Edgar Brau | |
|---|---|
 Brau at Lake Tahoe. April, 2003 | |
| Born | 1958 Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet, playwright, actor and stage director, photographer, artist |
| Language | Spanish |
| Notable works | Suite argentina, El último Viaje del capitán Lemuel Gulliver, Casablanca , Faustus |
| Website | |
| edgarbrau | |
Edgar Brau (born 1958) is an Argentine writer, stage director and artist.
Edgar Brau was born in Argentina. He engaged in different occupations: he was an actor, a stage director, a painter of icons, a photographer, until he completely devoted himself to writing literature. His two last performances, as actor and stage director, were A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud, and Malditos (“Damned Poets”), a dramatization he wrote based on poems by Gérard de Nerval, Charles Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.
His first book, The Poem and Other Stories, published in 1992, was included by the UNESCO in its Project for International Financing of Translations. Enrique Anderson Imbert, an eminent critic from Harvard University, referred to the author as “a poet of prose, with impressive imagination”, and predicted he would get a first place in Argentine literature. Rodolfo Modern, writer and secretary general of the Argentine Academy of Letters, wrote that Brau expresses himself in a language of “amazing richness and accuracy”.
In 1995, he published his first novel, The Player. Between that year and 2000, two books of poems, three short story books and a novel were released. To this period belong Argentine Suite (a collection of four short stories based on the last Argentine military dictatorship, the National Reorganization Process) and Captain Lemuel Gulliver's Last Travel, a satire of present-day society, in which the character created by Jonathan Swift is shown on a fantastic travel (his “fifth” voyage) to the Río de la Plata, more precisely to a country that Gulliver calls Incognitahriah.
By mid 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded professor Donald A. Yates, first American translator and editor of Jorge Luis Borges, a grant to translate all the work in prose written by Brau up to that year. Since then, Edgar Brau has been invited by different American universities and literary organizations to give seminars on his work and classes as Visiting Professor. Together with his translator, he also offered several bilingual readings on the West Coast.
In the Fall of 2002, during one of those stays, he wrote Casablanca , a novella in which a wealthy Argentine “estanciero” (ranch owner) builds a replica of Rick's café in the Argentine pampas, around the fifties, with the idea of recreating the famous film in real life. In this story, the unnamed protagonist, caught in a storm on a lonely road, takes a hitherto unnoticed turn and soon draws up at a group of Moorish-looking buildings. A battered tin sign out front says “Casablanca.” After parking, the driver seeks shelter in a shadowy room, glimpsing chairs and tables piled helter-skelter in the corners, just as a piano begins to play As Time Goes By. The piano player is an old black man, identical to Sam. By the wall opposite the piano, a man in dark glasses (his face seems familiar at first glance), a white jacket and black bow tie dozes, his chin resting on his chest. Somehow, the narrator has wandered into Rick's Café Americain from the film Casablanca. Before he leaves, the piano player will tell him the story of this place and of the people who lived and worked there, representing the movie characters.
Brau's first collection of works in English, entitled Casablanca and Other Stories, was published in the US by the end of 2006. The Washington Post published a lengthy review by Michael Dirda (“For the first time in English the Argentine labyrinths of Edgar Brau”) in which he states that Brau's works are further explorations of Borges´geography of the imagination. Writer and professor John T. Irwin, from Johns Hopkins University (author of The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story), wrote that Brau's stories must be regarded in the same level as those by Edgar Allan Poe and Borges: “These brilliant and haunting stories, superbly translated —Irwin writes— will introduce American readers to a contemporary Argentine fiction writer of startling power and subtlety, a writer whose stories it is no overstatement to mention in the same breath with those of Poe and Borges”.
In January 2007, Words Without Borders, from Chicago, published Woodstock, a long poem by Brau based on the famous rock festival.
