From the Imp's Archives

Rafael Dieste (Rianxo, 1899-Santiago de Compostela, 1981) stands alongside such names as Castelao, Álvaro Cunqueiro and Ánxel Fole as a classic of twentieth-century Galician literature. He wrote in both the Galician and Spanish languages and is best known for his short stories, of which he published two collections: one in Galician - From the Imp's Archives (Dos arquivos do trasno, 1926, expanded in 1962 and 1973) - and another in Spanish - Stories and Inventions of Félix Muriel (Historias e invenciones de Félix Muriel, 1943 and 1974, expanded in 1985). His stories are characterized by clarity of style, a sense of wonder in which a burning candle implies the presence of someone or a toy schooner comes to life and increases to fantastic proportions in order to bore a hole in the darkness, and attention paid to what might otherwise be considered marginal characters in life - a tramp, a stoker from the engine room, or the chess piece, a knight. The reader is transported to a past in which children place shoes on the balcony on Epiphany Eve and to a future, ten thousand years hence, when the narrator hopes to come across an advanced culture with teaching under the open sky. There are touching encounters - on an iron bridge, between a man who thinks of himself as long-suffering and one who it turns out has endured much more than him. But it is the sense of wonder, that thin veil between the narrow spectrum of light we are capable of seeing and a reality we only glimpse, that prevails in these stories, as when children playing on some ground-floor premises are convinced they have spotted an eye staring down at them from the ceiling (or was it a mislaid button?). Not everything goes our way - an emigrant to America may not return rich; a whale washed up on our shore may end up being claimed by someone else. But wealth is measured in experience. A brief preface contains the author's treatise on how to write a good story. From the Imp's Archives is one of the best books of short stories ever written, deserving of international recognition, and is here presented to an English-speaking audience for the first time in Jonathan Dunne's inimitable translation from Galician, carried out over a period of twenty-five years. The stories are skilfully illustrated by two well-known Galician artists: Xohán Ledo (in the 1962 edition) and Luis Seoane (1973).

This edition is bilingual and contains the Galician text from the 1973 edition and Jonathan Dunne's English translation.