João Guimarães Rosa made his debut in Brazilian letters with Sagarana (1946; translated, 1966), a volume of short stories that appeared to be fashioned in the perennially popular regionalist vein, but the stories were informed by a mystic vision not usually considered a part of that tradition. The language of the narratives appeared to be an amalgam of traditional Brazilian regionalist diction and some other unidentifiable idiom, perhaps an invented one. The title itself is a neologism, an agglutination of the Germanic root that produced the word saga, and a Tupi suffix meaning "rough, crude." Had Guimarães Rosa not written another word, his authorship of Sagarana would have assured him a place in Brazilian literary history as a great but minor writer. As a decade of silence from him drew to a close, it indeed appeared that he had exhausted his imagination on one...