Possibly because of its wonderful title, One Hundred Years of Solitude caught the world’s attention when it was first published in 1967 and launched a style widely referred to as magical realism, which came to be associated generally with South American literature. International publishers capitalised on that association and soon there was a stream of Latin American novelists, as well as their South Asian and African imitators whose cheap parodying of the style was flaunted as fresh originality, flooding the market. Though long past its peak, the phenomenon of magical realism as a quality uniquely associated with Latin American fiction still endures in the popular consciousness which is influenced not so much by a close reading of the authors as by the market inflation of their reputation. This is created by setting up new categories and labels that facilitate popular consumption and give opportunistic critics and academics a license to pass off their pretentious jargon as advanced critical thought.

Nearly half a century later, it is difficult to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude and not be struck by passages in it that are boringly journalistic with nothing magical about the writing, which, on the contrary, is full of clichés and generalisations as in this sentence: “Although her temperament lacked grace, she had a rare sensibility for appreciating the things of the world and had a secret tenderness.” Rare sensibility; secret tenderness? Come on now, who’s writing this, Danielle Steel? That’s just one sentence, quoted for its brevity, but there are whole pages of unrelieved dull journalistic reporting in the novel the world believes is a masterpiece. Critics who swooned over the apparent advent of magical realism failed to recall that literature which truly embodies that style was written by the supreme magicians of long ago — Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare. There’s more incredible magic that seems realistically believable in A Midsummer Night’s Dream than anything in the Latin American magical realists.

What is always magical in literature is how an author’s style transports the reader from the banal environment of ordinary reality to that enchanting realm where familiar forms present themselves in startlingly new formations that appear as revelations of new meanings, so that the familiar hovers on the edge of something foreign and exotic before settling into a transformed shape that becomes a new familiarity: the magician takes the objects of our senses, challenges our rational perception by making them disappear and then reappear in a new guise. The matter in the magician’s hands might be a pack of cards or a rabbit. Or words. Or a paint-soaked brush making marks on a canvas. It is always the magician’s style that does the trick. It is a procedure entirely to do with formal presentation.

Márquez is a good writer, but not a great one. The same can be said of his contemporaries, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende. The problem with them is that their appeal depends on their chosen subject matter, and therefore their value for readers will inevitably decline as interest in that subject matter declines. It is easy to impress one’s contemporaries with sociopolitical content because to them such content invariably seems “important” and “relevant” — as exemplified by Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat, both considered his major works because of their pregnant relevance to the late 20th-century’s conception of political reality, a condition, however, that has a finite term, so that what is swollen with meaning must in time end up flat and empty, whereas his two lighter novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and In Praise of the Stepmother, both of no portentous ideological relevance but concerned only with universal human experience, will continue to delight future generations.

As has happened before in literary history, posterity’s impartial eye sees among the neglected shadows what a past age, blinded by the intense light in which it stared at the illumined famous, had all but completely missed. As our enchantment for the likes of Márquez and Vargas Llosa, which has been nourished and sustained by the publishing industry’s need to project writers of little more than ordinary stature as giants, diminishes, a more fastidiously discriminating perception shows us the figures who had been cast in the shadows. In South American fiction contemporaneous with Márquez is the remarkable Álvaro Mutis; before him Felisberto Hernandez, María Luísa Bombal, and Graciliano Ramos; and before them all, writing his best work at the end of the 19th century, the truly great Machado de Assis (1839-1908).

An unprecedented literary feast awaits readers for whom these names are new. Forget the thirdraters you were sold as geniuses, forget your Forsters and Hemingways, your Bellows and Lessings. Reader, come out of the tapas bar where you’ve been nibbling at stale, over-salted snacks and deluding yourself you’re at a banquet, come where your taste buds may experience ecstasy. A new English translation of the stories of Machado de Assis provides us with an occasion to commence this feast.

First, a personal aside. I was active in the literary circles of London and New York in the 1960s, during which decade I first visited Rio de Janeiro, and was acquainted with many of the writers and literary editors of that time. Yet, though Machado’s work had begun to appear in English translation during the previous decade, I’d never heard of him. No one had that I knew of. To understand how shocking this is, imagine if no one had heard of two of Machado’s European contemporaries of whom he was an equal: Chekhov and Kafka.

I came across him by accident. I was browsing in a bookshop in Texas in 1972 and in a pile of remaindered books I found a novel called Epitaph for a Small Winner that was set in Rio de Janeiro. A random glance at a paragraph made me curious about its prose. I was looking at the work of one of the most original writers. Someone like James Joyce. Only, this novel had been first published in 1881, a year before Joyce was born.

Epitaph for a Small Winner (Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1952) is William Grosssman’s translation of what should correctly be titled ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas’. That and Dom Casmurro in Helen Caldwell’s translation (FSG, 1953) are Machado’s two great masterpieces. Both novels were issued four decades later in Oxford University Press’s beautifully produced Library of Latin America series, but unfortunately in inferior translations, though not as bad as the notorious Dom Casmurro brought out by Penguin in which the translator irresponsibly omitted whole passages. For a detailed analysis of these two novels, as well as a general discussion of Machado’s place in the pantheon of world literature, I refer the reader to the chapter on him in my Beckett’s Company: Selected Essays (OUP, 2009). With great books, most critical commentary is irrelevant in the end. All one needs to do is to read and reread and lie back in quiet meditation of the beauty that has entered one’s soul.

