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Im thinking about reading some literature in Spanish (translated of course). Anyone have any suggestions? By the way, does anyone think that writers like Cervantes and Borges are as good or near as good as the best writers of English? Are there any Spanish writers that are? Please reccomend not only authors but also your favorite books by them if you can. Much thanks in advance :)
Im thinking about reading some literature in Spanish (translated of course). Anyone have any suggestions? By the way, does anyone think that writers like Cervantes and Borges are as good or near as good as the best writers of English? Are there any Spanish writers that are? Please reccomend not only authors but also your favorite books by them if you can.
Not only do I think that writers like Cervantes and Borges are as good as the best writers in English... I KNOW it.:D
If you are thinking of starting to explore writers in Spanish I would recommend you begin with Cervantes, Don Quixote Pts. 1&2. He is essentially an equivalent to what Dante represents to Italian literature or Shakespeare to English. He is the writer a vast many of the subsequent Spanish writers engage in a dialog with.
Others:
San Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross)- Poems (tr. John F. Nims or Roy Campbell)
The Golden Age- selected poems by earlier Spanish writers (tr. Edith Grossman... who also did the recent acclaimed translation of Don Quixote)
Calderon- Selected plays
Federico Garcia-Lorca- Collected Poems
Juan Ramon Jimenez- Selected Poems
Vinciente Aleixandre- A Longing for Light and Shadow of Paradise (poems)
Rafael Alberti- The Owl's Insomnia (poems)
Antonio Machado- Selected Poems
Miguel de Unamuno-Three Exemplary Novels
Ramón Pérez de Ayala- Belarmino and Apolonio, Hopneymoon, Bittermoon
Jorge Guillen- Cantico, Horses in the Air (poems)
Francisco Ayala- The Usurpers
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester- The King Amaz'd
Julian Rios- Loves that Bind
Juan Goytisolo- Quarantine: A Novel
Jose Donoso- The Obscene Bird of Night
Pablo Neruda- The Captain's Verses, Residence Earth, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Essential Neruda, The Book of Questions, World's End, Selected Odes, etc... (arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century)
Cesar Vallejo- Trilce, The Complete Poetry
J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, Selected Non-Fictions, Ficciones, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers, Other Inquisitions, etc... (Along with Neruda he stands at the center of Latin-American literature and as one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th century).
Julio Cortazar- Hopscotch, The Blow Up and Other Stories
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera, 100 Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Collected Stories (arguably the greatest living writer)
Alejo Carpentier- The Kingdom of this World, Explosion in a Cathedral
Carlos Fuentes- Terra Nostra, Inez, Collected Stories, This I Believe, The Years with Laura Diaz, The Old Gringo, etc...
Mario Vargas Llosa- Conversation in the Cathedral, The War at the End of the World, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, In Praise of the Stepmother, etc...
Octavio Paz- Collected Poems, The Light of India, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, The Sunstone
Homero Aridjis- Eyes to See Otherwise, Solar Poems
Augusto Monterroso- The Complete Works: and Other Stories
Thank You so much!!
St Lukes - you put Gabriel Garcia Lorca instead of Marquez. Still, nice list, if not a bit overwhelming.
St Lukes - you put Gabriel Garcia Lorca instead of Marquez.
Fixed. Thanks. Must have been the fact that my volume of Garcia-Lorca was sitting right next to me by the computer. A Freudian slip?
Acckkk! I forgot Miguel Hernandez!:ack2: I didn't have his volume properly shelved.
Miguel Hernandez- The Selected Poems
You might also look into Tirant Lo Blanc written by Joanot Martorell and reportedly finished by Martí Joan de Galba. The book was written in Catalan and is referred to in Don Quixote as "the best book in the world." I dstarted to read it in the translation by David H. Rosenthal a good many years ago... but never finished it for some untold reason... which has little to do with the merits of the book, which I remember I quite liked. Maybe I just wasn't up to a long book at the time?
Rosenthal has also translated several other interesting books including, Nights That Make the Night: Selected Poems of Vicent Andres Estelles, Modern Catalan Poetry: An Anthology, and When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly; Selected Poems of F.V. Foix.
