Synopses & Reviews
Álvaro Mutis (1923–2013), born in Bogotá, Colombia, was the author of poetry, short stories, and novels. As a child he lived in Brussels, returning to Bogotá to complete his education, and then moved to Mexico in 1956. His first poems were published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, and his first novella,
The Snow of the Admiral—the initial volume of the Maqroll series —in 1986. NYRB Classics publishes the complete Maqroll series in
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Mutis received many literary awards, including the 1989 Prix Medicis and the 2002 Neustadt Prize for Literature.
Alastair Reid (1926 -2014) was a poet, prose chronicler, translator, and traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he was a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He published more than forty books, among them two word books for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn, and Supposing..., with drawings by Bob Gill, both available from The New York Review Children’s Collection.
Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by leading contemporary Spanish-language writers, including Garbiel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and, of course, Álvaro Mutis. Her translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha is one of the finest in the English language and in 2006 she was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. She lives in New York City.
Synopsis
Alvaro Mutis is celebrated internationally as the author of the seven novellas, written between 1986 and 1993, that constitute the legendary and widely loved Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, is a wanderer on the face of the earth, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can nor will last. Few know, however, that Maqroll made his first appearance, and established his myth, not in prose but in poetry. Starting 1948, Mutis published several volumes of surrealist-tinged poetry, but with an unmistakable voice of his own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who would later call him one of the greatest writers of our time. Here a selection of Mutis s haunting poems invocations to a hidden god, private talismans of an outcast spirit has been rendered into English by Alastair Reid, Edith Grossman, and Kristin Dykstra and published in a bilingual edition."
Synopsis
Peer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz, Alvaro Mutis is indisputably one of the greatest Latin American authors of the 20th century and this collection brings together the best of Mutis' largely-unknown body of poetry.
Alvaro Mutis is celebrated internationally as the author of the seven novellas, written between 1986 and 1993, that constitute the legendary and widely loved Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, is a wanderer on the face of the earth, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can nor will last. Few know, however, that Maqroll made his first appearance, and established his myth, not in prose but in poetry. Starting 1948, Mutis published several volumes of surrealist-tinged poetry, but with an unmistakable voice of his own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who would later call him "one of the greatest writers of our time." Here a selection of Mutis's haunting poems--invocations to a hidden god, private talismans of an outcast spirit--has been rendered into English by Alastair Reid, Edith Grossman, and Kristin Dykstra and published in a bilingual edition.
Synopsis
lvaro Mutis's fantastical, gripping, unnerving tales of the exploits and adventures of Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, an inveterate wanderer both on land and sea, are among the most beloved works of twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Like the stories of Borges, like the novels of Mutis's great friend Garc a M rquez, they conjure a strange world of their own which also holds up a mirror, disquieting and revelatory, to the everyday world we imagine we know.
If Maqroll eventually found his way into prose, he began his career in poetry, and it was as a poet that Mutis first made his name as a writer. This selection of Mutis's haunting verse, with its evocations, now lush, now stark, of the landscapes of South America, with its prayers to an unknown god, is the first to be published in English. Rendered by Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid, masters of the art of translation, these resonant poems offer a dazzling new entry into the imagination of one of the most original and memorable writers of modern times.