Languages

"Pegasus Autopsy" is one of four winning poems selected by David Tomas Martinez for the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.   Words without Borders · Poem-in-Translation Contest: "Pegasus Autopsy, " by Julio Pazos Barrera Listen above to Bryan Mendoza read his translation of Julio Pazos Barrera's "Pegasus Autopsy"   It’s a spacious chamber. Well lit. A light that refracts the distant...

In this short story by Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro, a selfless man gives himself entirely to his work. I One sunny May afternoon, a little man arrived in the city, and not just the city, but an office on the third floor of the Ministry of Education, in search of an official, a distant relation of his family, who would help him and get him work, was what he’d been told back home. Attired in his best clothes—a white shirt, clean pants, patent leather shoes, and a...

In two poems, Julia Wong Kcomt reflects on what it means to be a Peruvian with Tusán (Chinese) heritage.​ The Red Rooster To Wata, in memoriam Peru dies. Like garlic bulbs this whim of blouses cut so masterfully. The iron windows. Baroque. Relentless. Paint staining my ovaries. Sushi is now the language of the people and my mighty noodles wait in a forgotten pot. Papá told me to detest the Japanese like everyone says to hate Chileans. But with so much love, I find...

Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiles Lima’s oldest life drawing model in this short essay. Rodolfo Muñoz del Río has spent the better part of his life in the nude. Butt-naked. For the past half-century, students at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes have gazed upon him not as a human being, but as a configuration of shadows and proportions: a drawing condemned to sit still for seven to twelve hours a day. A sixty-six-year-old drawing whose...

In this poem, Peruvian writer Doris Moromisato contemplates love and longing in a seaside neighborhood of Lima. Here I say again that I don’t love you while city mist loosens the sky dampens my geraniums. Grounded like a gull on the terrace I recall the sermon at Benares and agree: suffering lives in me. During the festival of San Pedro the fishermen sling their offerings to the sea my eyes fill with rowboats and the sprawl of petals taken by the tide shows me how small vastness...

A Chinese immigrant to Peru refuses to give up tradition in this short story by Siu Kam Wen. When Lou1 Chen, loan shark and owner of a fleet of eighteen urban minibuses, managed to amass his first fifteen million, he had a luxurious mansion built in Monterrico and moved there with his Peruvian wife, their two sons, and his elderly mother. The two-story house measured 2,300 square feet and included a spacious front yard and a backyard with a pool. Two imposing German shepherds guarded the...

Peruvian writer Sui-Yun meditates on sin and sensual pleasure in four short poems. To Eve, my eternal mother To erase my sins I have licked the tip of evil I know Eve did the same our longings ended up sucking at the shafts of trees extracting drop by drop the sap of the apple branch To turn away from evil I’ve crammed my jars full of somber recollections calling to the unknown silks radiating from my body To turn away from evil I’ve added every letter of your body to my...

Cristy, the narrator of Tilsa Otta’s novel The Golden Children of Sexual Alchemy, experiences otherworldly orgasms with her partner: not only do they make her see God, they also give her visions of the future. Her curiosity about this “gift,” its purpose, and how it might properly be deployed prompt her to research the world of erotic spirituality. Here she offers notes from her fieldwork.  Frozen with One Foot in the Air After leaving Cosmos, I make...

A traveler takes to the road in this dreamlike poem by Miguelángel Meza.   Listen to Miguelángel Meza read "Dawn" in the original Mbyá Guaraní. By the streaming of the road I go I enter lift and pass. Black. I pause, see nothing. Wetness.  Black and streaming the road fragments before me. Wet I plunge on, all before me flowing.  The road stowing memories huddles dark under a seed-field of stars. Heavy my forehead. I part thickets of prone...

In this poem, Alba Eiragi Duarte contemplates the ways in which fire both encompasses and transcends the elemental, providing sustenance and companionship. Listen to Alba Eiragi Duarte read "My Fire" in the original Avá Guaraní. At light of dawn I rise and make fire, and dry in nascent fire-gleam the space where dew once pearled.  Joyful, joyful my fire, burning hot for máte to be made, I stoke the embers, prod-stick crackling in the coals.  The yams I...

In this poem by Susy Delgado, an exhausted god lets earth descend into darkness and death. Our First, Original Father is suddenly old tired   worn out he sits   he crouches down he dozes off eyes closed to the soul of the earth and his home It’s getting late they’re blowing already those winds of orphanhood Our First, Original Father has already lowered his arms and he no longer scatters across the rough weather his wisdom his aged breath he no...

