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The Wolf and the Buffalo
From the author of The Far Canyon and The Good Old Boys comes this poignant story of a freed slave who goes west with the army and confronts much more than the hostilities of the Comanche and Kiowa.
The Civil War has ended and Gideon Ledbetter is feed from slavery. Like many, he has no land, no money, and no means to make a living. Gideon is drawn into the army by a recruiter who paints an alluring picture of cavalry life out in the west. The Indians called the black men "Buffalo" soldiers, as their tightly twisted hair reminded them of the large animals that they hunted for survival. Gideon is drawn into a conflict with a Comanche warrior, Gray Horse Running, which leads to a shattering confrontation on the plains of west Texas. This is the story of two men drawn together amid the blood and the fury of a conflict not of their making.
The Civil War has ended and Gideon Ledbetter is feed from slavery. Like many, he has no land, no money, and no means to make a living. Gideon is drawn into the army by a recruiter who paints an alluring picture of cavalry life out in the west. The Indians called the black men "Buffalo" soldiers, as their tightly twisted hair reminded them of the large animals that they hunted for survival. Gideon is drawn into a conflict with a Comanche warrior, Gray Horse Running, which leads to a shattering confrontation on the plains of west Texas. This is the story of two men drawn together amid the blood and the fury of a conflict not of their making.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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188 people want to read
About the author
Elmer Kelton
196 books260 followersElmer Kelton (1926-2009) was award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men’s Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years. He served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/elmerk...
http://us.macmillan.com/author/elmerk...
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 25, 2015
I came across The Wolf and the Buffalo by Elmer Kelton in The Giant Book of the Western which is an anthology of Western stories compiled by Jon E Lewis. In the collection it was renamed Desert Command and relates just one episode from the novel. It certainly whet my appetite, and I subsequently received a copy of The Wolf and the Buffalo for my birthday. I believe the book is out of print but Judith(wife)managed to find a secondhand copy from the US. The book is set in the years following the American Civil War and tells the story of ex-slave, Gideon Ledbetter, who together with his friend Jimbo, suddenly discovering themselves homeless and jobless, join the US Cavalry and are sent to serve in a black regiment (Buffalo Soldiers) at a frontier fort. As men born into slavery and who have known nothing other than obedience and servitude they find clear decision-making very hard indeed. Kelton manages to communicate this dilemma to the reader very well; he shows us too that ‘freedom’ didn’t mean equality or an end to racism.
The book also tells the story of Gray Horse, a Comanche warrior who is determined to drive the white settlers from the lands of his ancestors and believes that they will be destroyed and their wanton destruction of the seemingly limitless herds of buffalo will be restored once the spirits of his people are appeased. Kelton manages to portray the Comanche as they truly were without ever imposing upon them any kind of New Age soppiness. So much of their culture seems brutal to a modern reader, yet I was deeply touched by their loyalty and compassion to members of their tribe. Elmer Kelton is obviously very knowledgeable and skilfully gives us an insight into their thought processes. We know all too well the tragedies that befell the Plains Indians - the (probably) inevitable outcome when a stone-age culture is overwhelmed and all but swept away by the determination of post-Industrial Revolution settlers. This book makes good reading and I can highly recommend it.
The book also tells the story of Gray Horse, a Comanche warrior who is determined to drive the white settlers from the lands of his ancestors and believes that they will be destroyed and their wanton destruction of the seemingly limitless herds of buffalo will be restored once the spirits of his people are appeased. Kelton manages to portray the Comanche as they truly were without ever imposing upon them any kind of New Age soppiness. So much of their culture seems brutal to a modern reader, yet I was deeply touched by their loyalty and compassion to members of their tribe. Elmer Kelton is obviously very knowledgeable and skilfully gives us an insight into their thought processes. We know all too well the tragedies that befell the Plains Indians - the (probably) inevitable outcome when a stone-age culture is overwhelmed and all but swept away by the determination of post-Industrial Revolution settlers. This book makes good reading and I can highly recommend it.
March 13, 2019
One of Kelton's upper tier books published by TCU Press ... Historical Fiction rather than Western. Four star plus rating. Recommended.
1. - United States. Army--Afro-American troops - History - Fiction
3. - Comanche Indians - Fiction.
