Clarice Lispector, tr. Johnny Lorenz, A Breath of Life (1978)

Popular Verse

“I think it’s very reasonable to see a popular singer as a poet, be it Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, or so many others,” says Argentine journalist and writer Andrea Álvarez Mujica when we discuss the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 2016 to the man behind “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Three years after that honor, songwriter Chico Buarque, one of the greatest exponents of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), received the Camões Prize, considered the highest literary honor in the Portuguese language.

The author of Horas de rock (2017, 2021) and Estelares: detrás de las canciones (2022) maintains, with no hesitation, that it was only right to award this recognition to a lyricist, “first because it takes into account a voice from the streets, outside the ivory tower or the elite. Also because the lyrics of a song can be a form of poetry, though they need not necessarily be; a song can do just fine with lyrics that might not work as verse alone. If we go back to the origins of poetry, probably a great deal of it came from popular singers.”

Rhyme and verse, rhythm and a couple of metaphors, rejoicing in language and taking a chance on cadent phrasing to weave story or song… That’s what the game is all about: “Creating the structure of a work of literature like you structure a piece of music. Using songs to build a correlative and start telling a story. The texts that make up a book create a rhythm, they have a musicality. Words ring out, even when we’re reading in silence,” states Octavio Escobar of Colombia, winner of the 1997 National Literature Prize from his country’s Ministry of Culture for the short story collection De música ligera, whose tales serve as a compass to lead us through the work of artists like Nino Bravo, Guns N’ Roses, Sandro de América, and the Bee Gees.

A Shared Tempo

“To be able to synthesise in the five or six lines of a bolero everything
that a bolero encapsulates is a true literary feat.”

Gabriel García Márquez, tr. Juan Carlos Garvayo, 1985 

“I’ve said myself, more in earnest than in jest, that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 400-page Vallenato and Love in the Time of Cholera is a 380-page bolero,” Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez told Germán Borda in the “Gabo contesta” section of Cambio magazine in 1990, in response to a question from the composer, writer, and music critic about No One Writes to the Colonel (1961). In said novel, Borda told him, “I find a fixed tempo throughout the work,” and he inquired if this was deliberate or, on the contrary, if this register had come about by coincidence. The Aracatacan pondered his profound relationship with music, and added that not only The Colonel but “even the least significant of my paragraphs is subject to that harmonic rigor.” 

The structure of a work of literature like that of a piece of music. Escobar translated Gabo’s meaning aptly, and in his own way, when the author claimed to have composed a vallenato, a genre declared intangible cultural heritage and marked by lyrics that, according to UNESCO, “interpret the world through stories that mix realism and fantasy.” One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a fundamental work of magical realism, which revindicated the fanciful, the imagination as a legitimate form of understanding and explaining the world. 

The vallenato, born on Colombia’s northern coast, is an amalgam of cowherd and captive songs, indigenous dances, Spanish poetry, and instruments from all three origins. García Márquez defined magical realism in The Fragrance of Guava (1982) as a mixture of “the overflowing imagination of Black African slaves with that of Pre-Columbian Natives […], the imagination of the Andalucians and the Galicians’ cult of the supernatural”—a principle and precept in the Caribbean. One and the other, with an inescapable vocation for storytelling.

The Everlasting Soundtrack

A way of reinventing the world, says Carolina Bello of Uruguay. Arts that shape time, that try to contain it, to make sense of it and reenact its passage, lending it both logic and catharsis, expresses Colombia’s Ricardo Silva Romero. Primordial stimulus and influence that turns the aesthetic keys of creation, signals Mexico’s Antonio Ortuño. The soundtrack of life and the stage on which the characters transit through a story, states Cuba’s Dainerys Machado. Thus do some Latin American writers, in consonance and perfect rhyme, conceive of the essential, unbreakable, powerful bond between music and literature.

