Place: Santiago

Translation Tuesday: A selection from Poems for Michael Jordan by Francisco Ide Wolletter

December 20, 2016 | in Translations | by Francisco Ide Wolleter and Tim Benjamin

fate is the phenomenon of the ball passing through empty space to arrive at your empty hands

Awarded first place in the CNCA’s Roberto Bolaño Prize for Young Literary Creation in the Poetry category, twenty-seven-year-old Francisco Ide Wolleter stands out from the latest generation of Chilean litterateurs. His “Poems for Michael Jordan” are miracles of observation, imbuing quotidian life with existential drama. You won’t ever watch basketball the same way again after this.

the ball’s porous plane

makes me think of human skin

a tactile nostalgia

though contact is always illusory

the facts are thus: we’re structured on emptiness

built of atoms,

atoms whose nature is to repel

and be repelled.

that’s why we don’t mix with things

that’s why when we touch

we haven’t really touched anything at all

Translation Tuesday: Two Short Nonfiction Pieces by Roberto Merino

August 16, 2016 | in Translations | by Neil Davidson

Waiting may be the most thoroughly human activity there is.

Described by Argentina’s Clarín newspaper as Chilean literature’s “best-kept secret,” Roberto Merino recently wrote evocatively about a childhood submerged in television for our Summer 2016 issue. Today we bring you two short nonfictions, about seasonal change, from the same pen.

Just Wait

I am waiting for something to change. While I wait, the days, weeks and seasons pass. Conversations from nearby buildings drift through my open window on summer evenings, snatches of song, appalled laughter. Hammers ring out in the afternoons. I get up very early each morning and before I know it I am taking taxis, making phone calls, setting my various affairs in motion.

The change I am waiting for will come from outside, and its causes will be revealed to me when whatever it is actually transpires. I am told that there can hardly be such a thing as chance, and that whatever happens to us is a consequence of our own doings: the law of karma, or of action and reaction. Gurdjieff says very much this: that what is happening to me now is the corollary of what I did yesterday, so today’s blunders will be sure to come back and weigh me down tomorrow or the day after.