Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Critical review of the book: Rondón, P. Death and the novel: From skepticism to plenitude in Darío Jaramillo Agudelo and Tomás González. University of Antioquia, 2023. 130 pages.

This article analyzes the adaptations of the Greco-Roman tale of Cupid and Psyche in the Colombian rural oral tradition. It highlights how this classic narrative, which has been transformed and appropriated in different cultural contexts, has found significant variations in Colombia. These adaptations are understood as “literary topologies,” a concept that emphasizes the dependencies between the local versions of traditional literary works and the specific territories where they are developed. The text explores how these versions diverge from Apuleius's original narrative by incorporating elements unique to Colombian culture and geography. Additionally, the article underscores the importance of oral tradition in the transmission of these tales, which allows for constant updates and reinterpretations of the stories according to the values and needs of each community.

This article analyzes the musical world of Fernando Vallejo as presented in his latest publication, La conjura contra Porky (2023). It outlines the influence of music on the author’s prose, illustrating how musical references highlight different vital stages in the life of the narrator-protagonist. This analysis allows for an understanding of the transversal role that musical resources play across Vallejo’s collection of novels. La conjura contra Porky facilitates a dialogue between Vallejo’s novels, revealing his relationship with both popular commercial music and classical music. This, in turn, enables an exploration of intermediality in Vallejo’s work, following one of the three divisions proposed by Irina Rajewsky. The aim is to provide a fresh perspective on Vallejo’s oeuvre through this recent publication, from the standpoint of comparative literature and studies on the relationship between music and literature (musician-literary studies).

This article explores the way in which the literary magazine Alpha of Medellín, starting in 1906, confronted the representations of the Thousand Days War. Its editors, fearful of seeing the war reactivated, whose images of terror circulated in the capital of Antioquia, proposed a serial publication that would be a textual platform for the meeting of Colombian writers, thinkers and artists with different political positions, former rivals during the war that had recently finished. To write this article, (1) the editorial line of Alpha was presented, (2) the images of the Thousand Day War exhibited in literary and pictorial works were explored, and (3) the representations about the War that had been built conservatives and liberals. It is concluded that Alpha magazine was born and developed as a part of a national project that sought to reduce the ideological violence that remained in the first Colombian postwar of the 20th century.

Review of Ficciones narrativas sobre la identidad de América Latina en: El Caballero de El Dorado y Cosas del pueblo. Una novela histórica y una crónica literaria de Germán Arciniegas by Blanca Miriam Valencia Echavarría

Roberto Bazlen (Trieste, 1902 - Milán, 1965) y Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Bogotá, 1913-1994) son dos lectores que se encuentran en los márgenes de sus respectivas culturas, Italia y Colombia. Su confluencia en un mismo catálogo editorial, Adelphi Edizioni, no es fortuita si piensa en la dimensión estética de los dos géneros literarios que cada uno cultivó: el parere di lettura editoriale [informe de lectura editorial] y el escolio. 903 / 5.000 Roberto Bazlen (Trieste, 1902 - Milan, 1965) and Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Bogotá, 1913-1994) are two readers who meet on the margins of their respective cultures, Italy and Colombia. Their convergence in the same publishing catalogue, Adelphi Edizioni, is not fortuitous if we consider the aesthetic dimension of the two literary genres that each cultivated: the parere di lettura editoriale [editorial reading report] and the scholium. When Roberto Bazlen noted in his notebooks that it was no longer possible to write more books but only footnotes, he probably had in mind an idea very similar to that of the forgotten Colombian philosopher, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who throughout his life dedicated himself to reading and writing scholia to an implicit text. This lecture seeks to elucidate why the notion of a work no longer fits into those small but difficult literary genres specific to the reader.

Conversation with the Yanakuna poet, oralitor and writer Fredy Chikangana/Wiñay Mallki. This interview  took place between August 14 and 16, 2024, within the framework of the VI Congress of the Network of Trainers in Education and Interculturality in Latin America (RedFEIAL), in Popayán, Cauca. The Yanakuna oralitor, Fredy Chikangana, was invited along with the Almanegra, Mary Grueso Romero and the Misak-Nasa poet, Nery Helena Beca Masaguallí, to the poetic recital at the opening of the Congress.

The bulk of this interview is the result of a conversation with Evelio Rosero in May 2023. I took many texts from two texts published in the Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico of the Banco de la República. The first, “On literary creation”, was published in 1993 (Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico, vol. 30, no. 33). The second, “On editors and translators,” was first a conference and was published in 2013 (Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico, vol. XLVII, no. 84). Digging around I came across an interview with him by Celedonio Orjuela and Mauricio Contreras that was published in Hojas Universitarias, the magazine of Universidad Central, in 1990 (no. 36). From there I took the epigraph.