Guest of the ilb 2003
Adolfo Castañón was
born in Mexico City in 1952. He studied literature and philosophy at
the autonomous university UNAM and was then engaged in literary
research at the Institute for Philology. Since 1975 he has worked for
the Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), which he headed
from 1985 to 2000. From 1992 to 1997, in cooperation with UNESCO, he
directed the project »Periolibros« to publish the poetic and literary
masterpieces of modern Iberoamerican writing. Over this period he
coordinated the Mexican edition of the complete works of Octavio Paz in
15 volumes, which together with the Spanish »Círculo de Lectores« is
published in Barcelona. He has worked as the editorial advisor on 12
Latin American cultural and literary magazines, including »Plural«
(Mexico, from 1975), »Gradiva« (Columbia, 1986–89), »Vuelta« (Mexico,
1988–98) and »Letras Libres« (Mexico, since 1999). As guest editor, he
has published dossiers on Mexican literature in the French magazine
»Nouvelle Revue Française« (2000, 2001). Adolfo Castañón is also a
prolific and gifted writer whose work includes stories, essays, poetry
and translations from both English (George Steiner) and French
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau) as well as literary criticism. His love of
transgression has led him to work with various literary genres like the
fable, portrait, parable, legend, fragment and prose poem. His
outstanding poetry collections include »La batalla
perdurable« (1996, t: The Permanent Fight), a benchmark in Mexican
modern prose poetry, as well as »Tránsito de Octavio Paz/The Passing of
Octavio Paz (1914-1998)«, a poetic-essayistic homage to the winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature, where the following is elegiacally and
concisely stated: »No one knows how to explain his poems: the poet is
dead.« He has recently published his collected poetry »La campana y el
tiempo«. »Por el país de Montaigne« (t: Through Montaigne’s Country) is
the name of his new book of essays, which was reprinted five times
between 1995 and 2000. The geographic location of Perigord and the
Loire area in France ,as well as the work of Michel de Montaigne as
space and metaphor, are his accomplices in the wandering work of his
essays.
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