Álvaro 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 García Márquez, 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.
Peer to Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz, Álvaro 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.
Álvaro 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 García Márquez, 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.
