Ricardo Blanco's Blog

Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• That obscure object of the author’s desire
  Three and half years ago on this blog I wrote about Adam Phillips’ book ‘Missing Out’, which explains how not getting what you think you want might actually be what you want. In the current issue of the LRB, Phillips reviews a new biography of Proust (Proust: The Search, by Benjamin Taylor), and we discover […]
• Hunter, White Mountains
    I woke in the freezing dawn, and looked out from the cave, over a misty sea. I stepped outside and stretched, drank the last of the water from my canteen, stuffed blanket into knapsack, and set off eastward along the coast, following a goat-track. The cliffs fell away sheer to the sea on my […]
• Notes from a Catalan village: summer on its way
    The weather has been cloudy, windy and wet for much of May – validating the Catalan proverb, Al maig, cada dia un raig (in May, a shower every day) – with just the occasional day of glorious sunshine, when we take off for a walk, just to reassure ourselves that summer is really coming. On one of these […]
• I kill out of rage
      Since posting María Rivera’s ‘The Dead’ on Wednesday, over 500 people have checked in, and María herself emailed to thank me for posting her poem. ‘The Dead’ evoked some powerful responses from readers. Echoing the views of others, John Freeman commented (on FB) that María achieves something he thought was ‘impossible to do – […]
• The Dead
    The Dead by María Rivera (Mexico)   Here they come the decapitated, the amputees, the torn into pieces, the women with their coccyx split apart, those with their heads smashed in, the little ones crying inside dark walls of minerals and sand. Here they come those who sleep in buildings that house secret tombs: they come […]
• Facing Rabbit Island
      Facing Rabbit Island   That night we came down from the colony on the hillside. The afternoon had strewn about our heads a debris of hyperbole and vague menace. Bewildered before the declaiming of Hikmet by an Air Force General, cast into stupor by amphitheatre kitsch, we sought out the solace of the […]
• Ballad of the House
      Last Tuesday saw the launch in Bogotá of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre’s Collected Poems (1988-2013), La pupila incesante. The event was introduced by another fine Colombian poet, Darío Jaramillo Agudelo. Both poets feature in my forthcoming anthology, The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America, to be published by Seren in October. Using a […]
• The War of the Idiots
      The War of the Idiots by Beatriz Vignoli (Argentina)   We dynamited the bridge before ever crossing it, the lovely bridge that we built.   The bridge over the river of forgetfulness, it was.   Now we will die forgotten. Let’s die then, and from this.   Translation by Richard Gwyn.     […]
• Ten Tequilas
    Ten Tequilas    by Julio Trujillo (México)   I went out into the street in flames and without myself, what was left were shreds of gazes: the world was my eyes and my eyes me, seeking and at the same time willing to be found, striding down there below, gasp and echo, a flow without direction […]
• Notes from a Catalan village: how to greet a stranger
  Yesterday morning, returning from a walk with Bruno in bright spring sunshine, I enter the small car park adjacent to the village cemetery. An old and weathered-looking fellow, somewhat twisted in appearance, is limping towards his car, parked at the entrance. I greet him, unthinkingly, in Spanish, with a cheerful ‘Buenos días’. He surveys me […]