Xavier Villaurrutia Critical Essay | Critical Review by Gwen Kirkpatrick

Critical Review by Gwen Kirkpatrick

SOURCE: A review of Nostalgia for Death and Hieroglyphs of Desire, by Xavier Villaurrutia and Octavio Paz, in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 22, No. 44, July-December, 1994, pp. 90-92.

In the following review of Nostalgia for Death and Hieroglyphs of Desire, Kirkpatrick offers an assessment of Villaurrutia's work nearly fifty years after his death.

The publication of Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death is an important contribution to the English-speaking world's knowledge of Mexican literature and of poetry in Spanish. It is, in a sense, a curiously belated translation, both of Villaurrutia's poetry, here beautifully translated by Eliot Weinberger, and of Octavio Paz's accompanying essay, "Hieroglyphs of Desire" (1978), translated by Esther Allen. Villaurrutia began publishing these poems in the late 1920s and published the definitive collected edition in 1946. Villaurrutia's poetry occupies a strong place in the canons of Mexican poetry; he was also a dramatist and critic. He...
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