Between 2009 and 2013 he wrote and published the following works: The Golem Project (El Proyecto Golem - Metzengerstein, October 2011), a story that takes place at an unspecified future date and narrates how the Israelis manage to bring Hitler back to life with his memory intact; The Child (El hijo – Metzengerstein, May 2012), a play about the theft of babies from political prisoners during the last Argentine military dictatorship; Faust (Fausto - Metzengerstein, December 2012), a play in which the character is now a bright Argentine biologist at Princeton, who, while considering the possibility of destroying the formula he has just discovered (which will enable man to live for a thousand years) is interrupted by the devil Mephistopheles, who has the mission of preventing that destruction; and Like Psalms (Como salmos - Metzengerstein, February 2013), twenty-six poems in which arguments with God and arguments about the existence of God build, through contradiction, a metaphysics in which the answer always seems to bring about a new question.
He also completed two suites of photographs and poems: A Wanderer´s Photo Album (Coghlan) and Woman in Syllables.
In January 2014 he published De lo que dura a lo que pasa (Metzengerstein), a series of eight interviews to the author made by Martina Rolandi Ricci, and in February of the same year, Gulliver´s Craft (El oficio de Gulliver - Metzengerstein), a novel written in 2012, which modifies and enlarges —from 60 to 350 pages— his earlier story based on Swift's character.
Edgar Brau lives in Buenos Aires.
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, diarist, and translator. He was a friend and frequent collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges. He is the author of the Fantastique novel The Invention of Morel.
Silvina Ocampo was an Argentine short story writer, poet, and artist. Ocampo's friend and collaborator Jorge Luis Borges called Ocampo "one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, whether on this side of the ocean or on the other." Her first book was Viaje olvidado (1937), translated as Forgotten Journey (2019), and her final piece was Las repeticiones, published posthumously in 2006.
This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
Luisa Valenzuela Levinson is an Argentine post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective.
Fernando Sorrentino is an Argentine writer. His works have been translated into English, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tamil, Kannada, Persian and Kabyle.
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, who normally went only by his surname, Fogwill, was an Argentine short story writer, novelist, and businessman. He was a distant relative of the novelist Charles Langbridge Morgan. He was the author of Malvinas Requiem, one of the first narratives to deal with the Falklands War. Fogwill died on August 21, 2010, from a pulmonary dysfunction.
Macedonio Fernández was an Argentine writer, humorist and philosopher. His writings included novels, stories, poetry, journalism, and works not easily classified. He was a mentor to Jorge Luis Borges and other avant-garde Argentine writers. Seventeen years of his correspondence with Borges was published in 2000. His published poetry includes "Creía yo".
Manuel Peyrou was an Argentine writer and journalist.
Blas Matamoro is an Argentine writer, lawyer, journalist and translator.
Susana Calandrelli was an Argentine writer and teacher.
Griselda Gambaro is an Argentine writer, whose novels, plays, short stories, story tales, essays and novels for teenagers often concern the political violence in her home country that would develop into the Dirty War. One recurring theme is the desaparecidos and the attempts to recover their bodies and memorialize them. Her novel Ganarse la muerte was banned by the government because of the obvious political message.
Casablanca is a novella written by Edgar Brau in Nevada, United States, in November–December 2002. In the story, set in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, a rich Argentine ranch owner builds a replica of Rick's Café Américain on his estate, with the idea of reproducing in it, by means of doubles, the most important scenes of the movie Casablanca.
Luisa Peluffo is an Argentine writer and journalist.
Roberto Jorge Santoro was an Argentine poet, publisher and political activist. Santoro created a literary journal and was active with other journals.
Carlos María Domínguez is an Argentine writer and journalist who has lived in Montevideo since 1989.
Luisa Futoransky is an Argentine writer, scholar and journalist living in France.
Ernesto Mallo is an Argentine writer.
Margarita García Robayo is a Colombian novelist and writer. She was born in Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. She has written several novels and short story collections as well as a book of autobiographical essays. Her book Cosas peores won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese.
Donald A. Yates was an American professor, writer, translator, and editor. His edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths was crucial to the worldwide dissemination of Borges' work.
Multimedia
Edgar Brau recites poems by Baudelaire and Nerval for Rabito, a homeless cat (English subtitles) on YouTube
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