El tópico del navigium amoris en El amor en los tiempos del cólera: de Propercio y Ovidio a Gabriel García Márquez

Love in the Time of Cholera, published by Gabriel García Márquez in 1985, is a real compendium of amatory motifs and topics which come from the classic Graeco- Latin tradition, as previously shown by different critics in several occasions. But there is a quite less well-known topic which appears in the Colombian writer’s novel but has never been previously pointed out by the critics: we are talking about navigium amoris, or “the navigation of love.” This topic is based on the metaphor of love described as if it was a boat journey in which one has to face the dangers, vagaries and uncertainties which are typical of navigation. Our aim with this research is to carry out a comparative analysis between the form of the literary topic as it appeared in the classical tradition and the form given by García Márquez to the same subject in his novel twenty centuries later. In this way we will ascertain two different things: firstly, we will see that the navigation of love has a quantitative and qualitative important presence in Love in the Time of Cholera, since it accomplishes an important structural function in the novel. Secondly, we will prove that the Colombian Nobel Prize winner knows how to combine the exact doses of tradition and originality in his particular re-creation of this classical topic.