Synopses & Reviews
The first English-language translation of the work of a Guatemalan master, this groundbreaking achievement of "ethnographic surrealism" promotes cross-cultural understanding. A liberating, avant-garde recreation of popular tales and characters from the Guatemalan collective unconscious—including, from the Mayan sacred text, the Popol Vuh—this book contains a riot of folklore, colonial resistance, animistic nature, and the unfolding drama of hybrid ethnic identity formation.
Review
"Asturias's Leyendas . . . will remain as Latin American classics when most of this [20th] century's writing is forgotten." —Philip Swanson, author, Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction
About the Author
Miguel Ángel Asturias was a Guatemalan novelist, a diplomat, and a Nobel Laureate. He is the author of several books, including Hombres de máiz and El Señor Presidente, and the cotranslator of Popol Vuh and other sacred Mayan texts. Kelly Washbourne is an associate professor of Spanish translation in the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University and the author of Manual of Spanish-English Translation. He has also translated literary works for Oxfords Library of Latin America, University of North Carolina Presss Latin America in Translation, the University of Texas Presss Pan-American Literature in Translation series, and the Modern Language Associations Texts and Translations series. He lives in Kent, Ohio. Gerald Martin is a former Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century.