The Turquoise Ring
and
Other Stories
Rafaela Contreras
Translated by Jessica Sequeira
The nine stories gathered here as The Turquoise Ring and Other Stories, written by the Costa Rican born Rafaela Contreras, were originally published in newspapers in El Salvador and Guatemala during the short period between 1890-91, but never appeared in book form during the author’s lifetime.
Composed in an almost fairytale-like style, with approaches that suggest a proto-modernismo, in some ways her work anticipates the literary line which her husband, Rubén Darío, would explicitly develop, but it also contains elements that might have taken a different direction had she lived longer, dying as she did at the early age of twenty-three, in 1893.
The present edition, translated by Jessica Sequeira, is the first English language offering of Contreras’s stories, which range from fables to prose poems, from the exotic to the supernatural, and are both entertaining and moving by turns, embarking on unusual and subtle forays into different realms of human experience, in the author’s own tones.
About the Author
Rafaela Contreras was born in San José, Costa Rica, on 21 May 1869 and died in San Salvador on 26 January 1893. She became the first wife of her childhood friend Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet known for beginning the modernismo movement. After the death of her first son left her ill, Contreras returned to San Salvador to be close to her family, and in 1893 died there during an operation. Her known literary output consists of nine stories that were published in newspapers in El Salvador and Guatemala, but never in book form during her lifetime.
About the Translator
Jessica Sequeira was born in San Jose, California in 1989, and currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero).
Her translations include Bernardo Couto Castillo’s Asphodels (Snuggly Books, 2020), Teresa Wilms Montt’s Sentimental Doubts (Snuggly Books, 2020), Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s Sentimental Stories (Snuggly Books, 2019), (Snuggly Books, 2019), Adolfo Couve’s When I Think of My Missing Head (Snuggly Books, 2018), and Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive).
Contents:
The Turquoise Ring
Violets and Doves
Reverie
The Water Nymphs
Winter Song
The Gold and the Copper
Humanzor
The Glass Woman
Delirium, or Sonata
Paperback, 102 pages. Release date, August 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64525-006-7
Price: US$13.00