Xavier Villaurrutia was one of the very few Latin American writers in the first half of this century who was openly homosexual, an important Mexican poet who wrote, essentially, one book, Nostalgia for Death, translated here for the first time by Eliot Winberger. As 1990 Nobel Literature Octavio Paz makes clear in his booklength study, Hieroglyphs of Desire (translated by Esther Allen), Villaurrutia is a major poet of desire whose beloved is the death we live each day. His poems define life between the nocturnal and diurnal and have take on added poignancy as uncanny prophecies of individual lives in the age of the AIDS epidemic.
* Esta contraportada corresponde a la edición de 1993. La Enciclopedia de la literatura en México no se hace responsable de los contenidos y puntos de vista vertidos en ella.
