Truman Capote - Summer Crossing

El Cantor de Tango -Tomás Eloy Martínez

"Eso es Buenos Aires, se dijo en aquel momento Grete y nos lo repetió más tarde: un delta de ciudades abrazado por una sola ciudad, breves ciudades anoréxicas dentro de esta obesa majestad única que consiente avenidas madrileñas y cafés catalanes junto a pajareras napolitanas y templetes dóricos y mansiones de la Rive Droite, más allá de todo lo cual - le había insistido el taxista - están sin embargo el mercado de hacienda, el mugido de las reses antes del sacrificio y el olor a bosta, es decir el relente de la llanura, y también una melancolía que no viene de parte alguna sino de acá, de la sensación de fin del mundo que si siente cuando se mira los mapas y se advierte cuán sola está Buenos Aires, cuán a trasmano de todo.
Cuando entramos a la avenida 9 de Julio y vimos el obelisco en el centro, me dio tristeza pensar que dentro de dos días tendremos que irnos, dijo Grete. Si pudiera nacer otra vez, elegiría Buenos Aires y no me movería de aquí aunque volvieran a robarme la billetera con cien pesos y la licencia de conducir de Halsingor porque puedo vivir sin eso pero no sin la luz del cielo que he visto esta mañana."

Antonio Tabucchi - Nocturno Hindu

Equatore - Miguel Souza Tavares

"Le isole sono un luogo di solitudine, e simile verità non è mai così nitida come quando riparte chi vi è giunto appena di passaggio e rimane invece sul molo, a salutare, chi resta. Al momento dell'addio, è assai più triste restare che partire, e su un'isola esiste fra le due cose una differenza sostanziale, come si fossero due categorie di esseri umani: coloro che vivono sull'isola e color che arrivano e ripartono. (...)"

(...)
"Quando arrivava una nave...Tutti accorrevano allora sulla spiaggia, e non solamente coloro che attendevano parenti o amici, o un carico speciale, ma anche una moltitudine di ragazzini, di donne di casa oziose, autorità che non avevano niente da fare e fingevano di svolgere qualche dovere d'ufficio, e tutti i curiosi in generale, di quella curiosità silenziosa e paziente di chi vive una vita intera fatta di arrivi e partenze appena osservati. (...)"

Andre Dubus - Dancing after dark

Falling in Love
"(...)
On a Friday afternoon near sunset, they stood at his window, looking at the river and Cambridge. She said: 'I have to do something before I go to New York. I'm six weekes pregnant.'
He looked at her eyes, and knew that what falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: 'No.'
'No what? I'm not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?'
'No, don't do it.'
'I'm twenty-two years old, I'm going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking baby?'
The falling thing in him hit and broke and he trembled and said: 'Not a fucking baby. Our baby, Susan. Our baby.'
He had to look away from the death of everything he say in her eyes.
(...)"


A Love Song
"(...)
The woman's name could not encompass what was happening. Nor could the words love and lie and sorry and you, nor could her own name on his tongue, on the night he told her in the bright light of their kitchen the color of cream, while upstairs their daughters slept. Nor could tears, nor any act of her body, any motion of it: her pacing legs, her gesturing arms, her hands pressing her face. The earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her. Stars fell. That was a song, and music would never again be lovely; it was gone with the shattering starts and coldly dying moon, the trees of such mortal green; gone with light itself.

These words in the kitchen, these smoked cigarettes and swallowed brandy, were two hours of her life. What began as the scent of perfume on wool, then frightened and sorrowful ratiocination that led her beyond his infidelity, into the breadth and depth of the river that was their sixteen years of love - its falls and rushing white water and most of all its long and curving and gentle deep flow that never looked or even felt as dangerous as she now knew it truly was - ended with not even two hours of truth in the kitchen, for truth took most of the two hours to appear in the yellow-white light, and the gray cirrus clouds of blows and rising and drifting smoke, or perhaps took most of the two hours to achieve. Then it was there, unshadowed, in its final illuminance.
(...)"

Train Dreams

Delta Blues

Age of Miracles

E se o tempo desse de desacelerar..

Caetano - Verdade Enrolada

Chega de Saudade

English, August

Borges - Poesia

Blues People

How to Create a Mind

Roberto Bolaño - El Exilio y la literatura

"He sido invitado para hablar del exilio. La invitación me llegó escrita en inglés y yo no sé hablar inglés. Hubo una época en que sí sabía o creía que sabía, en cualquier caso hubo una época, cuando yo era adolescente, en que creía que podía leer el inglés casi tan bien, o tan mal, como el español. Esa época desdichadamente ya pasó. No sé leer inglés. Por lo que pude entender de la carta creo que tenía que hablar sobre el exilio. La literatura y el exilio. Pero es muy posible que esté absolutamente equivocado, lo cual, bien mirado, sería a la postre una ventaja, pues yo no creo en el exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta palabra va junto a la palabra literatura.