In this poem, Alberto Luna seeks answers beyond traditional conceptions of good and evil and the images that give them their power, staking out a spiritual path all his own.   Listen to Alberto Luna read "Serpent" in the original Jopará Guaraní. There is no serpent. I alone plunge my roots and outstretch my branches. I alone am for myself fruit of intense sweetness, I alone, facing myself, make my mouth water and lick my lips. I alone, before myself, beg...

In humorous and reflective brief notes, Laia Jufresa records daily life in quarantine in Edinburgh. My daughter is a doctor. A dragon doctor. I know this because she tells me every day, all day long, and has been doing so for a month, ever since the nurseries closed. Her conviction wavers only occasionally, when she asks: Mamá, where can I find a real dragon? She says this in Spanish, but puts the words “real dragon” in the English order: adjective, noun. When she...

After returning home from gender-affirmation surgery, a patient navigates a new existence where the physical and emotional are laid bare in this poem by Mariana Spada. After ten days in the hospital the apartment is a desolate labyrinth a power outage as you shower in the dark gingerly probing at the new parts of your body the gaping wound and novel brush of flesh-folds in the open air. With no false glow to cover it the remnants of the evening disappear and somewhere in between the...

A man tries to honor his dead lover’s final wish in this short story by Juan Carlos Cortázar. You went back to him. The last months of his life, that’s how he said it, no embellishment. You went back—a year earlier you’d been the one to leave, you’re a piece of shit, you’d shouted—and the two of you made up. If it were HIV, even, he’d have more of a chance, but with this, no, nothing, a few months and that’s it, he said, and you...

In contemplative diary entries, Ricardo Romero records life in a locked-down Buenos Aires. 1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole is hardly the story we need, the law of gravity that prevents our world from dispensing of us), suddenly, then, we discover that making a bed, turning on a stove, regulating the temperature of the...

Mariana Oliver reflects on the intertwined relationship of language and migration in this essay about Turkish writer Emine Özdamar. In my language, tongue means language. The tongue does not have bones: it twists in the direction we twist it in. I sat tongue twisted in the city of Berlin. —Emine Sevgi Özdamar She moved to West Berlin at eighteen to work in one of the factories. Eyes accustomed to the colors of Istanbul; dark, thick hair. Though she wasn’t one for...

Karen Villeda tracks her journey through Eastern Europe in microessays that blend poetry and prose. Micro is the diminutive for something very small or a prefix derived from the Greek μ (mikró), meaning                         “small”:             as in microelectronics, microscope, microcast,             micrococcus,...

Writing from her cramped New York apartment, Jazmina Barrera finds solace in lighthouses, tracing their history and pondering their symbolism in this essay from her collection On Lighthouses. 44° 40’ 36.4” N 124° 4’ 45.9” W Yaquina Head Lighthouse. Brick tower painted white, 28 meters high. Original Fresnel lens, visible at 31 kilometers. Blink pattern: two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off.   Yaquina Head We...

Felipe Restrepo Pombo reflects on his quiet days of COVID-19 quarantine in Bogotá, normally one of the most bustling cities in Latin America. “If I was in hell I would always feel I had a chance of escaping.”  —Francis Bacon, in an interview with David Sylvester A few months ago I was invited to teach a course at a university in Indianapolis. After class I headed for the outskirts of that small American city, where I would be spending the first night...

When he runs into an old friend, Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Hernández is forced to revisit the shocking 1995 murder-suicide of his best friend. They went into Rosario’s house, your father says from the next room, killed Rosi and took Nicolás. It’s the first thing you hear. The voice that wakes you up. The sentence you’ll never be able to forget. For a second, you prefer to think that it’s part of a dream, so you stay completely still beneath...

In this short story by Robert Marcuse, a man attempts to rid himself of his own shadow. When a man looks at his shadow, it’s because he’s thinking about something else: he looks at it without seeing it, lost in thought, and his gaze barely touches it. We’ve lived with our shadows so long that they no longer attract our attention. They’re withdrawn and rather mysterious beings often hiding just behind us, or they peek out from the soles of our shoes. They...

"Tomboy" is one of four winning poems selected by Mónica de la Torre for the Words Without Borders—Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest. Listen to Robin Myers read her translation of Argentinean poet Claudia Masin's "Tomboy" Listen to Claudia Masin read "Tomboy” in the original Argentinean Spanish. I don’t understand how we walk around the world as if there were a single way for each of us, a kind of life stamped into us like...

In this short story by Afro-Puerto Rican author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, a tough preteen girl fights for acceptance and finds unexpected kinship.   1 I've come to the conclusion that purple is the color of secrets. In art class, the teacher insists on teaching us that colors have meanings. Red means passion. White is purity. Green seems to be the color of hope. Nobody speaks of purple but I encounter it so often, accentuating the skin, cheeks, and knees of so many classmates...

