Skarmeta Offers Wisdom at Hispanic New York Class

“The key to my success was informality,” Chilean writer and Columbia alumnus Antonio Skármeta told the undergraduate Hispanic New York class last Thursday. Judging by his immense success and the joy in his voice, this strategy still seems to be working.

Skármeta is best known in North America for his novella, Ardiente Paciencia, which was made into an Italian Academy Award-winning movie called "Il Postino" ("The Postman"). But he is also the author of 11 novels, most recently El Baile de la Victoria and La Chica del Trombón, both widely embraced in Latin America. His work draws from other specific Latin American novels, poems, and writers, particularly Pablo Neruda. He also hosted one of Latin America’s highest-rated and most watched TV shows for several years and served as a Chilean ambassador to Germany.

Of his months of hard labor on an ocean liner while immigrating to America, Skármeta said, “It was not fun, but I thought, 'If I have a bad time, the better my novel will be,'” evoking a Hemingway-like sentiment. The author also described, in an equally lighthearted tone, the destruction of acting ambitions after his performance of Neruda’s Oda al Air—the panel of judges told him that if he liked literature, he should be a writer. “So I went home. That night I wrote a story, I sent it to a national competition, and I won. So I thought, why not? So I will be a writer,” he said.

Skármeta’s story, while less than epic, was inspiring in another way. While other writers complain about loneliness, rejection by magazines, feeling culturally displaced, and the ups and downs of love, Skármeta laughed at and utilized these themes in his prose. He recounted his first magazine rejection in New York, after he had already gained recognition for his first three novels in Chile. After having the same story rejected several times for its length, until it had been essentially decimated, he finally submitted a piece called “Short Story.” The publisher bought it for 50 dollars, and Skármeta began his career anew as a New York short-story writer.

Audience members had the treat of hearing Skármeta read Neruda, with the added bonus of an intimate and lengthy question-and-answer session at the end of the event. But above all, the chance to hear firsthand the kind of perseverance that literature demands, and the rewards it offers, was the crowning jewel in Skármeta’s charming narrative.