Language: Greek

What’s New in Translation: January 2025

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Greece and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring us news of ongoing efforts to address the daily relevance of poetry in Greece, as well as lauded film adaptations in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Greece

Various events have taken place to ‘seal off’ 2024. At Zatopeck Book Café, a big poetry night took place on the evening of December 27, in which a dozen young poets read their poems amidst the holiday atmosphere. Among the participants are: Dimitris Angelis, Eleni Athanasiou, Eleni Alexiou, Panagiotis Arvanitis, Anna Afentoulidou, Anna Vasiadi, Eleni Velenza, Gerasimos Voutsinas, Eleni Galani, Valia Gentsou, Thodoris Gonis, Spyros Goulas, Stella Dumou, Stella Dumou, and many more.

On the same day, at a different spot in Athens, the Vakhikon Editions and Enastron Book Café hosted an event organised by the poets Eftichia KatellanakiIrini Paradisano and Evangelia Tatsis in collaboration with Kapou Opa, entitled ‘Does Christmas “urgently” need poetry?’ Τhe contemporary urgency that penetrates every aspect of daily life within Greece and beyond affects not only the poets but their work as well; sometimes, poetry’s response is to become a political protest against the injustices that we experience, or it becomes the very medicine against the sepsis characterising our world. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Greece, Spain, Romania, and Mexico!

This week’s literary round-up include groundbreaking publications of Romanian literature, what to look forward to in the upcoming annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, and the passing of a Greek lyrical poet. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania

It’s the age of rediscoveries and revisitings in contemporary Romanian literature, both at home and abroad. In his singular indefatigable and all-inclusive manner, past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau has launched the first volume of the monumental anthology Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), previously presented on our blog. The event took place on November 15 in Madrid at the Romanian Cultural Institute, where Nicolau presented the collection together with co-editor Alba Diz Villanueva.

While introducing Romanian classics to Spanish-speaking audiences—and thus marking a huge milestone in Romanian literature in translation, the impressive release has received accolades regarding its unique approach and framework amidst the entire Spanish-speaking literary world, specifically regarding its multifaceted richness fusing translation, literary commentary, didactic utility, and cross-cultural interpollination.

Felix Nicolau has also been involved in what is perhaps this year’s most sensational rediscovery in Romanian literature: De dor de sufletul lui Andersen (On Missing Andersen’s Spirit), a collection of fairy tales by Nichita Stănescu, published by Rentrop & Straton. Nicolau authored the preface to the text, and recently contributed an astute review of the same book to the literary magazine Astra. Famously known for his neo-modernist poetry of intriguing sophisticated imagery and memorable, abstractly paradoxical formulations that both stylistically revolutionized Romanian letters in the 1970s and implicitly opposed Communist social realism, Nichita Stănescu has been rediscovered in a staggeringly surprising capacity. These one-of-a-kind fairy tales verge on potentially best-selling children’s literature without relinquishing the radically imaginative innovativeness and the hypnotizing oracular diction of his poetry, with Nicolau placing them at the crossroads of Perrault, Saint-Exupéry, and Terry Pratchett. Additionally, argues Nicolau, there is so much more to these tales, as they are informed by avant-garde poetics and retain a cultural relevance within the digital age. READ MORE…

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from France, Greece, and the United States!

In this week’s roundup of world literary news, our team members fill us in on France’s literary awards season and exciting festivals in Greece and the United States. From the race for the Prix Goncourt to feminist literature in Athens, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

As the leaves begin to shift their colors, France’s literary scene is shifting into awards season. Last week, Jean-Pierre Montal took home the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel La Face nord, the Prix Medicis announced their 2024 shortlist, and the contenders for the prestigious Prix Femina are to be revealed in just a few weeks. That’s only to name a few!

Perhaps the most esteemed French literary prize, however, is the Prix Goncourt, and the time for its conferral is fast approaching. Awarded annually in November, the Prix Goncourt is bestowed by the Académie Goncourt upon “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.” They also give separate awards for poetry (conferred this year to Haitian poet Louis-Philippe Dalembert), biography, and a large variety of international works, among others.   READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2024

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

Backer-Promo-Cover-150

Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico

“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”

Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers. READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on recent publications and annual book fairs! From a discussion on ‘cancelling’ and its real-world parallels to the genocide of Palestinians, to the passing of a beloved Greek poet, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Has ‘cancelling’ subsided lately? Surely not for the Palestinians. Sadly, these times might even be the worst for them, to the extent that the ICJ is considering whether they are being subjected to genocide, i.e., literally a cancelling, an erasure! But when it comes to literature, this concept of cancelling, of erasing, often serves as a lens to examine social dynamics, power structures, and questions of identity.

This is the case of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem. Originally published in North America by Syracuse University Press some five years ago, a revised and updated English translation (by the original translator Sinan Antoon) is appearing this month by And Other Stories.

