Efrain Kristal - Böcker

One of the major novelists in world literature over the last five decades, Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is also one of Latin America's most engaging public intellectuals, a critic of art and culture, and a playwright of distinction. This Companion's chapters chart the development of Vargas Llosa's writings from his rise to prominence in the early 1960s to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. The volume traces the development of his literary trajectory and the ways in which he has re-invented himself as a writer. His vast output of narrative fiction is the main focus, but the connections between his concerns as a creative writer and his rich career as a cultural and political figure are also teased out in this engaging, informative book.

One of the major novelists in world literature over the last five decades, Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is also one of Latin America's most engaging public intellectuals, a critic of art and culture, and a playwright of distinction. This Companion's chapters chart the development of Vargas Llosa's writings from his rise to prominence in the early 1960s to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. The volume traces the development of his literary trajectory and the ways in which he has re-invented himself as a writer. His vast output of narrative fiction is the main focus, but the connections between his concerns as a creative writer and his rich career as a cultural and political figure are also teased out in this engaging, informative book.

Choice Outstanding Academic Book 1998Temptation of the Word offers an ambitious and careful reading of the creative process--the origin of themes and the development of literary techniques--that Mario Vargas Llosa has brought to each of his novels, published through 1996. To understand the novelist's intellectual environment, Efrain Kristal analyzes the entire corpus of Vargas Llosa's writings, his literary influences in several languages, his intellectual biography, and his political activism, all in the light of the evolving political turbulence of his times and his own changing concept of literature.

It is well known that Jorge Luis Borges was a translator, but this has been considered a curious minor aspect of his literary achievement. Few have been aware of the number of texts he translated, the importance he attached to this activity, or the extent to which the translated works inform his own stories and poems. Between the age of ten, when he translated Oscar Wilde, and the end of his life, when he prepared a Spanish version of the Prose Edda, Borges transformed the work of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Melville, Gide, Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton, and many others. In a multitude of essays, lectures, and interviews Borges analyzed the versions of others and developed an engaging view about translation. He held that a translation can improve an original, that contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and that an original can be unfaithful to translation. Borges's bold habits as translator and his views on translation had a decisive impact on his creative process. Translation is also a recurrent motif in Borges's stories. In ""The Immortal,"" for example, a character who has lived for many centuries regains knowledge of poems he had authored, and almost forgotten, by way of modern translations. Many of Borges's fictions include actual or imagined translations, and some of his most important characters are translators. In ""Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,"" Borges's character is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a translator, and the narrator insists that Menard's masterpiece - his ""invisible work"" - adds unsuspected layers of meaning to Cervantes's Don Quixote. George Steiner cites this short story as ""the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation."" In an age where many discussions of translation revolve around the dichotomy faithful/unfaithful, this book will surprise and delight even Borges's closest readers and critics.

It is well known that Jorge Luis Borges was a translator, but this has been considered a curious minor aspect of his literary achievement. Few have been aware of the number of texts he translated, the importance he attached to this activity, or the extent to which the translated works inform his own stories and poems. Between the age of ten, when he translated Oscar Wilde, and the end of his life, when he prepared a Spanish version of the Prose Edda, Borges transformed the work of Poe, Kafka, Hesse, Kipling, Melville, Gide, Faulkner, Whitman, Woolf, Chesterton, and many others. In a multitude of essays, lectures, and interviews Borges analyzed the versions of others and developed an engaging view about translation. He held that a translation can improve an original, that contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and that an original can be unfaithful to translation. Borges's bold habits as translator and his views on translation had a decisive impact on his creative process. Translation is also a recurrent motif in Borges's stories. In ""The Immortal,"" for example, a character who has lived for many centuries regains knowledge of poems he had authored, and almost forgotten, by way of modern translations. Many of Borges's fictions include actual or imagined translations, and some of his most important characters are translators. In ""Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,"" Borges's character is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a translator, and the narrator insists that Menard's masterpiece - his ""invisible work"" - adds unsuspected layers of meaning to Cervantes's Don Quixote. George Steiner cites this short story as ""the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation."" In an age where many discussions of translation revolve around the dichotomy faithful/unfaithful, this book will surprise and delight even Borges's closest readers and critics.

The first volume of essays in English on one of the most renowned contemporary Italian Philosophers.Remo Bodei (1938–2019) was one of Italy's most influential philosophers of the past half-century. His intellectual influence was wide-reaching as he guided the search for rational explanations of seemingly irrational phenomena and the philosophical underpinnings of poetry. Diverse both in their disciplinary approach and theoretical style, yet following a logical and coherent progression, the essays within Geometries of Experience begin with an exploration of Bodei's methodology followed by an analysis of his interest in the crisis of subjectivity in modern culture; his engagement with Spinoza, especially in his work Geometria delle passioni; his treatment of the body, framed as a "materialistic spirituality"; and his engagement with the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Overall, the book provides a rich and nuanced view of Bodei's intellectual legacy, demonstrating his distinctive approach to philosophy and literature.