Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Enclosed Garden, by Angelina Muniz-Huberman







The translator of Angelina Muniz-Huberman’s collection of stories “Enclosed Gardens” warns us that in translating this work from Spanish to English, much has been lost.   

Of course, this is the case with all works of translation, but this translator goes out of her way to explain that what we are reading is a thin facsimile of the original.

This is what makes this book such poor reading.   Without the background in Spanish and Mexican literature, whose allusions abound in this small collection, these stories appear to be little more than one more venture into Spanish and Latin American magic realism, and who needs that?

If you have read Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Luis Borges, you don’t really need to read Enclosed Garden.  It seems derivative and second rate.

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