Search results for ""Author Edith Grossman""

From the celebrated translator of Cervantes and Garciá Márquez, a testament to the power of the translator’s art “Groundbreaking.”—New York Times Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.” For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.” Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

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The priest adjusted a cross hanging on the wall. It was a black cross without the image of Christ. Just a black cross on a grey surface. The prosecutor did not want to think about the cross burned into the forehead of the corpse...Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is a hapless, by-the-book prosecutor living in a small town, six-hundred kilometers from Lima. Until now he has led a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But when a charred and mutilated body, discovered during Carnival, signals the return of a serial murderer, Saldívar is inexplicably put in charge of the enquiry. As he investigates he must confront what happens to a man, and to a society, when death becomes the only certainty.

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Celebrating the Spanish Renaissance's greatest poems and offering a new appreciation of Spain's "Golden Age, " Edith Grossman turns her passionate fervor and stylistic brilliance to the works of Jorge Manrique; Garcilaso de la Vega, a soldier and courtier who wrote love poetry; Fray Luis de León, a converso Jew; San Juan de la Cruz, whose poems are the finest exemplars of Christian mysticism; Luis de Góngora, a great sensualist; Lope de Vega, Cervantes' rival; Francisco de Quevedo, the ultimate Baroque poet; and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the nun whose haunting poetry embodied the voice of Mexico. Through these glorious voices, presented in facing-page Spanish and English, The Golden Age offers a new way to connect with the literary heritage of the Spanish-speaking world.

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As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man...Mario Vargas Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.

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Eighteen-year old orphan Andrea moves to battle-scarred Barcelona to take up a scholarship at the university. But staying with relatives in their crumbling apartment, her dreams of independence are dashed among the eccentric collection of misfits who surround her, not least her uncle Roman. As Andrea's university friend, the affluent, elegant Ena, enters into a strange relationship with Roman, Andrea can't help but wonder what future lies ahead for her in such a bizarre and disturbing world. Translated by Edith Grossman'One of the great classics of contemporary European literature' Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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In an isolated community in the Peruvian Andes, a series of mysterious disappearances has occurred. Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás believe the Shining Path guerrillas are responsible, but the townspeople have their own ideas about the forces that claimed the bodies of the missing men. This riveting novel is filled with unforgettable characters, among them disenfranchised Indians, eccentric local folk, and a couple performing strange cannibalistic sacrifices. As the investigation progresses, Tomás entertains Lituma with the surreal tale of a precarious love affair.Death in the Andes is both a fascinating detective novel and an insightful political allegory. Mario Vargas Llosa offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society, from the recent social upheaval to the cultural influences in its past.

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.

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October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life. A rich, panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war, In the Night of Time details the passions and tragedies of a country tearing itself apart. Compared in scope and importance to War and Peace, Muñoz Molina's masterpiece is the great epic of the Spanish Civil War written by one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.

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When the beautiful teenage Lily arrives in Lima in 1950, fifteen-year-old Ricardo falls instantly in love with her. She claims to be from Chile, but vanishes the moment it becomes clear that she has lied about both her name and her nationality. A decade later, now living in Paris, Ricardo falls in love with a woman named Comrade Arlette, who is incredibly similar to Lily but refuses to acknowledge that she is the same person. For his whole life, Ricardo seems doomed to keep running into 'Lily', and to keep falling in love with her. Will he ever discover who she really is?

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In the world of Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman, men and women can be forced to choose between leaving their country or dying for it. The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto—love, faith, hope, truth—might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices—exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence—gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.

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Acclaimed translator Edith Grossman brings to English-language readers Rojas’s imaginative vision of Francisco de Goya and the reverberations of his art in Fascist Spain This historical novel by one of Spain’s most celebrated authors weaves a tale of disparate time periods: the early years of the nineteenth century, when Francisco de Goya was at the height of his artistic career, and the final years of Generalissimo Franco’s Fascist rule in the 1970s. Rojas re-creates the nineteenth-century corridors of power and portrays the relationship between Goya and King Fernando VII, a despot bent on establishing a cruel regime after Spain’s War of Independence. Goya obliges the king’s request for a portrait, but his depiction not only fails to flatter but reflects a terrible darkness and grotesqueness. More than a century later, transcending conventional time, Goya observes Franco’s body lying in state and experiences again a dark and monstrous despair. Rojas's work is a dazzling tour de force, a unique combination of narrative invention and art historical expertise that only he could have brought to the page.

