Paola Cortés Rocca on Bruno Dubner’s Las Muertas (The Dead)
translated by Jennifer Croft

1. Images are wily: they don’t lay out facts, don’t make any cases. They’re indolent and superficial: they would have us believe that the world is what we see, and that it’s just fine as it is already. They reside as far away as possible from Comprehension, which begins where we resist appearances and first glances.

2. “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” said Susan Sontag. Photographic discourse is elegiac and crepuscular: it not only cherishes the past, but also converts into past everything it touches. Salvaging it, damning it, protecting it, asphyxiating it. Photography is an overprotective mother, sweet and terrifying. A melancholy lady in eternal agony.

3. In the new regime of technology dominated by the digital, certain characteristics … Read More »

Pola Oloixarac
translated by Maxine Swann

The living and the dead at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand in hand
Virgil, The Aeneid, VIII 483-88

In rock caves like these, Cicero reports (Aristotle confirms) the obscure metaphysics of the Etruscan pirates. Their domination spanned the Tyrrhenian Sea up to the Cisalpine Gaul as far as Alalia and the Latium, before the coalition of Carthage; Herodotus mentions that “their ships brandished enormous golden spiders or gigantic octopuses.” They secured the ships to rocky formations of alum, remnants of the marine floor elevated to the surface that was man’s; then they descended with ropes into the caves turned tombs.

(These grottos have been known to attract human beings. They are not indifferent to the organic. It’s the voice of the tundra that coats beings with its excretions, without distinguishing … Read More »

Mariano López Seoane
translated by Pola Oloixarac

In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.

There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into … Read More »

translated by Jennifer Croft

HOW WILL TERROR TAKE ROOT IN THE FUTURE?

We jump right in, head first.
The beginning is incredible. Halfway through
is incredible. You quit
smoking. We do the things
people do
under the influence
of talismans. You start
smoking again. You say
you’re not against me,
or against the people who are against me.
I can’t love someone
without knowing what they’re afraid of.
But you don’t think
about the future, you act
like it doesn’t exist, you configure
an idea of a present continuous
like the past doesn’t exist. Or
are we our past? You’re scared
of it, you don’t want for anything
to be gone and buried
with whatever else has already happened.
But some things of yours and mine
are gone,
some of the delight of that pink I put on.
When we drift off,
I have dreams about people going wild,
a flight attendant jumping out of a plane mid-air
who winds up fighting in Cambodia.
At dawn I wake … Read More »

translated by Andrés Alfaro

DUST

My voice seems not to come from me but rather from another throat
buried within the depths of my own.
I am like a collection of walls surrounding what I am.
Someone must have built this great wall.
If there are men who fly like feathers, why can I not
move when I move? I smell of stone and dust,
I wear the traces of those who touch me.
I am dust, stone. I do not know who my father is.

* *

FEAST ON MY SNOW

I whisper to the birds: leave my poems, feast on my snow.
I whisper to the snow: get out of my poems,
dig in, taste the birds’ eggs.
Birds’ eggs take wing.
Do not let the shell of stillness devour you.

* *

THE SPRING OF BALTHUS

Balthus’ desire was never realized. The white of the
girl’s underwear brought back … Read More »

Edgardo Cozarinsky
translated by the author

1. “Il vecchio non trova pace”

What’s that you’re saying, I am about to snap at the barman with my coldest voice and a killer look, when I realize he wasn’t staring at me but at another old man, maybe younger than me, who knows, but who showed those signs of senectitude I take care not to offer to the perfidious onlooker—head bowed, definitively defeated, trying to follow the spasmodic shaking of a blonde on the dance floor.

And how could he find peace, il vecchio, who knows how much champagne he has already bought her, and how much else if this is not their first time, and of course the blonde is deep inside herself, shaking and shaking for nobody, no one, two, or four, not caring who is in front of her, … Read More »

María Gainza
translated by Jane Brodie

I’m scared. I’m sitting on a plastic chair waiting to see the doctor. It’s a cold spring morning and I’ve come here because my right eye has been twitching for several days. It throbs—intensely, insanely, especially the lower lid. I sometimes think it’s going to burst. I have ruled out the most obvious causes: it’s not fatigue because it sometimes starts up just five minutes after I wake up; it’s not strain because I haven’t read a thing for a week; it’s not alcohol or cigarettes or coffee because I’m a strict ascetic; I don’t believe in stress. I’ve considered possible illnesses. I went online and found forums for people with a twitch in their eye. One group even invited me to one of the meetings they have on Monday nights in … Read More »

Eitán Futuro
translated by Jennifer Croft

[an excerpt]

Lara began to kiss me. I hadn’t kissed her first because I thought you couldn’t kiss them on the mouth. I touched her breasts over her bra and lay down on the bed. They were fine. Mariela had had hers done last year. The first time we were together—my first time—she didn’t let me take her t-shirt off. She said they were too small, and if I saw them I wasn’t going to want to be with her anymore. She also didn’t want me to take off my t-shirt. She said I was really thin, and that it freaked her out. She didn’t even take her tights all the way off. She got this idea in her head that if I wanted it so bad, I ought to have to tear through her … Read More »

Milton Läufer
translated by Heather Cleary

It’s true: Edipo is an ugly bookstore. And yet, though this may seem like a contradiction, its most notable trait is its invisibility. Though it was founded more than thirty years ago on one of the busiest stretches of Corrientes Avenue and has survived the rise and fall of some giants of its guild nearby, surprisingly few people know about it. The reason for this, I think, is that Edipo disappears among the dozens of its less important peers that surround it. The ones that, instead of shelving their books, heap them carelessly on rickety tables; the best-seller is everywhere in these stores, as are the self-help book and a few classics in reprint editions of questionable legality. These shops are passed over by the eye of the book fetishist, … Read More »

Maxine Swann

Two riveting scenes frame Zadie Smith’s exciting and unsettling new novel NW, recently shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the first, Leah, a thirty-five-year-old Londoner of Irish descent, opens her door to a desperate woman—tiny, grubby, shaking. There’s something familiar about the woman’s face, but Leah’s not sure why. Is it just one of those street faces you recognize? The woman, Shar, tells Leah that her mother is in the hospital. She needs money to take a cab there. She’s been asking up and down the street and no one has helped her. Leah, a charity worker by profession, rises to the occasion, trying to determine what hospital it is, calling a cab, making tea despite the summer heat. Shar’s the one who realizes it: they went to the same high school. As … Read More »