This week, I bring you (with great nostalgia) my first ever full length podcast interview, which I was lucky enough to do with the inimitable Frank Wynne. Since Spotify and Apple only let podcasts keep 100 episodes online, this was about to disappear from the Internet and the Colombia Calling archive: I decided to keep the memory alive here.
So, here is an hour with Frank Wynne, tracing his incredible career from the very start of his linguistic journey - a breakup and a bookshop in Paris - to his award-winning translation of writers across Latin America and the francophone world. We chatted all things translation, language-learning, slang, and song lyrics.
We also delved deep into an obsession of mine, cult Colombian author and ‘Enemy Number 1 of Macondo’ - Andrés Caicedo, whose only finished novel was translated by Frank himself, for Penguin Modern Classics.
“All of the arts fuse together – and those then fuse with the salsa and the sex and the landscape. In the two days before he died, he read 11 novels. He needed to inhale everything in life. And he did,” Frank told me.
The novel, ‘Lifeforever!’ is a wild spiral of youth, hedonism, and salsa music, straight from the mind of Cali’s own Kurt Cobain - the man many see as the anti-Márquez
Caicedo died a tragically early death, killing himself the same day he received a published copy of his novel, but his work is canonical to Colombian literature and he is an iconic figure in its cultural history.
Frank has translated authors from Caicedo to Virginie Depentes and has won awards worldwide for his work, as well as acting as chair of the judges for the International Booker Prize – the first time that a translator had been asked to chair the jury.
“Being a translator, I can write books I could never have written – the sorts of novels I couldn’t even imagine – why would you give that up?”
The episode ends with Frank reading my favourite passage from the novel ‘Liveforever!’ - Caicedo’s swirling manifesto on life, madness, violence, and sex.
If you enjoy my podcast work, make sure to save this playlist on Spotify and never miss an interview!
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