Gerald Martin

Kelly Washbourne

Miguel Ángel Asturias

Legends of Guatemala

José Asunción Silva

Lost in a shipwreck in 1895, rewritten before the author's suicide in 1896, and not published until 1925, José Asunción Silva's After-Dinner Conversation (De sobremesa) is one of Latin America's finest fin de siècle novels and the first one to be translated into English. Perhaps the single best work for understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century writing in South America, After-Dinner Conversation is also cited as the continent's first psychological novel and an outstanding example of modernista fiction and the Decadent sensibility. Semi-autobiographical and more important for style than plot, After-Dinner Conversation is the diary of a Decadent sensation-collector in exile in Paris who undertakes a quest to find his beloved Helen, a vision whom his fevered imagination sees as his salvation. Along the way, he struggles with irreconcilable urges and temptations that pull him in every direction while he endures an environment indifferent or hostile to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, as did the modernista writers themselves. Kelly Washbourne's excellent translation preserves Silva's lush prose and experimental style. In the introduction, one of the most wide-ranging in Silva criticism, Washbourne places the life and work of Silva in their literary and historical contexts, including an extended discussion of how After-Dinner Conversation fits within Spanish American modernismo and the Decadent movement. Washbourne's perceptive comments and notes also make the novel accessible to general readers, who will find the work surprisingly fresh more than a century after its composition.

The Diary of a Decadent

After-Dinner Conversation

"The poetic movement that was Spanish American modernismo ran from the early 1880s to 1916: it expressed the desire both to join universal literature - aesthetic modernity - and to break colonial ties with Spanish belles lettres. The new translations in this bilingual anthology, many of them first translations, present eighteen modernista poets from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay. This volume in the MLA series Texts and Translations is designed to provide the student of Spanish American literature with work not easily accessible in Spanish and English and to introduce modernismo, an often misunderstood movement, to a wider audience."--BOOK JACKET.

In English Translation, with Spanish Text

An Anthology of Spanish American Modernismo

Ben Van Wyke

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation provides an accessible, diverse and extensive overview of literary translation today. This next-generation volume brings together principles, case studies, precepts, histories and process knowledge from practitioners in sixteen different countries. Divided into four parts, the book covers many of literary translation’s most pressing concerns today, from teaching, to theorising, to translation techniques, to new tools and resources. Featuring genre studies, in which graphic novels, crime fiction, and ethnopoetry have pride of place alongside classics and sacred texts, The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation represents a vital resource for students and researchers of both translation studies and comparative literature.

Kelly Washbourne

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