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‘Ualalapi – Fragments from the End of Empire’, the title of the English language version of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s book, was published recently in the United States three decades after its launch in Maputo by the Mozambican Writers’ Association.
According to a press release sent to AIM yesterday, ‘Ualalapi – Fragments from the End of Empire’ was released in the United States by Tagus Press, an imprint of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, with English translation by Richard Bartlett and Isaura de Oliveira.
In his commentary on Ualalapi’s North American edition, voted among the best 100 African books of the 20th century, Hilary Owen of Oxford and Manchester universities said that the English translation of this indisputable masterpiece of modern Mozambican fiction was greatly welcomed.
Owen said that both the translation and the preface provided the Anglophone reader with an excellent introduction to the work of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa by offering a historical and convincing view of peoples and cultures in the crucible of conflict.
The American version of Ualalapi has a preface by Professor Phillip Rothwell, Professor of Portuguese at Oxford University and Director of the European Humanities Research Centre and an expert in Portuguese and Lusophone literatures and culture, known for his lectures on Angolan and Mozambican literature and culture at several European universities, including Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bucknell and Bristol.
‘Ualalapi – Fragments from the End of Empire’ joins the Adamastor series, coordinated by the professor of African Literature of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Anna M. Klobucka, which includes volumes by Eça de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, Eduardo Lourenço, Father António Vieira, Hélder Macedo and Fernando Gil.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Luís Madureira says Ualalapi stands as one of the most compelling historical novels produced in post-independence Mozambique, with Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s narrative portraying the portentous and multifaceted mood of an ending world.
Ba Ka Khosa’s Ualalapi was Named one of Africa’s hundred best books of the twentieth century.
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