Eight Novellas

The Translators: Herlinda Charpentier Saitz received her Ph.D. from Boston University, and is Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. She is known internationally for her leading scholarly work on Gómez de la Serna and Carmen de Burgos. Professor Saitz has published articles and books on the above writers, including Las novelle de Ramón Gómez de la Serna and El Hombre de Alambre. She has also published bilingual materials with software and teaching guides ranging from pre-literacy to the college level.Robert L. Saitz received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and is Emeritus Professor at Boston University. His field of concentration has been the teaching of English to speakers of other languages, on which subject he has published or collaborated on more than twenty-five books, including a comparative study of English and Colombian kinesics. He developed the intensive English as a Second Language Program at Boston University and his career also includes several Fulbright teaching awards to Spain and Colombia. He is the founder and director of the Boston Area Seminar for international students.

«Besides (Ramón’s) ‘greguerías’ little else has been translated. An occasional short story has appeared in an anthology where it remains buried, or in an inaccessible literary review. For this reason the publication of Robert and Herlinda Saitz’s translation of a generous selection of novelle can be hailed as an important literary event. The cooperation between Professor Herlinda Saitz (who, as a critic-scholar, has produced two important contributions to Gómez de la Serna’s scholarship) with her husband Robert, a Profesor of English, has proven quite successful. Their translations can be read as if the texts had been originally written in the English language. There are no seams or hanging threads. To continue with Cervante’s famous simile, we feel that we are looking at the tapestry from the right side, not from the wrong one.» (Rodolfo Cardona, University Professor Emeritus, Boston University)«The stories I read – ‘Kill the Morse!’ and ‘The Master of the Atom’ – are extraordinary. I had never previously heard of de la Serna, but I am delighted to know that you are going to make him known to us Anglophones. He seems to have achieved a very special blend of the naïve and the surreal, utilizing the technological allusion available in his time to express a touching modernist mood of bewilderment and yearning. I hope you are planning to publish these soon.» (Millicent Bell, Professor Emeritus and James Scholar, Boston University)