In this short lyric piece by Alejandro Zambra, a bed sheet is a blank canvas and a record of family history.   It was before my dad set the house on fire. Fifteen or twenty days before.  There was a closet full of sheets, almost all of them white with red thread at the seams, Italian red. And one light blue set that was mine, patterned with blue letters or treble clefs.  My mother, from the window, her back to me, facing a white sheet; fifteen or twenty days before, back,...

In this short story, Alia Trabucco Zerán spins a tale of class, connection, and human cruelty in Chile.    Neither good nor bad. Neither nice nor unpleasant. Neither short nor long. It was life, period. The cloth wipes the grime. The broom gathers the trash. The water wets the soap. As I already said, the señora, the lady of the house, treated me well. If you ask her, she’ll say she considered me part of the family. Exactly which part I still don’t...

Boyhood friends meet again after years apart, sparking a trip through the narrator’s memory that leads to a forgotten—and harrowing—episode.  Listen to Eduardo Plaza read "Hyenas" in the original Spanish. 1 Miguel Rodewald and I were good friends. We knew each other because his family, who lived in Temuco, used to spend their summers in Coquimbo. When they were kids his father used to rent a house a few blocks from ours, in El Llano. We’d meet, five...

Catalina Mena's manifesto confronts the dilemmas facing women forced to choose between private household duties and public endeavors. Listen to Catalina Mena read "The Head of Household Manifesto" in the original Spanish. And if the Head of Household were to draft her manifesto, it would be in the absence of a form that can hold her. And because this same absence left her adrift. Stamped like a Chilean census form. A form that called the Head of Household a national hero. But that...

A girl of seventeen agrees to marry a gringo on their first date. Nothing in this impulsive start to their marriage hints at the coming misfortunes that will tear them from each other and themselves.    Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Hosea, 4:11   He said: I know you. You used to live in Ch, near the big port—isn’t your name Carla? I told him he was right except for the name, recognizing the same roughness in his accent as those...

Climbing into bed with her raconteuse grandmother, a young woman anxiously expects another of the old lady’s stories of a bygone Santiago. Instead, she discovers a physical deformity that provokes a reflection on the stories our scars tell of us.     My grandmother had no belly button. I found that out one night when I went into her room without knocking. It was late, I’d woken up from a bad dream and, to feel safe, I walked down the hall, thinking I’d get into...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren, a personal friend of Ashbery and translator of his work into Spanish, considers Ashbery's poetics and his legacy vis-à-vis other poets in the US and internationally.   The Voice, the Voices Unlike the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular), poets of the New York School like James Schuyler and John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard. Frank O’Hara was a possible exception, and Schuyler also occasionally declaimed in public...

Panamanian writer Melanie Taylor Herrera looks on as two assassins kill time at a nightclub​.   Two men head for the table in front of the dance floor. They sit down in the aluminum chairs silently and in unison. The man wearing the skintight black shirt orders two drinks. The bar is empty. It’s almost nine on a Wednesday night—a lazy night that slips through the waitresses’ and bartender’s fingers like thick wet sand. The men watch the few...

Panamanian writer Cheri Lewis observes a household inexplicably deluged with infants.   The babies started arriving that summer. I remember the first one so well. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when, in the mirror, I spotted the reflection of a shadow making its way down the hall. I leaned out the door and saw a baby, naked and covered in dirt. He crawled right down the center of the living room and headed straight for my sister, who was sitting on the couch, reading a book....

An anxious woman awaits her lover in Panamanian writer Carlos Oriel Wynter Melo’s exploration of jealousy and doubt​ If you look at the park head on, stare straight at it, look with more than your eyes, imagining it or linking it to a memory, you’ll see a tunnel of trees that ends in a hole of light. If your gaze is colored by some melancholy thought, that spot of light might suggest several interpretations. One possibility is that everything comes to an end. On the...

In this short story, Abilio Estévez's narrator wades into reminiscences of the murky, weed-choked waters of his adolescence in Cuba and an indelible experience with an older friend.   1 This is the story of a small happiness that, for some inexplicable reason, occurred the day I turned sixteen. Now, after such a long time, I can’t be sure if what took place had anything to do with my birthday. In any case it undoubtedly was a Sunday, gray and humid, because I...

In this homage to Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec sends a novelist, an essayist, and a theologian on a pilgrimage to the great writer’s final resting place in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.   Three Argentineans are in Paris one Sunday in spring. They walk through its empty streets as if they had nothing else to do that morning. They think of their families, of the people they’ve momentarily left behind, and of their imminent return to routine: each...

In this 2014 essay, Marcelo Cohen reflects back on decades as a translator in Spain and the complex relationship between translation, exile, and identity.   This text takes as its starting point another that I wrote once for a talk on exile and Argentine literature. But don’t think I’m simply trying to make things easier on myself. Remembering Joyce’s famous motto, “silence, exile, and cunning,” I briefly considered as a title for this chronicle: "On the...

