It is war. The general leaves the barracks and walks to the trenches. A recruit follows him. In war there is no rest: if you are not shooting, you march or you clean your rifle, march or take a drink. The general marches to the trenches. There is a din of gunshots, a bomb or two, maybe even cannon fire. The recruit follows him, nervously, his hand on his head because he has not put his helmet on right. With the other hand he clutches a rifle. He is far too young, he trembles. The general is experienced, he does not tremble. He marches and is not bothered by the shoes, helmets and cadavers he tramples over, the bodies are stacked against the fences in piles that bleed just like a Pollock painting. The general jumps over the dead as if it were a game, and the recruit follows, cowering, spluttering in the smoke. In next to no time, the general stops beside a pile of badly stacked sandbags.
“This is not protected,” he says, but he does not crouch down. He is brave, or perhaps he is just a hard man, he no longer feels anything.
Continue reading ‘Ratatat: a philosophical discourse on war, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
To realise that you are but fragments, that the short and the longer and the longest of times are nothing but fragments … that the lifespans of cities and of countries are nothing but fragments … and the earth a fragment … that development in its entirety is a fragment … that perfection cannot be … that fragments came about, that they continue to come about … no road to travel, only to arrive … that the end is without consciousness … that then nothing can be without you and that thus nothing can be …
Those people who die without having known their illness, their mortal ilnesses … life would then be unbearable…
The stream has frozen over, the spring has frozen over, the summer has frozen over, the winter has frozen over, people, animals, sensations, everything … that spoken word that just shuts the world off …
Continue reading ‘From Amras, by Thomas Bernhard’
Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.
Continue reading ‘A natural history of instantaneous seduction, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
At last Lisa dropped a letter from her window: “There’s a ball at the *** ambassador’s house tonight. The countess will be there. Here is an opportunity for you to see me alone. Come at half past eleven.”
Hermann trembled like a tiger, waiting for the appointed time. At ten he was already standing in front of the countess’s house. The wind howled and thick wet snow fell; streetlamps cast a dim light. The streets were empty. At times a cabbie would drag by with his meagre jade looking for the last customer. Hermann wore no coat, but he didn’t feel the cold. At last the countess’s carriage arrived. He saw footmen carry out a hunched old woman wrapped in a sable coat. Then Lisa, the countess’s young charge, fresh flowers in her hair and a light cape on her shoulders, slipped into the carriage. The doors closed, the carriage moved along heavily on the wet snow. The doorman went inside and windows went dark. Hermann remained outside the empty house. He went up to the streetlamp and looked at his watch – it was twenty past eleven. He remained under the streetlamp, staring at the watch, waiting for the minutes to pass.
Continue reading ‘From “The Queen of Spades,” by Alexander Pushkin’
… now I would rather say something of myself, even just a couple words, as everyone is important in this story, and so we all have the right, at least, to a tiny dose of egoism. All that about “everyone is important in this story” was probably the idea of somebody who had a devastating inferiority complex, but anyway. My name is Zed, which for Linda is a constant source of jokes about my position in the alphabet, identical, according to her, to my position in life. Searching around, I found that Tchaikovsky used the letter zed – I guess some kind of Cyrillic zed – in his letters and diaries as a secret code to refer to homosexuals, e.g. “the party was very lively, there were many Z…” On the other hand, the fact that the letter zed is hardly ever used in English means that in a game of Scrabble – the one in which the letters build a jigsaw puzzle on the grid of a board, where every square has a different score – the one of my letter is the highest: ten points.
Continue reading ‘From One Hundred Bottles in the Wall, by Ena Lucía Portela’
Now everything is mixed up in my head: graveyards, weddings and the various types of shit. -Samuel Beckett
I remember. Yes, your parents lived in an apartment. An empty apartment beside where you and your sister played. That evening my parents abandoned me at your empty apartment while they went to talk about grown-up matters. I had to ring the bell.
A certain Laura opened the door (or at least that’s what she said her name was); she said she was your secretary. “Do come in, my friend is waiting for you in the lounge.”
