{"id":290666,"date":"2012-06-01T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/06\/01\/dona-barbara-gallegos-and-the-backstory-of-a-books-lifetime\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:27","slug":"dona-barbara-gallegos-and-the-backstory-of-a-books-lifetime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/06\/01\/dona-barbara-gallegos-and-the-backstory-of-a-books-lifetime\/","title":{"rendered":"Do\u00f1a Barbara, Gallegos, and the Backstory of a Book's Lifetime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press<\/a> and Seminary Co-op<\/a> up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem<\/a> of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U. of Chicago Press, about how Do\u00f1a Barbara<\/a> by R\u00f3mulo Gallegos, which had been out of print for decades, came to her attention via her foreign rights manager, In\u00e9s ter Horst. Inspired in part by a telenovela ad on the side of a bus, Venezuelan political history, and a lot of helpful folks in Cuba and Venezuela, Hivnor recounts the arduous process she and Ines went through to see Gallegos\u2019 masterwork, the \u201cnational book of Venezuela,\u201d see the light of day again after years and years of being out of print, forgotten in English.
\n


\n
\nThe cover of the Univ. of Chicago reprint of Do\u00f1a Barbara<\/em>
\n<\/center>
\nHere\u2019s a nice bit from Maggie\u2019s article:<\/p>\n
\n

Of the Latin American writers I most admire\u2014Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2014all were recipients of an award named after R\u00f3mulo Gallegos. A teacher, writer, and one of the founders of Acci\u00f3n Democr\u00e1tica\u2014an important political party in the early years of Venezuelan democracy\u2014Gallegos became the first democratically elected president of Venezuela in 1947. But in 1929, he was forced to flee the country after publishing a novel critical of the regime of Juan Vicente G\u00f3mez. That novel was Do\u00f1a Barbara.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

. . . The story pits an educated, principled land-owner against a beautiful and tyrannical cattle-rustler, Do\u00f1a Barbara, rumored to be a witch. One of the first examples of \u201cmagical realism,\u201d it is an epic, a love poem to Venezuela: the land, its peoples and their legends. It\u2019s also a romance, a political parable, a story of cowboys, spirits and hustlers, and the strange magic of history.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

From the first page, I was wowed by Robert Malloy\u2019s beautiful, poetic translation of Gallegos\u2019s language: an eerie description of the river and the sense of danger hovering over the young Santos Luzardo. By the time I\u2019d gotten through visions of dawn on the prairie, with \u201cthe smell of mint and cattle\u201d and encountered Pajarote\u2019s stories of vampires and ghosts, and the legal\/political shenanigans of the gringo bully \u201cSr. Danger,\u201d I was ready to gallop out onto the Venezuelan llanos myself and lasso the rights. But we still had no leads on whom to contact.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

So it was In\u00e9s who ventured to Venezuela, via the Guadalajara book fair, where she left a hand-written note inquiring after the English language rights at the Cuban-Venezuelan stand. A month later, an e-mail from the Cuban Ministry of Culture landed in In\u00e9s\u2019s inbox, suggesting she get in touch with the CELARG<\/span>, in Caracas, Venezuela (Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos R\u00f3mulo Gallegos). After several days of phone calls, she finally reached the head of Publications, who referred her to R\u00f3mulo Gallegos\u2019s daughter. (He had a daughter! We had a phone number!) Encouraged, In\u00e9s kept phoning and writing Venezuela until she managed to negotiate the rights. She even recruited relatives to help us resurrect this Venezuelan masterpiece: her father hand-delivered the license agreement to R\u00f3mulo Gallegos\u2019s daughter, and Ines\u2019s uncle, who happened to be in Venezuela at the time for business, transported the signed agreement back to The University of Chicago Press for its countersignature. After almost six months, we had a deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the book being Venezuelan, the political plays an integral part of this story, as Ines relates to Maggie: <\/p>\n

\n

“When your country struggles for democracy and you watch it sink from afar, your only hope is to raise consciousness in the people around you about what is really happening. I think it\u2019s essential that English-speaking readers discover this literary gem now, so they can draw parallels between the conflicts described by Gallegos and Venezuela\u2019s current situation\u2014where frequent clashes between civilization and barbarism are experienced on a daily basis. Do\u00f1a Barbara is a parable of how Venezuela could be saved from a corrupt and backward-thinking regime. Venezuelans saw that in 1929; that\u2019s why the book caused such a sensation and made them want to elect Gallegos as their president. If the book could do that then, maybe it can help, in some way, now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n


\nThe telenovela ad that inspired the reprint!
\n<\/center>
\nEsteemed bookwrangler Larry McMurtry even wrote a foreword for the book, quoted on the cover, in which he proclaims Do\u00f1a Barbara as \u201ca Madame Bovary of the llano.\u201d Read the whole article “here”: http:\/\/publishingperspectives.com\/2012\/05\/how-we-putdona-barbara-back-in-the-saddle-in-english\/ and grab a copy of Do\u00f1a Barbara<\/em> in stores this month!<\/p>\n

Like Jeff so rightly told us, this is the type of backstory we all love to hear, both as readers and as people in the business of books. It\u2019s a lot of work, but sometimes the payoff is so rewarding we can get a little misty-eyed\u2026even cowboys cry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U. of Chicago Press, about how Do\u00f1a Barbara by R\u00f3mulo Gallegos, which had been out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[3556,47246,47266,47256,14846,47286,26296,47276],"class_list":["post-290666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cuba","tag-dona-barbara","tag-larry-mcmurtry","tag-romulo-gallegos","tag-seminary-co-op","tag-telenovela","tag-university-of-chicago-press","tag-venezuela"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341116,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290666\/revisions\/341116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}