Quotes, Introduction :
"Old Uncle Henry Moore, a longtime farmer who had worked on the Texas and Pacific Railroad in the early days of West Texas settlement, told me years ago that he thought a lot of people vitally important to the West's development were sadly overlooked in its literature."
...
" ... Only in recent years has the black soldier's role in the Indian wars begun to be given the recognition it deserves. Generations of Texas history students learned about the frontier picket-line of military posts guarding the western fringe of settlement, but seldom was the point made to them that a substantial number of the soldiers were black.
"The black trooper's service on the frontier was fraught with ironies. In general, the people whose interests he protected had little regard for him, and little gratitude. ... In essence it was the black trooper's role to take land away from the red man so the white man could have it. ... The desertion rate among blacks at the time was far lower than among white soldiers. ... Black units tended to receive the poorest of equipment, the poorest of horses. ..."
...
"Having risen no higher in rank than Pfc. in World War II, I thought I could relate in many aspects to the private soldier on the frontier. ... My intention was to bring in the Indian character, Gray Horse Running, only in a minor way to serve as a counterpoint to the soldier's experience. But Gray Horse would not let me get away with it." ...
"Gray Horse kept expanding his role ... forced me to take a deeper and more compassionate look at his tragic situation. His way of life was collapsing with an awesome suddenness. He was being failed by the mystical protective spirits around whom his entire existence revolved."
***
obituary link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
"ELMER KELTON, 83
Western Writer Elmer Kelton Dies at 83
In 1995, the Western Writers of America named Mr. Kelton the best Western writer of all time. He had already won many top awards of the organization." (See books tagged Spur in my catalog.)
(By Cameron Yarborough -- San Angelo Standard Times Via Associated Press)
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
"Unlike many writers of formula westerns over the years, Elmer Kelton avoided the lure of sagebrush nostalgia and the easy indulgence of Old West cliche. Nobody gets shot in a Kelton novel -- which are often set in the modern West -- and his cowboys and ranchers are not mythic heroes on horseback. "I can't write about heroes 7 feet tall and invincible," Mr. Kelton liked to say. "I write about people 5-foot-8 and nervous."
Mr. Kelton, 83, a celebrated writer who produced novels and stories that transcended the Western genre, died Aug. 22 of pre-leukemia at a nursing home in San Angelo, Tex.
While supporting himself as an agricultural journalist -- he paid his bills covering news about heifer prices and the scourge of screwworms -- Mr. Kelton wrote more than 60 books. They included the novels "The Time It Never Rained" (1973), "The Wolf and the Buffalo" (1980) and "The Good Old Boys" (1978), the last of which became a movie on the TNT cable network directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones in 1995.
That same year, the Western Writers of America named Mr. Kelton the best Western writer of all time. He had already won many top awards of the organization and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
As Mr. Kelton continued to produce best-selling westerns, critics and reviewers began to notice that he was driving the genre into unexplored territory. He learned to "use the western setting as a vehicle for studying mankind, rather than as an end in itself," in novels that "are characterized thematically by the moral complexities wrought in men's lives by change and stylistically by a narrative voice that speaks clearly of West Texas," wrote Judith Alter, editor of Texas Christian University Press.
In what is arguably his best novel, "The Time It Never Rained" (1973), he described the years-long drought that devastated Texas agriculture in the 1950s: "Winter wore on relentlessly with a constant series of cold, dry winds that droned a dusty dinge across the hills and prairies, robbing strength from thinning livestock, seeking out and stealing any vestige of moisture that might still cling in hidden places."
The novel is the story of the Joblike vicissitudes of a West Texas rancher named Charlie Flagg, who in late-middle age is a "broad-shouldered man who still toted his own feed sacks, dug his own postholes, flanked his own calves" and who took pride in never taking money from the government.
"The Good Old Boys" is just as realistic as "The Time It Never Rained" but is leavened with comic overtones. The 1995 movie starred Tommy Lee Jones as Hewey Calloway, an easy-going drifter who's torn between the carefree life of a hired hand and the lure of his own land and family. Also starring Frances McDormand, Sam Shepard and Matt Damon, the movie is set in West Texas circa 1906; first-time director Jones insisted on calling it "a period piece," not a traditional western.
