The Exiles and Other Stories Read Online

But he is in the same class as they, even in his unevenness, and his best work belongs not only to Latin America, but the world.

We have mentioned his attachment to Misiones. But perhaps only a visit to that land can convince one of its immense attractiveness: its rich red earth, its forests and yerbales, its magnificent falls on the Iguazú, its remote towns and villages, the resplendent jacarandás along the streets of its lovely capital, Posadas—and above all the majestic river, Olivera’s “devil of a Paraná” (“A Workingman”), which defines its long border with Paraguay. These stories, whatever their incidents and conflicts, whoever their characters, are preeminently tales of Misiones, their narratives compenetrated with Misiones, its trees and waters, its climate, it agriculture, its people. San Ignacio’s Jesuit ruins and Quiroga’s house outside town have been cleaned up now, for the tourists, but readers of his tales can still picture them as they were more than sixty years ago, when Dr. Else mistook his daughter for an enormous rat. Because sense of place is so important in Quiroga, and because most readers in our distant climes will never see Misiones, I have thought it important to provide a map, and a list of place names, which follow the text. (But if you can, take a plane to Rio, and continue on to Foz-do-Iguaçu. Cross the new bridge to Argentina, and take a long bus ride south, down through Misiones to Quiroga country.)

In these translations I have not attempted to improve upon Quiroga, nor to drag him out of his context and into Anglophone literature. I have tried to stay close to his Spanish, to avoid dipping too far below the surface in search of his underlying meaning. In the process I have no doubt stretched the capacities of English a bit, but intentionally, in the conviction that a translation should not conceal its origin, not read as though written directly in the receptor language, but rather exploit the rich possibilities of the bilingual encounter, while respecting the norms of that second language. In so doing I hope I have conveyed something of the special flavor of Quiroga’s prose, which like Quiroga himself is sui generis.

J. D. D.

THE EXILES
and Other Stories

Translator’s Note

Listed below are the Spanish titles of the stories translated for this book, ordered according to their dates of publication in Quiroga’s own collections (as reprinted by Losada), and the sequence in which they appear in each of these. This order differs somewhat from that of their first appearances, which are indicated by the dates in square brackets. The first story and the last were never collected by the author.

Beasts in Collusion

On a stormy night in June, a man was walking furtively along a path in the depths of the jungles of Mato Grosso. The night was profoundly dark. The thunderclaps rumbled one after the other, and, to the massive churning of the sky, the jungle answered with the deep murmur of its trees shaken by the heavy wind. From time to time the sky was crossed by the livid flash of a lightning bolt; black and ghostly, the woods came into view, only to disappear instantly in the impenetrable darkness.

The jungle (always terrible even in the daytime with its ambushes and its treachery) at that hour, in the gloomy solitude, irresistibly filled the most intrepid soul with anguish.