Spanish & Portuguese

Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)

Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.

Translated with Notes by John Rutherford
Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría

Dom Casmurro (Library of Latin America)

The unreliable narrator and the fictional memoir are long-standing literary traditions. Nineteenth-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis uses both to brilliant effect in his novel Dom Casmurro. Narrated by Bento Santiago, this memoir looks back over a life filled with the suspicion of betrayal: Bento is convinced that his wife had an affair with his best friend, and that his son was the result of it. Though he has no real evidence to support this belief, Bento becomes so obsessed with it that, in the end, he commits crimes far worse than the suspected adultery to avenge himself. The memoir itself is a kind of justification for his actions; Bento, now alone, recreates the environment of his childhood and attempts to rewrite the facts of his life--in essence, reconstructing the past.

Among readers familiar with Latin American literature, Machado is considered a master. His novels blend black comedy with deadly accurate social commentary and an unerring perception of human psychology to create works that are brilliant, complex without being opaque, and joys to read. The Oxford University Press edition is ably translated by John Gledson and accompanied by critical essays that will help orient readers unfamiliar with Machado's work.

Like other great nineteenth century novels--The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary--Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro explores the themes of marriage and adultery. But what distinguishes Machado's novel and what makes it such a delightful discovery for English-speaking readers, is its eccentric and wildly unpredictable narrative style. As he recounts the events of his life from the vantage of a lonely old age, the narrator Bento continually interrupts his story to reflect on the writing of it. But the novel is more than a performance of stylistic acrobatics. It is an ironic critique of Catholicism, in which God appears as a kind of divine accountant whose ledgers may be balanced in devious as well as pious ways. It is also a story about love and its obstacles, about deception and self-deception, and about the failure of memory to make life's beginning fit neatly into its end.
This crisp new translation by John Gledson is the only complete, unabridged, and annotated edition available of one of the most distinctive novels of the turn of the century.

Don Quixote

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.

"Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction.

Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake."

From the Introduction by Harold Bloom

Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.

Don Quijote (Norton Critical Editions)

Part parody and part cautionary tale, Don Quijote is a literary masterpiece. This Norton Critical Edition of Don Quijote is based on Burton Raffel's masterful translation. The Raffel translation comes as close as possible to recreating Cervantes's inimitable prose style-the translation is consistent, fluid, and modeled closely on the original Spanish. Diana de Armas Wilson provides a thought-provoking introduction and explanatory textual annotations. Carefully selected contextual materials bring readers into the creative process that culminated in Don Quijote. Jncluded are other writings by Cervantes published during the period from 1585 to 1616 as well as contemporary works by Ariosto, Avellaneda, Sannazaro, and Montalvo. Patricia Finch and John J. Allen provide a modern account of the novel's influence throughout the ages. Fifteen critical pieces present major interpretations of both the novel and selected episodes. Included are contributions by Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Michel Foucault, Javier Herrero, Ruth El Saffar, Carroll B. Johnson, Robert ter Horst, Nicolas Wey-G6mez, Maria Antonia Carces, and Anne J. Cruz, among others. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real (Modern Library Classics)

Celia Correas de Zapata, an internationally recognized expert in the field of Latin American fiction written by women, has collected stories by thirty-one authors from fourteen countries, translated into English by such renowned scholars and writers as Gregory Rabassa and Margaret Sayers Peden. Contributors include Dora Alonso, Rosario Ferré, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Lydia Vega, and Luisa Valenzuela. The resulting book is a literary tour de force, stories written by women in this hemisphere that speak to cultures throughout the world. In her Foreword, Isabel Allende states, “This anthology is so valuable; it lays open the emotions of writers who, in turn, speak for others still shrouded in silence.”

Don Quixote de La Mancha (Modern Library)

                                                            

"        Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being," said novelist Milan Kundera. "And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?"
----Widely regarded as the world's first
modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. This Modern Library edition presents the acclaimed Samuel Putnam translation of the epic tale, complete with notes, variant readings, and an Introduction by the translator.
----The debt owed to Cervantes by literature is immense. From Milan Kundera: "Cervan-
tes is the founder of the Modern Era. . . . The novelist need answer to no one but
Cervantes." Lionel Trilling observed: "It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote." Vladmir Nabo-kov wrote: "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality. . . . He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon." And V. S. Pritchett observed: "Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends as a universe. . . . The true spell of Cervantes is that he is a natural magician in pure story-telling."


The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-
dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Corrosive Signs: Essays on Experimental Poetry (Visual, Concrete, Alternative) (Visual, Concrete, Alternative) (Visual, Concrete, Alternative)

Poems based on sight and sound, video and performance, politics and street action? This is an important collection of manifestos by prominent poets and critics in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain documenting the evolution of experimental poetry from the inside. Some contributions are historical, while others are theoretical, critical, or polemical. Contains numerous illustrations, drawing, photos.

That BringAs Woman (Everyman's Library (Paper))

On the eve of revolution, the decadent upper classes of Madrid struggle to maintain a life of conspicuous consumption and extravagant display. This caustic masterpiece of ironic style follows Rosala's attempt to keep up appearances, accumulation of secret debt, and ultimate exchange of the only commodity of value she still possesses: herself. The equal of contemporaries Balzac and Hardy, Galds is Spain's best-kept literary secret.

Poets of Brasil

The first bilingual anthology of Brazilian Poetry to cover its entire 500-year-long history, this book drew the following comment from Yale's expert in world literature, Harold Bloom: Poets of Brazil: A Bilingual Selection is the only book available that gives these poets to us in both languages, Portuguese and American English. The choice of poets is remarkably inclusive and various and is particularly enlightening in the works of the twentieth-century Republic of Brazil. In particular, the representation of Manuel Bandeira, of the three Andrades and of Archanjo are brilliantly rendered. The quality of the introduction and notes is also estimable.

The Passion According to G.H. (Emergent Literatures)