Vortex

“The most influential Colombian novel before Gabriel García Márquez.”―Times Literary Supplement

A new translation of a Latin American classic, 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. When Alicia―pregnant, jealous, and more than a little fed up―disappears, it’s up to Arturo, and his unstoppable ego, to follow and win her back. From the cattle ranches of the llanos to the dense jungle of the rainforest, accompanied by hucksters, cowboys, desperate souls, and a terrifying tide of ants, Arturo pursues his bride-to-be, and becomes an inadvertent witness to the appalling conditions suffered by workers forced or tricked into tapping rubber trees. 

Inventive, funny, and wildly prescient about the human and environmental costs of extractive systems, 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. 100 years after its publication, it remains full of verve, and ready to inspire and delight a new generation of readers and writers.

José Eustasio Rivera was born in the municipality of San Mateo, Colombia, on 19 February, 1888, and died on 1 December, 1928 in New York. From a very young age, he experienced the deprivations of rural life, but was able to attend a series of educational establishments while living in poverty, eventually earning a doctorate in law in 1922. He was appointed secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan Border Commission, as a result of which he 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 . On his return to Bogotá, he wrote articles denouncing this and other issues in the press, and in 1924 he published the first edition of his great and only novel. In the meantime, he held political posts that brought him further unpleasant experiences, which did not prevent him from representing Colombia at an international congress in Havana in 1928. From there, 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.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s master’s programme in literary translation. His published and forthcoming translations include Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero (World Editions, 2025) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in 2023. His translation of Natalia García Freire’s_This World Does Not Belong to Us_ (Oneworld and World Editions, 2022) was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. His work has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. His translations for Charco Press span Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru.