The protagonist and the woman get to spend some time alone in this fourth chapter. 4. I expected her gaze to be lowered, expectant or fearful, but when I turned towards the woman I saw her eyes fixed on me, with a fiery expression of reproach. She opened her lips to...
This third chapter of Levrero’s novel only carries the protagonist further away from where he wants to be. (Chapters one and two are here and here.) 3. When I opened my eyes I realised that the sun had already risen. I observed my travelling companions. The...
This is my translation of the first two chapters of Mario Levrero’s novel The City. The protagonist lives in a perverse universe where nothing he does produces the outcome he expects and his choices keep leading him further and further from home. By his own...
En la historia de cada colonia, después de la independencia había una crisis adolescente de identidad. Los ciudadanos del nuevo país elegían entre dos opciones: emular la modernidad de los amos antiguos o buscar algo propio de las tierras colonizadas. La ansiedad...
Juan Rulfo is one of those authors famous for only a couple of books – his reputation rests on the short story collection El llano en llamas and the novel Pedro Páramo, both published in a burst of creativity in the 1950s. For an author whose terse style evokes a...
The poetry of Gabriela Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in 1945, is very concrete, and generally it’s yoked to the Chilean landscape. Often her protagonists are women: on solitary journeys that might be a pilgrimage or an attempt at flight; stuck in landscapes...
