Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems

Maqroll's Prayer and Other PoemsBy: Alvaro Mutis lvaro Mutiss 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 Mutiss great friend Garca Mrquez, they conjure a strange world of their own which also holds up a mirror, disquieting and revelatory, to the

By: Alvaro Mutis     

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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.

This bilingual edition includes the original Spanish versions of each poem.