The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth
AUTHOR
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez
TRANSLATOR
Rhonda Dahl Buchanan
In Mogador—the city of desire—a woman, tired of her lover’s insensitivity, decides to pose a challenge to him: She will make love with him only when he tells her about a new garden in the city. The problem is that he must search for gardens where one least expects to find them, and he may not invent them. To discover hidden gardens, he will have to tune his most powerful impulses.
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez examines the complex nature of enduring intimacy and the daily challenge of addressing the ever-changing desires of the other. He considers the perpetual quest to re-create the magical moment when paradise was first discovered in the body of the beloved.
Reviews
“Ruy-Sánchez’s works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry, and intelligence in a new geometry of words. . . . His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.”
—Octavio Paz
“In the books by Ruy-Sánchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives, is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay they are made of. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breathes through the erotic.”
—Alberto Manguel
Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of Louisville, has translated fiction by authors from Latin America and Spain. She received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2006 for the translation of the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s novel Los jardines secretos de Mogador. Her translations of Ruy Sánchez’s novels The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth and Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador were published by White Pine Press. Her other published translations include works by the Argentine authors Mempo Giardinelli, Tununa Mercado, Ana María Shua, and Perla Suez, and the Spanish poet Fernando Operé.
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is an award-winning writer and editor who has authored thirty-two books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His works have been translated into fifteen languages. He has received international acclaim forQuinteto de Mogador, a series of five novels that explore the many facets of desire while extending a cultural bridge between his native Mexico and Morocco. His previously translated works in English include The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth and The Poetics of Wonder.