Short stories
Costa Rican Short Stories of Anguish and Landscapes
Cuentos de angustias y paisajes
Carlos Salazar Herrera · 1947
Synopsis
Thirty short stories, set in various regions of Costa Rica, from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean coast, most of whose titles name a thing or a place: “El puente”, “El bongo”, “Un grito”, “El chilamate”, “El resuello”, “La ventana”. The studies devoted to them note in them the passions and the human condition, the anguish tied to places, the opposition of civilisation and nature, and the popular vocabulary of the country; twenty-eight are illustrated with the author's engravings.
Context
The stories first appear in the Repertorio Americano in the 1930s, then the El Cuervo press gathers them in 1947 with unpublished pieces. Several enlarged reissues follow, among them that of El Bongo, in 1990, held to be definitive and provided with a glossary. The engravings are on wood or on linoleum depending on the sources. In 2017, María Luz Méndez Salazar publishes an English translation of it, in which she renders the peasant speech through African American Vernacular English.
Who it is for
Short stories of a few pages each, in Spanish, studded with words of popular speech; the 1990 edition includes a glossary.
Prizes and reception
A collection extensively studied by the country's academic critics, adapted for the screen and translated into English in 2017.