Her on to Raymond Carver’s stories and she gave me El Llano en llamas. Through Meritxell Pucurull, a translator in Barcelona. I caught up with Stephen in the week of the book’s release to talk about the process of translating El Llano in flames. It was to be the first book from Structo Press. Which isn’t a bad recommendation, as it goes.Ī few months later we had begun on the path to commissioning a new translation. Juan Rulfo didn’t write more than three hundred pages, but they are almost as many and, I believe, as durable as those we’re acquainted with from Sophocles. This became more mysterious when I came across this quote from Gabriel García Márquez: The novel was published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail but, for whatever reason, El Llano en llames was not available in English anywhere outside of North America. Juan Rulfo, it turned out, was an incredibly well-regarded author in Latin America who had published two books in his lifetime: a novel called Pedro Páramo in 1955 and, two years before that, a story collection called El Llano en llamas. When Stephen left the magazine to concentrate on his own writing, I asked him to keep an eye out for any interesting work which could do with an English translation. That day he was telling me about a Mexican author called Juan Rulfo. A little later he had a stint as a member of our editorial team. We had published one of Stephen’s remarkable short stories in Structo 9.

This particular chat was with Stephen Beechinor, a writer and translator from the Spanish and Catalan. It started, as many things do, with a chat in a pub.

El llano en llamas english