Javier Marías's Debt to Translation Sterne, Browne, Nabokov

This is a book that shows how Spain's most important contemporary writer, Javier Marías, has engaged with literature in English during his career. Marías has won multiple national and international awards, and is considered among the best writers working today. He has explained many times that working as a translator of literary works from English into Spanish helped shape the writer he became and this study explores those claims by analysing twothings: firstly, his translations themselves, scrutinized closely to determine their accuracy and flair; and secondly, seeing how those translations have left discernible traces in his own fiction, either through therecurrence of particular phraseology or evidence of a more largescale aesthetic debt; an example of the latter explored in this study would be Marías's decision to write a pseudo-autobiographical novel in much the same digressive and chaotic vein as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.