JACOB THE MUTANT
MARIO BELLATIN
Primera edición: 2015
Traducción del castellano al inglés
ISBN 978-1-939419-10-1
5 x 7 in., 136 pp.
Edición de:
Scrambler Books
Sacramento, CA
Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Mario Bellatin’s Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation—a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and the owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely, while the novella mutates into another story. Cleverly translated by Jacob Steinberg, this Phoneme Media edition of a new novel by one of Mexico’s most notorious and celebrated writers includes a translator’s afterword and explanatory maps by illustrator Zsu Szkurka.
REVIEWS
“When we talk about translation, too often we talk about what is lost. The brilliance of this translator’s afterword—which does not comment on Bellatin’s text but rather performs it anew, weaving Roth’s fragments together with Steinberg’s personal history, religion, and family tree—is that it establishes a parity between Bellatin’s productive appropriation of Roth’s narrative persona, and his own, of Bellatin. As a whole, then, that belongs to a greater whole, the recent publication of Jacob the Mutant not only offers the reader a memorable exploration of the compelling but futile drive to hold on to the familiar in a world marked by constant change; it also insists on the status of its translation as the rebirth of a work that, like its protagonist, will continue to take on new and ever vital forms.”
—Heather Cleary for Music & Literature
Read more: https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2015/4/20/mario-bellatins-jacob-the-mutant