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…
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.
This is going to be a short(ish) one, as I’m just getting back in the swing of things after a month of prep for my first comprehensive exam. A brief and likely redundant lesson in history: The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s decimated the Cuban economy. With drastically reduced access to … More We’re gonna party like it’s 1991.
Despite the fact that Bonsái wears its (somewhat obvious) conceptual heart on its sleeve, and is built around the conceit of writing itself into its own title (the novel itself is a work in miniature in which characters are established and then neatly – and explicitly – trimmed away), the novel is not without its … More A tree grows in Chile
Mario Bellatin is in a league of his own. In fact, I’m not sure he’s even playing the same sport as most of his contemporaries. Experimenting with the limits of narrative and form and spearheading “The Dynamic School for Writers,” which aspires to blur the line between writing and other forms of art, Bellatin pushes … More The Tuesday Video Clip: Mario Bellatin
Breaking up is hard to do. For Sofía and Rímini, of Alan Pauls’ El pasado (Alfaguara 2003; translated into English as The Past in 2008), it seems downright impossible. After nearly thirteen years together, the two part ways and Rímini sets out to make a fresh start. He moves in with a young woman named … More El Pasado de Alan Pauls
Heather Cleary 