Javier Marías
Encyclopedia
Javier Marías is a Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist.

Life

Javier Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julián Marías
Julián Marías
Julián Marías Aguilera , was a Spanish philosopher. His History of Philosophy is widely accepted as the greatest work written in Spanish on the subject of the history of philosophy...

, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...

 (the father of the protagonist of Your Face Tomorrow was given a similar biography). Parts of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his father spent time teaching at various institutions, including Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old. Marías's first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...

 scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesús Franco
Jesús Franco
Jesús "Jess" Franco is a Spanish film director, writer, cinematographer and actor. His career took off in 1961 with his cult classic The Awful Dr. Orloff, which received wide distribution in the United States and England...

. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.

Writing

Marías began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga", one of the short stories within While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just fourteen. Marías wrote his first novel, Los dominios del lobo (The Dominions of the Wolf), at seventeen, after running away to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. His second novel, Travesía del horizonte (Voyage Along the Horizon), was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.

After attending the Complutense University of Madrid
Complutense University of Madrid
The Complutense University of Madrid is a university in Madrid, and one of the oldest universities in the world. It is located on a sprawling campus that occupies the entirety of the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid, with annexes in the district of Somosaguas in the neighboring city of...

, Marías turned his attention to translating English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 novels into Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

. His translations include work by Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

, Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

, Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

, Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

, Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

, Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

, James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

, Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....

, Browne
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....

, and Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...

 Tristram Shandy. Between 1983 and 1985 he lectured in Spanish literature and translation at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

.

In 1986 Marías published El hombre sentimental (The Man of Feeling), and in 1988 he published Todas las almas (All Souls), which was set at Oxford University. The Spanish film director Gracia Querejeta
Gracia Querejeta
Gracia Querejeta is a Spanish film director.Her father is the film producer Elías Querejeta and she studied Ancient History in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid...

 released El Último viaje de Robert Rylands, adapted from Todas las almas, in 1996. Marías, however, later wrote that the film adaptation was not to his liking and this resulted in a permanent estrangement between him and the director and her father, Elias Querejeta, who had produced the film.

His 1992 novel Corazón tan blanco was a commercial and critical success and for its English version A Heart So White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish fiction and poetry, including the works of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Javier Marías and José Régio.-Works and awards:...

, Marías and Costa were joint winners of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award for a work of fiction, jointly sponsored by the city of Dublin, Ireland and the company IMPAC. At €100,000 it is one of the richest literary prizes in the world...

. His 1994 novel Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize
Rómulo Gallegos Prize
The Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize was created on 6 August 1964 by a presidential decree enacted by Venezuelan President Raúl Leoni, in honor of the Venezuelan politician and President Rómulo Gallegos, the author of Doña Bárbara....

.

The protagonists of the novels written since 1986 are all interpreters or translators of one kind or another, based on his own experience as a translator & teacher of translation at Oxford University. Of these protagonists, Marías has written, "They are people who are renouncing their own voices."

In 2002 Marías published Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza (Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear), the first part of a trilogy which forms his most ambitious literary project. This latest translated into English as Your Face Tomorrow I: Fever and Spear is dominated by a translator, an elderly don based on a real professor emeritus of Spanish studies at Oxford University, Sir Peter Russell.The second volume, Tu rostro mañana 2. Baile y sueño (Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream), was published in 2004. On 25 May 2007, Marías announced the completion of the final instalment, entitled Tu rostro mañana 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós (Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell). It was released on 24 September 2007.

Marías operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is included in the monthly magazine The Believer.

Marías was elected to seat R of the Real Academia Española
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...

 (Royal Spanish Academy) in 2006. At his investiture in 2008 he agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....

 that the work of novelists is "pretty childish," but also argued that it is impossible to narrate real events, and that “you can only fully tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and imagined.”

Redonda

Marías's novel, Todas las almas (All Souls), included a portrayal of the poet John Gawsworth
John Gawsworth
John Gawsworth , a pseudonym of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong , was a British writer, poet and compiler of anthologies, both of poetry and of short stories. He also used the pseudonym Orpheus Scrannel...

, who was also the third King of Redonda. Although the fate of this monarchy after the death of Gawsworth is contested, the portrayal by Marías so touched the "reigning" king, Jon Wynne-Tyson
Jon Wynne-Tyson
Jon Wynne-Tyson is a British author, publisher, activist and pacifist who founded Centaur Press in 1954. He ran Centaur Press from his home in Sussex and is a distinguished independent publisher. Centaur Press was a full-time independent publishing company until it was sold in 1998...