Para mí, creo que es conveniente decirlo ya mismo, es un placer estar aquí con ustedes, en la renombrada y famosa Viena. Para mí Viena tiene mucho que ver con la literatura y con la vida de algunas personas muy cercanas a mí y que entendieron el exilio como en ocasiones lo entiendo yo mismo, es decir como vida o como actitud ante la vida. En 1978 o tal vez en 1979 el poeta mexicano Mario Santiago, de regreso de Israel, pasó unos días en esta ciudad. Según me contó él mismo, un día la policía lo detuvo y luego fue expulsado. En la orden de expulsión se le conminaba a no regresar a Austria hasta 1984, una fecha que le parecía significativa y divertida a Mario y que hoy también me lo parece a mí. George Orwell no sólo es uno de los escritores remarcables del siglo XX sino también y sobre todo y mayormente un hombre valiente y bueno. Así que a Mario, en aquel año ya un tanto lejano de 1978 o 79, le pareció divertido que lo expulsaran de Austria con esa recomendación, como si Austria lo hubiera castigado a no pisar suelo austríaco hasta que pasaran seis años y se cumpliera la fecha de la novela, una fecha que para muchos fue el símbolo de la ignominia y de la oscuridad y de la derrota moral del ser humano. Y aquí, dejando de lado lo significativo de la fecha, los mensajes ocultos que el azar o ese monstruo aún más salvaje que es la causalidad enviaba al poeta mexicano y por intermedio de éste me enviaba a mí, podemos hablar o retomar el posible discurso del exilio o del destierro: el ministerio del Interior austríaco o la policía austríaca o la Seguridad austríaca cursa una orden de expulsión y envía mediante esa orden a mi amigo Mario Santiago al limbo, a la tierra de nadie, que en inglés se dice no man’s land, que francamente queda mejor que en español, pues en español tierra de nadie significa exactamente eso, tierra yerma, tierra muerta, tierra en donde no hay nada, mientras que en inglés se sobreentiende que sólo no hay hombres, pero animales o bichos o insectos sí hay, lo que la hace más agradable, no quiero decir muy agradable, pero infinitamente más agradable que en la acepción española, aunque probablemente mi percepción de ambos términos esté condicionada por mi ignorancia progresiva del inglés e incluso por mi ignorancia progresiva del español (el diccionario de la Real Academia Española no registra el término tierra de nadie, cosa que no es de extrañar, o yo no he buscado bien)..."

Texto completo aqui.

Alex Gilvarry - From the memoirs of a non-enemy combatan

(...)
"But on the first foray into Brooklyn Heights with Michelle, I wasn't thinking about any of this. Through the open collar of her frock, I could see her pale skin, the ridges in her chest, and where the plumpness of her small breasts began. Then there was the long freckled neck - a branch. How intoxicating. Her face a ripened piece of fruit! Take a bite, it said. I resisted this compulsion to sexualize her, I swear. Oh, but how I lusted for a body! Still, I knew I needed patience and self-control if I wanted to get together with a girl of Westchester stock. I wasn't going to kiss her yet, I decided,"
(...)

"I watched Michelle trail off along a row of oil street lanterns with Todd Wayne Mercer's knapsack slung over one shoulder. I watched his initials fade away."
(...)

"Those hands could grip my whole being and hold me close. I felt safe whenever she put one on me, as she did at the counter while we slurped our borscht. I placed mine on top of hers and we interlaced our fingers. What warmth! That first breach: My hand touching hers, her hand touching mine, my thigh in her hand, her hand on my thigh. The first time two lovers touch intentionally is always more memorable than a first kiss or a first time, at least for me. It's that rare singular jolt that can never be replicated."
(...)

"Naked, we bare our souls to each other. There are no pretensions. It is the antifashion. Whenever I show skin in one of my dresses - an open chest in front of the heart, or a slither of exposed back - I feel I am providing a peek at the truth. Michelle's body, naked, was like truth serum. I melted at the sight of her bare shoulders, lightly freckled from a summer spent on Nantucket Island; her breasts, two matured handfuls of pale white flesh, outlined with a bikini tan like. I'd get down on my knees and breathe her in just below the navel until her white stomach fuzz stood on end. American women are so wonderfully hairy. Oh, how I fell apart before everything down there! The scent of young womanhood, so unmistakable! Her ass was tremendous - I still dream about its two halves. And what her buttocks held within its dark shadow was the God's honest truth! It was His work, revealed. Go tell it on the mountain."
(...)

No Country for old men - Cormac McCarthy

(..)
"He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock monuntains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away."

(..)
"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it. It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about."

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

(...)
"Life in the militia brought about many positive changes in my life. I was forced to bathe regularly, which I did not like at the start, but I endured, and this return to the habits of cleanliness successfully killed my bedeviling excrement obsession. I was fed, and the cots were comfortable, the barracks warm enough, and there was usually at least a little something to drink at night. We played cards, sang songs. A sturdy group of men, those soldiers. A bunch of orphans, really, alone in the world, passing time together, with nothing much to do."
(...)

(...)
"The gold from our buckets shone in dense shafts of light, and the branches and limbs of the surrounding trees were bathed in the glow of the river. There was a warm wind pushing down through the valley and off the surface of the water, it kissed my face and caused my hair to dance over my eyes. This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction, certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since. At any rate, and perhaps this is just, it was not something we could hold on for very long. Everything immediately after this went just as black and wrong as could be imagined. Everything after this was death in one or the other way."
(...)

Antonio tabucchi - Il gioco del rovescio

Entrando in Portogallo - Entrando en Portugal

"Il treno era fermo, dal finestrino si vedevano le luci della cittadina di frontiera, il mio compagno di viaggio aveva il volto sorpreso e scomposto di chi è svegliato improvvisamente dalla luce, il poliziotto sfogliò attentamete il mio passaporto, viene spesso nel nostro paese, disse, cosa ci trova ditanto interessante? (...)"

Passaggio in italiano

"El tren se había detenido, por la ventanilla se veían las luces de la pequeña ciudad fronteriza, mi compañero de viaje mostraba el rostro sorprendido y molesto de quien se despierta bruscamente por la luz, el policía hojeó atentatmente mi passaporte, viene a menudo a nuestro país, dijo, ¿qué le encuentra de interessante? (...)"

Fragmento de texto en Español



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