Now, to celebrate the occasion that prompted these reflections, the publication this spring by Dalkey Archive Press of a book simply titled Stories, which contains 13 of Machado’s stories, 10 of them never before published in English translation, plus an essay by Machado, translated by Rhett McNeil. For readers new to Machado, this book makes an excellent introduction.

Succinct and informative, McNeil’s prefatory essay rightly points out that had Machado “written in English, French, or Russian, he would be ranked alongside Dickens, Flaubert, and Gogol.” In a brief biographical note, McNeil records the astonishing facts of Machado’s life: born to racially mixed parents in 1839 when slavery was yet to be abolished, poor and uneducated, Machado taught himself several languages and read “Dickens, Sterne, and Shakespeare in English; Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal in French; Dante, Leopardi, and Ariosto in Italian; Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer in German; as well as Cervantes in Spanish.”

Incidentally, there you have evidence that genius is not a gift of nature but the result of determined hard work. With the rare exception of a Mozart or a Picasso, all great artists discover their genius in a profound study of the tradition, absorbing the whole of it in that internal chemistry of the individual’s tormented self, and then bursting forth with that re-arranged amalgam of traditional forms that is perceived as a new style and accorded the designation of a new art form.

McNeil’s choice of the stories to translate provides the reader with a taste of Machado’s “formal playfulness, ironical pathos, and stylistic subversiveness.” The selection opens with ‘The Psychiatrist,’ a novella, in which a scientist takes over a town, imposing his theories about mental health on the citizens that prove the majority of them to be insane. Having confined the majority to an asylum, the doctor decides that it is the sane minority that needs treatment, so the insane are set free and the sane incarcerated. Further doubts convince the doctor that the only person who really needs to be confined to the lunatic asylum is he himself. But it’s not just the story that makes ‘The Psychiatrist’ interesting, it’s Machado’s wit, his incidental observations with their philosophical undercurrent, his graphic depiction of human behaviour, and that bemused ironical voice behind the narrative that have the reader entirely under a magical spell.

‘The Psychiatrist’ was first translated into English by William Grossman whose rendering of Machado’s Portuguese had always struck me as competent, especially his version of Brás Cubas in which he captures Machado’s very special ironical tone. But comparing McNeil’s translation of ‘The Psychiatrist’ with Grossman’s shows how even a translator one had trusted can be occasionally deficient; it has been disappointing to note that in some passages Grossman does not translate so much as paraphrase: one gets the idea but does not hear the voice. McNeil takes one closer to the original.

A good translator produces a text that creates the impression that the work was composed in the language into which it is being translated while a poor translator slips into awkwardness, condenses the original into a generalised idea, or quietly skips a phrase. A glaring example of the latter is Grossman’s rendering of Machado’s final paragraph in Chapter XI where Grossman reduces the narrative to a paraphrase of the content and skips the important opening phrase, which is perfectly translated by McNeil as “Thus proceed the affairs of humanity!” and without which Machado’s voice is lost.

The second story in McNeil’s selection, ‘The Immortal,’ is one of Machado’s best: a homeopathic doctor tells the incredible story of his father who, having drunk an elixir given him by a native Indian, becomes immortal; thus, he lives during different times and in a variety of geographical settings where he is a participant in some important historical events. Immortality turns out to be a curse, for regardless of time and space the human race is seen trapped in its narrow, self-centred concerns and the only prospect before one is that of eternal boredom. It’s a hilarious and absorbing narrative that is philosophically serious. The idea of a character who lives longer than normal mortals and is at the centre of the principal historical events of a succession of centuries seemed familiar. Reading Machado’s tale made me do a double-take: I had done the same thing with my Gregório in The Incredible Brazilian trilogy, making him theoretically immortal through reincarnation, so that he is present and at the centre of the important events in Brazilian history through several centuries. I had been inspired by Thomas Berger’s truly magical Little Big Man in which the long-lived hero is associated with the history of the American West. And here was Machado’s story that had done the same thing in the century before us!

That is the mark of the great writer: a Cervantes or a Sterne, a Melville or a Conrad creates the template of crucial symbols, like a planetary centre, to which succeeding generations of writers bring their particular variations, like so many stars around a sun, and our earthly experience, released from the weight of gravity by the sheer force of a new, individual style, rises to become timeless and universal.

The other stories in McNeil’s selection are well chosen for the diversity of their form and content. Whether mimicking the Socratic dialogue or pretending to discover lost chapters of the Bible or merely producing a comedy of manners, and though full of learned asides and literary cross-references, Machado is always a brilliant entertainer. Ironical, cynical, intellectual and profoundly pessimistic he may be; yet on each page he makes one smile, if not laugh out loud. His formal range as a short story writer is astonishing. The modern short story as created by Chekhov, Kafka, Henry James, Conrad and Joyce is a marvel of world literature. Add Machado de Assis to that list and you will find yourself in a world of sheer magic.