This podcast was recorded several days ago but I was only now able to upload it. In it we talk about some impressions gained from brief visits to Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico.
This podcast is available in a number of different platforms including Soundcloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.
Interested to hear your travel impressions, and your observations about Dario. It looks like you visited some fascinating places and people of the world. I’ve added Leon, Nicaragua to my list of future travel destinations.
I don’t know much either about Latin American literature. It brought to mind a couple of the books I read a long time ago:
“The Autumn of the Patriarch” by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an very descriptive novel about a fictional Latin American dictator in his death throes. The English translation is incredibly ornate, rich prose. I can’t imagine the dedication of the translator who has such a command of both Spanish and English.
“The Jaguar’s Smile” by Salman Rushdie, a travel book about Nicaragua in the eighties. All I remember about that book, was that it was pro-Sandinista – but interestingly, a great number of those Sandinist left-wing revolutionaries were poets. So your comments reminded me of the richness and role of literature in these Latin American countries, (and the Latin American culture as a whole).
It’s hearing podcasts like this, and my recent reading of Don Quixote that has reinvigorated my interest in Spanish literature. And now Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has a whole course of lectures in the Yale open online series devoted just to “the Quijote”, the pillar of Spanish literature. He’s a professor of Latin American literature, and listening to these lectures opens up a doorway to a vast and fascinating world of discovery.
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Great comment, man. Yes, it was a great trip. It will take some time for me to process it all, in fact!
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