Using magical realism to shed light on real-world tensions and human experiences in Israel and Palestine, this book is a thought-provoking novel that explores those complexities through a unique premise. The story imagines a scenario where all Palestinians suddenly vanish overnight. Azem skillfully uses this surreal concept to examine issues of identity, memory, and power dynamics in the region. The narrative alternates between the perspective of Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and the reactions of Israeli society to the mysterious disappearance.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from the Latinx, Greek, and Filipino literary worlds!

This week, our editors direct us towards the profound and plentiful artistic productions emerging from border crossings, diverse encounters, and cross-genre interpretations. From a festival celebrating multicultural writings, novel adaptations of classic canons, and the newly elected fellows to a prestigious international residency, these developments in world literature remind us that within the schematics of difference, shared passions grow and proliferate to create unities.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

Between June 21 and 23, Hispanic and U.S. literary enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco for the International Flor y Canto Literary Festival. Originally founded by Latinx poet Alejandro Murguia, acclaimed poet and professor at San Francisco State University, this year’s lineup featured a diverse variety of poetry readings, literary workshops, and movie screenings—all open to the public. Participants included Latinx and Mexican writers, poets, and directors dealing with topics such as identity, multiculturalism, language, and resistance. Most of the events took place at the legendary Medicine for Nightmare bookstore, a unique promoter of Latin American and Latinx literature in San Francisco.

One of the most exciting events was a poetry workshop led by the Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. Titled “¿Quieres escribir pero te sale espuma?” (Do you want to write a poem but only foam comes out?), the workshop encouraged new writers to try out different techniques to overcome writer’s block. In another event, Reynosa read from her most recent book, Iremos que te pienso entre las filas y el olfato pobre de un paisaje con borrachos o ahorcados. The collection portrays life around the Mexico-U.S. border in the nineties, told from the perspective of a bicultural family dealing with gender violence. The works in the book are long poems of mostly short unrhymed verses, using colloquialisms endemic to the north of Mexico, in a fast paced and highly rhythmic prosody. They also include fragments from songs by the iconic Latinx singer Selena. In her reading, Reynosa usually sings these musical portions, highlighting the sonic elements in the poems and their cultural significance. READ MORE…

Serpentine

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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To Tear Down Since They Won’t Let Us Build: Katerina Gogou and Her Impressive Invasion of the Poetic Realm

Since they won't let us create life, we're going to ruin what's existing, and the new will follow.

As one of Greece’s most bold and unwavering poets, there is a ruthlessness running through the work of Katerina Gogou. In ferocious, free-styling verse, she vividly identified the brutalities and loneliness around her, and, with the incendiary vibration of a radical cry, came up always on the side of anarchism. As sensitive to hypocrisy as she was to corruption, Gogou dreaded a poetics that stood aside from politics, in one of her poems confessing: “What I fear most / is becoming “a poet” . . . / Locking myself in the room / gazing at the sea / and forgetting . . .” So it is that she remained dedicated to the necessity of rebellion and freedom until her death in 1993.

In this following article by Dimitris Gkionis, translated from the Greek by Christina Chatzitheodorou, we are offered an insight of this powerful poet in the midst of her time, navigating rages, passions, injustices, and her own poetic urgency. A woman who believes in words as action, as weapon—this is what comes into view.

On October 13, 1980, this piece, featuring an interview between Dimitris Gkionis and the poet Katerina Gogou, was published in the newspaper Eleftherotypia. It has since then been re-published—along with other interviews of Gogou—in Katerina Gogou, Mou Moiazei o Anthropos m’enan Ilio, Pou Kaigetai apo Monos tou (The man reminds me of a sun that burns by itself, published by Kastaniotis Editions in 2018). In both her poetry and interviews, Gogou’s work had always reflected her unconventional, rebellious, and combative spirit—always rebelling against authority, no matter what form. A supporter of the radical movement, she spent most of her days in Exarcheia—the historical centre of radical left-wing/libertarian politics—and was in constant conflict with the establishment, eventually giving up a promising career in acting to write poetry instead.

Through her verse, Gogou denounced social inequality, condemned police violence, criticised the death penalty, and stood in solidarity with political prisoners. Her mind was never at rest, and neither was her pen. While some of her poetry has previously been translated in English, it is the interviews that have been able to directly capture Gogou’s reasoning behind her aesthetic interventions, providing a more holistic picture of her and her work. In these conversations, she explains why she writes what she writes, and her anger at a stagnant world that she wants to change: “I am writing to get rid of this rock (kotrona) that is weighing me down. If I didn’t write, my ears would buzz. Ιf I don’t take this action, if I don’t put words on this white paper to bring myself to life, I could do things that are horrible and unimaginable.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large celebrate writers of children’s literature, experimental postmodern novels, and memoirs of oppression. From a celebration of a beloved poet in Mexico to a new novel by a novelist and comics scholar in North Macedonia, to a recently republished chronicle of Greece’s years under dictatorship, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

“Forgetting is a modern phenomenon that goes beyond the usual individual, medical frameworks,… because it is already an instrument for political and wide(r) scale manipulation, embedded in… almost the whole society”, writes literary critic Gligor Stojkovski in the preface to the latest novel by the author Tomislav Osmanli. Known for diving deep into the problems of history and modernity, Osmanli zeroes in on collective forgetting as a pathological social force in Zaborav (Forgetting), his fifth novel.

