The magic and malice of warring gods and men crowd this novel of Mexico's turbulent history, written by Mexico's most important modern woman writer. Rosario Castellanos' towering fictional achievement is wonderfully conveyed in Irene Nicholson's translation from the Spanish, giving the reader all the urgency of rising Indian resentment, the jealousies of childhood, the fascination of ancient myths, dzulúms and the Nine Guardians, the isolation and tension within a tiny, doomed landowning class as it fights to keep its power.
Castellanos' narrator, a seven-year-old girl, watches wide-eyed as the old order -- where a few powerful landowning families and their male heirs could dominate a region politically and even sexually -- breaks down. Into her world of nursery tales, Indian magic and religious superstition come new and powerful dangers.
"Castellanos' art... is mesmerizing and beautiful."
PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY
Castellanos, Rosario: - ROSARIO CASTELLANOS (1925-1974) was born in Mexico City, but raised in the small town of Comitán, and on her family's ranch in the southern state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala. The tensions of her childhood, including her closeness to her Indian carers and resentment that her mother favoured her brother, Benjamin, who died suddenly when she was eight, are reflected in Balún-Canán -- in English The Nine Guardians -- as is the deterioration in her family's fortunes after the Cárdenas land reforms. This led finally to the family moving back to Mexico City when Rosario was fifteen. In 1948, when she was only 23, both her parents died in an accident.At UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico) she studied philosophy and literature and joined the group of Mexican and Central American intellectuals known as "The generation of 1950." She began to write, including a weekly column for the newspaper Excélsior and scripts for the National Indigenous Institute for puppet shows staged in poor rural areas to promote literacy. In 1958 she married Ricardo Guerra Tejada, a philosophy professor, and after several miscarriages and suffering from depression she had a son Gabriel in 1961. She continued her writing career, including poetry, essays, a major play and three novels, Balún-Canán (1957, in English The Nine Guardians), Oficio de tinieblas (1962, in English The Book of Lamentations), and Rito de iniciación (1996, in English Rite of Passage). In 1966, Castellanos resigned her teaching post in protest over government meddling in university affairs and became a visiting fellow at the universities of Wisconsin, Indiana and Colorado. With the political situation in Mexico somewhat stabilized, she returned home in 1967 to once again teach at the National University, this time specializing in literature courses. By now, Castellanos was Mexico's leading woman writer and one of the country's best-known intellectuals abroad. That same year, 1967, she was named Mexico's Woman of the Year. In 1971 she divorced, retaining custody of her son. The same year, in recognition of her contribution to Mexican literature, she was appointed Mexico's ambassador to Israel. She held this post for three years, also teaching a literature course at the University of Tel Aviv, until on 7 August 1974 she was electrocuted while trying to plug in a lamp. Her body was flown to Mexico City, where she received a state funeral and burial in the Rotunda de los Hombres Ilustros, resting place of the nation's most revered artists and leaders.
Nicholson, Irene: - IRENE NICHOLSON was a distinguished British-born translator and Latin-Americanist with special expertise on Mexican and Central American mythology. Besides translating The Nine Guardians, she authored Firefly in the Night: A Study of Ancient Mexican Poetry and Symbolism (1959), The X in Mexico: Growth within Tradition (1965), Liberators: A Study of Independence Movements in Spanish America (1969), and a later volume in the 1980s on Mexican and Central American Mythology.
