I’m hearing music. Debussy uses the froth of the sea dying on the sands, ebbing and flowing. Bach is a mathematician. Mozart is the impersonal divine. Chopin reveals his most intimate life. Schoenberg, through his self, reaches the classical self of everyone. Beethoven is the stormy human elixir searching for divinity and only finding it in death. As for me, I’ve got nothing to do with music, I only arrive at the threshold of a new word. Without the courage to expose it. My vocabulary is sad and sometimes Wagnerian-polyphonic-paranoid. I write very simple and very naked. That’s why it wounds.
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).