Bello finds three modes of this almost hallucinatory hybridization of music and literature: as theme, motif, or incidental accompaniment. “Since time immemorial, literature and music have been schemes of representation; in this sense, as artistic manifestations based on rhythms and textures, they have always gone hand in hand. Literature has often been subsidiary to sonic arrangements that came before it as a mechanism with which to represent and comprehend the world; at other times, music has operated within literature as a motif—even one of survival—in the characters’ logic,” says the winner of the 2016 Gutenberg Prize, awarded by the European Union and Fin de Siglo press. The best example, she says, is Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) by Manuel Puig of Argentina, “with music inserted into the plot as a mechanism of salvation” (not to mention the tangos. boleros, and foxtrots of Heartbreak Tango). 

Álvarez Mujica concurs with Bello’s conception of music as a sort of frame that becomes foundation and fiber:

It seems, when you put an as-yet nonexistent scene to music, that scene somehow starts coming to life. The music the characters are listening to, or more generally, the music they pick, the music they like, which gives them their identity, obviously gives them life and starts setting them in motion. Music is one of those elements that also adds volume, information, and movement to what’s going on… especially volume!

Likewise, in La Armada Invencible (2022), Antonio Ortuño (winner of the 2018 Nellie Campobello Fine Arts Prize for the Hispano-American Short Story) tells, with heavy metal in the background, the story of a band of aging musicians, “ailing and frustrated,” who plan to get back to their glory years while struggling to survive a life of humdrum adulthood. Ortuño says for himself, “almost every book I’ve published recently has its own soundtrack: for the novel La fila india, Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Serú Girán, Sui Generis, Pescado Rabioso, cuplés my grandma used to sing, zarzuelas and music from the Spanish Civil War; for Olinka, soul, Curtis Mayfield, Blixa Bargeld, ambiental and experimental music…” And, among so many other sounds, metal and punk as “the music that has given me a literary identity.”

The author of El resto del mundo rima (2021, Mapa de las lenguas) also presents the inverse case, where “music has taken its motifs from literature, or has directly converted literary texts into song, especially from poetry, an inherently musical genre.” Such is the case of Un mundo sin gloria (2023) by Garo Arakelián of Uruguay, in which, Bello tells us, “many songs reelaborate journalistic chronicles published in books or the press, creating a ‘nonfiction album.’ It’s no longer a question of turning a poem or some other preceding text into a song, but rather of reelaborating it into another code that, with all its lyricism, maintains a narrative structure.”

Besides music as a motif, Álvarez Mujica cites albums and songs inspired by books like “La Biblia by Vox Dei, a foundational album of Argentine rock, and foundational from the book it picks up. In Argentine rock, books and authors and literature inspiring music is a common occurrence: for Fito Páez, for Spinetta with Artaud, which is also an iconic record, and one through which many young folks at the time got to know the French author.” “Flaco” himself recognized that he dedicated this album to the author of The Nerve Meter (1927), taking his work not as a starting point, but rather as a response—“an insignificant one, perhaps,” he told Eduardo Berti—to the suffering that came from reading him.

Music As Complicity

For Silva Romero, selected in 2006 by the Hay Festival as one of the thirty-nine most important writers under the age of thirty-nine in Latin America, some popular songs have the vocation of novels, of epic poems, of short stories, and are just as heart-rending as the greatest works of literature. This is so because, as Álvarez Mujica sees it, some artists are “chronicling,” making stories of lyrics “that have meaning for others from the intimate or a more social side, forming that antenna that connects with what happens to others; they receive a little feeling, a little state-of-mind from others, and they put it to verse.”

The author of Cómo perderlo todo (2018) aspires for what he writes “to sound like, and to be, a certain kind of music; that gives you chills, accompanies you, and puts you back together like music does.” For the same reason, he tried—unsuccessfully—to write his degree thesis on Paul Simon, his “favorite writer.” He then wrote it on another Paul, this one surnamed Auster, whose work reminded him of “that vocation as strange as all others,” as he found in it “a oneness that tells the story of a whole world, and, in the process, surpasses the exclusivity of genres and their linguistic codes.”