Considering the impact of Arab and Jewish culture upon Spanish literature, I would also recommend, Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (tr. Cole), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (tr. Cole), Yehuda Halevi- Poems of the Divan, Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi, and the Poems of Arab Andalusia (tr. Cola Franzen). The last book... a slim volume of which has existed in the classic Cola Franzen translation in City Lights Books for a good many decades... was incredibly influential upon the whole development of Modern Spanish poetry... beginning especially with Garcia-Lorca. It was part of an entire revival of the Arab-Andalusian history of Spain which itself was a major influence upon the development of lyric poetry in Europe.
Felisberto Hernandez, Horacio Quiroga, Ruben Dario, Quevedo, Bioy Casares, Juan Rulfo, Bolano, Ernesto Sabato, Ricardo Guiraldes and stuff like El Cid or Lazarillo Tormes or El Conde Lucanor for pre-cervates works
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Don Quixote is generally number one on everyone list. I have read it three times myself. The only other author I have read is Borges' Ficciones, which I did not care for. The remainder of those mentioned are perhaps those primarily read by pedants and pedagogues, not by the ordinary literature lover, unless Marquez was on your list and I missed him. The ordinary English speaking/reading person would not be reading these others, although they may be of value.
Pedants, we must hate them for not being ordinary...
Paz, Neruda, Borges, Garcia-Lorca, Cortazar, Fuentes, Llosa, Carpentier, etc... are by all accounts quite well read... especially, one would presume, by Spanish speaking audiences. Believe it or not, there are ordinary literature lovers beyond the confines of the English-speaking world... and even within the English-speaking world there are those literature lovers who recognize that the English language provides but a minority of what amounts to the great literature in existence and are interested in exploring other possibilities.
Roberto Bolaño? The Savage Detectives and 2666 are his most talked about works.
He called you pedant just because you listed the books in your shelves, imagine when you try to argue towards the existence of other idiom, imagine if he discovers its spoken beyond new mexico?Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
this makes me think of another question. If only one or two Spanish writers are read by most of us in English then why are so many, say, Russian writers read by "normal" people. Is it just me? I have heard of Cervantes a lot and Don Quixote was required reading in school (but I never read it), but that is where it ends (I know of Borges only because of this forum). But I can think easily of Chekov, Tolstoi, Pushkin, Pasternak, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. I dont know much of Russian literature either but it seems to me to be more ingrained in western culture than that of Spanish literature. Spain seems much more a part of Europe to me that Russia, so I dont understand this. Any thoughts on this please?
Please do not personalise your arguments.
Posts containing personal comments will be removed without further notice.
this makes me think of another question. If only one or two Spanish writers are read by most of us in English then why are so many, say, Russian writers read by "normal" people. Is it just me? I have heard of Cervantes a lot and Don Quixote was required reading in school (but I never read it), but that is where it ends (I know of Borges only because of this forum). But I can think easily of Chekov, Tolstoi, Pushkin, Pasternak, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. I dont know much of Russian literature either but it seems to me to be more ingrained in western culture than that of Spanish literature. Spain seems much more a part of Europe to me that Russia, so I dont understand this. Any thoughts on this please?
Off-hand... I can think of several reasons that certain Russian writers are far more popular among the Western readers than Spanish. First of all... from the time of the Spanish Inquisition until the recent death of Franco, Spain has largely been isolated from the rest of Europe. It seems to have completely missed the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Few of the works by the great Spanish painters (El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, Ribera, etc...) have ever traveled beyond the confines of Spain. Those artists whose works have had larger impact (Picasso, Miro, Dali) achieved this by leaving Spain and exhibiting on the larger international stage.
The same seems true of Spanish music and literature. By most accounts, Calderon de la Barca and Lope de Vega, dramatists of the "Golden Age" of Spanish literature, were towering figures... worthy rivals of the greatest writers and dramatists of England and France. Yet they remain little known or translated. The same is true of the great Spanish poets of the same and subsequent ages: Luis de Góngora, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, San Juan de la Cruz, Garcialaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de Leon, and Francisco de Quevedo. It is more difficult (and expensive) to find a passing translation of Bécquer or Quevedo than it is to find the same for any number of Chinese or Japanese poets... to say nothing of German, French, Italian, etc...
The second obvious reason would seem to me to be the fact that a great majority of the strongest literature written in Spanish is poetry (or other forms) and not the novel. Beyond Cervantes, the greatest works of the earlier Spanish writers were poetry and drama. Neruda and Borges are the two towering figures of Latin-American literature... one was a poet, the other wrote short works which continually blurred the boundaries between short story, essay, criticism, history, science-fiction, mystery, fantasy, poetry, etc... The novel is unquestionably the dominant literary form of our time. One need only look at how little commentary is made on the poetry boards or regarding dramatists... excepting Shakespeare (How many have read any drama beyond Shakespeare?)... here versus discussions of novels. How few members would even think to list a book of poetry among those ever-returning threads of "Your Ten Favorite Books". The great Russian writers repeatedly discussed, on the other hand, are masters of the epic novel: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, The Master and Marguerita, Fathers and Sons, On the Eve, Petersburg, Doctor Zhivago. Yet even with Russian literature how often do the common readers go beyond the novels... and perhaps a few short stories? How often is the poetry of Pushkin, or the poetry of Pasternak (who was a far greater poet than novelist), or the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, or Osip Mandelstam discussed...? How often do Checkov's plays or the almost surreal stories of Gogol come up in discussion? Considering this, is it surprising that the most popular Spanish books among English-language readers are Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the popular works of Garcia-Marquez, Llosa, Carpentier, etc...?
A third consideration to make relates to the power of the nations from which a given body of literature derives. The English, for example, repeatedly looked to the French... their great economic, military, and cultural rival... and learned from and built upon their achievements. Undoubtedly the economic, cultural, and military power of the United States is responsible for the impact that American art has had upon the world. With the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, Russia (The Soviet Union) rose to a status of international influence. Certainly the nations of the West sought to learn of their rival... just as the British had... just as we now are exploring the literature and cultures of Japan, China, and the Middle-East.
Finally, one might point out that Spanish literature underwent a great Modernist Renaissance. Poets such as Ruben Dario, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernandez, Jorge Guillen, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Vinciente Aleixandre, Cesar Vallejo, and J.L. Borges are largely of the same generation as Picasso and Dali. They often employ Modernist techniques that are not exactly popular with the general readers seeking traditional, linear narratives, character development, etc... They are also quite a bit "newer" than the Russian classics (this applies to the great Latin-American fiction writers as well: Garcia-Marquez, Borges, Carpentier, Cortazar, etc...) and have yet to be more fully absorbed by the larger literary culture.
Having said this much, I will reiterate my assertions that in many ways ignorance of Spanish language literature is unconscionable considering the achievements. Cervantes' Don Quixote rivals anything by Shakespeare, and his great characters, the Don and Sancho live beyond the confines of his text in a way that few other literary inventions ever have. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez is arguably one of the greatest living (if not the greatest) living writers... and Cortazar and Carpentier may even be greater writers. Neruda is quite possibly the strongest poet of the 20th century... and J.L. Borges was quite definitely one of the most influential writers of the second half of the century. His impact upon the whole of Latin-American literature is unquestionable... and he may have been just as influential upon writers in America and elsewhere. One cannot imagine John Barth, Donald Barthleme, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, and many other Post-Modernist writers without Borges.
Well, lets just imagine the following, we have a great baroque literature from Spain - Don Quixote is far more popular than Shakespeare or Dante for example, the translation of Don Quixote is quite related to the appearance of new libraries in europe. Anyways, after 16 Century, Spain (and Portugal) start a decadent period and became secundary to France and England. So, Cervates was basically the superhero, but he was a novelist, not dramaticist or poet (or he was good). When the XIX century starts and prose starts to domain, you do not have a writer so good in Spain as Cervantes and the new Novels are under another style. Unlike the Russsians who are writing exactly like England, France, German. And those giants are more absorbed by modern writers of the rest of europe, unlike spanish writers until the Latin America explosion (which main works are short stories), who not only are yet recently but from an universe much more distant than Spain itself, which is Latin America.
I guess this is mostly why less spanish writers are translated than russian giants from 2 centuries ago.
And I forget Ortega Y Gasset, very nice writer, great thinker and literary critic.