Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. … Read More »

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: … Read More »

Iosi Havilio
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

And in the middle of the day came the night . . . Down the hill, all made of shadows, the Protagonist strides along the paving stones, midway between the cordon and the buildings, left, right, left. The past approaches and he gives in to it: all those moments of afternoon and freedom festering in the open air, consuming down the block, amid zombies and doormen. Nearer by, businesses, those tender galaxies of cheap hankerings, of good rates, of infinite love for the craft, record shops, discount stores, lottery ticket sellers, lingerie boutiques, all crammed together, embracing him to recall those aimless hours . . . unhurried, unhurried, ly: the syndicalist girlfriend with a satellite phone, the boy with the acid feet, the ardent interlocking of tall glasses wet with Criadores whisky, the … Read More »