Elmer Stephen Kelton was born April 29, 1926, in a line-camp house on a ranch near Andrews, Tex., where his grandfather was foreman. Mr. Kelton's great-grandfather had come to the region in the 1870s with a string of horses and a covered wagon; his father, Buck Kelton, also was a ranch foreman.
"I was the oldest of four boys and by far the worst cowboy," Mr. Kelton told Texas Monthly in 1995. "I rode a horse like all the rest, just not as well, so I took a lot of refuge in reading. Westerns were my heritage. . . . By eight or nine, I decided if I couldn't be a cowboy, I would at least write about it."
His mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged her son's career choice, but his father was skeptical. "He gave me a look that would kill Johnson grass," Mr. Kelton recalled, "and said, 'That's the way with you kids nowadays; you all want to make a living without having to work for it.' " Mr. Kelton entered the University of Texas at Austin at age 16, where he took journalism courses. Two years later, he left school to join the Army. As an infantryman near the end of World War II, he was stationed in Czechoslovakia and then guarded prisoners of war in Austria. In a memoir, he told of meeting a young, blue-eyed Austrian woman named Anni Lipp in the village of Ebensee.
As he recalled in his 2008 memoir, "Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer," his "brain and voice did not synchronize well" when he first tried talking to her. According to Anni, who married him a year later, he was like a stray pet: "I fed a soldier apple strudel and he kept coming back."
Besides his wife of 62 years, of San Angelo, survivors include two sons, Gary Kelton of Plainview, Tex., and Stephen Kelton of San Angelo; three brothers; four grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.
After the war, Mr. Kelton and his wife settled in San Angelo, where he made his living as a farm and ranch reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times and later as an editor for Sheep & Goat Raiser Magazine and Livestock Weekly. He wrote stories on the side. The first one he published, "There's Always Another Chance," appeared in a 1948 issue of "Ranch Romances," and earned him $50. His first novel, "Hot Iron," was published in 1955.
Until he retired from journalism in 1990, Mr. Kelton continued to cover feeder steers, the slaughter meat goat market and other farm and ranch news, even as his novels received growing acclaim. Texas Monthly noted that when "The Time It Never Rained" appeared in 1973, Mr. Kelton "was no longer a fine Western writer but a fine writer, period."
1. - United States. Army--Afro-American troops - History - Fiction
3. - Comanche Indians - Fiction.
Quotes, Introduction :
"Old Uncle Henry Moore, a longtime farmer who had worked on the Texas and Pacific Railroad in the early days of West Texas settlement, told me years ago that he thought a lot of people vitally important to the West's development were sadly overlooked in its literature."
...
" ... Only in recent years has the black soldier's role in the Indian wars begun to be given the recognition it deserves. Generations of Texas history students learned about the frontier picket-line of military posts guarding the western fringe of settlement, but seldom was the point made to them that a substantial number of the soldiers were black.
"The black trooper's service on the frontier was fraught with ironies. In general, the people whose interests he protected had little regard for him, and little gratitude. ... In essence it was the black trooper's role to take land away from the red man so the white man could have it. ... The desertion rate among blacks at the time was far lower than among white soldiers. ... Black units tended to receive the poorest of equipment, the poorest of horses. ..."
...
"Having risen no higher in rank than Pfc. in World War II, I thought I could relate in many aspects to the private soldier on the frontier. ... My intention was to bring in the Indian character, Gray Horse Running, only in a minor way to serve as a counterpoint to the soldier's experience. But Gray Horse would not let me get away with it." ...
"Gray Horse kept expanding his role ... forced me to take a deeper and more compassionate look at his tragic situation. His way of life was collapsing with an awesome suddenness. He was being failed by the mystical protective spirits around whom his entire existence revolved."
***
obituary link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
"ELMER KELTON, 83
Western Writer Elmer Kelton Dies at 83
In 1995, the Western Writers of America named Mr. Kelton the best Western writer of all time. He had already won many top awards of the organization." (See books tagged Spur in my catalog.)
