Julio Cortazar

 “Explanation is a well-dressed error.” 

― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“Every time it starts to get cool, I mean in the middle of autim, I start gettin nutty ideas like I was thinkin about what was forein and diffrent, like for exsample how I'd like to turn into a swallow and get away and fly to countrys where it gets hot, or be an ant so's I could get deep into a cave and eat the stuff I stored away durin the summer or be a snake like what they got in the zoo, the ones they keep lockt up in glass cages thats heated so's they don't get stiff from the cold, which is what happens to poor human beans who cant buy no close cause the price is to high, and cant keep warm cause theys no keroseen, no coal, no wood, no fule oil and besides theys no loot, cause when you go around with bocoo bread you can go into any bar and get some sneaky pete that can be real warmin, even tho it aint good to overdo it cause if you overdos it it gets to be a bad habbit and bad habbits is bad for your body just like they is for youre selfrespeck, and when you start goin downhill cause your actin bad in everythin, they aint nobody or nothin can stop you from endin up a stinkin piece of human garbidge and they never gone give you a hand to haul you up outen the dirty muck you rollin around in, not even if you was a eaglE when you was young and could fly up and over the highest hills, but when you get old you like a highflyin bomber thats lost its moral engines and fall down outen the sky. I jes hope what I been writin down hear do somebody some good so he take a good look at how he livin and he dont be sorry when it too late and everythin is gone down the drain cause it his own fault. -- Caser Bruto, What I Would Like to Be If I Wasn't What I Am (Chapter: "A St. Bernard Dog")” 
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Julio Cortazar

 

“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.” 
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Umberto Saba

The Borgo

It was in the ways of this
Borgo what a new thing
it happened to me.

It was like a vain
sigh
the sudden desire to go out
of myself, of living life
of all,
to be like everyone else
men of all
the days.

I was never so great
joy, nor have it from life I hope.
I was twenty that time, and I was
sick. For the new ones
streets of the Borgo the vain desire
like a sigh
he made me his.

Where in the sweet time
of childhood
few I saw lost
climbing bare houses
of the hill,
a fervent human village rose
work. In him the first
once suffered the sweet desire
and vain
to put mine in the heat
everyone's life,
to be like everyone else
men of all
the days.

Faith to have
of all, say
words, do
things that each one understands, and are,
like wine and bread,
like children and women,
values
of all. But a corner,
alas, I left to desire, blue
crack,
to contemplate me from that, to enjoy
the high joy obtained
of not being me anymore,
to be this only: among men
a man.

Born of the dark
events,
little was the desire, just a short one
sigh. I find it again
- lost echo
of youth - through the streets of the Borgo
changed
more than changed it is not me. On the walls
of the high houses,
on men and jobs, on everything,
the veil that wraps things has come down
finished.

The church is still
yellow, if the lawn
that surrounds it is less green. The sea,
that I see below, it has only one vessel,
huge,
which, stationary, folds to one side. Shapes,
colors,
life whence my sweet sigh was born
and vile, a world
finished. Shapes,
colors,
others I created, remaining myself,
only with my hard
suffer. And death
awaits me.

They will return,
or to this
Borgo, or to another like this, the days
of the flower. Another
will relive my life,
than in extreme labor
of youth, he will have asked for him,
hoped,
to put his into life
of all,
to be like everyone else
the men of one day will appear to him
since then.

Alejo Carpentier

 

In the quarter where the sun should have appeared, the sky was covered by a strange reddish cloud, like smoke, like hot ashes, like a dark pollen that had arisen swiftly, stretching from one horizon to the other. When the cloud moved overhead, it began to rain butterflies on the roofs, the water jars, our shoulders. They were little butterflies, deep amaranth in color, striped in violet, which had come together by myriads in some unknown spot behind the immense jungle, frightened, perhaps, driven away, after multiplying frenziedly, by some cataclysm, some awful occurrence, without witnesses or record. The Adelantado told me that these swarms of butterflies were nothing new in the region, and that when they took place the sun was almost blotted out for the whole day. The burial of the father would have to be carried out by candlelight in a day that was night, reddened by wings.

                                                        from The Lost Steps

Reinaldo Arenas

               Egon Schiele. Young boy (1918

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round dirty face
who on every corner is bothering you with
his “can you spare one quarter?”1
I am that child with the dirty face
—no doubt unlucky—
that from far away contemplates coaches
where the other children emit laughter
and jump up and down considerably
I am that unlikable child
—definitely unlucky—

with the round dirty face who under giant
streetlights or under the grand dames
also illuminated or before the little
girls that seem to levitate
project the insult of my dirty face.
I am that sullen child, even more gray,
that wrapped up in lamentable
combinations puts a dark note on the snow
or on the carefully trimmed lawn
that nobody but me would walk on,
because I don’t pay fines.

I am that angry and lonely child of
always, that throws you the insult of
that angry child of always
and warns you: if hypocritically you pat
me on the head I would take that
opportunity to steal your wallet.
I am that child of always,
before the panorama of eminent terror,
of eminent leprosy, of eminent fleas, of
offenses or of the eminent crime.
I am that repulsive child that improvises
a bed out of an old cardboard box and
waits, certain, that you will accompany
me.

New York (October 1983)
 

Vicente Huidobro

 Eclogue

                                    Sun about to die

The car broken down

And a smell of spring
Remains as the air sweeps by

                                            Somewhere
                                                                 a song

                    WHERE ARE YOU

One afternoon much like this
                                                   I looked for you in vain

In the fog covering the roads
I kept finding myself

And in the smoke of my cigar
A lost bird

Nobody answered

                                 The last pastors drowned

And the stray sheep
Ate flowers and did not give honey

The wind that went by
Piles up their wool

                                                Between the clouds
                                                Holding my tears

Why cry once more
                                   about what I've cried already

And since the sheep eat flowers
Sign that you went by

(Egloga)

                                                         translation by Johannes Beilharz

Vicente Huidobro

 

Night

You hear the night glide across the snow

The song fell down from the trees

And through the fog sounded voices

I lit my cigar at a glance

Every time I open my lips

I flood the void with clouds

                                    In the harbor

The masts are full of nests.

And the wind

                       groans in the birds' wings

     THE WAVES ROCK THE DEAD SHIP

Whistling on the shore I

          Look at the star that glows between my fingers

(Noche)

                                                translation by Johannes Beilharz