The Best Untranslated Writers series – in which established writers select and showcase fellow writers from their own languages who are not yet widely translated or read – began with a trio of Brazilians on the writers they love most but are yet to make the leap into English. Today Valeria Luiselli introduces us to the work of one of Mexico’s most enigmatic writers, Sergio Pitol.
(…)Pitol is probably one of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable and eccentric.
Pitol was born in Puebla, Mexico, but moved away early in his life. He lived in Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow, Prague, Rome, Beijing and Barcelona –sometimes on diplomatic missions, at others working as a translator or teaching, but always, always writing. He is one of the most prolific and brilliant translators of Russian, English and Polish literature into Spanish: Chekov, Gombrowicz, Conrad, James, Carroll and Austen are a few of the authors he has translated.
Sergio Pitol’s stories, essays and novels do not only travel through his many places of residence. His writing – the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words – reflects the multiplicity of languages he has read and embraced –and perhaps, too, the many men he has been. Reading him is like reading through the layers of many languages at once. More.
See: Granta
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