(By Cameron Yarborough -- San Angelo Standard Times Via Associated Press)
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
"Unlike many writers of formula westerns over the years, Elmer Kelton avoided the lure of sagebrush nostalgia and the easy indulgence of Old West cliche. Nobody gets shot in a Kelton novel -- which are often set in the modern West -- and his cowboys and ranchers are not mythic heroes on horseback. "I can't write about heroes 7 feet tall and invincible," Mr. Kelton liked to say. "I write about people 5-foot-8 and nervous."
Mr. Kelton, 83, a celebrated writer who produced novels and stories that transcended the Western genre, died Aug. 22 of pre-leukemia at a nursing home in San Angelo, Tex.
While supporting himself as an agricultural journalist -- he paid his bills covering news about heifer prices and the scourge of screwworms -- Mr. Kelton wrote more than 60 books. They included the novels "The Time It Never Rained" (1973), "The Wolf and the Buffalo" (1980) and "The Good Old Boys" (1978), the last of which became a movie on the TNT cable network directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones in 1995.
That same year, the Western Writers of America named Mr. Kelton the best Western writer of all time. He had already won many top awards of the organization and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
As Mr. Kelton continued to produce best-selling westerns, critics and reviewers began to notice that he was driving the genre into unexplored territory. He learned to "use the western setting as a vehicle for studying mankind, rather than as an end in itself," in novels that "are characterized thematically by the moral complexities wrought in men's lives by change and stylistically by a narrative voice that speaks clearly of West Texas," wrote Judith Alter, editor of Texas Christian University Press.
In what is arguably his best novel, "The Time It Never Rained" (1973), he described the years-long drought that devastated Texas agriculture in the 1950s: "Winter wore on relentlessly with a constant series of cold, dry winds that droned a dusty dinge across the hills and prairies, robbing strength from thinning livestock, seeking out and stealing any vestige of moisture that might still cling in hidden places."
The novel is the story of the Joblike vicissitudes of a West Texas rancher named Charlie Flagg, who in late-middle age is a "broad-shouldered man who still toted his own feed sacks, dug his own postholes, flanked his own calves" and who took pride in never taking money from the government.
"The Good Old Boys" is just as realistic as "The Time It Never Rained" but is leavened with comic overtones. The 1995 movie starred Tommy Lee Jones as Hewey Calloway, an easy-going drifter who's torn between the carefree life of a hired hand and the lure of his own land and family. Also starring Frances McDormand, Sam Shepard and Matt Damon, the movie is set in West Texas circa 1906; first-time director Jones insisted on calling it "a period piece," not a traditional western.
Elmer Stephen Kelton was born April 29, 1926, in a line-camp house on a ranch near Andrews, Tex., where his grandfather was foreman. Mr. Kelton's great-grandfather had come to the region in the 1870s with a string of horses and a covered wagon; his father, Buck Kelton, also was a ranch foreman.
"I was the oldest of four boys and by far the worst cowboy," Mr. Kelton told Texas Monthly in 1995. "I rode a horse like all the rest, just not as well, so I took a lot of refuge in reading. Westerns were my heritage. . . . By eight or nine, I decided if I couldn't be a cowboy, I would at least write about it."
His mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged her son's career choice, but his father was skeptical. "He gave me a look that would kill Johnson grass," Mr. Kelton recalled, "and said, 'That's the way with you kids nowadays; you all want to make a living without having to work for it.' " Mr. Kelton entered the University of Texas at Austin at age 16, where he took journalism courses. Two years later, he left school to join the Army. As an infantryman near the end of World War II, he was stationed in Czechoslovakia and then guarded prisoners of war in Austria. In a memoir, he told of meeting a young, blue-eyed Austrian woman named Anni Lipp in the village of Ebensee.
As he recalled in his 2008 memoir, "Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer," his "brain and voice did not synchronize well" when he first tried talking to her. According to Anni, who married him a year later, he was like a stray pet: "I fed a soldier apple strudel and he kept coming back."
Besides his wife of 62 years, of San Angelo, survivors include two sons, Gary Kelton of Plainview, Tex., and Stephen Kelton of San Angelo; three brothers; four grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.