In this essay, literary and cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo takes on the longstanding myth that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America.   Among the many commonplaces about Buenos Aires, I’ll mention but two. The first panders to the Argentinean ego and is especially inaccurate: Buenos Aires resembles Paris. The second was a criticism that could be heard for decades from the mouths of these same Argentineans who would drive themselves into a frenzy imagining themselves heirs of...

A retiree from one of Argentina’s state-owned companies finds his garden engulfed by the sea one day in this story from recently rediscovered mid-century writer Sara Gallardo​. Once upon a time there was a pensioner with a garden in Lanús. He had been head of personnel at a state-owned company. His garden was the admiration and envy of all Lanús. That’s a zone that, as everyone knows, lacks water two days out of three. The neighborhood writes notes of...

In this excerpt from her first-ever book-length translation into English, Borges contemporary Norah Lange seeks to cast a light onto the enigma of her three mysterious neighbors’ identities.    Despite their excuses, I tried many times to convince them of how easy and convenient it would be for them to communicate, and even call for help, if they had a telephone. “The afternoon I saw you at the post office, it was reassuring to know I could call home and ask someone...

Marco Avilés grapples with questions of difference and discrimination for immigrants in Peru and the US in this essay from his book No soy tu cholo, published in Peru by Debate, an imprint of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. An earlier version appeared originally in Ojo Publico. An American couple relocated to Lima and opened a hamburger joint in one of the city’s culinary hotspots: the formidable Calle Dante, in Surquillo, a neighborhood full of...

A family must learn to adapt when their house takes on a life of its own in this playful homage to Julio Cortázar by Mexican author Yuri Herrera, winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.   &°°° couldn’t be happier. @°°° couldn’t be happier. The twins *~ and #~ couldn’t be happier. Roanoke, the dog, was less enthusiastic, but agreed to lie in a corner of the laundry room, which elegantly hollowed out a spot as...

One of the founding members of the FARC, known as “Sergeant Pascuas,” recalls the origins of the guerrilla movement in the “independent republics,” areas in rural Colombia held by Marxist peasant guerrillas in the 1950s in the aftermath of La Violencia, which lasted from 1948 to 1958. Conservative politicians believed these areas needed to be brought into line with the rest of the country through military force. After an amnesty of 1953, figures such as Juan Cruz...

The poetry of Vito Apushana is a composed of several intersections: between oral and written literatures, between Spanish and Wayuunaiki, between the Wayuu people and Colombian society at large. Here, we present his poetry in translation from the Spanish alongside the same poem in Wayuunaiki. WAYUU (II) We are silent joy - the toiling of ants- - the leaping of rabbits- We are placid sadness - the curlew's gaze- - the bat's dream- We are life, this way - the child...

Piedad Bonnett reads "Kitchen" ("Cocina") in the original Spanish.   Cocina                         Para Ma. Victoria. Una cocina puede ser el mundo, un desierto, un lugar para llorar. Estábamos ahí: dos madres conversando en voz muy baja como si hubiera niños durmiendo en las alcobas. Pero no había nadie. Sólo la resonancia del...

The poetry of Fredy Chicangana straddles two languages: Spanish and Quechua. Here, we present his poetry in translation from the Spanish alongside the same poem in Quechua.   BIRD SPIRIT These songs to Mother Earth in a major key are whispers that come from distant forests, those furtive words that yearn to be a droplet in the human heart. They're gentle tones, as if they were telling us: "We come in silence along the moist paths of life, the grass of hope greets us between night...

Bubblegum and Baldy, lackeys for two fraternal gang leaders in gritty Medellín, forge a bond over salsa music and try to find themselves. Baldy’s real name was Arcadio and no one ever knew Bubblegum’s. They were of different ages, races, backgrounds, and temperaments, but they were united by salsa: both were true fanatics and their conversations and even their lives revolved around it. I remember the day the song “Juanito Alimaña” was first played...

Luck of the draw spares one young man while simultaneously condemning his friend to a tragic fate in this short story by Juan Gabriel Vásquez.   Ernesto Wolf. In the class list our surnames were neighbors, because after mine there don’t tend to be too many surnames in Colombia (unless it’s a foreign one or some curiosity: Yáñez or Zapata, Yammara or Zúñiga). The day of the lottery that would or would not send us into the army,...

Reyes offers an acute portrait of the agonies of maternity and the search for our origins in this tale revolving around Spanish mother Belén and her adopted Colombian son, Federico.  Where do babies come from? From desire, she wanted to tell him, as they read aloud, like they did every night: he leaning over the illustrations, with his head of black pompoms so close to her arm, and she thinking how she had imagined him differently. She was going to name her Paloma, she...

