City College News

Media Credit: Roacche Eduardo Garcia Aguilar

April 7 2009, writer, journalist and poet Eduardo Garcia Aguilar spoke to aspiring young journalists and held an excerpt reading of his latest publication The Triumphant Voyage even as MCTC's journalism classes face death by a thousand budget cuts. In addition to his journalism pedigree he has published five books, all of them based a little on real life events, places and things with his own interpretations and elaborations.

Aguilar was guest of his English translator, and friend, MCTC journalism professor, Jay Miscowiec. Miscowiec and Aguilar have been working together for about 25 years, having met over a cigarette break when they were reporting in Mexico City.

Since that time Miscowiec has devoted his spare time to English translations of Aguilar's books. Writing since age 14, Aguilar has become an extremely successful writer over the years, something he doesn't always admit.

"I don't think I'm a success, I'm only one writer amongst many," (Aguilar said through Miscowiec) when asked if he thought starting his writing career so young had brought him his success. "When I was fifteen my dream was to be a poet ... I gave articles and poems to the editors [of La Patria] and they published me."

At seventeen he began his own newspaper (The Conflict), shut down after one edition due to controversial views, (an expose on prostitution in a highly Catholic city).

Triumphant chronicles the fictional Columbian writer Arnaldo Faria Utrillo's exploits through the early twentieth century. As a student, Utrillo returns from a day trip to the tunnels beneath his Catholic school transformed by a chance meeting with the mad poet Florez: "'And from today, I am Arnaldo Faria Utrillo, because I like the way it sounds. I swear on these skulls I will never give up my love for poetry-I surrender to it until I am peacefully lowered in my grave.' Florez came up to the two boys and embraced them. Then he took a bottle out of his coat and invited them to drink from a skull encrusted with malachite. 'Let us toast our alliance with this wine!' he cried."

Born in Manzales, Columbia, Aguilar described his hometown in terms of an art-deco look, lavish and evocative. "My father's office was in one of these beautiful buildings, like Europe. When I was a boy, I loved this architecture. My father asked me, do you want to go to a specialist school of English or French?"

Aguilar chose French because, "...I thought it was most easy to learn English...all people with television knew more English than French." And so it was that Alliance de Francais became his launch pad. "I had a French teacher who taught us the language," explained Aguilar. "He said that if we want to learn French, we must drink wine. And he gave me a cup of wine. It was marvelous!"

It was at age fifteen that Aguilar first recalls traveling in his dreams. At nineteen he left Columbia to study political economy in Paris. "I thought I could study literature on my own because I love it, Aguilar explained. "I am interested in political, social, and economic things, problems of the world. I used to write articles about that."

Since then he has written publications from all over the world; San Francisco, India and Mexico, to name a few. At age 27 he published his first book. Through the years inspired by the great writers of history, from Jean Jac Rousseau to Hemingway, who he stated as the author he could most closely identify with. The man has indefinitely become an inspiration to young writers across the world.

Currently Aguilar works for three separate press agencies, Excelsior, a large Mexican newspaper, the Columbian newspaper La Patria, and Agence France Presse, a French press wire. Also, he has two news blogs, in Spanish.

Still, Aguilar remains dedicated to poetry. To him the most important literary genre, the color of his poetry accents the prose throughout his novel Mexico Madness, a work of non-fiction that examines globalism's impact as he viewed it on assignment, and even more so in Triumphant, in which his voice and artistic technique simply explodes.

"The most honest way to be a writer is to use this language of poetry near the sound, near the natural, near the essence of humanity," Aguilar said.

This essence he discovered in Parisian jazz clubs, an influence glimpsed in Triumphant, a sound reshaped, "made prisoner of a musical phrase ... of an exile who abstracts from form out of forgetfulness."

In the midst of his rigorous schedule, Aguilar works on his sixth book, based on a Greek myth, and set in Columbia in the midst of the ongoing "war on drugs." The myth itself, is based on a father who is willing to sacrifice his own daughter in an effort to win the war, however, her mother does not believe that sacrifice is worth it. When asked how long it would take to complete he stated, "Nunca se sabe" (You never know), "quisas nunca." (maybe never).

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