For her part, Bello notes that, in her own work, music has been present “as an intertextual reference that anchors the text to a given meaning; in characters directly linked to sound; as a matrix of textures to attain sonority in the texts or as an excuse to talk about music and its effects on the characters’ lives and the context in which it appears.” Her book Oktubre, an analysis in novel form of the record of the same name by Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, is an example of this work. It was written as part of the “Discos” collection from Estuario Editora, an initiative of academic Gustavo Verdesio that sought for different writers to address a Río de la Plata rock album of their choice, on the condition that they speak about all of its songs.

“I think we artists in general are looking for accomplices and inspiration. Sometimes we find them walking down the street, sometimes in a book, sometimes in a song,” says Álvarez Mujica. Thus we have Uruguayan writer Ramiro Sanchiz with the uchronia and dystopia of Un pianista de provincias (2022, Mapa de las lenguas), making us walk alongside a young musician across desolate lands, playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and contending with an old Michael Jackson imitator, in a novel with “musical methods, techniques, and structures transferred to literature”; or the “literary projects based entirely on musical references, as in the work of Alejo Carpentier, especially his short novel El acoso, whose backdrop and pretext is Beethoven’s Eroica, and you can almost follow the symphony through what befalls the character,” as we are reminded by Dainerys Machado, chosed in 2021 by Granta as one of the twenty-five most outstanding contemporary Spanish-language novelists under the age of thirty-five.

For Chilean writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet, one of the keys to Ciertos chicos (his return to the novel, after seven years without publishing this genre) was its wager on music: it was advertised in the streets with flyers designed to resemble eighties concert posters, fake cassette tapes were handed out, and playlists were created with its songs (some unknown to the author himself). Almost thirty years have passed since an editor struck down his idea to add music to Por favor, rebobinar, “but now, when someone says a book is like a record, it’s no longer an insult. In fact, that’s how this novel is reaching people.”

No one list will be enough. Music and literature offer us thousands of versions and visions of the world. Millions of symphonies and tempos, lyrics and rhythms from a universal novel, the works that have been dreamed up and written down to the sound of a beloved song, the paragraphs composed to dance or hurt to. Mónica Ojeda offers us a festival of retrofuturist music in Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol (2024). Julio Cortázar incorporated jazz as essence and path in Hopscotch (1963). Pablo Milanés created sones nourished by the poetry of José Martí and Nicolás Guillén. Rubén Blades inherited a pair of “Ojos de perro azul” and Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys found lively ideas in the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. With his new tango, Astor Piazolla put Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato to music. Juan Villoro dedicated two great pages to the music of the Mexican counterculture and to Caifanes. Willie Colón inherited lines from Clarice Lispector. And, Porque demasiado no es suficiente, Mariana Enriquez reflects regally on Suede, Nick Cave, Manic Street Preachers, Iggy Pop, Radiohead, and Low. Today we repeat, like Andrés Caicedo in 1977: ¡Que viva la música!

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Juan Camilo Rincón is a writer, journalist, and cultural researcher focusing on Hispano-American literature. He earned his Master’s in Literary Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and is a former grantee of FONCA (Mexico). He is the author of Ser colombiano es un acto de fe: Historias de Jorge Luis Borges y Colombia, Viaje al corazón de Cortázar, Nuestra memoria es para siempre, and Colombia y México: entre la sangre y la palabra. He has written on cultural topics for outlets in Latin America and Spain, and has been a guest author at international book fairs in Bogotá, Culiacán, Guadalajara, Guayaquil, Havana, and Pachuca.

Natalia Consuegra is a cultural journalist. She writes on literary topics for outlets in Latin America and Spain. She also works as a proofreader and copy editor (APA style and RAE guidelines).

Photo: Diane Picchiottino, Unsplash.