In this short story by Juan Álvarez, a young man, forced to confront his Uncle Javier's violence, recounts its effect on his family.   Who has heard my voices? Is it Clotaldo? —Life is a Dream, Calderón de la Barca   I never wanted to sock you in the face, Javier, let’s just get that clear. Things happened the way they did because you left me no choice. Two plus two is four, and four plus two is six, simple as that, and if I’m...

In this excerpt from his novel An Orphan World, Giuseppe Caputo explores the love between a father and son in the midst of poverty, as well as questions surrounding violence and homosexuality.   A butterfly flew down to a dark place; all beautifully colored it seemed; it was hard to tell. MAROSA DI GIORGIO   One night, many moons ago, my father gave me a star. We lived on the breadline, as we do now, in a sad house with next to no furniture. And since the house...

In this short story by Óscar Collazos, two brothers whose parents consider them beyond redemption bond over unspeakable acts and their communal rebellion.   Alberto returned home and went to his room without saying a word, evading Mom’s eyes (What are you doing home? I thought you went to Confession?) and avoiding her questions. Then I thought: Something must have happened to him. I chose to continue on with the sports page, distracting myself by...

Claire, recently returned to Bogotá after years living abroad, visits The House of Beauty in the city’s posh Zona Rosa and is instantly reminded of everything she hates about Bogotá’s racial and class divisions.   1 I hate artificial nails in outlandish colors, fake-blonde hair, cool silk blouses, and diamond earrings at four in the afternoon. Never before have so many women looked like transvestites, or like prostitutes dressing up as good...

A private history of Tres Cruces, Montevideo's main bus terminal where every day thousands of strangers collide, converse, grow bored and even, sometimes, get hitched. Why does Mom always say we shouldn't talk to strangers?   The woman who serves coffee in Montevideo’s central bus station is good at talking to strangers. “Sometimes it’s easier chatting with someone you don’t know,” says Raquel Quirque, a stranger to me, and one with no less than...

Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez examines the violence of urban Guatemala through the anecdotes of its taxi drivers, finding that where they've been is less telling than where they are no longer willing to go.   One asks the questions and the taxi driver responds. After many years of taking taxis, I know that although there are some more inclined to chatter than others, no taxi driver can resist talking about his job. And what does his job involve? Does it involve...

The following excerpt is from Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández's Roza tumba quema, the story of a peasant who dares become a guerrillera at a young age, and the daughters she will have to raise, protect, push forward during constant rural turmoil. The story is inspired by events surrounding the civil war in El Salvador, which raged from 1980 to 1992.   When she turned fourteen, three men came for her at her maternal grandmother's house, with...

I didn't understand what it meant to be a man. If in the past I thought that it was enough to have genitals dangling between one's legs, now I began to doubt. I doubted, because Uncle Marcelo's did dangle but nobody in the village considered him a man. Then would the perfect male be one who fathered children? "Of course not," I answered myself. My grandfather fulfilled that function and, in the opinion of my grandmother, he shouldn't be considered a man because he had shown...

That it is ridiculous to speak of joy that “the promised land” does not exist that our rage will find no calm. All this I know. —Reinaldo Arenas   Yes, I introduced them, but that was all. Everything that happened afterward, what they said, I swear it’s not true, sugar. Úrsula was on the other side of the tracks when I met Tomás, so it was me he saw first. He looked at me and said, Going North? We became traveling companions, and—this...

          I That sturdy show time still surprises, assaults, unsettles words. All was not said nor did you then dress your gaze in blue. All was not said, the rain a kind of tango. It was dawn.                                                             II             ...

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are...

Dreadful is the condition of the castaway better schooled in gastrosophy than shipwreckology. Predisposed to survive on what lies within my reach and in my reportoire, should I long for oven-roasted oysters with zucchini, a rock lobster with fresh favas, striped bass with celery, cabbage, and vinegar, red mullet filets with rosemary cream, breaded mullet with oysters, even a little dish of oysters Girardet, what materials do I have to attain an acceptable result? Neither wine for deglazing...

Alejandro Saravia charts the life and death of a rookie dealer on the mean streets of Montreal on a corner on avenue Decelles a Caribbean man finds an abandoned mattress where he can sleep and dream that he speaks French and English that he wears the best brands that he owns 24-karat gold bracelets that he has women to spare and drives a brand-new Mercedes drawn by the myth of the streets of gold Santiago Nasar arrives on rue Barclay and becomes a pusher in his pocket the niveous ecstasy...

