To Reiterate
Lydia Davis, in inimitable style, consolidates the elements of reading, writing and travel in a short piece from her 1997 collection, Almost no Memory: Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to… Read More
More notes on being a foreigner (III)
More translation – literary and the other, everyday kind – and more thoughts on being a foreigner: “Foreigners are, if you like, curable romantics” writes Alastair Reid. “The illusion they retain, perhaps left over from their mysterious childhood… Read More
Exhibit B in Santiago de Chile
Continuing my readings of Alastair Reid, while travelling in Chile, I find the following: “The fictions we make are ways of ordering and dominating the disorders of reality, even though they in no way change it. The… Read More
More notes on being a foreigner (II)
“Anonymity is peculiarly appealing to a foreigner: he is always trying to live in a nowhere, in the complex of his present.” With this thought in mind I come to the end of re-reading Alastair Reid’s essay, and… Read More
More notes on being a foreigner (I)
Staying for any extended period of time in a country where one is obliged to speak a language other than one’s own inevitably results in reflection about core identity. Core identity, if there is such a thing, presumes… Read More
Caca de Duende
On Sunday we visit Los Colmillos de Chaihuín, which contain, among other trees, canelo, alerce (larch) and eucalyptus. The first two are indigenous, the last a moisture-hogging outsider, the villain of the piece in the local ecology, imported… Read More
Life as an act of translation
Many and varied are the approaches to translation, and numerous its unsought consequences. There are those who become obsessed by the process even at the cost of progressing to the end of a piece of work. It doesn’t… Read More
At the bottom of all this sleeps a horse
At the bottom of all this sleeps a horse by Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011) At the bottom of all this sleeps a white horse, an old horse long in the ear, lacking in brainpower, worried by the… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The hill of wild horses and the nature of risk
- Returning to animism in the Anthropocene
- Cwm Banw and the Clowde of Unknowyng
- Cwm Banw and the myth of core identity
- The configuration of confusion
- A day in the high Pyrenees
- The untimely departure of Javier Marías
- Dues serralades
- The Black Mountains and the human brain
- Capel-y-Ffin and the many worlds interpretation
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 