Essay
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There is a malicious joke about probability theory. A scientist tells a millionaire that if he gives a hundred monkeys chalk and books and sets them in front of a chalkboard for thirty years, it is pr... -
As I write this, Chile is burning. The streets are burning, the monuments, the symbols, and signs of an abusive and unequal system that has been in place since Pinochet’s dictatorship. People are sayi... -
In 2007, one of my Seattle neighbors asked me to translate the poem “Bedandá dxí di’ naa / Me llegó este día,” written by a poet who lived close to his southern Mexican hometown. “I Was Given This Da... -
Relations between academic criticism and contemporary literature have never been easy. They have fluctuated between rejection, admiration, and mutual ignorance. The case of Latin America is not so dif... -
Finishing among the finalists for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award with your first book translated into English, and for Barack Obama to have included it in his annual recomm... -
The art of narration consists in endowing a story with the pleasant vertigo of a lucid carousal. Paradoxically, those aspiring to this aesthetic ideal have to drink in moderation, because a producer o... -
Seferis leads me directly to Dark Rivers—Oscuros ríos in Spanish—a book by Chilean poet Juan Carlos Villavicencio. In Villavicencio, Seferis’s river splits into many rivers, but the road is sim... -
One of digital pages of Los campos magnéticos (Buenos Aires: CHINA editora, 2013) contains a statement that perfectly captures the corrosive process reality is subject to, in the name of what i... -
For almost the entire second half of the last century, a considerable portion of Latin American literature was held captive to the conviction that in order to be taken seriously, it needed to comply w... -
In his acceptance speech, Joseph Brodsky said that to receive the Nobel Prize was to take the longest route between Saint Petersburg and Stockholm. This was no surprise, as it had been a long while si... -
Gracias—this is the word that we use to say thanks. It implies gratefulness; so then, gracias to Askold Melnychuk, founder and director of Arrowsmith Press, and to Nidia Hernandez, Robert Pinsky, Forr... -
What at first sparked if not a scandal, I would say a degree of suspicion and even unease about Matate, amor (Buenos Aires: Paradiso, 2012) (Die, My Love, Charco Press, 2017), was the bl... -
Though the Latin American boom has in many ways cemented its history in myths and legends, when a literary movement is represented in myth, it can become frozen, stultified, and, most dangero... -
One of the central topics of the Colombian literature of the last two decades has been how to build narratives and structures that allow for the recovery of personal and national memory surrounding th... -
Acknowledging that Rossella Di Paolo (Lima, 1960-) is one of Peru’s most important contemporary poets is long overdue.1 For over thirty years, she has patiently and tenaciously cultivated her poetic l... -
I still have yet to find a word in Spanish quite like the English word journaling, something that would maintain—in a verbal, active sense—all the different senses I mean to convey when I use... -
Before we became parents, my wife and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment for a few years. One of the bedrooms was my office. It was the first time I had a physical space entirely devoted to my writing... -
My first imagined land was Romania, where my father was born. When I was a boy in Buenos Aires, my father hardly talked about his distant native Romania at all. He only said what was strictly necessar... -
The confinement from which I write is at the same time both a sentence and a luxury. Like many other people across the entire world, I have spent several months without leaving the house in order to p... -
In these non-poetic times of widespread disenchantment of the world, literature and especially poetry have been given less and less attention, relegated to the enclaves of elites or those who are larg... -
A debate, sometimes public and most often muted, has arisen in the humanities regarding writings, their differences, and their not-always-convergent designs. Claims of stylistic rigor and purification... -
Javier Sologuren (Lima, 1921-2004) is a key figure in twentieth-century Peruvian literature and he masterfully developed his scholarly work in the most diverse aspects. An instinct for poetic creation... -
Inheritance is a reaffirmation of what is assigned to us and a reactivation of its contents through an act of betrayal on the part of the inheritor: to not leave the mandate received intact but to int...
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In 2018, I translated Julianne Pachico’s collection of short stories The Lucky Ones (2017, published in Spanish as Los afortunados by Seix Barral in 2019). The book follows a diverse gro... -
Four years ago I published a book of poems, in one of which the following lines can be read: “Given that I write in a language / I learned, / I need to awaken / when others sleep.” Later, in the same...
