Biography

Edgar Brau was born in Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

. 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

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

, and Malditos (“Damned Poets”), a dramatization he wrote based on poems by Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...

, Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

, and Rimbaud.

His first book, The Poem and Other Stories, published in 1992, was included by the UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 in its Project for International Financing of Translations. Enrique Anderson Imbert, an eminent critic from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, 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

National Reorganization Process

The National Reorganization Process was the name used by its leaders for the military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In Argentina it is often known simply as la última junta militar or la última dictadura , because several of them existed throughout its history.The Argentine...

) and Captain Lemuel Gulliver's Last Travel, a satire of present day society, in which the character created by Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

 is shown on a fantastic travel (his “fifth” voyage) to the Río de la Plata

Río de la Plata

The Río de la Plata —sometimes rendered River Plate in British English and the Commonwealth, and occasionally rendered [La] Plata River in other English-speaking countries—is the river and estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River on the border between Argentina and...

, more precisely to a country that Gulliver calls Incognitahriah.

By mid 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

 awarded professor Donald A. Yates, first American translator and editor of Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

, 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

Casablanca (novella)

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,...

, 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 U.S.A. by the end of 2006. The Washington Post

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

 published a lengthy review by Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda , a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic for the Washington Post.-Career:Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree, Dirda took a Ph.D. from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the...

 (“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

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 (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

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

 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

Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders is an international magazine opened to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the world’s best writing and authors who are not easily accessible to English-speaking readers....

, from Chicago, published Woodstock, a long poem by Brau based on the famous rock festival.

In 2008 and 2009 a series of eight interviews to the author made by Martina Rolandi Ricci came out on the Internet.

Among Brau's latest works are The Golem Project, a long fantastic 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 play Faustus, in which the character is a bright Argentine biologist at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, who, while considering the possibility of destroying the formula he has just created, that will enable man to live a thousand years, is interrupted by the unexpected presence of Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles is a demon featured in German folklore...

; and Like Psalms, twenty-one 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.

In 2010 he also completed two suites of photographs with poems inspired by them: A Wanderer's Photo Album (Coghlan) and Woman in Syllables.

Edgar Brau lives in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

.

Books

• (1992) El Poema y otras historias (short stories). Antigua Librería de Marie Roget, Buenos Aires.
• (1995) El comediante (novel). Antigua Librería de Marie Roget, Buenos Aires.
• (1998) Tres cuentos (short stories). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (1998) El Viaje (short stories). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (1998) Dos historias fantásticas (two short stories). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (1998) El último Viaje del capitán Lemuel Gulliver (novel). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (1999) La Torre y Babel (poems). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2000) Suite argentina (four short stories). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2000) Mares de Ahab (poems). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2001) El fin de Cronos (Diaries 1999-2001). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2001) El sueño de Tiresias (poems). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2003) Casablanca (novella). METZENGERSTEIN Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
• (2005) Woodstock (a poem). NAPHTA & SETTEMBRINI, Buenos Aires.

Works in English

• The Siesta. ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE, June 2000. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• Bárcena's Dog. TWO LINES, 2001. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Calendar. SOURCE, Spring 2002. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Blessing. BEACONS, Number eight, 2002. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Prisoner. THE LITERARY REVIEW, Fall 2002. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Poem. NIMROD, Spring-Summer 2002. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Journey. TWO LINES, 2003 Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Forgotten God. THE ANTIOCH REVIEW, Summer 2003. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Child. THE LITERARY REVIEW, Winter 2004. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• Casablanca and Other Stories. MSU Press, 2006. Translated by Donald A. Yates and Andrea G. Labinger.
• Woodstock. WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS, January, 2007. Translated by Michele McKay Aynesworth.
• The Journey. NEW WORLD, NEW WORDS, 2007. Recent Writing from the Americas. A Bilingual Anthology. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Blessing. Argentina, A Traveler's Literary Companion. Whereabouts Press. Spring 2010. Translated by Donald A. Yates.
• The Golem Project. THE ANTIOCH REVIEW, Fall 2010. Translated by Andrea G. Labinger.
• The Key. WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS. Beyond Borges: Argentina Now. October, 2010. Translated by Donald A. Yates.

External links

• Edgar Brau Official Site