The Complexity (and Joy) of Coexistence
On a warm, sunlit Saturday afternoon, the Basilica Palatina di Santa Barbara fills with people. Alejandro Zambra is in Mantova on the occasion of the publication of the Italian translation of his Tema Libre. Silvia Pelizzari, an expert in Latin American literature, guides the conversation through Chilean narrators, local dialects, and the many different genres in which Zambra writes.
Right from the very beginning of the conversation, Zambra connects writing to the sacred. He recalls his own time as an altar boy, and suggests that literature, especially poetry, is a space where we can encounter the sacred.
At the moment of creation, he explains, there is no genre: every book begins, in some sense, as a poem, or at least with the idea of a poem. Zambra’s work moves across many genres, and he usually starts working without a fixed form in mind. A plan may exist, but it rarely holds. The book takes its own shape, diverging from whatever outline he first imagined.
Navigating the commonalities between Italian and Spanish in the course of the interview, Zambra seldom asks for translations of the questions posed by Pelizzari. The audience laughs easily at his jokes in Spanish, and this interplay animates the event, a live enactment of the way languages brush up against one another.
After all, language itself is a shape-shifter. Raising his son in Mexico, Zambra finds himself attuned to the differences between Mexican and Chilean Spanish. He offers a playful example: in Chile, people say they “occupy” the bathroom, as though staking a territorial claim, whereas in Mexico they simply “use” it. These tiny changes reveal larger worlds of meaning and habit.
When the conversation touches on the difficulty of teaching literature, Zambra remains loyal to a kind of "anything goes" ethic. For him, the task lies not in imposing interpretation, but in cultivating joy: the joy of encountering a text and discover how literature allows us to blissfully dwell in the complexity of coexistence.