I entered, frightened, all ten years of me, with my old Lego and Super Mario Brothers under my arm. That was all I had to offer. It was no trifle.
There you were, in the lounge, in profile like Cleopatra, covering your eyes and smoking a pen.
Continue reading ‘First Love, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
If you want to know what the future has in store, only take a walk down to the Prater. There stands an ancient, highly useful machine gigantically, like an orchestra conductor. At any moment, music could begin, which might spin chirping and unwieldy, melancholy and fleeting, into the fresh green crowns of the nearby trees down the avenue, and delicately into the neverending tangle of leaves and branches of the distant Danube woods. Through a round bit of glass, there is a marvel of metal feathers and capsules, spirals and tiny gears, meticulously designed. Our terrible awe robs us of breath.
How far our technicians had come already in the year ‘90! “Singularly original, authentic fortune-telling machine”: we need only trust the words to step up, lay down a left hand (and this is important, since it is linked straight to the heart, and thus to our reason and longing, which we Viennese go by instead of our heads), while the right hand puts the schilling on the metal tongue, and Zack! Away it goes…
Continue reading ‘From In the shadow of Burenwurst: sketches from Vienna, by H.C. Artmann’
Preface
France is going through a vulgar phase. Paris, the heart and power of universal stupidity. In spite of Moliere and Beranger, one would never have thought that France would go so far in the name of Progress. -Questions of art, terrae incognitae. The great man is a fool.
My book may have done some good. This doesn’t cause me distress. It may have done harm. This doesn’t make me rejoice.
The aim of poetry. This book was not written for my wives, my daughters or my sisters.
I have been accused of all the crimes I am telling you about. Amusement of hatred and scorn. The elegiac is sentimental twaddle. Et verbum Caro factum est. – Yet the poet has no part to play in that. Otherwise, he would be a mere mortal.
The devil. Original sin. Virtuous man. If desired, you could be the Tyrant’s favourite; it is harder to love God than to believe in him. For the people of this century, however, it is harder to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone serves him and no one believes it. The Devil’s sublime subtlety.
Continue reading ‘Draft prefaces for The Flowers Of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire’
Suddenly there was knocking at the front gate and the dogs started barking. Hivrya ran out hastily. She came back looking pale:
“Well, Afanasiy Ivanovich, we’ve been caught red-handed, there’s a crowd of people knocking at the gate and I think I heard my brother-in-law’s voice…”
The pastry the priest’s son was eating got stuck in his throat. His eyes started to bulge as though he saw some otherworldly creature.
“Get up there!” shouted the frightened Hivrya, pointing at the planks of wood that were fixed upon two beams under the ceiling. All the old rubbish was usually kept up there. Danger spurred on our hero. He thought for a minute then stood on the bench and carefully pulled himself up onto the planks; half-mad with fear, Hivrya ran to the gate, as the knocking became louder and more impatient.
Continue reading ‘From “The Sorochintsy Fair,” by Nikolay Gogol’
Patricia González Bermúdez
published in Translations on August 17, 2009
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That tempest in Augusto’s soul was finished, like in a dead calm, with the decision to commit suicide. He wanted to put an end to himself, the source of his own miseries. But before carrying this out, like a castaway who clings to a weak board, it occurred to him that he could consult with me, with the author of this entire tale. Around that time, Augusto had read one of my essays in which, although superficially, I discussed suicide; it seemed to have made such an impression upon him, as well as other things that he had read about me, that he did not want to leave this world without having met me and talked to me for a while. He embarked, therefore, on a trip hither, to Salamanca, where I have lived for more than twenty years, in order to see me.
When they announced his visit to me, I smiled quizzically and I ordered him to come into my office-library. He entered like a ghost, looked at an oil portrait of me that presides over the books of my library, and on my signal he sat down, opposite me.
Continue reading ‘From Mist (Niebla), by Miguel de Unamuno (Chapter XXXI Part 1)’
