames. 17 years passed between the two collections, and it’s as if they were different worlds. In the new volume my fellow travelers are people like Alice Munro and Juan Carlos Onetti.

NWR

What book do you wish every incoming American college undergraduate would read before the first day of class?

JGV

A selection of essays by Michel de Montaigne (that I would have to prepare for the occasion, because the whole work is too long). There are in those essays ideas about freedom, tolerance, race, violence, lies and truth, experience and regret, parents and friends, money and lack thereof, cowardice and how it leads to cruelty… All things pertinent in the life of a young American growing up in this age. The book was written in France in the 16th century, but I read it today and wonder if Montaigne is getting The New York Times.

NWR

Which of your own works have you remained the most proud of as the years go by?

JGV

What a difficult question! I’d say there are two stories in Songs for the Flames that are among my sources of pride. Also, I’m slowly realizing that my best book is the novel I’ve just published in Spanish. But a writer’s opinion of his own work is as trustworthy as Ted Cruz.