Malambo kings
Laborde, a town three hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires in Argentina’s Côrdoba province, was founded in 1903, originally under the name Las Liebres. Populated at the time by Italian immigrants, it now has six thousand inhabitants and is situated in an oasis of wheat and corn dotted with mills. The wheat and corn brought...
Greetings from Fürstenfelde
The vixen lies quietly on damp leaves, under a beech tree on the outskirts of the old forest. From where the forest meets the fields – fields of wheat, barley, rapeseed – she looks at the little group of human houses, standing on such a narrow strip of land between two lakes that you might...
Erasures
Ann Goldstein, the English translator of Elena Ferrante, said in a panel discussion hosted by Rosie Goldsmith at Waterstones Piccadilly this month that she felt “bereft when the last translation was finished.” “The characters,” she felt, “become people we live with.” The same sense of bereavement, of loss of a vital friend or voice, is...
Autobiography of a reader
I translate for myself, then for the novel, finally for any future reader. It is for the pleasure of the work of translating that I do it, but I can only begin when I meet a text that moves me as a reader – which for me means to write. Haroldo Conti’s Sudeste was the...
On the delta
Between the Pajarito and the river that’s an open sea, turning sharply northwards, narrowing and narrowing at first, to almost half its size, then widening again and drawing curves towards its mouth, coiling in on itself, secluded in the first islands, is the Anguilas Stream. Beyond the final bend the open sea breaks into view,...
Fleet of word and deed
We know perhaps too much about Paul Morand, and certainly too little. Distillations of his being, his writer’s essence and his place in history most often focus on his celebrated friendships with Chanel and Proust, his occasionally bombastic, somewhat affected and at times self-glorifying public persona, his casual intolerance of much that did not conform...
The first apparition
I was attending a local kindergarten at the time, so I must have been about five years old. The azaleas had bloomed a bright red at the top of the hill, and my sisters were out filling their baskets with freshly-picked shepherd’s purse, which means it had to be early spring. I was sitting on...
A home unknown
I write with my hands tied. Here in the stationary solidity of my room, which I haven’t left for the longest time. I write without being able to write, and I write for this. At any rate, I wouldn’t know what to do with this body that has been unable to move ever since it...
Origins
I really loved the piece of land I grew up on. I spent so much time alone there, looking at the things around me, that sometimes I thought I myself was one of the trees that grew there. I didn’t rule out the possibility that my head might sprout leaves or that mangoes might grow...
A narrow escape
The light is incredibly clear today. For the past few days the sky was almost blotted out with snow, but today the sun’s rays penetrate deep down into the sea. The sea’s stormy indigo is ribboning out across its surface, like ink dissolving in water. After that it grows docile, a wild animal newly tamed,...
Dogs both big and small
Novels are weighty tomes. Short stories fill a few pages. When we pick up a novel that’s as thick as a brick, or open the first book of a series whose volumes might reach our waist if stacked on the floor, we tremble with awe. Compared to a novel, a short story seems as inconsequential...
