Susana is perhaps the prettiest woman I have seen, and the most beautiful character I ever created or described. This is the winning short story of the 1983 Metropolitan University (Barranquilla, Colombia), and the only one of my short story actually published in a book, by Universidad Metropolitana Editions. Please note that Diario del Caribe had decided to spanishize my name and printed it as Antonio rather than Anthony, a significant recommendation from friends and several members of La Esquina literary group, quite linked to El Caribe newspaper, where I once also worked as a part-time IT consultant.
The epigraph atop the short story reads “Men of cold character have quick eyes”, Nathaniel Hawthorne, (Journals, 1937)
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The French version of “No me Sigas, María” (“Don’t follow me, María”) translated under the title of “Ne viens pas, Marie” (“Don’t Come, María”). The translation was a joint effort of great friends like French-Italian Professor Elizabeth Lamboglia, Prof. Eric Séebold, then Director of the Alliance Française, and myself for some contents and expressions. This can get diverse opinions from a few European Francophones and Canadian readers of this blog.
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An excerpt of my column appearing in El Heraldo newspaper that I wrote in Cali after receiving a National Literary prize. My column appears next to that of German Vargas, a well-know critical writer in García Márquez literary movement.
The number of my American Spanish short stories is just about 12. Some have survived time. This is one that in the first few years after my arrival in North America. This simple short story clear shows how difficult was it to recreate a Latin American scenary immersed in an American environment, where the Spanish language struggles to be a pure language with some American regionalisms, Caribbean barbarisms, while being greatly impacted by Spanglish more than just plain Angliscims. Most versions of the Spanish (Castellano) spoken in Latin American combine a good spoken and written language, with a great variety of regionalist slangs, and some barbarisms. Unlike many native Colombian writers, I do not curse in any of my writings, in great part for the negative feedback by my critics as a teen writer, the pressure from my school teachers, like Prof. R. Díaz, but by far my French literature teachers, who explicitly asked me to avoid this in order to maintain a global literary and creative level, and seek to a be an elite writer. Likewise, I limited the number of regionalisms I ever used due to the same factor.
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