Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems

Álvaro Mutis’s fantastical, gripping, unnerving tales of the exploits and adventures of Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, an inveterate wanderer both on land and sea, are among the most beloved works of twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Like the stories of Borges, like the novels of Mutis’s great friend García Márquez, they conjure a strange world of their own which also holds up a mirror, disquieting and revelatory, to the everyday world we imagine we know.

If Maqroll eventually found his way into prose, he began his career in poetry, and it was as a poet that Mutis first made his name as a writer. This selection of Mutis’s haunting verse, with its evocations, now lush, now stark, of the landscapes of South America, with its prayers to an unknown god, is the first to be published in English. Rendered by Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid, masters of the art of translation, these resonant poems offer a dazzling new entry into the imagination of one of the most original and memorable writers of modern times.

This bilingual edition includes the original Spanish versions of each poem."Portentous dreamer, irredeemable traveler, subtle monarchist and conversationalist extraordinaire, Álvaro Mutis is the inhabitant of an unique, self-sufficient cosmos—endless, without timetables and borders.” —Ilan StavansColombia-born Álvaro Mutis (1923–2013) was an author of poetry, short stories, and novels. He received many literary awards, including the 1989 Prix Médicis and the 2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. NYRB Classics publishes his complete Maqroll series in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. 

Chris Andrews is a translator of Spanish and French literature. He has translated nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including By Night in Chile and Distant Star, and ten books (and counting) by César Aira, including The Musical Brain and Ghosts, and titles by many other authors. He has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. He lives in Australia. 

Edith Grossman (1936–2023) was an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by contemporary Spanish-language writers, including Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2006 she was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. 

Alastair Reid (1926–2014) was a poet, translator, and traveler. He published more than forty books, including two books for children, Ounce Dice Trice and Supposing. . . , both available from The New York Review Children’s Collection.