Talks

Leviathans, Labyrinths and Levitations : Kevin Maynard

A presentation on three titans of Latin American Literature – Pablo Neruda, Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Kevin’s Feb ’26 talk began with a map showing the land-bridge and islands that collectively are called ‘Central America’ and the attached continent known as ‘South America’.  He then offered a list of seventeen ‘representative’ Latin American writers, explaining that all but the first belonged either to the ‘Latin American Boom’ of the 1960s and 1970s, or to the ‘Post-Boom’ of the subsequent decades:

  1. Machado de Assis (Brazil) [recommended: Epitaph of a Small Winner];
  2. Gabriela Mistral (Chile) [recommended: Selected Poems, translated by Ursula Le Guin];
  3. Cesar Vallejo (Peru) [recommended: Neruda and Vallejo – Selected Poems, ed. Robert Bly];
  4. Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) [recommended: The President];
  5. Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) [recommended: Everyman Collected Fictions / Penguin Selected Poems];
  6. Silvina Ocampo (Argentina) [recommended: The Imposter and Other Stories];
  7. Pablo Neruda (Chile) [recommended: Neruda and Vallejo – Selected Poems, ed. Robert Bly / I Explain a Few Things – Selected Poems];
  8. Alejo Carpentier (Cuba) [recommended: The Kingdom of This World];
  9. Julio Cortázar (Argentina) [recommended: Everyman Hopscotch and Blow-Up];
  10. Octavio Paz (Mexico) [recommended: Sunstone, translated by Eliot Weinberger];
  11. Clarice Lispector (Brazil) [recommended: The Complete Stories / The Hour of the Star];
  12. Jaime Saenz (Bolivia) [recommended: Immanent Visitor];
  13. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia) [recommended: No One Writes to the Colonel / One Hundred Years of Solitude / Love in the Time of Cholera];
  14. Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) [recommended: The Death of Artemio Cruz];
  15. Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina) [recommended: Extracting the Stone of Madness];
  16. Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) [recommended: The War of the End of the World / Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter];
  17. Roberto Bolaño (Chile) [recommended: The Savage Detectives]

He then concentrated on the work of three major authors, all of whom have achieved global fame, namely Neruda,Borges and Marquez.  Short exemplary extracts were provided of Neruda’s nature poetry, his love poetry, his angry political verse, and his often humorous Odes.  From Borges, extracts from both his poetry and his prose were chosen.  And from Marquez, we saw displayed and heard extracts from his short stories and his longer fiction.

Portraits of the major authors and political figures of the time illustrated this interesting presentation.

Kevin Maynard and Lois Coulthart