English literature in the world
By Alberto Manguel
"With the exception of some poets of the first half of the twentieth century, good written English literature ceased at the end of the Golden Age," a teacher told us literature when we were thirteen or fourteen.
Apart from certain inveterate readers, this view prevailed in Argentina throughout my adolescence. Borges had decreed that no English novel, after Don Quixote, was worth the effort to be read (when someone told him that Galdós was in their opinion, best novelist Eça de Queiroz, Borges replied "my sincere condolences.") Despite this bleak view, the readers of my generation discovered that English literature did exist. Memory learned Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Blas de Otero and Miguel Hernández; read (not enough respect) to Ortega y Gasset and Américo Castro; devour novelists (that seemed extraordinarily bold) of Benet Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Laforet to Rodoreda. It is true, however, that English literature had little influence on the writers of my time, focused mostly on poetry and French philosophy, and American Novel and Italian. And then came the so-called boom of Latin American literature, with which all the literature of the Peninsula, in the eyes of English-language, ceased to exist. Partly as a result of so-called globalization, in part because the new air began to breathe after the death of Franco in the new millennium great number of English authors began to take popularity across the Atlantic. Today Javier Marías, Javier Cercas, Manuel Rivas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Bernardo Atxaga bestsellers are common, and when I told my sister who knew Rosa Montero, appeared with a stack of twenty novels for her sign, telling me that for all friends, was a "total diva." In the Anglo world, the situation is different. While some authors (by, for example) are well reviewed and very well sold, and a few others belong to that nationality without borders that grants the status of best-seller (as the ubiquitous Carlos Ruiz Zafon), most editors Anglo-Saxons seem uninterested in the literature of Spain. It is true that, as always, the English reader has not felt more affinity with the writers of the Iberian Peninsula. And Robinson Crusoe, retrieving some books from the wreck, leaving behind the volumes "written by pens papists." Only Don Quixote enters the universal canon of English readers, neither Calderón Quevedo and Góngora are not allowed. English poetry of the last century, nothing is known except to Lorca. The British magazine Granta included some English in their list of "best young storytellers in English", but none has become a star of British literary firmament. Curious one critic in The Times Literary Supplement has ever said Ortega, but other English thinkers do not know anything. When I mentioned to Fernando Savater and Maria Zambrano in a note to The Washington Post, the editor (Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism), I asked who they were. In Germany (where they do know to Calderon, who is part of the repertoire national) is an effort to publish and make known to the English authors. In Scandinavian countries, only a handful of authors of novels about police are read (Vázquez Montalbán, Perez-Reverte). In Italy, if it seems to have a greater interest in the North of English literature, she (I confess a publisher in Rome) is not for sale. Take small Italian publishing translations of poets and essayists, and great novelists published the most famous, but this does not mean neither to be read: in Italy seems to have more editors than readers. For historical, economic, literary and sometimes other less definable, some literature sometimes reaches to interest on the whole, readers of other languages. In some cases, acquired abroad a uniform identity: from Spain, talk of Japanese literature, for example, or Mexican, and we know what we mean. The case of English literature is not so simple. Almudena Grandes Javier Cercas or are read in Korea and Finland but not in the same way. Perhaps the English literature has become, in recent decades, something as complex and diverse, which has lost its national character and has become a wonderful variety of unique voices universal.
Alberto Manguel has recently published The city of words. Political lies, truths of literature. (RBA. Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2010. 192 pages. 21 euros).
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