Creature of a Day - Hardcover

Juan Tovar, Leland H. Chambers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0929701682 ISBN 13: 9780929701684

Publisher: McPherson, 2002

Synopsis

Winner of the Kayden Translation Award, University of Colorado-Boulder. Foreword Magazine "Book of the Year" 2002 Bronze Medalion. Border crossing may be literal, figurative, imaginary, symbolic or psychological, or, as in the Mexican novelist Juan Tovar's Creature of a Day, all of these at once. This richly conceived prose fiction (a novel in the freshest sense) enchants and seduces the reader with a beguiling tableau of tales told in a language contemporary yet resonant of Calderón de la Barca, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Creature of a Day is inhabited by actors and priests, murderers and harlots, mendicants, merchants, pilgrims and storytellers. Themes of isolation and migration emerge in the wit and repartee of these characters; at the same time, in a stream of literary hallucination that flows from Lautreamont and Strindberg to Beckett, Cocteau, Calvino, and Borges, Creature of a Day washes across the North American consciousness. This award-winning translation by Leland H. Chambers reflects a vital new Mexican literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in the city of Puebla, Mexico in 1941, Juan Tovar is a writer of short stories, novels, and screenplays, as well as being a dramatist of note. He majored in chemical engineering at the Univesity of Puebla and got involved with the Teatro Universitario there, transferring to Mexico City in 1962. In Mexico City he focussed on dramatic theory and composition, which he studied with Luisa Josefina Hernández and Emilio Carballido, and which he has taught in various schools and centers from 1967 to the present time. Among his many books of fiction are Los misterios del reino (1966; La Palabra y el Hombre Prize for short fiction; revised, 1992), La Muchacha en el balcon o la presensica del coronel retirado (1970; Primer Concurso Cultural de la Juventud Prize for a novel), and El lugar del corazon (1974). Tovar has translated plays by Shakespeare, Stoppard, and Shepard, as well as poetry by Yeats, Hopkins, Malcolm Lowery, and Ted Hughes. Leland H. Chambers is a translator of modern and contemporary Latin American and Spanish fiction. An emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Denver, he directed the Comparative Literature Program (1967-83) and spent six years as editor of its nationally recognized literary magazine, Denver Quarterly (1977-83). Among the authors he has translated are Jorge Stamadianos, Carmen Boullosa, Julieta Campos, Enrique Jaramillo Levi, Julieta Campos, Julieta Campos, and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. His translations of short fiction from Spanish have appeared in more than 25 literary magazines. His translation of Juan Tovar's Criatura de un día was one of the two winners of the 2000-2001 Eugene M. Kayden Translation Award.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0929701682
• ISBN 13: 9780929701684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 159