So it was Inés who ventured to Venezuela, via the Guadalajara book fair, where she left a hand-written note inquiring after the English language rights at the Cuban-Venezuelan stand.

But we still had no leads on whom to contact. Danger,” I was ready to gallop out onto the Venezuelan llanos myself and lasso the rights. By the time I’d gotten through visions of dawn on the prairie, with “the smell of mint and cattle” and encountered Pajarote’s stories of vampires and ghosts, and the legal/political shenanigans of the gringo bully “Sr. It’s also a romance, a political parable, a story of cowboys, spirits and hustlers, and the strange magic of history.įrom the first page, I was wowed by Robert Malloy’s beautiful, poetic translation of Gallegos’s language: an eerie description of the river and the sense of danger hovering over the young Santos Luzardo. One of the first examples of “magical realism,” it is an epic, a love poem to Venezuela: the land, its peoples and their legends. The story pits an educated, principled land-owner against a beautiful and tyrannical cattle-rustler, Doña Barbara, rumored to be a witch. But in 1929, he was forced to flee the country after publishing a novel critical of the regime of Juan Vicente Gómez. A teacher, writer, and one of the founders of Acción Democrática-an important political party in the early years of Venezuelan democracy-Gallegos became the first democratically elected president of Venezuela in 1947. Of the Latin American writers I most admire-Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolaño-all were recipients of an award named after Rómulo Gallegos. Inspired in part by a telenovela ad on the side of a bus, Venezuelan political history, and a lot of helpful folks in Cuba and Venezuela, Hivnor recounts the arduous process she and Ines went through to see Gallegos’ masterwork, the “national book of Venezuela,” see the light of day again after years and years of being out of print, forgotten in English. of Chicago Press, about how Doña Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos, which had been out of print for decades, came to her attention via her foreign rights manager, Inés ter Horst. Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U.