3 - Children of Scheherazade: Gabriel García Márquez in Arabic

Summary

I wrote like a blind man.

Elias Khoury, ‘Elias Khoury, the Art of Fiction’

Comparative studies of twentieth-century Latin American and Arabic literatures have long been dominated by attention to the reception of The Thousand and One Nights in Latin America and its influences on Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. However, there are other connections between the two literatures: a long history of migration from the Levant to Latin America; the presence of the Orient in Latin American literature; and the translation, reception and influence of Latin American literature in the Arab world. One influence of Latin American literature in the Arab world can be found in adaptations of magical realism, a style popularised by the novels of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s. Comparative work on Latin American and Arabic literatures offers a rich area of exploration and new frameworks, especially ones that extend beyond conventional literary comparisons. These new comparisons turn the focus from the more common attention to examinations of colonial relations in world literature, which have commonly focused on literatures of the East and the West rather than comparative frameworks for literatures of the global South.

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) read Cien años de soledad by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) before the publication of his novel Layālī alf layla. In Najīb Maḥfūẓ yatadhakkar (Naguib Mahfouz Remembers), Mahfouz notes in a conversation with the Egyptian writer Gamal al-Ghitani (Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī) that he read García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad in 1980 – two years before the appearance of Layālī alf layla: ‘This year I read Cien años de soledad by García Márquez. If you had not loaned it to me, I would not have read it … and note that García Márquez is from Colombia – Latin America’ (al-Ghitani 1987: 92). In addition to confirming his reading of Cien años de soledad (which he would not have read if a member of the younger generation of Egyptian writers had not brought the novel to his attention), he alludes to García Márquez’s national origin and continent, which implicitly expresses a fellowship with García Márquez as a Colombian writer from the global South.