Alianza comes to cover the gap, or sinkhole, that prevents our readers from finding works by Robert Graves. His translations had become outdated and the editions were restricted to the second-hand market. The British and Majorcan poet (Wimbledon, 1895 – Deià, 1985) is an unrepeatable name of the 20th century, both for the transcendence and popularity of his novels and for the intellectual depth of his poetry and his essays on mythology or his splendid memoirs. .
The Madrid publisher's pocket collection presents the first four titles: the great bestseller I, Claudius, about the murdered and deified Roman emperor of the Julia dynasty; the monumental essay The White Goddess, a tribute to the Mediterranean beliefs that subjugated him and two more novels, Homer's Daughter, an alternative version of the Odyssey, and Count Belisarius. The teacher incorporated his knowledge of classical literature and mythology into the plots.
The conception of Homer's Daughter – also coming from Edhasa – can be related to his manuals The Greek Myths and The Hebrew Myths. The protagonist, Nausícaa, an empowered princess from Sicily – great Greece – saves her father from succession ambitions, and in turn, avoids a marriage of convenience. Attentive to everything that concerned the classical world, Graves incorporated Samuel Butler's theory of 1896 in which he attributed the authorship of the Odyssey to a Sicilian princess.
The intention was to derive the epic point of view and move it towards a more domestic one. Or Count Belisarius, a robust historical plot about the Byzantine Empire, its battles against the Goths and the battles against the barbarians during the reign of Justinian when the capital had moved to Constantinople. The religious struggles and persecutions and the changing character of the characters that fill the novel are succulent ingredients. More for a reader attentive to the ideological controversies that flood a perfectly woven plot.
The pass to the Graves pocket library of The White Goddess recovers the translation by William Graves, the poet's son, which replaced the historical version, also in Alianza, by Luis Echávarri from 1983. The new publication of Yo, Claudio only incorporates the front page.
Also in the process of editing, for this month of March, Goodbye to all that –new version by Alejandro Pradera–, which we veterans had read as Goodbye to all that in the versions by Seix Barral and Edhasa from the seventies and eighties , directed by Sergio Pitol. With these memoirs, Graves put an end to his relationship with the empire, his traumatic experience in the First World War and his serious war wounds on the front – he was left for dead among the mountains of corpses.
In the book he describes the trenches and their thousands of rats and the chemical warfare, which took the lives of one in three of his companions: “It was my bitter farewell to England,” he wrote. The volume will appear with original photos that William Graves himself has donated from the family archive, and because the book has been translated from the reference edition, the one revised by the author in 1957, in which he added proper names that he had previously omitted and that the poet completely revised.
A writer of many nuances, successful and in different genres, united to our country to the core, Robert Graves is one of those authors that you never finish, always, in every moment of your life. He will give you an observation about existence, death or nature that will transform you. The Moon goddess, the mythological forests, the pantheistic conception of the world and the perpetual satire of her peculiar sense of humor, seasoned by the Majorcan winds, will fill our lungs while she cultivates and entertains us. Graves was a unique character. Today his children keep it alive and serve it to us in luxury packaging at pocket-friendly prices.
Robert Graves The White Goddess/Count Belisarius/Homer's Daughter/I, Claudio Editorial Alliance
