Free Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans

in
Revista de Occidente,
the intellectual magazine based in Madrid and edited by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The translator was probably Galo Sáez, although others attributed it to Margarita Nelken. In 1945 that translation was published in book form by the Editorial Revista de Occidente, in a series called
Novelas extrañas
(Strange Novels). Borges purportedly translated
The Metamorphosis
in 1938 for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, in a series entitled “
La pajarita de papel,
” the paper bird. 17
    Which translation did García Márquez read? It is impossible to know. What is unquestionable is that it was a trigger. Years later, he said that he wouldn’t have been able to write his early story, “
La tercera resignación”
(The Third Resignation)—dated September 13, 1947, when he was twenty—had he not read Kafka’s novel. The story, which first appeared in English in the
New Yorker,
is García Márquez at his most self-conscious. It chronicles the impressions of a nameless narrator, much like Gregor Samsa, as he lies in his coffin, a man “ready to be buried, and yet he knew that he wasn’t dead. That if he tried to get up, he could do it so easily.” 18 The middle-class angst and the bizarre condition in which the protagonist finds himself seem to be an homage to Kafka’s narrative.
    García Márquez claimed that “Kafka, in German, told stories in the exact same way my grandmother did.” 19 While Kafka’s absurdism resonated with many in Europe, especially after World War II, his initial reception in the Spanish-speaking world was mixed—in spite of the enthusiasm of Borges, García Márquez, and a few others. There are ardent followers of Kafka in the Americas (Calvert Casey, for instance), but they aren’t numerous. And then there are writers, such as the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964) who areKafkaesque without necessarily being Kafkian, i.e., they might not be aware of the debt they owe to the author of
The Castle,
yet it is obvious. 20
    Equally significant, although for the opposite reasons, was García Márquez’s relationship with Borges himself. Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires of British and Argentine stock, the author of “The Circular Ruins,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Funes the Memorious,” and other fictions was a Europeanized poet and essayist known, until the late fifties, only among a small cadre of intellectual devotees. A voracious reader, Borges’s cosmopolitanism and his disdain for politics often put him at odds with the Latin American left. Borges was of a diametrically different ideological mindset. While he opposed, even ridiculed Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón, he was an intellectual dandy in the tradition of Oscar Wilde. He had little interest in the indigent. His view of the world was based on philosophical disquisitions and metaphysical constructions.
    Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Uruguayan critic and Yale professor who befriended both Borges and Neruda and wrote biographies of each (rather mediocre ones, filled with psychoanalytic interpretations), once asked Borges, sometime in the seventies, if he had heard of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
a book that everyone was talking about. Borges, with acumen, said he had never heard of it. Except that with Borges it is always difficult to know if he was being honest. Had its author not been a left-leaning intellectual, had it been written elsewhere on the globe, maybe even in the nineteenth century, the Macondo saga would probably have hypnotized the Argentine man of letters. But the model of the writer as an artist engaged with the world that García Márquez represented was antithetical to Borges.
    The English novelist Graham Greene—author of
The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana,
and other books—was another strong influence on García