2022 marks the 40th anniversary of writer Márquez winning the Nobel Prize and the 55th anniversary of the first edition of his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. And recently his documentary work "Back to the Seed" was first published Chinese edition, we can see how Márquez outside the novelist grew up, and how he understood the shortcomings of literary education.
"Years from now, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will recall the distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice cubes." Even if you haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude, you've probably read the beginning of this well-known novel. Márquez's opening creates an unprecedented narrative — recalling the past from the perspective of the future. This sentence pattern was later imitated by countless writers. The Chinese writers who rose in the 1980s, such as Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Chen Zhongzhong, and Han Shaogong, were almost all influenced by Márquez. Mo Yan once talked about the feeling of reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for the first time: "The mood is indescribable, just like Márquez read Kafka in Paris, very surprised, shooting the case, the original novel can be written like this." ”
Marquez
Márquez spent his grandfather's house until he was eight years old. My grandfather was a respected retired military officer, and my grandmother had a belly full of myths, legends and ghost stories. In Márquez's psychic world, home is a strange world full of ghosts. Returning to his hometown many years later, he said: "My memories of that era are the purest and truest things that have been preserved in my mind, and I can not only recall the appearance of every house that has survived in the village as I did just yesterday, but even find a crack in a wall that did not exist in my childhood." Childhood memories are deeply rooted in his memory, becoming the first source of his creations, and the village where his grandfather's family lived is also the prototype of the Caribbean coastal town of Macondo in "One Hundred Years of Solitude".
At the age of 23, Márquez was admitted to the university law department to fulfill his father's wishes, but he had no interest in the university's law courses. He only enjoyed reading poetry and novels. He rode on the city's tram every Sunday, reading poems on the train and spending his afternoons reciting poems one by one with friends in the school's little café. Márquez started journalism before he finished his sophomore year and became a journalist. After that, he worked as a journalist for forty years, writing news reports, columns, editorials, and novels at the same time. Márquez, a journalist, and Márquez, a novelist, are a blend of real events, using the literary creativity of genius and the superb novel skills to move freely between fiction and non-fiction. He once said: "Journalism helps me stay in touch with reality, which is crucial for literature." Journalists and novelists work to find out the truth, and I've always thought my best professional experience was being as a journalist. "Like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, the twentieth-century literary magnate García Márquez honed his literary skills as a journalist before he became a famous novelist." ”
Marquez has loved to read since childhood, reading a variety of books, including the unabridged adult version of One Thousand and One Nights. In middle school, I read a lot of literary masterpieces, quoted scriptures from chinese teachers, and even memorized my "first choice of reading when going to the toilet" "Don Quixote" in its entirety. However, he never liked reading for exams. After he became famous, his masterpiece was selected as a reading textbook by middle school teachers. In order to cope with the exam, a friend who has undergone systematic literary training has developed an intensive plan to ensure that the girl can master a wealth of knowledge when she takes the exam, but the teacher has an unexpected question: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" The title of the book appears in reverse printing, why is this? A friend's daughter couldn't answer, Márquez couldn't answer, not even the cover designer.
A similar situation was encountered when Márquez's son applied for a college exam, asking what was the symbolism of the rooster in Márquez's "The Colonel Who NoBody Wrote to Him." Márquez's son joked, "That's a rooster hatched from a golden egg." The standard answer is that the Colonel's rooster symbolizes the power of a deeply oppressed people. In fact, Márquez said, the original design was for the colonel to break the neck of the rooster and use it to cook a pot of soup.
Márquez uses these two ironic examples to illustrate that many times exams and literature classes are misleading people, or even becoming a kind of nonsense.
What should a good reading look like? Márquez said he was grateful to a female teacher who taught him to read before the age of 5, "it was she who read us the first poems she heard in her life in class, which I remembered deeply and will never forget." He is equally grateful to the middle school literature teacher, "who leads us through the labyrinth of literature without over-interpreting it unpretentiously." "Márquez also teaches students, and he says all a good literature class needs to do is guide students to the good books they should read." Read with a pleasant mood and your own prudent judgment. ”
Back to the Seeds by Márquez translated by Tao Yuping, South China Sea Publishing Company
Writing requires material, and real life is the best library of materials. When Márquez became famous, he said that the only thing he wanted to do again was to take a boat ride along the Magdalena River, Colombia's largest river. Six years of middle school and two years of college, he has always maintained such trips twice a year, going back and forth once. Each trip can take anywhere from one week to three weeks. I can learn a lot more every time than I can in school.
Márquez believes that his magical world has never gone further than reality. "We writers in Latin America and the Caribbean should put our hands on our own hearts and admit that reality is better writers than we are. Our destiny, perhaps our glory, is to imitate it with humility, and to imitate it as well as possible. ”