Miguel Delibes
Love Letters from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian
Translated by Teresa Boucher
Miguel Delibes (1920-2010) was born and died in Valladolid, Spain. He was a novelist, journalist, newspaper editor, professor, and father of seven. He won virtually every literary prize awarded in Spain from the Nadal Prize for his first novel in 1948 to the Cervantes Prize in 1993 to the National Prize for Narrative for his last novel in 1999. In 1973 he was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy. He delivered his inaugural address in 1975, his wife having died in the interim.
Delibes is the author of twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories and essays. Nine of his novels have been adapted to film, one to theater, and one to television. To date, eleven of his works have been translated into English. Love Letter from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian is the first English translation of Cartas de amor de un sexagenario voluptuoso, originally published in 1983. This novel has already been translated into Bosnian, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian--but only now into English.
In Love Letters from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian, our antihero, Eugenio Sanz Vecilla, a sixty-five-year-old retired Castilian newspaperman, reads a personal ad in Sentimental Correspondence while in the waiting room of a doctor's office. Thus begins a six-month exchange of letters with RocÍo, a fifty-six-year-old widow from Seville whose son, Federico, is writing a graduate thesis on censorship of the press in the 1940s under Francisco Franco's dictatorship. This novel, an epistolary mono-dialogue, weaves a comic love story with an unwitting exposÉ of the state of journalism under an authoritarian regime.
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Teresa Boucher holds the Ph.D. from Princeton University in Romance Languages and Literatures. She is professor of Spanish at Boise State University. She has published articles, book reviews, and a monograph on Miguel Delibes.
