Javier Marías


Javier Marías is a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist. He is one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, and his work has been translated into 42 languages.

Life

Javier Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julián Marías, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco. Marías is the fourth of five sons and spent parts of his childhood in the United States, where his father taught at various institutions, including Yale University and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old. His first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesús Franco. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.

Writing

Marías began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga", one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping, was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, Los dominios del lobo, at the age of 17, after running away to Paris. His second novel, Travesía del horizonte, was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.
After attending the Complutense University of Madrid, Marías turned his attention to translating English novels into Spanish. His translations included work by Updike, Hardy, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Kipling, James, Stevenson, Browne, and Shakespeare. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Between 1983 and 1985 he lectured in Spanish literature and translation at the University of Oxford.
In 1986 Marías published El hombre sentimental, and in 1988 he published Todas las almas, which was set at Oxford University. The Spanish film director Gracia Querejeta released El Último viaje de Robert Rylands, adapted from Todas las almas, in 1996.
His 1992 novel Corazón tan blanco was a commercial and critical success and for its English version A Heart So White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Marías and Costa were joint winners of the 1997 International Dublin Literary Award. His 1994 novel, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize.
The protagonists of the novels written since 1986 are all interpreters or translators of one kind or another, based on his own experience as a translator and teacher of translation at Oxford University. Of these protagonists, Marías has written, "They are people who are renouncing their own voices."
In 2002 Marías published Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza, the first part of a trilogy that is his most ambitious literary project. The first volume is dominated by a translator, an elderly don based on an actual professor emeritus of Spanish studies at Oxford University, Sir Peter Russell. The second volume, Tu rostro mañana 2. Baile y sueño, was published in 2004. In 2007, Marías completed the final installment, Tu rostro mañana 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós.
Marías operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. In 2005-06 an English version of his column, "La Zona Fantasma", appeared in the monthly magazine The Believer.
Marías was elected to Seat R of the Real Academia Española on 29 June 2006. He took up his seat on 27 April 2008. At his investiture he agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson that the work of novelists is "pretty childish," but also argued that it is impossible to narrate real events, and that “you can only fully tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and imagined.”
In 2013, Marías was awarded the prestigious Prix Formentor.

Redonda

Marías's novel, Todas las almas, included a portrayal of the poet John Gawsworth, who was also the third King of Redonda. Although the fate of this monarchy after the death of Gawsworth is contested, the portrayal by Marías so affected the "reigning" king, Jon Wynne-Tyson, that he abdicated and left the throne to Marías in 1997. This course of events was chronicled in his "false novel," Negra espalda del tiempo. The book was inspired by the reception of Todas las almas by many people who, falsely according to Marías, believed they were the source of the characters in Todas las almas. Since "taking the throne" of Redonda, Marías has begun a publishing imprint named Reino de Redonda.
Marías has conferred many titles during his reign upon people he likes, including upon Pedro Almodóvar, António Lobo Antunes, John Ashbery, Pierre Bourdieu, William Boyd, :Fr:Michel Braudeau|Michel Braudeau, A. S. Byatt, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Pietro Citati, Francis Ford Coppola, Agustín Díaz Yanes, Roger Dobson, Frank Gehry, Francis Haskell, Eduardo Mendoza, Ian Michael, Orhan Pamuk, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Francisco Rico, Sir Peter Russell, Fernando Savater, W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Coe, Luis Antonio de Villena, and Juan Villoro.
In addition, Marías created a literary prize, to be judged by the dukes and duchesses. In addition to prize money, the winner receives a duchy.
Winners: 2001 – John Maxwell Coetzee ; 2002 – John H. Elliott ; 2003 – Claudio Magris ; 2004 – Eric Rohmer ; 2005 – Alice Munro ; 2006 – Ray Bradbury ; 2007 – George Steiner ; 2008 – Umberto Eco ; 2009 – Marc Fumaroli.

Awards and honours

All English translations by Margaret Jull Costa and published in the United States by New Directions unless otherwise indicated: