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.

Colombia-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. 

Kristin Dykstra’s translations include books by Reina María Rodríguez, Ángel Escobar, and others. She is the co-editor Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. She lives in Hinesburg, Vermont. 

Edith Grossman is 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. She lives in New York City. 

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.