CHESTERTON'S TRANSLATOR ON PUPPETS AND THE SURPRISE
REYES, Alfonso.
Corrected carbon typescript, signed, of an essay entitled ‘Chesterton y los titeres’ [Chesterton and the puppets].
[Buenos Aires?, c. 1952–3.]
4 leaves, 285 x 216 mm, carbon typescript with autograph corrections, signed by the author; lightly browned, previously stapled at top left-hand corner.
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Corrected carbon typescript, signed, of an essay entitled ‘Chesterton y los titeres’ [Chesterton and the puppets].
Corrected carbon typescript of Alfonso Reyes’s essay entitled ‘Chesterton y los titeres’, concerning G.K. Chesterton’s play The Surprise, a religious allegory written in 1932 but first published posthumously in 1952.
Reyes (1889–1959) discusses the theological dimensions of Chesterton’s play, the use of puppets, Chesterton’s philosophy of the miracle, the enigma of the universe, and the significance of the ‘surprise’. Reyes has briefly inscribed the essay for the literary review to which he submitted it: ‘A Buenos Aires Literaria, Salud! A.R.’, and he has signed it in ink at the end. The text is corrected in type in a number of locations and in the author’s hand in five. The finished article would appear in the literary journal Buenos Aires Literaria 12, edited by the celebrated poets Julio Cortazar and Daniel Devoto, inter alia (September 1953).
Like his friend Borges, Reyes finds much to admire in Chesterton’s work. Borges was among many admirers of Reyes’s translations of Chesterton into Spanish, many of which are still in print today. Reyes’s published translations of Chesterton include Orthodoxy (1917), The Man who was Thursday (1919), A short History of England (1920), and The Innocence of Father Brown (1921).