Joe R. and Teresa Lozana Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture (Paperback): The Plain in Flames (Paperback)

Juan Rulfo; Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans; Harold Augenbraum
University of Texas Press
 9780292743854
0-292-74385-8

Juan Rulfo is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Mexico, though he wrote only two books--the novel Pedro Pramo (1955) and the short story collection El llano en llamas (1953). First.

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translated into English in 1967 as The Burning Plain, these starkly realistic stories create a psychologically acute portrait of poverty and dignity in the countryside at a time when Mexico was undergoing rapid industrialization following the upheavals of the Revolution. According to Ilan Stavans, the stories' "depth seems almost inexhaustible: with a few strokes, Rulfo creates a complex human landscape defined by desolation. These stories are lessons in morality. . . . They are also astonishing examples of artistic distillation."To introduce a new generation of readers to Rulfo's unsurpassable literary talents, this new translation repositions the collection as a classic of world literature. Working from the definitive Spanish edition of El llano en llamas established by the Fundacin Juan Rulfo, Ilan Stavans and co-translator Harold Augenbram present fresh translations of the original fifteen stories, as well as two more stories that have not appeared in English before--"The Legacy of Matilde Arcngel" and "The Day of the Collapse." The translators have artfully preserved the author's "peasantisms," in appreciation of the distinctive voices of his characters. Such careful, elegiac rendering of the stories perfectly suits Rulfo's Mexico, in which people on the edge of despair nonetheless retain a sense of self, of integrity that will not be taken away.