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It wasn't his cough reaching me from the inner cells across the dark, narrow hall that struck my interest more than the slamming of a door or the resonating ring of a pot falling on the hard floor. Rather, it is what followed that changed the sense of the trivial event and imbued it with meaning. Shortly after the coughs, sharp and successive, emerged from the heart of the hall, I was coincidently afflicted by my own coughing fit—less harsh though, and just about over when two...

Fatima did not capture my attention simply because she was a beggar-child. Alas, I was rather accustomed, in spite of myself, to the sight of children begging, pestering passersby in alleyways and on streets, reminding me each time how vile the taste of life could be. But something in Fatima, who could not have been more than ten years old, I thought, crippled my thinking and provoked my emotions, and each time I met her, or when she came to my office, I felt the eruption of a muted...

Your cooing wears me out at night— so wear me out. Like wine in the odes, you go on cooing and leave me what moves horses to tears, what weighs birds down with more wings, what singing follows Your coo is a cradle kept from rocking cornered by absence. Is the tree of the heart enough If our wind was shattered and we too were shattered with the wind? Is the tree of the heart made of our blood, or mirage? A question seduces me shooting star by shooting star a flower a flower or two numb...

If you believe my grandmother's version of the story, then her mother-my great-grandmother Rose Garden-must have been fifty years old when she finally decided to live with "Black Anees" under one roof. And all of the stories agree-that is, the stories of the neighbors, which my grandmother heard when she got older-that Rose Garden was beautiful, in addition to having remained a strange and puzzling character to the women in the Saa'i quarter (I'll leave aside for now speaking...

Author's note Ernesto Sábato's novel Abaddón el exterminador (1974) includes a dense epistolary chapter addressed to a virtual fellow writer, which begins "Dear, distant young man..." This response (published March 20, 1984, in the Romanian literary monthly Vatra) borrows ideas, themes, and even expressions from that and other novels by Ernesto Sábato, using them as references for a publicly declared solidarity. But the "open letter" to...

Where I used to dwell in my autumn, with my rags and I say dwelled because I felt alive inside there as never before. Where I used to inhabit tremulous, subtle and I was recognized by my sinews and my veins and by the air that traveled in and out your lungs. There, down in your bloodstream and within your thoughts that host now another guest, is there not left a remnant of sorrow? not even some ashes? written in jail in Cuba in the summer of 2003

I don't want anyone coming around to save me So, whoever is sending me those nice thoughts, those smug little messages, --take it elsewhere. Cut off the oxygen now. I don't want to suffer the agony of the mask. And that black paint from the stone path is not going to hide my fatigue nor my headstrong, parsimonious way of putting up with it. The gauze, the tight gauze, saves just the burns on the surface of my skin So there is nothing to do about the...

It loved to happen. -Marcus Aurelius (Written over the doorway to Seymour and Buddy Glass's bedroom in J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey) He had always heard that to name disasters was sure to make them happen. And now, once again, the Jornal de Angola was announcing an imminent South African invasion. Every week the same announcement was repeated with absolute certainty along with irrefutable evidence, logistical facts and government statements. Nevertheless, despite the fact...

The sun reflects off the asphalt. For the hundredth time, Ishmael shades his eyes with his hand to his visor, and he sees the truck. "Five!" calls out the amarillo.1 The couple climbs on, the old woman, the girl, and Ishmael, in that order. The old red Ford displays, thanks to its owner's inspiration, a faked coat of arms of the Transportation Ministry: a white headed eagle lifted from the Harley-Davidson trademark emblem. Rather than hunting for himself, the eagle is snatching...

They'll be free from the gramophone's pain, its torture from the rub and the needles. Chaste, they'll not know the sin of singing a capella while hungry caught between the farce and the fair. The men who stay at home humming soft melodies will acquire wisdom. A fortunate life, serene happiness will be theirs and their children's. As light as ash. As clear as eternity. For the next poem in this sequence, please click here.

In February, during the Book Fair, my first novel was published. It merited two reviews, one in the May-June issue of El Caimán Barbudo, and the other in La Gaceta of July-August. The first was wary: the second frankly cryptic. I will cite one typical excerpt. "Nosotros los impotentes is, then, genesis and epiphany. The discursive continuum flows without stumbling, meandering from the initial spell to a sudden surprise, and at the end of the eternal adventure of reading, to the...

Mom and I are alone once again the same as it was at the end of the forties. Alone, in a house that's not our own, we tell each other last night's dreams (in hers two old people are always crying in mine I've just missed a train, a plane or maybe a horse-drawn carriage.) Alone, my mother and I bereft of Dad's protection, who did not, is not and won't ever come back and then too because her youngest son lives in another country and my oldest daughter has...

