Mario Mukhnik, risk-taking trading

I met Mario Mu მუხnik in a very unusual situation, almost 25 years ago. Our mutual friend Pedro Sorrela gave him a print version of my first novel, and two months later Mario sent me a short letter in which he made the following comment without anesthesia: the third part of the work is left ( Pantaleon and guestsHe did not like the title at all, and if we agreed on his observations, he would “take the risk” of publishing it. Pedro had already warned me of Mario’s direct and provocative style, but this warning did not prevent me from feeling some disgust while reading the letter.

A few days later, Mario met me in his office, in the building of the publishing house “Anaia”. The company had just acquired Muchnik Editores – founded in 1973 in Paris by Mario and his father, Jacobo, five years before they both settled in Spain – and Mario now heads a new label, Anaya-Mario Muchnik. He invited me to sit on the other side of his solid wooden table, with books and folders on top. He was in the sleeves of his shirt, with his classic hangings and piercing eyes staring at me behind the lenses of his thick black frame glasses. – Do you have any objections to the letter? He exclaimed. I told him that I was not happy with the title of the novel either, so I was ready to change it, but I did not agree with his recommendation to cut the work, let alone the brutal hack he intended.

After listening carefully to my arguments, he got up to make coffee and said, “I had a lot of fun with the song.” The novel tells the story of the creation of an informal neighborhood in the cities of the Caribbean, narrated with a biblical key that Mario has clearly deciphered. From that moment on, the conversation continued in the Old Testament irony that my interlocutor knew orally, even though he was not a believer, because of our common roots in troubled Eastern Europe and because of our literary preferences, the moment I took the opportunity to admit that commercial folly when Primo Levy, Elijah Canetti, and other great Jewish European writers were introduced to the Spanish-speaking world. When we parted, he told me in a soothing tone of pardon: “Do not take anything away from him. I will publish it as it is. “I asked the question at the door,” Why do you say it would be risky to publish it? “He replied,” Do not take it personally. Editing is a risky business. ”

It was like that for Mario anyway. He was an editor from the lineage of Galimard, Feltrinelli, Baral or Lafont, with whom, by the way, he began trading after leaving the career of a promising physicist. He published exclusively what he was excited about, without the current trends. Sometimes gambling suddenly turned into a huge commercial success for him. Happened The African Dream By Javier Martinez-Reverte. Mario published it he was sure would go unnoticed as there were no signs at the time that travel books were interested in Spain. However, due to a kind of astral connection, the book, in addition to being of extraordinary quality, became a sales phenomenon and revived a virtually abandoned literary genre in the country. Another of his editorial “blows” was the French translation From the Dead Princess, By Kenizé Mourad, which was sold like hot cakes. At a dinner hosted by Mario Murad at my house, I was surprised that the Spaniards were interested in the story of the Ottoman Sultan’s grandson.

Rather, the books I expected to be successful. In an interview he gave to journalist Alba Perez del Rio in 2013, Mario recalled that Football without cheating! “Not a single dick has been sold,” said Argentine coach Cesar Menotti. One of his greatest discoveries was the Sephardic Bulgarian writer Elijah Canet. Fascinated bought the right translation Mass and power, automatic def And Kafka’s other process, But, fortunately for him, only about 400 copies were sold. However, years later the “award came”: in 1981 Canetti received the Nobel Prize in Literature and interest in his work exploded.

Shortly after meeting Mario, he experienced one of the biggest disappointments of his life: the service of the publishing house Anaya was canceled. Mario could not fully recover from the blow, one of the consequences of which was to stop publishing my novel. However, he found the strength to go ahead and founded Mario Muchnik’s workshop. Interestingly, one of his most creative stages began with the new publishing house. He has written several fun and corrosive books on the editor’s craft, starting with The worst authors are not, And autobiographical gems such as Day Two: Childhood in Buenos Aires Or Story setting. He also started what was his greatest editorial epic: The New Translation War and Peace, The task he entrusted to a non-general translator, Lydia Cooper, and who noted before and after Tolstoy’s approach to the monumental novel of the Spanish-speaking world. More than 15,000 copies of the work published in 2010 were sold in Spain.

And published many more books. Between them Caribbean Vulgate, As it ended my casual novel was called. I can not say that it was one of Mario’s commercial successes; If I owe anything to those early works, it is that he gave me the opportunity to meet a distinguished character, free, as I meet very few creatures, a brilliant polemicist, a tasteful talker, immensely cultured, and as Perez del Rio noted in his interview, “The Best of Niochi and Macaroni “Manufacturer Pesto, when he meets a group of friends at home early in the morning and feels that the gathering should be extended.” I also had to meet Nicole, the love of her life, an extraordinary artist who has not yet received such recognition as an artist.

Mario died on Sunday, at the age of 90, in his apartment in Paseo de la Castellana, Madrid, after resisting several stubborn attempts at death with good humor and the usual glass of whiskey in the evening. He took three detours, joking that he had “the longest bridge in the world” in his heart. Literature in Spanish obliges him to publish more than 500 works, many of which would never have been published without a risky publisher.