Peer to Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz, Álvaro Mutis is
indisputably one of the greatest Latin American authors of the twentieth
century, and this collection brings together the best of Mutis's 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, always in pursuit of love and
fortune, even as he knows that neither can or 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 poetry influenced by surrealists like
Robert Desnos and Pablo Neruda, but with an unmistakable voice of his
own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez,
who called him "one of the greatest writers of our time." Here a
bilingual selection of Mutis's haunting poems--invocations to a hidden
god, private talismans of an outcast spirit--has been rendered into
English by Chris Andrews, Kristin Dykstra, Edith Grossman, and Alastair
Reid.