José Ignacio Valenzuela’s distrustful woman debates whether she ought to allow a stranger into her home.       Characters WOMAN MAN NEWSCASTER (voiceover) A living room with a small sofa, a television set switched on, and a door. There’s an old- fashioned phone beside the TV. We hear the sound of rainstorm: thunder and lightning. A woman is sitting on the sofa watching the TV. VOICEOVER OF THE NEWSCASTER  The police have issued no statements...

Miguel Alcantud and Santiago Molero present the mysterious call-and-response of a nameless man and the woman who appears to be holding him captive.    Characters HIM HER The room appears to be a bedroom but with a bit of everything thrown in. It looks like a kind of basement area or shed, although it is well set up. There is a bed, a piece of low furniture that could be a dresser or chest of drawers, and a chair. As the audience enters a man can be seen...

Gabriela Wiener finds romantic safety in numbers.  I never got the knack of fidelity. Ever since I first experienced pleasure outside the four walls of our tacky bathroom, I’ve continually violated the most sacred pacts of love. At first I put this down to my lack of character or inability to assert my desires in relation to an Other, to have some coherence in my life. How could I enjoy properly transgressive sex without sacrificing Sunday movie nights and breakfasts in bed? How...

Machos in the Metro I’m always aware of who’s around me in the metro. For two reasons. One is that I like to snap pics of hot guys without them realizing. I pretend to be texting or browsing Facebook, but I’m actually capturing portraits of raw masculinity: an unshaven square jaw, a bulge at the crotch of some sweatpants, the biceps of a guy holding onto the pole when the car starts to slow down. And it’s an even bigger turn-on because they’re not aware of my...

stone over stone s i l e n c e   il pleut aujourd’hui au Fort Chambly il pleut exactement comme il pleuvait il y a 400 ans il pleut comme il pleuvait il y a 1 400 ans il pleut comme il pleuvait il y a 11 400 ans 11 400 années de pluie as rain falls this afternoon a man in wet clothes stares at stone over stone the low clouds, the rain in s i l e n c e   Louis XVI reinaba en Francia en Nueva Francia llovía sobre las piedras y los bosques sobre la piel del...

the flowers of war open at night on boulevard Saint-Laurent a line from Lorca a word from Castellanos a body unharmed by the siege of Sarajevo a bomb that didn’t explode in Hanoi or Baghdad and the sweet lips of women in winter are enough to make dawn bear fruit on this corner on boulevard Saint-Laurent best if you don’t know who you are best if you don’t know where you’re from best if you don’t know where you’re going the boulevard’s flowers in...

a man standing on the tracks stares at a train as it advances with a moan of metal and night the iron moves the blind diesel thrusts the siren wails the feverish headlight lights up and splits the chest of the earth and forest but the man stays still before the apparatus still ten meters left and he just stares and stares at the invention that will chop him split him shatter him he lacks no strength or ability     to thrust his body to one side he can jump run dodge save...

Mexican-Canadian author Martha Batiz tells an extraordinary story about a mother and her ill-fated septuplet daughters.   Across the entire region, people spoke about Doña Toña’s multiple births for weeks. Seven strong and healthy baby girls had issued from their mother’s swollen belly, screaming at the top of their lungs. No sooner had Doña Toña finished breastfeeding the lot of them than a ravenous appetite roared again in those who were...

Herson Tissert Pérez reads “Project DreamReal.”  1 The individual who greeted me in the building’s lobby didn’t much resemble the one pictured in the advertising leaflets. He seemed less physically imposing, and his smile, cordial and welcoming in the leaflets, now struck me as that of a man with some kind of secret to conceal. Nevertheless, my excitement was so great that I followed him unhesitatingly down a network of hallways and staircases until,...

“I don’t like ballet,” the doctor admitted. “OK,” Nicanor said, “but it’s different with me. It’s not that I don’t like sports, it’s that they don’t make any sense to me. Like I wouldn’t understand a salmon explaining why it has to migrate. I just don’t get a stadium full of people screaming with enthusiasm or outrage about eight guys who bang a leather ball around better than the other eight.”...

To my love, the Tramontana wind that shook my life forever. A book is a bottle flung into the sea. I want my books to reach the bleeding hands of  castaways. —Samuel Feijóo I found an old mining asteroid of no interest to anyone, rented it for a few Federation kopeks, and built a bar that matches your eyes, though you’re not here. I searched through the tangle of collapsing tunnels until I came upon exactly the right space, its acoustics perfect for your voice. I...

For Erelvis Jiménez and Roberto Armas Saladrigas This exquisite dessert, so emblematic of our era of space conquest, dates back to the 2103 recipe by Iljon Tichy, though some detractors of the celebrated cosmonaut refuse to accept this theory on the grounds that there’s no mention of the now-legendary delicacy in any of the many volumes of Tichy’s well-known Star Diaries. Great is human envy . . . and extraterrestrial envy is even greater. What remains undisputed...

