Gabo and the drunks
On Tuesday at five I do a reading in the library of the University of Cartagena – whose most famous alumnus was Gabriel García Márquez – and learn from one of the Profs that there is a crypt in the… Read More
Thunderstorms and a dead dog alibi
Tuesday 4.30 a.m. William is outside the hotel with the pick-up truck for the return journey to Cartagena. This time I get to sit in the front. I must have earned the privilege somehow, or else he is… Read More
Cartagena, the Inquisition and slavery, all in a day
On my second evening in Cartagena I take a stroll around the old walled city, which despite its colonial style and nostalgic elegance is sadly heading in the same direction as every other tourist destination in the… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- Poems for staying at home (Day 29)Today Piedad Bonnett sings the praises of the oft-neglected sea cucumber. I once spent so long trying to find her house in Bogotá, in a taxi with Jorge Fondebrider and a clueless driver, that she thought we’d been... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 28)Now, listen: do not go roaming with the possum. Is that perfectly clear? from A Somewhat Difficult Syntax The possum represents those who craved the Holy Word, but who, once they have received it, do nothing... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 27)Today – because ‘it’s the only thing the universe knows how to do’ – a poem about falling, from Argentina’s Beatríz Vignoli. I love the particularity of these lines: ‘If they tell you that I fell / don’t... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 26)The theft of a rooster prompts today’s poem from the Venezuelan Igor Barreto; a lament for a creature who ‘sings like the Angel Gabriel’. The poem can be found, along with 155 others, in The Other Tiger:... Read More
- Poems for staying at home (Day 25)Carlos López Beltrán is the author of one of the most haunting poems in our anthology, The Other Tiger: as the speaker travels by train through the German forest, he has a vision of the son he never... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
