The death of Carlos Fuentes
"You start by writing so as to live and you end up by writing so as not to die."
Carlos Fuentes, writer and diplomat: born Panama City 11 November 1928; married 1957 (marriage dissolved; one daughter), 1973 Sylvia Lemus (one son deceased, one daughter deceased); died Mexico City 15 May 2012
As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose influence went far beyond the literary. “Carlos’s significance for Mexico is huge: he admonished Mexicans to take charge of their history and their culture as early as 1962,” writes Mac Adam. “He was always a constructive critic, both of Mexico, the United States, and any other country he felt was acting against his idea of civilization. Carlos was a great advocate of human rights and equality before the law for all. That stance is an important one, now and forever.”
In 1981, the Paris Review ran an interview with Fuentes by Mac Adam and Charles Ruas, who met the author one wintery day in Princeton, N.J. “That interview helped Carlos map out his writing, see where he’d been, and to plan for the future,” says Mac Adam. “It was in a way the nucleus of the memoir or autobiography we all knew he would never write.” “The last time I spoke with him, about three months ago, he outlined a memoir that would cover his early years. Whether he finished it or not I can’t say,” the scholar adds. “Carlos Fuentes was a loyal friend. He was a human being with all the faults we humans have, but he was a glowing mind and a man who could never stop writing.”
That continual writing—novels, plays, short stories, criticism, more—has created quite a translation market. For what may be the newest Fuentes translation, readers can turn to the Dalkey Archive Press, a non-profit publisher that is housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/translating-fuentes/30420
See also: Professor Carlos Fuentes: Author whose work fuelled the rise of South American writing It is an abiding mystery why the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A major 20th century literary figure, he launched "el boom" in Latin American fiction with his first novel, Where The Air is Clear (1958), while his magnum opus, Terra Nostra (1975), is one of the great novels of the 20th century. Some critics rate The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) and his later novel The Years of Laura Diaz (1999) as Terra Nostra's equal. The one-time Mexican ambassador to France and Harvard professor was also a high-profile critic of the US's policy towards Latin America and an acute analyst of his own country's problems. He moved among presidents, film stars and other world-ranking artists. He was close friends with Luis Buñuel, collaborated on film scripts with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, had an affair with the actress Jean Seberg and numbered among his friends Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Lhosa. As a Latin American writer he was often lazily bracketed with Marquez, Lhosa and the other "magical realists". He did something different, however. Some critics have argued that he has more in common with European modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, and Proust: The Death of Artemio Cruz was just about the first Latin American novel to employ stream of consciousness. He was dubbed "the Balzac of Mexico", and, he said, "Balzac travelled between documentary realism and stories of the fantastic with the greatest of ease."..
Carlos Fuentes, writer and diplomat: born Panama City 11 November 1928; married 1957 (marriage dissolved; one daughter), 1973 Sylvia Lemus (one son deceased, one daughter deceased); died Mexico City 15 May 2012
As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose influence went far beyond the literary. “Carlos’s significance for Mexico is huge: he admonished Mexicans to take charge of their history and their culture as early as 1962,” writes Mac Adam. “He was always a constructive critic, both of Mexico, the United States, and any other country he felt was acting against his idea of civilization. Carlos was a great advocate of human rights and equality before the law for all. That stance is an important one, now and forever.”
In 1981, the Paris Review ran an interview with Fuentes by Mac Adam and Charles Ruas, who met the author one wintery day in Princeton, N.J. “That interview helped Carlos map out his writing, see where he’d been, and to plan for the future,” says Mac Adam. “It was in a way the nucleus of the memoir or autobiography we all knew he would never write.” “The last time I spoke with him, about three months ago, he outlined a memoir that would cover his early years. Whether he finished it or not I can’t say,” the scholar adds. “Carlos Fuentes was a loyal friend. He was a human being with all the faults we humans have, but he was a glowing mind and a man who could never stop writing.”
That continual writing—novels, plays, short stories, criticism, more—has created quite a translation market. For what may be the newest Fuentes translation, readers can turn to the Dalkey Archive Press, a non-profit publisher that is housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/translating-fuentes/30420
See also: Professor Carlos Fuentes: Author whose work fuelled the rise of South American writing It is an abiding mystery why the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A major 20th century literary figure, he launched "el boom" in Latin American fiction with his first novel, Where The Air is Clear (1958), while his magnum opus, Terra Nostra (1975), is one of the great novels of the 20th century. Some critics rate The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) and his later novel The Years of Laura Diaz (1999) as Terra Nostra's equal. The one-time Mexican ambassador to France and Harvard professor was also a high-profile critic of the US's policy towards Latin America and an acute analyst of his own country's problems. He moved among presidents, film stars and other world-ranking artists. He was close friends with Luis Buñuel, collaborated on film scripts with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, had an affair with the actress Jean Seberg and numbered among his friends Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Lhosa. As a Latin American writer he was often lazily bracketed with Marquez, Lhosa and the other "magical realists". He did something different, however. Some critics have argued that he has more in common with European modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, and Proust: The Death of Artemio Cruz was just about the first Latin American novel to employ stream of consciousness. He was dubbed "the Balzac of Mexico", and, he said, "Balzac travelled between documentary realism and stories of the fantastic with the greatest of ease."..
