A classic work of Latin American literature, Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo has become an integral part of the history, politics, and culture of Latin America since its first publication in 1845. Partially translated into English when it was first published, this foundational text appears here for the first time in its entirety.
An educator and writer, Sarmiento was President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. His Facundo is a study of the Argentine character, a prescription for the modernization of Latin America, and a protest against the tyranny of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835–1852). The book brings nineteenth-century Latin American history to life even as it raises questions still being debated today—questions regarding the "civilized" city versus the "barbaric" countryside, the treatment of indigenous and African populations, and the classically liberal plan of modernization. Facundo’s celebrated and frequently anthologized portraits of the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga and other colorful characters give readers an exhilarating sense of Argentine culture in the making.
Kathleen Ross’s translation renders Sarmiento’s passionate prose into English with all its richness intact, allowing the English-language reader the full experience of Facundo’s intensity and historical reach.
Kathleen Ross, Associate Professor of Spanish at New York University, is the author of The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1994), co-editor of Scents of Wood and Silence: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers(1991), and the translator of works by César Vallejo, Roque Dalton, Julieta Campos and others. Roberto González Echevarría is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures at Yale University
"Sarmiento's Facundo remains a foundational work for the traditions of Latin American fiction and historiography, and so an essential book for English language North Americans also, at least for those not content to abide in ignorance of an ongoing common destiny. Roberto González Echevarría, the leading critic of Hispanic literature, powerfully introduces the sensitive translation by Kathleen Ross. Sarmiento's High Romantic vision created the myth of the gaucho and his death drive, fascinatingly at some variance with Sarmiento's own vitalistic nuancing of his saga."—Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Genius: A Mosaic of On Hundred Exemplary Minds
"Publishing this book in a new translation is a historic event in itself. Sarmiento's epic Facundo is more than one of the Western Hemisphere's most important literary works; it epitomizes the meaning of 'classic.' The translator, Kathleen Ross, has captured the epic majesty and metaphoric power of Sarmiento's prose."—Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
284 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 map
9780520239807$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jan 2004