Javier Marías
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Javier Marías Franco (born September 20, 1951) is a Spanish novelist, translator and columnist.
Marías was born in Madrid. His father, Julián Marías, was a teacher and famous philosopher who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing the government of Francisco Franco. (Marías gave the narrator of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy a father with a similar history, and has used the on-going novel in part to explore the effects of this history on the father and his son and their relationship.)
Marías wrote his first novel The Dominions of the Wolf at the age of 17 after running away to Paris. His second novel, Travesía del Horizonte, an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica, has been translated into English as Voyage Along the Horizon. After attending the Complutense University of Madrid, Marías turned his attention to translating English novels into Spanish. His translations include work by John Updike, Thomas Hardy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. After returning to original composition Marías won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his 1992 novel A Heart So White in the English translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Currently he is completing the final part of the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.
He was elected to armchair 57 of the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) in 2006.
His sympathetic portrayal of John Gawsworth, the third King of Redonda, in his book All Souls so touched the "reigning" king Jon Wynne-Tyson that he abdicated and left the throne to Marías in 1997, although his reign has been highly contentious. This course of events was chronicled in detail in his "false novel" Dark Back of Time, a book inspired by the reception of the book All Souls by many people who, falsely according to Marías, believed they were the source of the characters in All Souls. Since "taking the throne" Marías has given honorary titles to such people as Pedro Almodóvar, Francis Ford Coppola, and A. S. Byatt.
He operates a small editorial house for pet editions under the name of Reino de Redonda. He writes a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column La Zona Fantasma is included in the monthly magazine The Believer. (The publisher of The Believer, McSweeney's, has recently re-issued one of his early novels, Voyage Along the Horizon (2006), originally written in 1972.)
[edit] Bibliography
- Los dominios del lobo (1971)
- Travesía del horizonte (1972)
- El monarca del tiempo (1978)
- El siglo (1982)
- El hombre sentimental (1986)
- Todas las almas (1989)
- Corazón tan blanco (1992)
- Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994)
- Cuando fui mortal (1996)
- Negra espalda del tiempo (1998)
- Tu rostro mañana 1: Fiebre y lanza (2002)
- Tu rostro mañana 2: Baile y sueño (2004)
[edit] English translations
- All Souls (1992) §
- A Heart So White (1995) §
- Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (1996) §
- When I Was Mortal (1999) §
- Dark Back of Time (2001), translation by Esther Allen
- The Man of Feeling (2003) §
- Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (2004) §
- Voyage Along the Horizon (2006), translation by Kristina Cordero
- Written Lives (2006) §
- Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream (2006) §
§ indicates translations by Margaret Jull Costa
