Invisible Dog

Fabio Morábito is one of Mexico's best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn's translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission. The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of 'national culture'. Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. His position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet's 'foreignness' in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in 'Journey to Pátzcuaro', a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.

Auteur

Fabio Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. He has published five collections of poetry, including De lunes todo el año, which won the Aguascalientes National Prize for Poetry in 1991 and Lotes baldíos, which was awarded the 1995 Carlos Pellicer prize. His poetry and short stories have established him as one of Mexico's best-known writers over the past thirty years. He has compiled and retold a book of 125 oral Mexican short stories, Cuentos populares mexicanos (2014), which won the 'White Raven Prize' in 2015. His novel El lector a domicilio (2018) was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Award. He is also a prolific translator from Italian, and his own books have been widely translated.