Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World

by Francisco Coloane

Book Overview

"These stories, well translated from the Spanish, describe the severe beauty and cruelty of southern Chile--cold, inhospitable, full of craggy, treacherous channels--the end of the world. As in Jack... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0935480501
• ISBN13: 9780935480504
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A collection of stories for a different hemisphere

Just before the funeral for Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, Francisco Coloane walked up to the open coffin and buttoned his deceased compatriot's shirt. Such an attention to the details of human existence flow through Dave Petreman's translation of Coloane's short stories, "Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World."Coloane, a respected and award-winning writer in Chile whose works have been published around the world in Spanish and other languages, is introduced to a greater American readership in this collection of sixteen intense and thoughtful short stories. Petreman's translation pays homage to the language of the original stories and manages to cross the barriers that face any translator of prose and poetry.Coloane's stories describe a world of the essentially human. He introduces us in "Cape Horn," for example, to people "whose hearts were nothing more than another clenched fist" and shows how the natural world inhabited by such people has its own way of imposing an unmerciful justice on them. The recurring theme in Latin American literature that poses commonality of civilization and barbarity forms the basis for "Gulf of Sorrows," where a small boat filled with struggling sailors prefers to head on against the storm rather than face being declared shipwrecked. In the story "Bottle of Caña" Coloane introduces the reader to the inner lives of two characters who meet and share for a while a path through the cold patagonian tundra. One of the characters is headed home to get married. The other remembers how, on the same trail a year earlier, he had killed another man just like this momentary companion. The innocent future of one man is juxtaposed with the violent past of the other, with the reader discovering in the story how closely each of us lives blissfully unaware of the violence hiding in the deepest recesses of the human heart. It is just these collocations of opposites that make Coloane's stories so gripping and unstoppable. The fire of life and the iceberg cold of hidden death, control and violence, obstinacy and honor, plunder and compassion are part of every one of these stories. Coloane's perception of the essential relationship between the world of man and the world of nature makes each of these confrontations more than just one in another in a collection of stories. The stories present human nature as natural, the anima of compulsion and unexpected submission behind our sense of human importance.David Petreman, associate professor of Spanish language & Latin American literature at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, translated these stories from other collections of Coloane's work previously published in Chile. Petreman, who specializes in Chilean literature, is a long-time friend of Coloane, a relationship that is evident in the careful rewriting of these stories for another hemisphere. The stories in this book reveal a world seldom seen by English-speaking readers. This i