Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise—García Lorca in hell—to reexamine the poet’s life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist’s eye and a moral philosopher’s mind. He conjures a profoundly original world

 

Carlos Rojas, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell, Trans. by Edith Grossman, Yale UP, 2013.

A masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century, this novel explores the identity and destiny of beloved Spanish poet García Lorca, who finds himself in hell watching his entire life replayed—but not as it happened.


In Carlos Rojas’s imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel’s Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theater in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own life performed over and over and over. Unexpectedly, two doppelgängers appear, one a middle-aged Lorca, the other an irascible octogenarian self, and the poet faces a nightmarish confusion of alternative identities and destinies.


Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise—García Lorca in hell—to reexamine the poet’s life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist’s eye and a moral philosopher’s mind. He conjures a profoundly original world, and in so doing earns a place among such international peers as Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and José Saramago.

Carlos Rojas is a novelist, an art historian, and since the age of fifty a creator of visual works of art. He was born in Barcelona and came to the United States as a young man. In 1960 he joined the faculty of Emory University, where he is now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus. He has received numerous important Spanish literary prizes, including the Premio Nadal. He lives in Atlanta, GA. Edith Grossman has translated into English many works by major Latin American and Peninsular writers, garnering an array of awards and honors.



Carlos Rojas, Salvador Dali, or the Art of Spitting on Your Mother's Portrait, Trans by Alma Amell,

read it at Google Books

A new analysis of the controversial painter's art as viewed through his life and a biography of his life as viewed through his art.

Among the many books written on or by Salvador Dalí, this is the first to give a complete, well-documented picture of his life and art. Carlos Rojas's approach to Dalí is somewhere between biography, Freudian analysis, and art and literary interpretation. Dalí is haunted from earliest childhood by the specter of his elder brother who died as a toddler shortly before Dalí was conceived (both brothers and the father bore the same name), as he is haunted by the devouring phantom of his mother, that praying mantis on whose portrait he would like to spit. Dalí is seen as endlessly struggling to affirm his identity and existence. A combination of genius, madman, neurotic, and spoiled brat, Dalí is illuminated by his work, while the known facts of his life, his own writings, those of his sister, and of others, are used to analyze the paintings, which are described in considerable detail. Rojas also provides sustained analyses of Dali's relationships, including his influential amorous and intellectual affair with Federico García Lorca.