In her books Cuerpo extraño (Literal Publishing, 2013), Cuaderno de faros (Tierra Adentro, 2017), Línea nigra (Almadía, 2021), and Punto de cruz (Almadía, 2021), there converge themes such as motherhood, bodies, loneliness, family, isolation and, among them all, many questions. Through diaries and fragments—which she considers versatile literary tools—and explorations on themes that preoccupy her, Jazmina Barrera has built a body of work that today is read in five languages and with great attention.

Here we converse with the author about her work, the points of convergence between her books, and the current state of Latin American literature.

Juan Camilo Rincón & Natalia Consuegra: Regarding some of your works, you mention an intersection that transcends genre, that what some call a novel you consider an essay, uncoupled from any academic connotations or categorial assertions…

Jazmina Barrera: I think what I associate immediately with the essay is freedom. I studied in a primary school outside of Mexico City where they used a system called Freinet. One of the elements of that system is that, every so often, the teacher asked us to do a free write; they didn’t say a story, an essay… They said: a free write. Then we printed those texts, because we had little movable-type printers, and we made books. I remember perfectly the first text of mine that was printed and the excitement of being able to share my ideas, the collective creation, writing as a game, the satisfaction of having a product that emerged from your creativity. That’s when I started to associate writing with pleasure and with freedom, a free write. I feel like I still write free texts. And then in canonical texts, which we have to understand are subjective definitions, classifications that we build out of texts that already exist… From those texts we decide to make classifications. Sometimes it seems like the classifications exist prior to literature, but that’s not true. First come the texts and later the classification, and we have all the freedom possible to write those texts. We can take any literary tool that we associate with the novel, the essay, poetry, they’re there and we can use them. Of course there are certain rules of the game and those are different for every person, in every country, in every culture. For example, the “memoir” genre is something that in Spanish we hardly ever use, maybe we would instead call it “essay.” Our classification of nonfiction is distinct from the English-speaking world’s. So we must understand that these are subjective, cultural classifications and they operate like the rules of a game; for some people they work for their writing or as a departure point for their writing. They don’t work for me; they disorient me, upset me, constrain me. I prefer to think very openly about what I want to say and the literary tools I need to say it. And that, what I do, I call “essay,” because in the essay we find experimentation, process, staging. On the other hand, the word “novel” tells me nothing; it speaks of novelty, something that for me is a value that’s not very useful in writing. And that’s why I think every good book is an essay; on the other hand, a novel… I don’t know.

C. R. & N. C.: Right, to impose a label and a genre ends up limiting the expressive possibilities. It can be complicated for writers as well as for readers…

J.B.: Yes, I think it’s a category that works above all for marketing. It tells the booksellers where to put them and it works for some authors who even play with it, who want to write a novel thinking of the possibilities of the novel, bringing it to its limit, responding to a tradition. There’s lots of people for whom it really does work. It’s like writing a sonnet within those rules; for plenty of people it works and they do it really well, but we can see that for some it doesn’t. As opposed to, for example, visual arts, where alternative media have existed for a long time, or there’s more flexibility for hybridity, the literary industry is still much more ordered according to these canonical genres. If you’re competing for a prize, you have to select a category; if you apply for a master’s program, you have to select a category. And it turns out there’s much more than just that.

C. R. & N. C.: Turning to your books, in Línea nigra you say that one needs a tribe for childrearing, and in Punto de cruz you suggest that weaving is richer as a collective exercise. Is there a dialogue within your body of work? When you reread it, do you find that thread?

J.B.: Well, I don’t read and reread myself; it’s more like I published the book and said goodbye. Unless I have to do it for some specific reason, I prefer not to go back. César Aira said each book is corrected with the next one, and I have faith that that’s true. But I do think there are, of course, like everyone has, manias, obsessions, even defects that repeat from one book to another. I think I can visualize almost all of my books like a collection. I think of it that way because my mother is a painter and my father is a museologist, so the idea of a collection has always been very present in my life; I have a book that is a collection of lighthouses; I have a book that is a collection of stories and visual works that talk about birth, pregnancy, and breastfeeding; I have another book that has a collection of memories, on the one hand, and a sampler of ideas and references that have to do with embroidery in many expressions around the world and in different times. So I think, in that sense, all are books that go from the subjective to the collective, from the personal to the political, and that use fragments also, in different ways and with different pretexts. I’ve always found some motive to make my books fragmentary.

