The isolated backlands of the interior Brazilian state of Minas Gerais—its cowboys, outlaws, and primitive dirt farmers—these are the raw material of [João Guimarães Rosa,] Brazil's most original short story writer of the twentieth century. Strange to say, this creator of stories so congenitally rooted in the sertão is no mere picturesque "regionalist" but an erudite master of language and a bold stylistic-linguistic innovator….

Guimarães Rosa is primarily a teller of stories, carrying on in literary fashion the oral tradition of time immemorial, a tradition replete with talking animals, extrasensory communication between beasts and humans, and a pervasive teluric mystique. In no work are these features more evident than in his first published collection of stories—Sagarana (1946), a set of nine tales of the sertão that introduce into Brazilian literature on a decisive scale numerous elements of backland vocabulary and syntax...