, that he abdicated and left the throne to Marías in 1997. The island of Redonda, which occupies less than one square mile of the West Indies, is wholly uninhabited, and none of its monarchs has ever set foot on it. It was purchased in 1865 by a banker named Matthew Dowdy Shiell. As one version of the story goes, Shiell asked Queen Victoria to establish Redonda as an independent kingdom, something Her Gracious Majesty did without hesitation because it seemed to pose no threat to the British Empire. Over time the island fell under the control of various monarchs, some of whom sold the title several times, causing tussles among swarms of pretenders. In 1997 the last king, Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in favor of Marias, who began to nominate dukes and duchesses right and left.

This course of events was chronicled in his "false novel," Dark Back of Time. The book was inspired by the reception of Todas las almas by many people who, falsely according to Marías, believed they were the source of the characters in Todas las almas. Since "taking the throne" of Redonda
Redonda
Redonda is a very small, uninhabited Caribbean island which is part of Antigua and Barbuda, in the Leeward Islands, West Indies.This small island lies southwest of Antigua, in the waters between the islands of Nevis and Montserrat...

, Marías has begun a publishing imprint named Reino de Redonda ("Kingdom of Redonda").

Marías has conferred many titles during his reign upon people he likes, including upon Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular...

 (Duke of Trémula), António Lobo Antunes
António Lobo Antunes
António Lobo Antunes, GCSE, MD ; born 1 September 1942) is a Portuguese novelist and medical doctor.-Life and career:António Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon as the eldest of six sons of João Alfredo de Figueiredo Lobo Antunes , prominent Neurologist and Professor, close collaborator of Egas Moniz,...

 (Duke of Cocodrilos), John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 (Duke of Convexo), Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

 (Duke of Desarraigo), William Boyd
William Boyd (writer)
William Boyd, CBE is a Scottish novelist and screenwriter.-Biography:Of Scottish descent, Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria, in Africa...

 (Duke of Brazzaville), Michel Braudeau (Duke of Miranda), A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner...

 (Duchess of Morpho Eugenia), Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Guillermo Cabrera Infante was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín.A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965...

 (Duke of Tigres), Pietro Citati
Pietro Citati
Pietro Citati is a famous Italian writer and literary critic.He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short but unforgettable memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.In Kafka, Pietro Citati has the great writer...

 (Duke of Remonstranza), Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...

 (Duke of Megalópolis), Agustín Díaz Yanes
Agustín Díaz Yanes
Agustín Díaz Yanes is a Spanish Goya Awards winner screenwriter and film director.- Screenwriter :* Al límite * Belmonte * Demasiado corazón * A solas contigo * Baton Rouge * Barrios altos...

 (Duke of Michelín), Roger Dobson (Duke of Bridaespuela), Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...

 (Duke of Nervión), Francis Haskell
Francis Haskell
Francis Haskell was an English art historian, whose writings placed emphasis on the social history of art.He read history at King's College, Cambridge and became a Fellow there in 1954...

 (Duke of Sommariva), Eduardo Mendoza
Eduardo Mendoza
Eduardo Mendoza may refer to:*Eduardo Mendoza Ceballos, Spanish novelist, Venezuelan businessman, special commissioner for international narcotic affairs, with the rank of ambassador...

 (Duke of Isla Larga), Ian Michael (Duke of Bernal), Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk , generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk, is a Turkish novelist. He is also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing....

 (Duke of Colores), Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for twenty-one years . His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was released in 1986. He is well known outside Spain for his "Alatriste" series of novels...

 (Duke of Corso), Francisco Rico (Duke of Parezzo), Sir Peter Russell (Duke of Plazatoro), Fernando Savater
Fernando Savater
Fernando Fernández-Savater Martín is one of Spain's most popular living philosophers, as well as an essayist and celebrated author....

 (Duke of Caronte), W. G. Sebald
W. G. Sebald
W. G. Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature...

 (Duke of Vértigo), Luis Antonio de Villena (Duke of Malmundo), and upon Juan Villoro
Juan Villoro
Juan Villoro is a Mexican writer and journalist. He has been well known among intellectual circles in Mexico, Latin America and Spain for years, but his success among the readers grew since receiving the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo.-Biography:Juan Villoro received his bachelor's degree...

 (Duke of Nochevieja).

In addition, Marías created a literary prize, to be judged by the dukes and duchesses. In addition to prize money, the winner receives a duchy. Winners: 2001 John Maxwell Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee ; is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia...

