Álvaro Mutis

"[...] Álvaro Mutis hasn't been very inclined to write for newspapers and magazines. I believe that when he has done so, it's been in response to the invitation of friendship. However, by adding some prefaces to books by poets and writers dear to him and the texts from the occasional art catalog, we've gathered a little over three hundred notes, without striving for exhaustiveness.

I fear we've excessively pruned this legacy once more to shape it into readings and other celebrations. Here are many texts that had not been collected in a book until now, and which their author was willing to let go, but we did not. Personally, I owe to these articles the discovery of many beloved writers (Eliseo Diego, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Anna Akhmatova, Miguel de Ferdinandy, Jorge E. Eielson, José Lins do Rego...).

Everything we do now for Álvaro Mutis and his work, even in this centenary of his birth, will be for us, his readers, if we wish to escape from this "macabre carnival," as he often called our time.

The poet and writer Mutis always needs the reader Mutis, of which there is something astonishing in this anthology with which we look at him once again from above the century."

S. M. D.