Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems

Peer to Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz, Álvaro Mutis is indisputably one of the greatest Latin American authors of the 20th century and this collection brings together the best of Mutis' largely-unknown body of poetry.

Álvaro Mutis is celebrated internationally as the author of the seven novellas, written between 1986 and 1993, that constitute the legendary and widely loved Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Maqroll, the Gaviero, or watchman, is a wanderer on the face of the earth, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can nor will last. Few know, however, that Maqroll made his first appearance, and established his myth, not in prose but in poetry. Starting 1948, Mutis published several volumes of surrealist-tinged poetry, but with an unmistakable voice of his own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, who would later call him “one of the greatest writers of our time.” Here a selection of Mutis’s haunting poems—invocations to a hidden god, private talismans of an outcast spirit—has been rendered into English by Alastair Reid, Edith Grossman, and Kristin Dykstra and published in a bilingual edition.