 (Duke of Deshonra); 2002 John H. Elliott
John Huxtable Elliott
Sir John Huxtable Elliott, FBA , who normally publishes as J.H. Elliott, is an eminent historian, Regius Professor Emeritus in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge....

 (Duke of Simancas); 2003 Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris is an Italian scholar, translator and writer.Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978.He is an essayist and columnist for the Italian newspaper...

 (Duke of Segunda Mano); 2004 Eric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....

 (Duke of Olalla); 2005 Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize...

 (Duchess of Ontario); 2006 Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

 (Duke of Diente de León); 2007 George Steiner
George Steiner
Francis George Steiner, FBA , is an influential European-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust...

 (Duke of Girona); 2008 Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...

 (Duke of la Isla del Día de Antes); 2009 Marc Fumaroli
Marc Fumaroli
Marc Fumaroli was born June 10, 1932 in Marseille. A historian and essayist, he was elected to the Académie française March 2, 1995 and became its Director. He is also a member of the Académie des Inscriptions, the sister academy devoted to high erudition...

 (Duke of Houyhnhnms).

Spanish titles

  • Los dominios del lobo (1971)
  • Travesía del horizonte (Voyage Along the Horizon, 1972)
  • El monarca del tiempo (1978)
  • El siglo (1982)
  • El hombre sentimental (The Man of Feeling, 1986)
  • Todas las almas (All Souls, 1989)
  • Corazón tan blanco (A Heart So White, 1992)
  • Vidas escritas (Written Lives, 1992)
  • Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, 1994)
  • Cuando fui mortal (When I Was Mortal 1996)
  • Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time, 1998)
  • Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza (Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, 2002)
  • Tu rostro mañana 2. Baile y sueño (Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream, 2004)
  • Tu rostro mañana 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós (Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell, 2007)
  • Los enamoramientos (Fallings in Love, 2011)

English translations

All English translations by Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa
Margaret Jull Costa is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish fiction and poetry, including the works of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Javier Marías and José Régio.-Works and awards:...

 and published by New Directions unless otherwise indicated:
  • All Souls (1992)
  • A Heart So White
    A Heart So White
    A Heart So White by Javier Marías was first published in 1992 and received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1997. Margaret Jull Costa's English translation was published by New Directions in 2000.-Summary:...

    (1995)
  • Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
    Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
    Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías was first published in 1994. Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation was published by The Harvill Press in 1996...

    (1996)
  • When I Was Mortal
    When I Was Mortal
    When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías was translated by Margaret Jull Costa into English and published in 2002 by New Directions.-External links:* reviewed by Elizabeth Judd, New York Times, May 21, 2000.* at Complete Review. Includes links to many reviews....

    (1999)
  • Dark Back of Time
    Dark Back of Time
    Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías was first published in 1998. Ester Allen’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2001.-Summary:...

    (translated by Esther Allen, 2001)
  • The Man of Feeling (2003)
  • Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear
    Your Face Tomorrow Volume 1: Fever and Spear
    Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías was first published in 2002. Margaret Jull Costa’s English Translation was published by New Directions in 2005. Costa won the coveted Valle- Inclán Award for this translation....

    (2004)
  • Voyage Along the Horizon (translated by Kristina Cordero and published by McSweeney's
    McSweeney's
    McSweeney's is an American publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers.Apart from its book list, McSweeney's is responsible for four regular publications: the quarterly literary journal,...

    , 2006)
  • Written Lives
    Written Lives
    Written Lives by Javier Marías was first published in 1999. Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2006.-External links:* by Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement, May 3, 2006....

    (2006)
  • Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream
    Your Face Tomorrow Volume 2: Dance and Dream
    Your Face Tomorrow Volume 2: Dance and Dream by Javier Marías was first published in 2004 and became a London Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2007. Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2006....

    (2006)
  • Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
    Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
    Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Fare is a third part of a Javier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.This trilogy, and in particular its final volume, has been widely hailed as one of the most important works of the fiction of the current century....

    (2009)
  • Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico (translated by Esther Allen, 2010)
  • While the Women Are Sleeping (2010)

Further reading

  • Berg, Karen, Javier Marías's Postmodern Praxis: Humor and Interplay between Reality and Fiction in his Novels and Essays (2008)

  • Cunado, Isabel, El Espectro de la Herencia: La Narrativa de Javier Marias (2004)

  • Herzberger, David K. A Companion to Javier Marías. Rochester, NY: Tamesis Books, 2011. ISBN 9781855662308

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK