Translation Rights TQE / The Slave Trader

It is always gratifying for a publisher to be able to make literary gems which, for one reason or another, have been out of print for some time, available to the public. This is the case with El negrero, a novel which the author himself subtitled a fictionalised account of the life of Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava and which Alejo Carpentier termed “an extraordinary true tale of adventure”.

Pedro Blanco is the child of a rich lady and a poor sailor from Málaga, who dies when the boy is very young.  As an adolescent, Pedro is driven out of his home village due to a scandal and is forced to leave behind his mother and his beloved sister Rosa.  From that moment on, his life becomes a series of incessant wanderings that take him from the Mediterranean to the Antilles. The tale is set at the beginning of the 19^th century when the first laws against slavery were being enacted.  Despite the new laws, Pedro wishes to ship aboard a slaver.  However, before he can do so, he has to sail to Terranova, one of the toughest and most dangerous destinations of the time period.  Once he has passed this fearful test, he becomes a crew member on all kinds of ships and survives various perils such as rough seas, epidemics, slave mutinies, treachery, and pirates.  Pedro’s ambitions lead him to establish his own slaving post in Africa, but before he can acquire wealth and power among the savage warring tribes, he – and the reader – must pass through a series of uninterrupted and outlandish adventures.

The huge amount of research that Novás Calvo brings into the writing of the story, along with his natural narrative gift combine to make this novel a masterpiece in its genre.

Lino Novás Calvo was born in Granas de Sor, Galicia, in 1903 and died in Florida, USA, in 1983. When he was seven, his family emigrated to Cuba where they took a wide variety of jobs to keep body and soul together: a rich source of inspiration for his later writings. In 1928, he made a name for himself with the publication of an avant-garde poem in the Revista de Avance. Upon his return to Spain, he took a job as a correspondent for the magazine Orbe (1931-33) and published El negrero (The Slave Trader). He was also a translator of Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Faulkner, and was a regular contributor to the magazine Revista de Occidente. During the Spanish Civil War, he remained in the country as a newspaper correspondent. In 1939, he returned to Cuba where he contributed articles to magazines and published the short story collections La luna nona (The Ninth Moon, 1942), Cayo Canas (Key Canas, 1945), and En los traspatios (In the Backyards, 1946). In 1960, he went into self-imposed exile in the United States, and in 1970 he published Maneras de contar (Ways to Tell).