For Elisú   I walk into the bank, check in hand, and ask a security guard whether I can cash it. He takes my question to another man who might be a plainclothes guard, then comes back to tell me 1) that I can indeed cash my check at this branch, and 2) that the computer connections have been going down a lot today. I don’t know exactly what this means in technical terms, but I soon see the practical result: slow at the best of times, the bank is putting its full capacity...

Years ago, there was a doctor who lived in our town, a wealthy widower. The only family he had left was a beautiful daughter, blond as beer, named Cleis. He had a bad heart and was worried that he’d die and leave his little girl all alone, so he married his housekeeper, a respectable widow who had two daughters named Lotta and Regan, and who seemed very fond of Cleis. I knew that scheming bitch didn’t love Cleis. Far from it. She hated the poor girl and was just faking it. But...

Father traded his life savings for this hole in the waste-recycling compartment. Of course there’s not much space. Anela, Soulness, and I are getting cramped arms and stiff necks, we’re steeping in each other’s hot breath. But we couldn’t have asked for more from our old man. Trembling, he placed the two mega-credits in the spaceport attendant’s gloved hands. He trembled because he feared our trip would be thwarted and we’d have no chance at a second...

“where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be.” —Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus   It is one of those mornings when it’s hard for her to get out from under the sheets, as if her body weighed more than usual. Tons weighing down her arms and each of the hairs on her legs. She rubs her right eye with three slow swipes of the hand, her elbow grazing her husband’s back. He barely stirs; his body, sunk into the mattress, hardly...

Overwhelmed by the weight of oblivion, she plunged one leg into the bathtub full of warm water, flowers and leaves that chased away the pain living inside her . . . fortunately, the herbal bath relieved her aching body and the sores spreading across her skin.   Still standing there with one leg navigating the tiny ocean she had designed at the end of the bedroom, she caught a glimpse of the world lying in wait outside her window. Her other leg hung suspended in the surrounding cold; a...

Bilbao rose to meet them, swathed in stagnant drizzle. At the door to the train station, the old woman opened her umbrella and stepped outside, with the girl walking snug against her body. The damp fog blurred the outlines of the city. Objects appeared menacingly distant, and the people seemed to be walking an inch off the ground. The old woman tied her black kerchief under her chin without dropping the basket hung over her arm. She was dressed in an old village woman’s prim mourning...

This is the third installment in a three-part fiction serial of Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito's short story "Lessons for a Boy Who Arrived Late," translated by Valerie Miles. You can read the first installment here and the second installment here.   5. The day the farming truck crushed Papá’s car the hunting had been bountiful; the marmalade jar had struck and stirred up the tight body of an earthworm colony. We trapped at least fifty of them but I had to...

3 I hated how Margarita cracked her knuckles when it was her turn to play the piano. She knew the sound of cracked nuts when she laced her fingers together and twisted them triggered a slight nervous twitch I wasn’t able to conceal. But it wasn’t only to bother me that she popped her joints like snail shells underfoot; in fact, she meant it as a reminder of how much happier both of us were outdoors and not underneath that roof. But to maintain the serene course of things,...

  Wilfredo Inuma is the chief of an indigenous Amazonian community. But above all, he is the guardian of the lavatory. Wilfredo founded the Shipibo community of Bena Gema twelve years ago, together with 150 families fleeing the misery of the jungle. They settled in the outskirts of the city of Pucallpa, capital of the Peruvian region of Ucayali. They wanted schools for their children. And jobs. Wilfredo has worked guarding oil company facilitiess against attacks by locals. He has...

The fat man was interesting. A tourist, of course, who had only come to Qoyllur Rit’i to rubberneck. Zimm had seen him on previous days down on the plain below the ice, walking around the campsites set up most recently on the Sinakara depression. There was no mistaking his shape; Zimm figured he must weigh at least three hundred pounds, which ruled him out as a typical festival pilgrim. Plus, the fat man hadn’t brought altar candles with him up to the still night-darkened ice,...

On the first attempt, the trigger jammed. The prisoner wasn’t afraid, and in fact felt a sort of indifference that seemed, in light of the brutality of the instant, to have been there all along, his whole life, quietly lurking behind each of his experiences as though awaiting the ideal moment to surface. Behind him, the footsteps of the soldier, his executioner, rang out: rapid-fire, ready to finish off the job. Then the cold of the steel touched the back of his head for the second...

“We die from the moment we’re born, but only say we die when we’ve reached the end of that process, and sometimes that end lasts an awfully long time.” Thomas Bernhard, Breath Mariana Speranza! It’s been four years since I last heard my name. I’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. Someone knocks on the door three times. The last time I heard it was on a Thursday, four years ago, as I was leaving the office. It was my last day of work. I resigned. I...