Osmanli (b.1956 in Bitola) is a media critic, poet, screenplay writer, dramatist, and author of multiple prose works. His first novel won the Best Macedonian Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Balkanica Literary Prize and his scholarly work, Comics: Scripture of the Human Image, was the first example of comics studies published in Yugoslavia. With a father of Macedonian and a mother of Greek descent, Osmanli grew up trilingual—speaking Macedonian and Greek, and having been taught Aromanian by his paternal uncle. His work as an independent editor and member of the editing board of his nation’s oldest daily newspaper, Nova Makedonija, from 1991 to 1998, as well as his theoretical studies in political cinema, are visible in the themes of his fiction. His scholarly interests blend with his mixed cultural heritage and find expression in Zaborav, a postmodern tapestry of lives and languages.

Told almost entirely in present tense to illustrate the loss of connection between past and present, Zaborav renders a bleak social landscape where values and freedoms previously achieved are being obscured by false spectacle and slipping into oblivion. The novel’s characters, increasingly egotistical and politically repressed, are unable to resist hypercapitalism. To capture both the fragmentation and diversity of modern society, Osmanli weaves his text from documentary citations, fictional scientific language, multilingual speech, dialects, web-addresses, footnotes, and QR codes leading to musical pieces which complete the atmosphere of the passages where they are found. The philosopher Ferid Muhić, speaking at the novel’s launch, notes that Osmanli’s “suggestive, …original…, and deeply humanistic” novel creates awareness which acts as an antidote against the “pandemic” of “collective forgetting.”

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Translation Tuesday: “The Perfect Crime” by Tasos Leivaditis

This manuscript was discovered in the room of a low-ranking bank official. The official himself was found dead, his head smashed.

This Translation Tuesday, a twisted, rambling screed offers a window into the dark mind of a low-level bank clerk. Obsessed with money, plagued by seedy, morbid memories, buffeted by obscure resentments, he comes across a letter that confirms his paranoid delusions, and begins to plan his ‘perfect crime’. This is a powerful study of madness from the Greek writer Tasos Leivaditis, rendered into a genuinely disturbing English by N. N. Trakakis.

It continued raining, and so I too continued sitting under the porch of a cheap, commonplace hotel in a small cul-de-sac. How I got there is an entire saga, but I would often absent-mindedly find myself in the most unlikely parts of the city, and by ‘absent-mindedly’ I mean absorbed in thoughts that troubled me of late. I was always of course a procrastinator, but this delay had lasted for years and the resolution that had been ordained, from whatever angle you examined it, was not at all in my favour. When I left my boss’ house, in my haste I forgot my one and only coat, but I thought that, rather than trying to clear up such a messy situation, I’d be better off hanging myself. And I may well have done so if this letter hadn’t arrived. “The landlady must have left it on the table,” I thought. A letter that, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that I had been waiting for it for a long while, it contained moreover so many details regarding my personal life that there couldn’t be any doubt that it was destined for me – despite the fact that people’s morals have slackened so much in our time that they might even call into question the authenticity of a letter, the contents of which would admittedly crush them.

The rain abated, I was ready to leave, then I remembered why I had come, it was the same hotel, many years ago, I might not have even been eighteen, I would often think “my God, if I could at least see one woman naked, then I can die!” but I was also afraid lest I did in fact die, one night it seemed I was hypnotised, a woman approached and brought me here to this hotel, I had no idea how.

“C’mon, get undressed and get in bed,” she told me.

It was winter, I was wearing a khaki scarf which belonged to my grandfather, I remember that it was this very scarf, hanging close at hand on a rack, that we used to bind his jaw as soon as he had died, as was the custom. I took off my jacket and lay down, the woman undressed completely, and I, of course, may as well have been dead, for whether from fear or bad timing nothing was happening. The woman got up.

“If you can’t do it, why hire a hooker?” she said, washing her hands in the basin.

“My apologies, some other time…,” I stammered.

She perhaps thought that I was trying to avoid paying, for she immediately replied:

“The body fell on the bed, it must be paid.”

That expression made an impression on me, in particular its tone: she spoke about her body as though she was referring to someone else, as though she was saying, for example, “the old lady is unwell, it doesn’t look like she’ll make it through the night,” an old lady, in fact, who’s lived her life and made your life miserable with her old-age grumbling – in exactly that way. Then, I don’t know how, I felt a kind of distress, as though they had stuffed my mouth with lots of cotton wool, I then observed the wall next to me: it seemed to tremble at first, then it began to tilt and tilt, until it was about to collapse on me, I rushed to the door and ran down the stairs.

At the exact moment when my boss was angrily showing me the door, I again noticed the wall shaking, “it’s weird how people live in houses like this,” I thought, when I got back home, past midnight, everything was shut, they were asleep, I began forcefully ringing the bell, eventually a window up high opened and that familiar, longish face appeared.

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