After the war, Mr. Kelton and his wife settled in San Angelo, where he made his living as a farm and ranch reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times and later as an editor for Sheep & Goat Raiser Magazine and Livestock Weekly. He wrote stories on the side. The first one he published, "There's Always Another Chance," appeared in a 1948 issue of "Ranch Romances," and earned him $50. His first novel, "Hot Iron," was published in 1955.
Until he retired from journalism in 1990, Mr. Kelton continued to cover feeder steers, the slaughter meat goat market and other farm and ranch news, even as his novels received growing acclaim. Texas Monthly noted that when "The Time It Never Rained" appeared in 1973, Mr. Kelton "was no longer a fine Western writer but a fine writer, period."
August 12, 2010
An excellent novel both to read and to recommend to young people. It tells the stories of two young men shortly after the Civil War, a young newly free black man in New Orleans, who signs up for the army and is sent west to San Angelo, TX as a "Buffalo Soldier", and a young Comanche warrior who si seeing his way of life changing forever.
January 11, 2023
Antes de nada, comentar que la serie "Frontera" de la editorial Valdemar, al que este libro pertenece, es una pasada. Muy cuidada, excelentemente elegida, bien prologada. No recuerdo un título que me haya decepcionado y muchos de ellos son de lo mejor que he leído. 5 estrellas para ella.
Y ya al lío con éste. El autor, Elmer Kelton, bastante desconocido para el público en general, pero con premios y nominaciones para parar un ataque comanche. Y es que el problema de su popularidad es que casi no hay películas de sus libros, como les pasó a muchos de sus contemporáneos. Pero calidad literaria tiene; profundo conocimiento de la historia (de hecho, esta novela transcurre en parte en su ciudad natal, cuando era todavía un asentamiento de comercios junto al fuerte), le sobre; y tensión narrativa con personajes bien trazados, para dar y tomar.
Además trata uno de los grandes olvidados del western de frontera: los soldados búfalos. Soldados negros procedentes del esclavismo que tras la guerra de Secesión intentaron buscar su lugar en el mundo. Porque de éso también va este libro. De cómo un tipo negro en la flor de la vida, que se ha pasado toda su vida a las órdenes de su dueño recogiendo algodón, se ve de repente con libertad de morirse de hambre. Abandonado a suerte ve en el ejército un medio de ganarse la vida y comer todos los días.
Pero en la frontera sigue siendo un negro. Para los yankis, para los mexicanos, para los oficiales blancos. Hasta para los indios es un enemigo más (un blanco coloreado). Sólo le queda levantar la cabeza y hacer lo mejor que puede su trabajo, a pesar de las dudas que le genera.
Respecto al punto de vista indio, también el autor se mete en su curtido pellejo. Haciendo una fuerte crítica a la destrucción y apropiación de su mundo y el exterminio de la mayoría, costumbres incluidas. Sin paternalismo y con cierto distanciamiento objetivo, a pesar de que algunas conclusiones quedan algo rancias con el paso del tiempo.
Dejando fuera las cuestiones más "políticas", el libro se lee del tirón. Hay aventuras de las buenas, heridas de bala y flecha, caballos reventados de cabalgar, caliche en el agua y bisontes. Qué más se le puede pedir?
Y os dejo, que ya bulle el café en la cacerola que tengo en la fogata. Y no me gustaría tomarlo más amargo de lo que ya es.
Y ya al lío con éste. El autor, Elmer Kelton, bastante desconocido para el público en general, pero con premios y nominaciones para parar un ataque comanche. Y es que el problema de su popularidad es que casi no hay películas de sus libros, como les pasó a muchos de sus contemporáneos. Pero calidad literaria tiene; profundo conocimiento de la historia (de hecho, esta novela transcurre en parte en su ciudad natal, cuando era todavía un asentamiento de comercios junto al fuerte), le sobre; y tensión narrativa con personajes bien trazados, para dar y tomar.
Además trata uno de los grandes olvidados del western de frontera: los soldados búfalos. Soldados negros procedentes del esclavismo que tras la guerra de Secesión intentaron buscar su lugar en el mundo. Porque de éso también va este libro. De cómo un tipo negro en la flor de la vida, que se ha pasado toda su vida a las órdenes de su dueño recogiendo algodón, se ve de repente con libertad de morirse de hambre. Abandonado a suerte ve en el ejército un medio de ganarse la vida y comer todos los días.
