Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems

About 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 twentieth century, and this collection brings together the best of Mutis’s 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, always in pursuit of love and fortune, even as he knows that neither can or 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 poetry influenced by surrealists like Robert Desnos and Pablo Neruda, but with an unmistakable voice of his own, gaining the admiration of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, who called him “one of the greatest writers of our time.” This selection of Mutis’s haunting poems has been rendered into English by three of the finest translators of the Spanish language and is published in a bilingual edition.