Seventy years after the Spanish translation made by Cortázar of the ‘Complete Tales’ of Edgar Allan Poe, the Foam Pages Pages launches a new edition commented and full of that classic work, with a new translation that seeks to “renew the spell” of Poe in the readers of the 21st century.
Edited by the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi and the Peruvian Fernando Iwasaki, with translation by Rafael Accorinti, the work is extended by two contemporary heirs of the American master of terror, Argentina Mariana Enriquez and the Spanish Patricia Esteban Erlés, and has illustrations by Arturo Garrido.
Both take over to Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, who prologized the volume that the editorial published two decades ago, also by the hand of Volpi and Iwasaki, and that today is a “flagship” of the house.
The comments that enter each story of writers such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra, Pilar Adón or Manuel Vilas, among others, are maintained from that edition.
The new edition of the Poe Classic will soon arrive at “All Latin America” and was published in Spain on February 12, according to the editors, who emphasized, during the presentation of the book this Monday in Madrid, in the validity of these stories at a time when “Evil is part of the ‘mainstream’ and political discourse and our daily life,” according to Iwasaki.
“Trump and Musk could have been Poe characters,” said Volpi, who believes that we live in an era marked by the fear of characters like that, but also the “fear of the future, to global warming or the AI.”
Both are aware that today’s young readers have an idea of evil, the sinister or disturbing that have suckled since their earliest childhood. “Today the dark side and the poetics of evil are in all pairs,” said the Peruvian.
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Poe’s stories approach the 21st century reader in a new Spanish translation
“The dark character, the antihero, has always existed but today they are the protagonists in series such as ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘Narcos’,” he added.
Volpi stressed that without Poe (Baltimore, EU, 1809-1949) there would be no Stephen King, the “most obvious” continuator of that tradition, but neither many comics, video games or recent series such as ‘The fall of the house of Usher’, based on Poe’s stories, or ‘Black Mirror’.
Poe’s footprint is in Lovecraft, at Ray Bradbury or at Philip K. Dick; Also in classics of the twentieth century such as Borges, Machado, Baudelaire or Quiroga; And in teachers from other arts, such as Salvador Dalí, Odilon Redon, Rene Magritte, Alfred Hitchcock or Tim Burton.
Juan Casamayor, founder of foam pages, said that Cortázar’s translation is “more poetic and atmospheric” and that it is “impossible” to overcome, but also stressed that “every classic deserves a contemporary translation” and that Accorinti’s is “the best possible.”
He contributes, explained the translator, a “contemporary” and “professionalized” look and clarifies some inaccuracies or inaccuracies.
Before he also translated Poe Ramón Gómez de la Serna or Rafael Cansinos Assens. Baudelaire introduced him in Europe in 1856 and Cortázar adapted it a hundred years later.
This edition also serves to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the death of Poe and the 25 years of the publisher.
With EFE information.
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