Pero en la frontera sigue siendo un negro. Para los yankis, para los mexicanos, para los oficiales blancos. Hasta para los indios es un enemigo más (un blanco coloreado). Sólo le queda levantar la cabeza y hacer lo mejor que puede su trabajo, a pesar de las dudas que le genera.
Respecto al punto de vista indio, también el autor se mete en su curtido pellejo. Haciendo una fuerte crítica a la destrucción y apropiación de su mundo y el exterminio de la mayoría, costumbres incluidas. Sin paternalismo y con cierto distanciamiento objetivo, a pesar de que algunas conclusiones quedan algo rancias con el paso del tiempo.
Dejando fuera las cuestiones más "políticas", el libro se lee del tirón. Hay aventuras de las buenas, heridas de bala y flecha, caballos reventados de cabalgar, caliche en el agua y bisontes. Qué más se le puede pedir?
Y os dejo, que ya bulle el café en la cacerola que tengo en la fogata. Y no me gustaría tomarlo más amargo de lo que ya es.
September 28, 2023
La primera vez que hago una reseña durante la lectura. Esto es porque me está gustando la novela, pero no la edición. Voy a pasarme a leer la edición en inglés. Es la última vez que compro un libro nuevo de la editorial Valdemar hasta que no cambien de traductor.
Nunca miro quién traduce un libro. El traductor bueno ha de ser invisible. Cuando un traductor llama la atención… malo. O es porque está sacando los pies del texto o es porque lo está haciendo muy mal.
Llevo ya unos cuantos libros de Valdemar (unos seis) en los que miro quién traduce y digo “Mierda. Ella otra vez”. Siempre me saca de la lectura en algún momento, pero en este ya sucede cada diez o doce páginas, CON SUERTE.
Cacofonías, errores de concordancia, comas locas, construcciones traducidas de forma literal, expresiones modernas en boca de personajes nacidos a mediados del siglo XX o principios del XX, en incluso errores claramente producto de no haber corregido el texto en absoluto (de estos hay siempre alguno, pero en el caso de estos libros hay varios en cada título). Todos los autores traducidos por esta persona tienen un mismo estilo: plano, impersonal, pedestre. Escribe igual Aston Smith que Buchan, igual Le May que el señor que nos ocupa. Un amigo me mandó la edición en ingles y es otro mundo.
Esta traductora es como un rodillo gigante que pasa sobre las frases y las convierte en pulpa y mediocridad. Las novelas no respiran, no viven. Son fanediciones.
Me parece increíble que una editorial como Valdemar de esto por bueno.
Puede ser que ella, como tantos otros, tenga tal volumen de trabajo que no le quede otra que hacer chapuzas para sobrevivir. Puede que Valdemar tenga que sacar los títulos así de chapuceramente para sobrevivir. Lo entiendo.
Pero como cliente no lo acepto. Cada título ronda los 20€, y por ese dinero ya espero, como mínimo, que no haya errores de género y número. Lo del estilo ya es otra batalla.
Es decir, que no compraré un título más de los que haya traducido esta chica.
Nunca miro quién traduce un libro. El traductor bueno ha de ser invisible. Cuando un traductor llama la atención… malo. O es porque está sacando los pies del texto o es porque lo está haciendo muy mal.
Llevo ya unos cuantos libros de Valdemar (unos seis) en los que miro quién traduce y digo “Mierda. Ella otra vez”. Siempre me saca de la lectura en algún momento, pero en este ya sucede cada diez o doce páginas, CON SUERTE.
Cacofonías, errores de concordancia, comas locas, construcciones traducidas de forma literal, expresiones modernas en boca de personajes nacidos a mediados del siglo XX o principios del XX, en incluso errores claramente producto de no haber corregido el texto en absoluto (de estos hay siempre alguno, pero en el caso de estos libros hay varios en cada título). Todos los autores traducidos por esta persona tienen un mismo estilo: plano, impersonal, pedestre. Escribe igual Aston Smith que Buchan, igual Le May que el señor que nos ocupa. Un amigo me mandó la edición en ingles y es otro mundo.
