from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin
translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: … Read More »

Mat Chiappe
translated by Anna Hardin

Mario Bellatin once said to me: “I don’t want to go to Japan.” I don’t know if we went on talking about something else or what happened, but I never got a better explanation. And so, when I was presented with the opportunity to interview him specifically about the relationship between lo japonés and his literature, I decided the most important thing for me was a response to that statement. I prepared a long list of other questions (as you’ll see, all useless), dressed as seriously as I could, stowed my computer in my backpack, and took the metro to his house. I rang the doorbell and waited until, from the other end of a long hallway, the author, filmmaker, lecturer, and translator appeared.

“Hello, Mat,” he said, holding back his dogs, “come … Read More »

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 »