Essay
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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... -
Austin, TX, February 8, 1981. Haroldo de Campos took the mescaline of himself. He was coming out of a bender on Lavaca Street, where Texan poets praised him with ganha whistles. Then, after exh... -
Preceded by a series of important female voices like Salomé Ureña and Camila Henríquez Ureña, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Hilma Contreras and Jeannette Miller, Ángela Hernández Núñez is one of the most... -
For decades, Mario Vargas Llosa has been an icon for authors writing in Spanish. Indeed, many of us have spent time with—better put, plunged into—his novels and collections of essays, trying to elucid... -
If I had all the time in the world and a few blank pages, I could write a book called Lexicon of My Fondnesses and Habits, inspired by the poet Ida Vitale. -
Every now and then, the act of writing implies accepting that certain physical ailments were only diseases of the spirit and the word. As Susan Sontag points out in Illness as Metaphor, illne... -
“Sinking and stillness.” That’s what Ida suspects we need “to grow a bit of root.” Groundward deep in the soil, as translators we move into her poetry: calm, soft, mostly persistent. The thing about I... -
In her 2001 selection of Latin American women poets, Idea Vilariño complained that anthologies of Spanish American poetry have “utterly ignored writing by women,” for far too long and that even some o... -
If we were to believe that those conceited little people every single day on primetime TV are the ones that move history forward, a good part of our heritage would be incomprehensible. But the bad fic...
