New Spanish edition of Edgar Allan Poe stories to be released
Seventy years after Cortázar translated Edgar Allan Poe 's ' Complete Stories ' into Spanish, the publishing house Páginas de Espuma is launching a new, unabridged, annotated edition of this classic work, with a new translation that seeks to "renew Poe's spell" on 21st-century readers .
Edited by Mexican writer Jorge Volpi and Peruvian writer Fernando Iwasaki, with translation by Rafael Accorinti, the work has a prologue by two contemporary heirs of the American master of horror, the Mexican Mariana Enríquez and the Spaniard Patricia Esteban Erlés, and has illustrations by Arturo Garrido.
Both of them take over from Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, who wrote the prologue to the volume that the same publisher published two decades ago, also with the help of Volpi and Iwasaki, and which is today a "flagship" of the house.
The comments that introduce each story by writers such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez , Alejandro Zambra, Pilar Adón and Manuel Vilas, among others, have been maintained from that edition.
The new edition of Poe's classic will soon be available "throughout Latin America" and was published in Spain on February 12, according to the editors, who emphasized , during the presentation of the book this Monday in Madrid, the relevance of these stories in an era in which "evil is part of the ' mainstream ' and of political discourse and of our daily lives," according to Iwasaki.
"Trump and Musk could have been Poe characters," said Volpi, who believes that we live in an era marked by fear of such characters , but also "fear of the future , of global warming or AI."
Poe's mark on literature and seriesBoth are aware that young readers today have an idea of evil, of the sinister or the disturbing that they have been imbibed since their earliest childhood. "Today the dark side and the poetics of evil are everywhere," said the Peruvian.
"The dark character, the antihero , has always existed but today they are the protagonists in series like ' Breaking Bad ' or 'Narcos'," he added.
Volpi has highlighted that without Poe (Baltimore, USA, 1809-1949) there would be no Stephen King , the "most obvious" continuer of that tradition, nor would there be many comics, video games or recent series such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher', based on Poe's stories, or 'Black Mirror'.
Poe's mark is found in Lovecraft , Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick; also in 20th century classics such as Borges, Machado, Baudelaire and Quiroga; and in masters of other arts, such as Salvador Dalí , Odilon Redon, Rene Magritte, Alfred Hitchcock and Tim Burton.
Juan Casamayor, founder of Páginas de Espuma, said that Cortázar's translation is "more poetic and atmospheric" and that it is " impossible " to surpass, but he also stressed that "every classic deserves a contemporary translation" and that Accorinti 's is "the best possible."
It provides, the translator explained, a " contemporary " and "professionalized" perspective and clarifies some inaccuracies or inaccuracies.
Before him, Poe was also translated by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Rafael Cansinos Assens. Baudelaire introduced him to Europe in 1856 and Cortázar adapted him a hundred years later.
This edition also serves to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Poe's death and the publishing house's 25th anniversary.
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