Valeria Luiselli Reviews New Translation of Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo for the New York Times

Since its original publication in Mexico in 1955, Juan Rulfo’s sparse and haunting novel Pedro Páramo “has cast an uncanny spell on writers,” famously inspiring Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude—yet for English-speaking readers it “remains something of a best-kept secret, a book that people either cherish or have never heard of,” writes Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. “The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter.” Rulfo once suggested that Pedro Páramo, the only book Rulfo ever published, was meant to be read three times before understood. “Maybe the novel was also meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness. Maybe its time has finally come,” writes Luiselli, who deems the Mexican novel’s newly published and third English language translation by Douglas J. Weatherford “by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”

Post Date: 11-29-2023