Translation Rights TQE / The Artist and His Corpse

Fernando Aramburu broke into the Spanish narrative in 1996 with the great opera prima that is Fuegos con limón (Fires With Lemon). He has just received the Euskadi Prize to the best book in Spanish literature of 2000 for his second novel, Los ojos vacíos (Empty Eyes), and now surprises us with a gathering of texts, written when “the artist” was taking his first steps in the field of literature and debated between the many paths which he could choose to follow. Revisited fifteen years later by the consolidated writer that he is today, they undoubtedly acquire the dimensions of a model for formation and learning.

Aramburu wrote El artista y su cadáver when “the artist” decided to “murder” through these prose exercises, the hectic poet that he carried inside for years and who was beginning to bother him: “… you wrote during the afternoons those deeply conceited verses of the youth who strongly aspires to be elegantly ill once in a while, a sad and undignified being…”. Exercises on style, trials and proofs – Fuegos con limón was born precisely from the gradual amplification of one of those texts-, ironic vignettes, vital fragments, declarations of literary debts and aesthetic principles, as well as from the obstinate reconstruction of a missing sentimental landscape re-elaborated in memory. The proud writing of El artista y su cadaver demonstrates that Aramburu moves with the same ease and pleasure through this brief prose as in the novel and the short story.

Fernando Aramburu was born in San Sebastián in 1959. He has a degree in Spanish Language, Literature and Linguistics from Zaragoza University. He currently lives in Germany, where he has worked as a Spanish teacher since 1985. His work has been granted, among others, the Ramón Gómez de la Serna Prize 1997, the Euskadi Prize 2001, and for his short stories Los peces de la amargura (The Fish of Sorrow) the XI Mario Vargas Llosa NH Prize, the Dulce Chacón Prize, and the Prize of the Spanish Language Academy. The movie Bajo las estrellas (Under the Stars) based on Aramburu’s novel El trompetista del utopía (The trumpet player of the Utopia) was awarded a Goya Prize in 2008 for best adapted screenplay by the Spanish Cinematographic Academy.