The Vortex

The 100th anniversary edition of a classic.

A classic of twentieth-century Latin American literature, José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex follows the young poet Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia as they elope from Bogotá and embark on an adventure through Colombia’s varied and magical landscapes, with their rich biodiversity. After becoming separated from Alicia in the rainforest, Arturo witnesses the appalling conditions of the workers forced or tricked into tapping rubber trees. Newly translated for its 100th anniversary, The Vortex is both a denunciation of the horrific human-rights abuses that took place during the Amazonian rubber boom, and one of most enduring renderings of the natural environment in Latin American literature.

José Eustasio Rivera was born in the municipality of San Mateo (now renamed Rivera in his honour), Colombia, on 19 February, 1888, and died on 1 December, 1928 in New York. A lawyer and poet, he is best known for his major work La vorágine (The Vortex ), published in 1924 and considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history. Despite being born into rural poverty, he was able to study and eventually earned a doctorate in law in 1922. He was appointed secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan Border Commission, and embarked on an expedition to the Orinoco-Amazon jungle, where he came face-to-face with the poverty of the rubber tappers and the barbarism that plagued the territory. This experience was the inspiration for the characters he would go on to describe in The Vortex, published upon his return to Bogotá in 1924. After representing Colombia at an international congress in Havana in 1928, he moved to New York with the intention of setting up a publishing house, printing a new edition of The Vortex, and getting it translated into English. That same winter, Rivera fell ill and was admitted to hospital on the verge of a coma. He died suddenly, without his illness being diagnosed.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over one hundred books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. Recent books include the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and translations of Julián Fuks’ Resistance and Occupation . He is a former chair of the Society of Authors and is presently on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature, literacy, translation and free expression. In 2021 Daniel was made an OBE for his services to literature.