Fabio Morábito is one of Mexico’s best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn’s translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission.
The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of ‘national culture’.
Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. His position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet’s ‘foreignness’ in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in ‘Journey to Pátzcuaro’, a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.
Over de auteur
Richard Gwyn grew up in south Wales, and lived for many years in Greece and Spain. His travels in Latin America form the subject of a chronicle, Ambassador of Nowhere (2024). He is the author of four collections of poetry and three novels, and his memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, won Wales Book of the Year for nonfiction in 2012. He has translated poetry and short fiction by many Latin American writers. The Other Tiger, a major dual-text anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry, containing work by nearly 100 poets, was published by Seren in 2016. His translations of the poetry of Darío Jaramillo, Impossible Loves (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclán in 2020. His alter ego writes about literary and everyday matters on Ricardo Blanco’s Blog.