The Argentinian newspaper Clarín published an interesting story in its cultural section, Ñ (Revista de Cultura), about the translation of poet Juan Gelman‘s text into a sculptural red dress by the well-known Spanish design duo Victorio & Lucchino, which caught my eye because it is an unusual example of what Roman Jakobson has described as … More Juan Gelman in translation
Words Without Borders just published an interesting review of Horacio Castellanos Moya‘s The She-Devil in the Mirror, translated by Katherine Silver for New Directions. According to the reviewer, George Fragopoulos, Moya is a master of the harrowing, if often darkly comic, vitriolic diatribe; his claustrophobic voices exude and drip with despair, violence and abjection. The … More The She-Devil in the Mirror
Exciting! I didn’t know that Juan José Saer‘s El entenado had been translated into English! Apparently I was living under a rock, because Margaret Jull Costa translated it for Serpent’s Tail back in 1991 under the title The Witness. The novel’s narrator is a young man – an orphan – who hangs around the shipyards … More In nomine Patris
While I’m on the subject of weird and winning metafiction from Brazil: did you know that the internationally acclaimed musician Chico Buarque is also a talented novelist? I didn’t – until I read Budapeste (Companhia das Letras, 2003 / Budapest trans. Alison Entrekin for Grove Press, 2005). The novel’s protagonist, José Costa, is a shadowy … More Speaking in Tongues
It took a graceful, witty little number like Luis Fernando Verissimo‘s Borges e os Orangotangos Eternos (Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, trans. Margaret Jull Costa for New Directions) to distract me from the tech frenzy that had gripped me for the past few weeks. And oh, what a sweet dalliance it was. It’s a slender … More That which we call a rose…
Disclaimer: this is a shameless re-post of Laura Miller’s Salon.com article on metadata and iBook sales, plucked from Three Percent, the blog of Open Letter Books. As Chad Post of Three Percent points out, the article is grounded in the idea that, whereas the 20th century was about “sorting out supply,” or ordering information according … More What you really, really want.
Imagine you were told that for the next three days you could do as you pleased without any moral consequence. Madeinusa, Claudia Llosa‘s 2006 feature film debut and the darling of the festival circuit, does just that. Looking in on the fictional mountain town of Manataycuna over a period known as “Tiempo Santo” – the … More Madeinusa
… and there’s no such thing as a late adopter. That said, I just discovered ManyBooks.net – possibly the greatest thing to happen to books in the public domain since, well, ever. They lead pretty quiet lives. The selection at ManyBooks isn’t quite as comprehensive as Project Gutenberg‘s, but the interface is more user-friendly, and … More There are no stupid questions…
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Blame it on the exam, blame it on spring fever. Blame it on a recent trip to the ACLA. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think I’ve been writing much because it’s all been so… polite. So. I’m going to try something new: new topics, … More Let’s be honest.
Heather Cleary 