On weekdays I alight from the subway, the new day still in darkness and join the throng to ascend the stairs and listen to the female cry of 5 peso jellies for breakfast. Through the turnstiles and then I turn left, still groggy from too little sleep and pass churros being sugared, fruits high-powered liquefied, […]
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Last year I translated a short story by Cuban writer Odette Alonso for the Palabras Errantes project ´Writing Lesbian Desire´. It has just been published. The original title in Spanish is ´Con la Boca Abierta´. Below is an extract, click through to the Palabras Errantes site to read the story in its entirety in the […]
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The wide avenues and boulevards of Mexico City are deep oceanic trenches. An enormous, sleek marlin swims down Paseo de la Reforma effortlessly passing all the other, inferior fish using its seemingly effortless speed to cut through the water. Avenida Insurgentes is Angel Falls, gushing in a precipitous drop from north to south. The […]
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Dieciocho-trienta, dieciocho-trienta……. The numbers drifted across my consciousness, muddling with rapid eye movement sleep. Dieciocho-trienta, dieciocho-trienta. There it was again. Was I dreaming? My eyes opened. A baby-faced cop -still adolescent- hovered above, speaking into his radio. The voice was real. Dieciocho-treinta, dieciocho-treinta (18-30, 18-30), ciudadano extranjero dormido en parque publico (foreign citizen asleep in public park). Saturday […]
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It was a Saturday and the day dawned clear, which was good because I had some errands to run. One of them was to buy a new mobile telephone. After completing a few of the errands and without a particular intention to be there, in the early afternoon I found myself on a part of […]
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This short piece of fiction I wrote has a few references to Latin America so I thought I would publish it here. I have been doing quite a lot of translation recently but primarily from Spanish to English, so I decided I would translate this to Spanish. The photo is of Oaxaca, a beautiful colonial city […]
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Palabras Errantes (in English – Wandering Words) is an online literary translation project that has been making contemporary Latin American literature accessible to an anglophone audience since 2011. You can read more about the project objectives here. Palabras Errantes has presented a wide range of translation projects focusing on different voices and regions of Latin America. […]
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In late 2012 I found myself in a taxi in Mexico City with a fifty-something year old driver. Our conversation followed a familiar pattern. He asked me how long I had been in Mexico and which parts of the country I had visited. I told him of my travels and he replied that while that […]
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The following short story recounts an experience with the hallucinogenic flower commonly known as Angel’s trumpet and sometimes Devil’s trumpet. Whether the flowers ingested were actually Brugmansia or Datura I am unsure. The flowers are common throughout much of the Americas. While I don’t regret the experience it is not one that I would recommend and perhaps […]
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LATIN AMERICA FOCUS 