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Voices from Madagascar Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine
Jacques Bourgeacq
Ohio University Press, 2001
There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed. With little hope that their voices would be heard outside the island, writers nevertheless have continued to express themselves in French (alongside a literature written in the Malagasy language). Malagasy literature in French had begun in the colonial era with three poets: Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Flavien Ranaivo, all three presented in Léopold Senghor’s celebrated Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948). More recently, although a few Malagasy writers living outside the country have been published in France, the bulk of Malagasy literature today has remained largely unpublished, circulating locally mostly in manuscript form. Voices from Madagascar will bring a wide selection of these texts, both in French and in English, to the North American public.
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front cover of Voices of Change in the Spanish American Theater
Voices of Change in the Spanish American Theater
An Anthology
Edited and translated by William I. Oliver
University of Texas Press, 1971

The aim of this anthology is to present a selection of plays that are representative of a fresh spirit and of societal pressures and changes in Spanish American culture. The plays shun the earlier realistic, sentimental, and melodramatic conventions of Spanish American theater. Instead, they reflect the tenor of the dramatic imagination of the mid-to-late twentieth century—an imagination that sought new forms and ways of expressing a new awareness of the Spanish American dilemma.

In selecting these plays, William I. Oliver looked for more than mere illustrations of these changes. As a practicing director and playwright, he sought works that are effective on the stage as well as on the page. As an editor and translator, he sought works “that could be translated culturally as well as linguistically.” The six plays in this varied and vigorous anthology are the measure of his success.

The plays included are The Day They Let the Lions Loose, by Emilio Carballido (Mexico); The Camp, by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina); The Library, by Carlos Maggi (Uruguay); In the Right Hand of God the Father, by Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia); The Mulatto’s Orgy, by Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico); and Viña: Three Beach Plays, by Sergio Vodánovic (Chile).

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