Goodbye to the Nobel Prize Mario Vargas Losa, a writer with a thousand faces

Silvia Guidi and Eugenio Murrali – Vatican City

“I learned to read at the age of five and this is the most important thing that happened to me in life.” Mario Vargas Losa, with this phrase, opened it reading On December 7, 2010, in Stockholm, on the occasion of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded “for its permits to power structures and clear pictures of resistance, revolution and the defeat of the individual.” The definition is well described by a variety of internal landscapes in the writer and playwright writers in Peru, whose work is as liquid and rich in quantity and quality that it is not easy to determine priorities and classifications between articles, press articles, plays, and literary theory writings, and often exciting like stories.

Teacher in Flibrt

In 1959, he was 23 years old and a great desire to form the narrative profession that he felt sooner within himself; He needs a teacher, and he is an alleged literary father who is able to direct him to search for a personal and effective style. He finds it in Gustav Flibrt, author of Madame Boufari. When reading the great story of a dark boycott woman “badly married”, driven by the ideals but confusing, he discovers that what critics call may not be incompatible with strict aesthetic laws and great narrative projects. This reality can be a duel that accepts the magnitude of the same artistic aspirations.

Essential

Federica Nola, a student of Latin America’s culture and its translator, describes it as an Italian for Dyoudi, in these conditions: “It was the last monster of the sacred survivors of literature in Latin America from the heroic times, the Nobel Prize, and sometimes controversially controversially, but it is necessary literary in the presentation: from the first, the primary, basic, the basic, City and dogs and Green House and Cathedral talks To give an unfortunate look at the abuse of power in Goat party S. CrossroadsFrom the most cross Aunt Julia and writer S. Bad girl adventuresEven the last emotional greeting to Peru in The secret hero S. I dedicate my silence .

Literature and commitment

In his speech about Stockholm, the narrator affirmed his belief in writing and his rejection of all forms of totalitarianism, as well as his condemnation of intolerance and violence. Literature and commitment to their profession. He loved the great novelists in the nineteenth century, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, among others. But he learned from Camus and Orwell, from the twentieth century, that “morals -free literature is inhuman.” In the sixties of the last century, Vargas Llosa was one of the heroes of the “boom” of literature in South America. Your first novel, City and dogs The main text of that literary revolution of Latin America, inspired by his experience at the Longio Prado Military Academy, where his father sent him in the hope that he would have wrapped his passion for writing. The passion that has become stronger.

Famous reading A lot tells us about the author, who ended it with these words: “Literature offers in our spirit intolerance and rebellion on which all initiatives that contributed to reducing violence in human relations. To reduce violence, not to eliminate it. Because we will always be, fortunately, an incomplete story. That is why we should continue to dream, read and write: the most effective way we found to relieve our deadly condition, overcome wood and make the impossible possible. ”

Multi -writer

The “Multiple” writer, Mario Vargas Losa, is a variety of expressive records and a thousand faces, even in real life, not only in the imagination of his books: He participated actively in politics – in 1990 he presented himself as a candidate for the presidency of Peru, lost to Alberto Fujimori – Peruvian from birth and cultural appreciation, but also the French French.

“In Paris – Llosa wrote when his books became part of” Bibliothèque de la Pleiade “from Galimard – I wrote my first novel, I discovered Latin America and started to feel that I was in Latin America, and I published my first books and learned, thanks to Flebert, which is my work method, which allowed me to be what I am.” France, the writer, was a teacher of inclusiveness, a distinctive feature of Western culture, born after the Middle Ages, which are strengthened by planting ancient and glorious roots into new facts, and even very far. “I barely arrived in Paris in August 1959, and I bought Madame Boufari at the Francois Masspro Library, and Joie De Lire, on Saint-Séverin Street, and this novel, which I read in a coma, revolutionized my vision of literature.”

The rhinoge breaks the fence

In the sixties of the last century, Argentine writer Julio Cortzar compared the narrative energy of his friend and colleague with a unicorn energy from the Buenos Aires Zoo, which broke the walls of his container, driven by the desire to indulge in the adjacent cage pool. A story that you remember with affection by the Vargas Llosa himself, is absolutely annoyed by the violence of this image, able to evoke according to the author of his writing Goat party (Einaudi, 2011) The great power of writing: a force capable of looting the world, “skin, analyzes and reorganizing it in a coherent form, was freed from the integration between the word and the imagination (…) with calm but irresistible power from the great mammals.”

Vargas Losa at the French Academy Library in Paris, February 2023 (ANSA)

Re -read

Federica Nola faced the clear accuracy of the Vargas Llosa language: “Responsibility, through translation, always lies in commitment to transfer the sound in the most transparent way, allowing it to speak in another language. When the author’s prose is completely crystalline and his idea is clear, he lives and is unambiguous, as in the case of Vargas Llosa, the responsibility of the translator may be greater. In particular, in this regard, I remember the work The tribal appeal A kind of political and intellectual biography that explains the readings capable of forgery, over time, its vision and thinking in the world, a map that rebuilds the stages of its liberal formation. I think it is worth recovering, re -reading and appreciating its clarity and clarity, beyond the political affiliation of every person. ”

A city under the mercy of technology

Federica Nola also translates a story written by Varga Llosa, which will be published in the Autumn Einaudi. The translator explains: “Only these days, he reviewed the translation of this story that follows the adventures of the centenary in the Madrid ghost in the future without cinemas, libraries or museums, at the mercy of technological innovations, which deal with a world that has not been known for a long time. Small narrative synthesis of ideas is expressed again and again in different articles and writings, collected, among other things, in size Presentation. An enjoyable text, sometimes desperate, but above all sad, even more today.