Yo el Supremo

Yo el Supremo / I the Supreme

Novel , 1974

Lengua Viva

Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos's I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814.

By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power—over men, over events, over language itself.

"An elaborate and erudite opus saturated in the verbal bravura of classic modernism."The New Yorker

“These passages reverberate with a fierce surrealism—peopled with dwarfs, women warriors and clairvoyant animals; studded with Borgesian images. . . . A prodigious meditation not only on history and power, but also on the nature of language itself.” —The New York Times

“The most magnificent work, most magnificently translated, to come from Spanish into English in almost a quarter of a century.” —Commonweal

“[I the Supreme’s] breadth of vision and ambition make it important in any language.” —New Statesman

“The novel’s true achievement is one of tone and voice. The language is a triumph almost as much for the translator as for the author: ebulliently resourceful, brilliant in its vitriol and vituperation, Rabelaisian in its extravagance.” —Publishers Weekly