Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico (New Directions Pearls)

Javier Marías

shk 2010 · New Directions Pearls Libri 4 · New Directions Publishing

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A gem of a Marías story: Elvis and his entourage abandon their translator in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals. “It all happened because of Elvis Presley.” Elvis, down south of the border to film a movie, has insisted his producers hire a proper Spaniard so that he can pronounce his few lines in Spanish with a Castillian accent. But Ruibérriz has taken on much more than he bargained for. One fatal night, horseplay in a local bar goes too far: a fatuous drunken American insults the local kingpin, and when the thug insists that Ruibérriz translate, Elvis himself adds an even more stinging comment—and who must translate that?

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Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

Esther Allen has translated Javier Marias, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernandez, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and Jose Marti. She is currently a professor at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant (1989), a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship (1995), and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (2006).