P Sudhakaran
Much before we discovered the ‘global village’, there was one
writer who built a bridge between the God’s Own country and Latin America. And
he became a household name among us like Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, M T Vasudevan
Nair or O V Vijayan. And he is the most popular Malayalam writer in the words
of N S Madhavan! Gabriel García Márquez, the writer who needs no
introduction!
Though Marquez literally happened to the Malayalis in the 80s
after his winning Nobel Prize for 'One Hundred years of Solitude', a wide array
of his works got published here within years, mostly without copyright, thanks
to the small-time publishers. Though his celebrated works got published through
the brand of DC Books, it was the small-timers who played a major role in
making Marquez a household name in Kerala.
And that opened Kerala’s doors directly to the skies of Latin
America’ magic realism, thus creating an equation with the legends like Jorge
Luis Borges, Yuan Rulfo among others. However, Marquez was unbeaten
in the popularity though one can agree or disagree whether he is the best of
Latin American writers. During the good old days of the library movement,
people waited for weeks to get a chance to read ‘Ekanthathayude Nooru
Varshangal’, the Malayalam translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a
phenomenon we experienced very rarely for titles like MT’s ‘Randamoozham’
When One Hundred years of Solitude was published in 1984,
Malayali readers felt no alienation from the fictitious town of Macondo and
Melquiades the Gypsy became one among them, swinging between memories and
forgetfulness and cracking the family tree with great pain.
However, even before that a small-time publisher from Guruvayur,
Sikha, had introduced the great writer by publishing the excerpt of his
celebrated autobiographic interview ‘The Fragrance of Guava, which was later
published in complete format by Shalvy of Mulberry Publications, Kozhikode.
Later, the titles like The Story of a Shipwrecked
Sailor, No One Writes to the Colonel got published, which also gave a
new identity to the little publishing in Kerala, that was so far dominated by
one or two big timers. Even the short story, ‘Tuesday Siesta’, was debated at
length because it was departure from his magic realism.
However, it was the Malayalam translation of One Hundred Years
of Solitude that popularized Marquez in Kerala. The destination of the global
tourist got addicted to the world of magic realism in no time. A few years
back, when mysterious red rains were reported from some part of Kerala, someone
commented that it is nothing strange because such miracles can happen in a
state that celebrates Marquez and magic realism.
No doubt, for
Malayalis Macondo was a neighbouring village bordering Vijayan’s Khasak in
their world sans border, while R K Narayanan’s Malgudi still remained an alien
land in a faraway planet. That was Marquez effect for Malayalis who started
thinking globally much before globalization was invented!