C. R. & N. C.: Among those fragments appears the family. How does that work in and for your writing?

J.B.: Family, in my case, has always been a broad term. I grew up with my mother and my father, but I never had siblings; my cousins are the closest to that. As a girl I was very close with my paternal grandmother, who lived close to my house, and also to my maternal grandmother and grandfather, with whom I spent every weekend. My aunts were very important in my life, my second cousins. It’s an extensive family that has been fundamental in my life, not only in my emotional development, but also in my intellectual development, and now that I have a child it is also a very important part of my support network. Of course, my family also had cats, dogs, friends… I believe in chosen family, and sometimes you can choose within that family that is your biological family, sometimes not. I think family is a very important component of our identity. Its history, its layout, its attitude, its lexicon, as Natalia Ginzburg would say, influence in a determining way the people we are, for better or for worse; often they work as a counter-example. Now that I am a mother, they are also the primary reference point I have for childrearing and caregiving.

C. R. & N. C.: How have you addressed that topic in your literature?

J.B.: In my work, family is above all a group of stories, the ones I feel closest to and that touch me emotionally the most directly, and that have influenced the people around me and who I am. I use those stories as literary material, and often I put them into dialogue with other things, with the outside world, with other stories, other families and lots of other ideas. I go back to Natalia Ginzburg with her book Léxico familiar, which to me is a wonderful example of what you can do with family in literature, how family creates our first language. For example, to say we speak the same language is always an exaggeration, because there are always phrases we don’t understand, words we don’t know, and with family we share more words, more sayings, more local jokes, that maybe mean something different to us than to the rest of the world.

C. R. & N. C.: Do you think we have achieved a fluid dialogue between our literatures, at least in Latin America? 

J.B.: I think we are more and more independent from Spain, although still the two largest Spanish-language publishing houses have their headquarters there. This fact, clearly, determines to a large extent what we read and how we read. I think the hope here is in independent presses, because it seems to me that they are the ones who have made sure to investigate, read, look for what’s happening in other countries, make rights trades, co-editions, editorial lines that very explicitly look for a Latin American catalogue, like the case of Laguna in Colombia, for example. Although there are initiatives at large presses as well: at Random House there’s Mapa de Lenguas, which possibly brings more authors to new places, but I think it’s still lacking.

C. R. & N. C.: How do you read literature that addresses violence? Someone spoke about the importance of those books that now call things by their names (in the case of femicides, for example). Are we facing new narrative forms?

J.B.: I don’t know. The dilemmas are still the same as always. Whether or not to aestheticize violence, whether to address it in a literal, crude, and stark manner or in a more indirect and subtle manner… I think the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas are still the same. Possibly, as we were saying, women have more freedom to write about these topics than they had before… But still, some of the books I like most lately are not that far from what Faulkner would do. To talk about novelty in literature is very complicated for me because there are things that come and go. We really feed on what existed in the past, and I think, in the case of violence, there is a new vocabulary to talk about it, but I’m not so sure that literature in particular has a direct effect. I think language that comes from academia and the social sciences, in part, is very useful and indispensable to name things we didn’t name before. Nevertheless, I also think that language sometimes alienates, intimidates, complicates, and confuses a lot of people. I, at least, when I write, always try to avoid that vocabulary, because I think doing that allows me to reach more people. I think that has been an error of the left in recent times: maybe we stay too much in our own world and we assume everyone talks like we do, so it becomes hard for us to open up, to reach other audiences and convince more people of the things of which they still need to be convinced.

Translated by Madeleine Arenivar

Photo: Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera.