Bolaño’s “powerful endorsement” of Andrés Neuman

An online-only excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's essay “Neuman, Touched by Grace” in Between Parentheses (2011, tr. Natasha Wimmer).

http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/A-Powerful-Endorsement

Andrés Neuman, from Argentina, is one of “The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” – the theme of the latest issue of Granta magazine.

http://www.granta.com/Magazine/113
http://www.andresneuman.com/index.html

The magazine is posting a profile of each of these “twenty-two literary stars of the future.”
 
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Best-of-Young-Spanish-Language-Novelists

All these writers are also profiled in Three Percent.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?s=tag&t=young-spanish-novelists

The excerpt is now added to our list of online works of Bolaño.

http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2010/09/guide-to-online-writings-of-roberto.html

"Ernesto Cardenal and I" (Roberto Bolaño)

I've added the link to the poem "Ernesto Cardenal and I" to "A guide to online writings of Roberto Bolaño." I somehow missed including this poem whose translation first appeared in Poetry magazine in 2008. The translator is Laura Healy, though she wasn't credited in the Poetry Foundation site. It's also in the collection The Romantic Dogs.

Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) was a Catholic priest and poet from Nicaragua. Bolaño also wrote about Cardenal in a flash essay in Between Parentheses (forthcoming in translation from New Directions). He considered him "one of Latin America's greatest poets."

Corridor is Chile

It’s strange returning to Chile, the corridor country, but if you think about it twice or even three times, returning anywhere is strange. Provided, of course, you’re actually returning and not dreaming you’re returning. I returned after twenty-five years. The streets, actually, looked like they always had. So did the faces of the Chileans. That can lead to the most fatal sort of boredom or to insanity. So this time I kept calm for a change and made up my mind to wait for things to happen while seated in a chair, which is the best place to avoid being surprised by a corridor.

That's the start of Bolaño's essay on torture and the Chilean literary establishment, "The Corridor with No Apparent Exit," first published in Barcelona in May 1999. The English translation of the essay appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review in 2008.

The first half of the essay (no translator was credited) is viewable online. Paying subscribers can view it in full.

In the same journal issue, a profile on Bolaño by the perceptive critic Marcela Valdes discusses the political-literary context of this essay and Bolaño's books, here.