Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto
preface by Esther Allen
translated by Esther Allen

An NYRB Classics Original

First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.

Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Paperback | 224 pages | NYRB Classics | 2016

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922–1986) was an Argentine journalist and author of five novels, of which Zama is the most well-known. His first book, the story collection Mundo Animal (1952), appeared in English translation in 1997 as Animal World.

Esther Allen is an essayist and translator from Spanish and French. An associate professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, she directed the work of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund from its founding in 2003 to 2010, and co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature (2004).

A two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, she was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2009-2010. The French government has honored her as a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (2006).