La traducción del mundo

During October and November 2022, Juan Gabriel Vásquez was invited by the University of Oxford to give lectures for the prestigious Weidenfeld Chair of Comparative European Literature, in which authors of the stature of Mario Vargas Llosa, George Steiner, Umberto Eco previously participated. , Javier Cercas and Ali Smith. In these four presentations, gathered here, Vásquez asks if there is in literary fiction a way of understanding life that cannot be found in any other space. Is literature the place where the world is translated, interpreted and illuminated? Perhaps fiction has a unique capacity to elucidate the complexities of human experience - the mystery of each life, our link with the past, the tense relationship we maintain with the political universe - and transform that interpretation into knowledge. These texts ask us to redefine the uses of fiction, our understanding of its mechanisms, and the reasons why, in our current era, it is probably more indispensable than ever. With these reflections, Vásquez demonstrates his great intellectual stature and mastery of his craft, which led him to become a lecturer and writer-in-residence in the classrooms of Oxford and which have earned him such important awards as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Royal Spanish Academy Award, among others.