Villa Ocampo
Victoria Ocampo was one of the great patrons of the arts of the first half of the twentieth century. She first published Borges in her magazine Sur and she hosted and promoted writers and artists from around the… Read More
Dancing man to man
Tango was danced between men from the very beginning, since it was considered too immoral for women, although clearly this is only a part of the explanation of man-to-man dancing, and a fuller account is given here …. Read More
A Very Fine Cake Shop and the Palace of Ducks
After lunch in a cheerful Brazilian place in Palermo (the one in Buenos Aires, not Sicily) we walk through the sunny streets in search of dessert and coffee. Our destination turns out to be one of the finest… Read More
Good things about being Welsh: No. 3
We are so kind and noble we allow other teams to beat us at our national sport. I am not absolutely certain this is an asset, but it indicates true strength of character and I am sure the… Read More
We don’t want your semen here thank you
Forgive me for the poor quality of the photo, but I was slightly concerned about taking pictures in the immigration zone of an airport, and used my phone. Here, if you can read them, are the rules about… Read More
Joaquín O. Giannuzzi
Having written about illness in various media over recent years – principally as a so-called academic and the writer of a memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, I am alert to the ways that other writers approach the subject,… Read More
The riots: an afterword
Having just read Ken Clarke’s facile, vacuous and pompous account of the recent riots in English cities, Blanco feels moved to chip in. Clarke makes three points in his article in Monday’s Guardian. The first is that the… Read More
More thoughts on translation
I began translating, in a very amateur sort of way, when I first discovered the poetry of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos at the beginning of the 1980s. Not only was my Greek inadequate to the task and… Read More
On Translation
An email from my Chinese translator in quite extraordinary English reminded me of the following article, brought to my attention by my friend Hugo Pooley last year. It is the report of a corrida that appeared in the… Read More
Into the Mystic
The motif of the ouroboros appears in the ancient cultures of Egypt, India, Greece and Mexico, and was of particular interest to European alchemists in the early modern era. Conventionally it depicts a serpent or a dragon… Read More
The day my hard drive died
Worse things happen, obviously, certainly. But it was the suddenness of the event that most surprised me, after having the damn thing switched on for around five years and using it around the clock. One moment it… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- Returning to animism in the AnthropoceneSometimes a book comes along that enhances your way of being in the world: for two such books to fall into your hands, in serendipitous collusion, is a thing to marvel at, and perhaps even to write about.... Read More
- Cwm Banw and the Clowde of UnknowyngThere are days when mist covers the Welsh lowlands, all the way from the Canolbarth to the Severn estuary, and yet at around 300 metres above sea level you emerge into bright sunshine, and into a world unimagined... Read More
- Cwm Banw and the myth of core identityDeep into autumn, with the rich russet or burnt sienna of the ferns, and the grass still so green, with streaks of cloud racing up the valley to our left and, as the mist thickens, an overlay of... Read More
- The configuration of confusionI came to consciousness the other morning from a waking dream in which I had woken (in my dream) into an unfamiliar world, surrounded by strangers in a kind of ante-room, with thick velvet curtains and a single... Read More
- A day in the high PyreneesAutumn on its way, the equinox a week off, we head inland, to Setcases, and up towards the great bulk of Gra de Fajol, an angry giant guarding the head of the Ter valley. Ulldeter means Eye of... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 