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one hand, and Marxist texts lent to me secretly by my history teacher, on the other. I would spend Sundays in the school library to stave off boredom. So, I began with bad poetry before discovering the good. Rimbaud, Valéry . . .” 12 García Márquez enjoyed “popular poetry, the kind printed on calendars and sold as broadsheets. I found I liked the poetry as much as I loathed the grammar in the Castilian text which I did for my secondary school certificate. I loved the Spanish Romantics—Núñez de Arce, Espronceda.” 13
    Although poetry was an essential component in his literary apprenticeship, it seldom makes an appearance in his oeuvre. On occasion—in
Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons,
and his autobiography—García Márquez includes quotes from favorite masters he had read in his youth. Decades later, after he had achieved international renown, García Márquez, in collaboration with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, published in Cuba a calendar that included riddles he’d written about fruits. There’s hardly any more evidence. Still, his discovery of poetry was auspicious. “My most salacious form of entertainment (at the time) was to sit, Sunday after Sunday, on those blue-paned trams that took you back and forth from the Plaza Bolívar to the Avenida de Chile for five cents—desolate afternoons which seemed to promise nothing but an interminable string of other empty Sundays to come. I’d spent that entire journey of vicious circles reading books of poems, poems and poems, gettingthrough about one slim volume for each city block, until the first street lamps would light up in the never-ending rain. Then I’d roam the silent cafés of the old town searching for someone who’d take pity on me and discuss the poems, poems, poems I’d just read.” 14 Those volumes of poetry were by writers who, as Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza put it, were politically committed and sought to produce a literature that was clear and accessible to “the simple people.” Among them were Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pablo Neruda.
    To a large extent, García Márquez’s understanding of literature was shaped by his discovery of Franz Kafka’s writings. “I must have been around nineteen (on other occasions, he said he was seventeen) when I read
The Metamorphosis,
” García Márquez recalled in 1982. The transformation of Gregor Samsa astonished him. He remembered the first line with astonishing precision: “‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought. ‘My grandmother used to talk like that.’ I said to myself, ‘I didn’t know you could do this, but if you can, I’m certainly interested in writing.’” He decided to read the most important novels ever written. 15
    Kafka had a significant impact on García Márquez’s generation, but it took some time for the Czech Jewish author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924, to gain a presence in Latin America. The translation of
Die Verwandlung
that García Márquez read has been at the heart of a heated debate for years. For some time, it was believed to have been done by the Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges, who had been infatuated with Kafka since 1938. He translated the parable “Before the Law” for the journal
El Hogar,
and, as critic Efraín Kristal notes in his book
Invisible Work: Borges and Translation,
the Argentine also included a number of his renditions of Kafka in the famous
Anthology of Fantastic Literature,
which he edited with his friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. 16 However, Borges himself cast doubt on having translated
The Metamorphosis.
The novel was first translated into Spanish in 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, and published