Esta traductora es como un rodillo gigante que pasa sobre las frases y las convierte en pulpa y mediocridad. Las novelas no respiran, no viven. Son fanediciones.
Me parece increíble que una editorial como Valdemar de esto por bueno.
Puede ser que ella, como tantos otros, tenga tal volumen de trabajo que no le quede otra que hacer chapuzas para sobrevivir. Puede que Valdemar tenga que sacar los títulos así de chapuceramente para sobrevivir. Lo entiendo.
Pero como cliente no lo acepto. Cada título ronda los 20€, y por ese dinero ya espero, como mínimo, que no haya errores de género y número. Lo del estilo ya es otra batalla.
Es decir, que no compraré un título más de los que haya traducido esta chica.
August 18, 2023
Entretenida.
A valorar la ambientación histórica, muy cuidada y respetuosa con lo que en verdad sucedió.
También me ha gustado que no edulcora el racismo de la época.
Como todos los libros de esta magnífica colección tiene un prólogo muy revelador e interesante.
En definitiva, un libro honesto y que se deja leer.
A valorar la ambientación histórica, muy cuidada y respetuosa con lo que en verdad sucedió.
También me ha gustado que no edulcora el racismo de la época.
Como todos los libros de esta magnífica colección tiene un prólogo muy revelador e interesante.
En definitiva, un libro honesto y que se deja leer.
January 1, 2014
Good western as Kelton compares and contrasts the lives of Gideon Ledbetter, a buffalo soldier, and Gray horse, a Comanche warrior. Their lives are very different but they intertwine on the plains of Texas as the soldier fight the Indians. Recommended! I have been to Fort Concho where much of the action occurs with the buffalo soldiers. It is very interesting.
July 8, 2014
Fascinating historical story set on the West Texas land I now love so much. I'm glad to have found this book.
July 18, 2024
Gran novela, bien narrada e intensa.
August 15, 2012
The Wolf and the Buffalo describes the experiences of two men - Gideon Ledbetter, a recently freed black slave, who stumbles into the army as a raw recruit, and Gray Horse, a Comanche Warrior who is destined to watch the fading away of the Comanche nation. Gideon undergoes indignities common to his race in the prevalent times and has to dig deep into his soul to overcome bitterness and turn out to be a fine soldier. Gray Horse is a free spirit who cannot abide to live as a domesticated spirit in the Comanche reservation that whites have marked out.
The changes in character of both men as life teaches them bitter lessons is brought out well. I would definitely recommend this book with a rating of 4/5.
The changes in character of both men as life teaches them bitter lessons is brought out well. I would definitely recommend this book with a rating of 4/5.
October 6, 2011
Not at all what I was expecting. I feel like so often we, as Americans, feel so guilty about the chapter of our history that deals with the resettlement of Native Americans (and perhaps rightfully so) that any piece of literature treads a little too lightly. That is to say, authors are careful to be respectful in such a way that the reader gets the feeling that he isn't being told the whole story. Elmer didn't seem to shy away from the more brutal parts of Native American culture, and it made the book seem that much more believable.
April 18, 2009
A powerful story depicting life on the frontier for black soldiers.
Kelton also describes the Commanche way of life and how it is destroyed by advancing waves of settlers.
Kelton also describes the Commanche way of life and how it is destroyed by advancing waves of settlers.
October 16, 2015
A wonderful story, beautifully told, and I felt I learnt a lot, as well as enjoying the narrative. Would definitely read more of Elmer Kelton.
August 1, 2019
My all time favorite Western. Two coming of age stories that clash the young country changes.
January 22, 2018
I read this years ago, and I remember it as being a fantastic book.
May 29, 2019
Elmer Kelton could write no wrong. Excellent stories of Texas during the frontier days, with historical accuracy.
January 18, 2024
first book of the year!!!
August 27, 2007
this isn't really about wolves or buffalos. go figure.
August 26, 2007
Historical fiction set in the San Angelo / Fort Concho area in the late 19th century.
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July 24, 2016excellent story of the frontier and the Buffalo soldiers. This was set in my part of
Texas and I've been to many of the forts mentioned. Well written and realistic.
Texas and I've been to many of the forts mentioned. Well written and realistic.
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October 30, 2018Indigenous Nations Issues
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