George Henson’s translations include Elena Poniatowska’s The Heart of the Artichoke, Sergio Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory, and, most recently, Alberto Chimal’s novella The Most Fragile Objects. He teaches Spanish translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
IT WAS IN THE BATHROOMS of the Sanborns restaurant, near what is today the Somos Voces (We are voices) bookstore, where Adonis García, the hustler-protagonist of Luis Zapata’s now-cl...
Ropa vieja photo / Courtesy of Doña Eutimia
YOU HAVE TO WALK TOWARD THE Callejón del Chorro, alongside the Cathedral of San Cristóbal in Old Havana, to get to Doña Eutimia. Th...
Photo by Carlos Lechuga
Translator’s note: On July 16, 2020, the Cuban government announced a set of economic reforms that includes the immediate rescission of the 10 percent surcharge on...
In this column that originally appeared in La Jornada, Elena Poniatowska considers the role of editors and talks with Diego Rabasa, founder of publisher Sexto Piso. Already precarious, t...
Photo by Stephane P / Flickr
A Bolivian writer living in the United States paints a complete picture of his days in quarantine in New York, the most difficult in the city since the attack...
Weston, Florida. Katakana Editores. 2020. 126 pages.
Near the end of Alberto Chimal’s The Most Fragile Objects, Latour, one of the protagonists, tries, much like all enlightened tyrants, to w...
Multiple exposure of Alicia Alonso doing a pas de bourrée, 1944 / Photo by Kristine / Flickr
The news of her death stung. After years of hearing her name, seeing her dance, knowing that she wa...
The film ends where it all begins: like a fable that devours its own tail in order to explain how we always return to our origins.
Using this age-old though useful device, Pedro Almodóvar has achieve...
Birds Watching, by Jenny Kendler, part of Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center, depicts one hundred eyes of bird species threatened or endangered by cl...
Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair
For “El Negro” Fontanarrosa, for his lawless fat men . . .
A 2050 public health campaign goes too far, resulting in allergy-free municipalities, fines for obes...
Iron, Uranium, Calcium, Gold, Praseodymium, Rubidium, Stontium, and Lead books. Illustration by Shayna Pond
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Chromium books that are all shiny surface....
Mexican novelist and short-story writer Jorge López Páez died on Friday, April 28, at the age of ninety-four. Ernesto Reséndiz Oikión offers a tribute.Jorge López Páez. Photo: CNL-INBA Archiv...
Illustration: Heidi Tailleferr
First and foremost, we focus on the comfort of our clients.”“And what aspects of your operations are oriented toward that goal?...
Ignacio Padilla (date unknown) / Source: Ibero 90.9
Translator’s note: Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla (1968–2016) was killed in a car accident on August 20 while traveling through...
Jorge Luis Borges
Because June 14 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), I received a couple of calls, asking if I would be interested in answering some quest...
Photo by Michael Andrews
On her eightieth birthday, a woman waits for a telephone call in this story inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.” How can everything change without our realiz...
Photo by Marsha Brockman/Flickr
To say literary translation is to commit a pleonasm. All translation is intrinsically literary, in the same way every text is, at least for one of the three legs th...
for Adolfo Bioy CasaresBy Alicia D'Amico [Public domain or Public domain],via Wikimedia CommonsToday, September 15, would have been Adolfo Bioy Casares’s 100th birthday. A pr...
The Gardener
I learned to plant trees with my grandfather.“The willows need more water than you, Andrés,and their rootsin the beginning aren’tvery deep.Sometimes they grow so fastand sometimes they...
Photo: Spanish Ministry of Culture
The 2013 recipient of the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Elena Poniatowska Amor, delivered her acceptance speech yesterday (April 23, 2014) on the annivers...
Photo by hjhipster/FlickrI asked myself these questions in a field outside an apartment community in Dallas, Texas. It was cold. The people walking by looked at me strangely ei...
Not far from 23rd and L, where the hotel Havana Libre, the Yara movie theater, and the popular Coppelia ice cream parlor converge, Eliezer Jiménez’s bookshop offers a vast selection of books to curiou...
Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Photo by Carolina Vilches
In the wee hours of the sinister National Night,when winter is nothing, and nostalgia can barely endure,I return to you, I shield myself in you, I se...
Alberto Chimal published these stories in Spanish as “An Alphabet of Twitter-Stories: A Study by Horacio Kustos” (@hkustos) in summer 2012. In a self-interview Chimal published...
By Peter Groth (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0],via Wikimedia Commons
This essay is adapted from Leonardo Padura’s November 2012 speech in Havana, Cuba, at the Casa de las Améri...