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When a high-profile businessman is blackmailed by a notorious magazine editor, his comfortable life is threatened by the salacious exposé. While attempting to field the scandal, the businessman's wife, seeking comfort, begins a secret affair with the wife of his best friend. Then the editor is found murdered, and the two couples have no choice but to descend into the murkiest depths of Peruvian society, while the magazine's staff embarks on its greatest revelation yet . . .

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Don Rigoberto - by day a grey insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast - misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. The pair separated following a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and Alfonso, Rigoberto's son. To compensate for her absence, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies and unsent letters. Meanwhile, Alfonso visits Lucrecia, determined to win her love.In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from Rigoberto's imagination. The novel, a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling.If you enjoyed The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, you might also like Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother.

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'The Feast of the Goat will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's twentieth century and removes One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title.' Times Literary SupplementUrania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign.In 1961, Trujillo's decadent inner circle (which includes Urania's soon-to-be disgraced father) enjoys the luxuries of privilege while the rest of the nation lives in fear and deprivation. As Trujillo clings to power, a plot to push the Dominican Republic into the future is being formed. But after the murder of its hated dictator, the Goat, is carried out, the Dominican Republic is plunged into the nightmare of a bloody and uncertain aftermath. Now, thirty years later, Urania reveals how her own family was fatally wounded by the forces of history. In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa eloquently explores the effects of power and violence on the lives of both the oppressors and those they victimized.

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Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of compassion.This book brings together for the first time in English the volumes Complete Works (and Other Stories) (Obras completas [y otros cuentos] 1959) and Perpetual Motion (Movimiento perpetuo 1972). Together, they reveal Monterroso as a foundational author of the new Latin American narrative.

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Edith Grossman, celebrated for her brilliant translation of Don Quixote, offers a dazzling new version of another Cervantes classic “Compressed masterworks, containing great canvases and big ideas in just a few pages. . . . A pleasure.”—Kirkus Reviews The twelve novellas gathered in Exemplary Novels reveal the extraordinary breadth of Cervantes’s imagination: his nearly limitless ability to create characters, invent plots, and entertain readers across continents and centuries. The assemblage of characters (eloquent witches, talking dogs, Gypsy orphans, and an array of others), the twisting plots, and the moral heart at the core of each short tale proved instantly irresistible to readers. Love is the overarching theme. Now, as when it was published in Spain in 1613, the book brings readers pure entertainment, but also a subtle artistry that invites deeper investigation. Edith Grossman’s translation brings this timeless classic to English-language readers in an edition that will delight those already familiar with Cervantes’s work as well as those about to be enchanted for the first time. Roberto González Echevarría’s illuminating introduction to the volume serves as both an appreciation of Cervantes’s brilliance and a critical guide to the novellas and their significance.

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) was a feminist and a woman ahead of her time. She was very much a public intellectual and her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico", names that continue to resonate. This self-taught intellectual rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. The volume includes Sor Juana’s best-known works, including "First Dream", which showcases her prodigious intellect and range and "Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz", her epistolary feminist defence of a woman’s right to study and to write. Thirty other works are also included.

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) was a feminist and a woman ahead of her time. She was very much a public intellectual and her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico", names that continue to resonate. This self-taught intellectual rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. The volume includes Sor Juana’s best-known works, including "First Dream", which showcases her prodigious intellect and range and "Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz", her epistolary feminist defence of a woman’s right to study and to write. Thirty other works are also included.

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Edith Grossman’s acclaimed translations of The Tenth Muse’s best known works are offered here with introductory materials and explanatory footnotes, along with related additional works and eight critical essays.

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