Rescued Account of a Vanished People

POLITIS, G.

SCIENCE

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE

Lugar: Washington; Año: 1998 vol. 281 p. 1813 - 1814

0036-8075

Coming more than 20 years after the tragic death of the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, the publication of the English translation of his Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is long-delayed justice. The novelist Paul Auster had become ardently attracted to the original (1) when it first appeared. While trying to earn a living as a translator, he had prepared the manuscript for a publisher that became insolvent just before the book's planned publication. His translation was lost for 18 years, and Auster thought it had disappeared forever. (Living hand to mouth at the time, he had not retained a copy of his own.) The translator was reunited with his work two years ago, while signing books after a lecture in San Francisco; a passionate collector of books had rescued a copy of the bound galleys from the remainder bin at a secondhand bookstore. Auster's deep, positive feelings about Clastres's narrative emerge throughout his translation, which captures the original's freshness, sense of humor, and intellectual insight.