I cut my sister’s hair today the locks fell like huge tears against the baseboards I swept it up and tossed it in the trash All that dead hair has filled my dreams One day I dreamt of dead hair  The strands all joined back together They ganged up and demanded I account for my sad deed I was silent, dumbstruck The dead hair insisted: Are you there? Why did you butcher me? I gathered up the hair and my sister’s face appeared floating in the distance Why did you throw my hair...

1 We sensed that a shadow had caressed the door, but it couldn’t be the cat. My sister Candelaria was the first to notice it. She stopped playing the piano nearly at the same time. I had been observing a colossal painting that hung on the wall of the salon, feeling somnolent from the lesson’s stammering repetition. The painting was of a nude woman reclining beside a grotto, scarcely veiled by the modesty of her hair, one of her hands fallen to her side, like a leaf. I found it...

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth....

The recording and transcript below make up one example of the oral storytelling traditions of Peru, this one from the Tikuna, the most numerous tribe in the Amazon. The recording is made in the Tikuna language. José Fernando Muratú, narrator. 1Nguxtapax went out hunting; it was his second time going out hunting. When he came back from the hunt the kids were bathing in the ravine. 2“Nguxtapax tütütü ãῧbrikari tütütü,...

So it all boils down to this. A whole morning seeing my face and Paulo’s on the television screen. Ten reporters camped out at the entrance to the building. Three policemen on phone-tap duty, reading the soccer pages in the dining room. They might get in touch at any moment. Waiting is all that’s left for me. I’ve called Lucía to tell her that, obviously, I won’t be doing the program today. She started to cry. This can’t be happening to you, she...

Frail before the squalor             squalor being a feeble answer the everyday self gives its own abjections it surprises me to be in a city whose name like the humidity that clings to its ancient walls or like its tubercular pigeons means nothing to me any more than being inside its plastic image as I sink into La Defense or lose myself in the ardor of its past      oh the purity the freshness of withered things...

Equipped with “the rope of the dead,” Sexographies author Gabriela Wiener turns her sights on a different kind of trip, where physical agony is the ticket to expanded consciousness.​ Audio courtesy of Literatura Sonora. We look like funerary bundles dug out of our graves. There are ten or twelve people sitting on the room’s floor, in a circle and in the dark. The healer is at the center. He is smoking a mapacho—tobacco typically found in the...

I grew up in a country at war. I still remember clearly a month in 1990 in which twelve bombs exploded near my house in Lima, one every two or three days. Peru was living through its worst years of violence, and the Shining Path—the dangerous terrorist group that controlled a large part of the Andean region—had succeeded in descending from the mountains to the coast, and was very close to dealing the final blow. Lima, at the edge of the sea, was preparing for a siege by the...

Downstairs my dad’s real upset and he says when he gets his hands on those people he’s going to beat the crap out of them. My mom and María Fe are crying and going on about how could something like this have happened. Apparently someone’s stolen Dieguito’s body, his grave has been desiccated or something like that. I’m not allowed to go downstairs myself because they say I’m too small, but I know loads of things and I’m sure they’re...

What’s real isn’t this thing or that thing my presents that you gave away once they lost the weight and sheen of being given and became no more than fragile objects. What’s real isn’t our clumsy lies or the bodies of others we barely dare to touch. Nor is it doubt—it can’t be doubt— nor can it be hatred, fear, fatigue. My bet is that what’s real is infinitely beautiful. There is a false time set in motion when we fall, but true time is the...

Then my father asks what my plans are and I make the mistake of telling him that Ignacio’s girlfriend is coming by so we can go for lunch. “And he’s not going?” Dad asks. “He’s away,” I say. He says nothing. I struggle to picture him on the other end of the line. “Dad?” I ask, hearing him grunt. “Don’t you go fooling around with her,” he says. I didn’t expect this from him, let alone in these terms....

The boy looked at them again, though without any sign of recognition or comprehension. Then his eyes scrunched closed, his mouth opened, and he howled until he had no more air in his lungs. His face seemed to relax and soften then. His lips parted as his last breath was puffed through his throat and exhaled gently through the clenched teeth. —Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing” I Closing the book of short stories, I get up from the armchair and go into Isabel's...

All Sor Juana scholars differ on something. Differ among themselves. Differ on something, usually everything. For example The reasons Sor Juana took the veil. The reasons Sor Juana wrote the Carta Atenagórica. The reasons Sor Juana finally recanted. Or also, for example: The real last name of Sor Juana. The real meaning of “Primero sueño.” The real nature of her relationship with the Marquesa de Paredes alias Lysi. Mainly this: all Sor Juana scholars tend to...