The one that's out there in the street, out there in the country, the rough and vehement tyranny, that governs my life as a citizen that one will pass because it punishes my body, but does not have neither the agent nor the means to touch my spirit. But, listen to me well, Bertha, from your scent from your scent that presides over my memory from your last kisses from certain conversations that are now only echoes from that high security imposed by my own private...

Why do I have to die, Adelaida, in this jungle where I myself fed the wild animals where I hear even my own voice in the awful chorus of the street. Why here where we wanted trees but ended up with vines where we dreamt rivers but woke up sick in the middle of swamps, in this place which we entered like innocent, foolish children into a trap, into the quicksand with its cellophane banner that we tore apart applauding the swindlers. Why do I have to die not in...

To you, my friend Spartan, Sofia said to Sandra, reminding her of snowbound icy Moscow where she was trained as a StalinistFidelistaSpartan in long lines at thirty below zero with ever-enraged watchmen and the smell of booze but with professors who were scholarly and stifflyaffectionate, with nice fat wives who only ever smiled after knowing you for a long time because they don't trust anyone, and Sandra had come from Cuba so trusting and Spartan to begin with, having spent two years...

Beneath the shade of a tamarind tree in bloom My father was smoking under the tamarind tree while the women skinned the animals and peeled the cassava. Poor thing. I see him getting a breath of fresh air under the tree, a tree overshadowing the whole yard with its eight-meter-thick trunk and the small tamarinds flowering on its branches, its frond cooling and shading the property, its dense, brilliant green foliage marking its territory from twenty-five meters high, the extent of its...

I At ten o'clock on a fine sunny morning I went out for a stroll and, as luck would have it, ran into Marina in front of the big department stores in the city center. My friend was wearing a magnificent gray dress I'd bought for her from a band of gypsy women during a trip to Tashkent. It was probably the finest item in her wardrobe and suited her marvelously. I would never have dreamed that it actually was made in Tashkent. But I was the one to discover the real label beneath a...

Should Americans read more world literature to rip away the blinders we so often wear when it comes to those who are "not like us"? "Yes" is the quick answer, the answer that salves our collective conscience, but it is that word should that has begun to bother me. Should has not gathered as many dedicated readers of works in translation as, well, as it should have. The proof is in the numbers. In the April 23 edition of the New York Times, an article by Dinitia Smith on PEN World...

"Herr Rudolf! Wait a minute." The caretaker's old wife straightened up, dropped her rag into her bucket, and limped over to the stairs. Herr Rudolf stopped and removed his tasseled hat. The snow on his shoes was melting. As a man with both a social conscience and a vague and confused attitude to professional cleaning ladies, the puddle forming around his feet made him feel very ill at ease. "Good day, Frau Simmes." Herr Rudolf tried to smile. "Good day." The caretaker's wife...

Patrik Ouředník's forthcoming novel imagines one of the most striking phenomena of the nineteenth century: the founding of "free" settlements in North and South America by Europeans aspiring to a "brighter tomorrow." These literally hundreds of utopian experiments had one trait in common-the rejection of both social and political revolution as advocated by communists, as well as by socialist and social Catholic reformers. The book, to be published in the fall in Prague and...

After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved. The Hamster Lovers' Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd. They proposed that the tax be recalculated in accordance with an animal's surface area. The tax agency accepted this compromise, but then chose to avoid the term "surface area," which might have been construed as...

The day had advanced resolutely into evening. He returned to his hotel, anticipating an early departure in the morning; once in his room, he stretched out on the bed. Outside, blackest night. He rose to drink from the faucet. Unable to imagine falling back to sleep, he took a seat on the floor beside the bed, switched on the lamp, took out his wallet, and drew from it his plane ticket and Nawal's photograph. Laughable as it seemed to him, he found her image had become more...

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), the Alexandrian Greek poet whose poetry dazzled E. M. Forster and cast a haunting, luminous glow over Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, left us some of the most outspoken homoerotic poems. They bristle with desire, with the anguish of desire, and desire recollected in tranquility. Yet, for all their candor, many of these poems are shot through with something far more poignant than desire: regret: regret for love lost, for loves that could have been...

"German Dolls" takes Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to Berlin. It is a text about memories--false and inaccurate, as memories always are--and how they interfere with the places we inhabit, the places we best know by getting lost in them (in the sense of choosing to vanish into them). Pessoa grew up in Durban and wrote his first poems in English. Apart from two trips from Portugal to South Africa, he rarely traveled, and so far as I know was never in Berlin. But his invention...

Hameed, who had yet to learn the nickname by which he would be known for the rest of his life, entered the house, which emitted a fresh country scent. With his foot, as usual, he shoved open the heavy door, which was fashioned of walnut and decorated with large, broad-headed nails. Only at night was it closed by a bolt with protruding teeth. Verdigris had spread across this till its edges looked bright green. He climbed a few steps, making his way to the two small rooms over the entryway...