Southwest Review

Shortly after Leaving It All Behind

Juan Ignacio Boido (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)
Shortly after Leaving It All Behind

I’d fallen asleep reading, and when I woke up, the house was dark. I opened my eyes with a calm not my own: I knew exactly what I had to do. I got out of bed and walked to the living room in the darkness, navigating around my few furnishings from memory. I stopped in front of the bookcase, opened my eyes, and lifted my face to the sky: I was in the center of a dark night where the stars had retreated and left the stage empty. A night to be filled with only the warmth of my breath. If it’d been a dream, it wouldn’t have been a dream of blindness, but a dream of inhabiting a world where seeing was unnecessary.
I breathed in calmly, inhaling all the air I could, staring up into the nothingness, and when it was enough, the books began to come off the bookcase to the rhythmic movement of my hands, grabbing them one by one and throwing them out the window. They spun in the air, flapping open, suspended for a second, and with a grace that turned fall to flight, crashed into the street. Each thud sounded like the bottom of a well, like the bottom of an empty sea.
It wasn’t long before I was finished: I could feel the vacant shelves in front of me, liberated, the easing of the wood, the vast pulsating space opened up between them, the palpable darkness that surrounded me, like what a sleepless pirate must feel at high sea in the dead of night.
I dropped into the armchair. I didn’t know what to do, but knew what I’d done was right. The ideas would appear the way reliefs slowly emerge in the night, allowing their contours to be seen.
But it wasn’t reliefs, or the light, or a sound thrumming in the silence, that finally gave a shape to the night: little by little, the house took the shape of its smells—the leather of the armchair, the dark wood of the table, the freshness of the white walls, the soft scent of the wind now blowing across the empty shelves. One by one, they began to assume the precision of a line. The smell of things gleamed in my mind like the light painters capture. It reminded me, in some intangible way, that the world wasn’t just an idea.
Suddenly, like an animal that perceives the presence of another animal in a forest, I looked at my desk and knew there was a book on it, the only one left.
I got up and walked over to it: it seemed to be waiting for me. I ran my fingertips across its cover, touching it the way one touches a child or a woman who has died. It wasn’t a book; it was a notebook with a black cover. A notebook like one I’d had years before. A notebook that, if I still had it, would’ve been in one of the boxes in the closet, where I stored the artifacts of my own life.
I sat down in the chair, opened it, and began to read.
It was my handwriting. I knew I’d written it but couldn’t remember when. It was my dream diary. The entries were dated, and some seemed to include more than one dream. I flipped ahead: it was the diary of every dream I’d ever had and every dream I would ever have. I turned back to the beginning and read my first dream, the first dream I’d had in my life: as I read, I remembered the dream with the clarity dreams only have as they happen. Only then did I realize how long ago I’d dreamed it: I wouldn’t have been able to write, to hold a pen, to put anything I was reading now into words. I kept reading. I read other dreams, dreams I’d forgotten, dreams I thought I remembered. I read without fear. I read nightmares too, but they no longer produced the terror they’d once produced: I moved through them as if moving through a burning forest where the flames no longer gave off any heat: the forest only burned so I could see it burn, like the re-creation of a historical battle, like a fight between gladiators in an amusement park, like the memory of something we no longer feel anything about. I walked through the burning forests of my nightmares and no longer felt afraid: I realized that what I was watching burn was my own fear. I knew the forest had been burning for years, and now, at last, when I closed that notebook, it would turn to ashes and disappear forever. The forest could rest and, after a while, be reborn.
I read other dreams.
I read happy dreams and realized I had no memory of them.
I kept reading until I reached the dream in which I read my dreams, and I laughed, dreaming, at my own joke or that of my dream.
On the next page, my future dreams began. I flipped ahead in the notebook: I saw names I didn’t know, houses where I would live, faces of people not yet born. I considered not reading them. But then I realized that even if I did, I would forget them anyway: that was the only way I could dream them again. So I read them. I read them with delight, with curiosity, with sorrow. Reading them, I understood that I was already irredeemably me: my dreams covered me like scales that became part of me, but underneath, I could glimpse someone I recognized, someone life’s blows no longer bent and broke but marked, like notches in wood, like stab wounds in a corpse.
There were only a few pages left; I was approaching my final dreams. I flipped to the last one: I was dying in my sleep, and—I didn’t understand how I’d written it, but I didn’t ask either—I read the dream I was dreaming as I died. Was I waking up on the other side after dreaming it? Was life, viewed from there, like the memory of a dream, whose subject we know but whose plotline escapes us? Did I remember this life like a book I’d been inside of once? I don’t know. I can’t remember. I remember, yes, that I closed the notebook and knew, the way you know things in dreams, that the pages of the notebook were made of the trees that burned in my nightmares.
Now nothing was burning.
The darkness enveloped me, and the scent of the burning forests floated in the air.
I got up, and then I returned to the armchair.
To sink into that armchair was to sink a little further into that warm and deep sadness that survives after weeping. My whole life of dreams, and in those dreams all the people who would populate them, had passed before me, and now I sank back into the depths of what we call oblivion. I could still glimpse some scenes, faces, names that moved away from the people they belonged to. They sank, and I could see them for the last time below the surface, as they drifted down into the black depths of memory. They vanished, only to reappear on the day when I would finally meet them. It was sad, but there was comfort in it too. Even though I was forgetting them, I realized that oblivion doesn’t rob us of anything, but rather makes what’s forgotten definitively ours, and in so doing, lightens our burden.
My breathing made me think of a spy novel I’d read years before: the protagonist spent entire pages on the run from the KGB and the CIA through the streets of Prague, Berlin, and Moscow. For pages, he was a shadow, moving down cobblestone streets, dark alleyways, and snow-covered avenues in the dead of night, and there were always cars parked somewhere nearby with agents of the secret police lurking inside. The protagonist was just a shadow, but a shadow you could hear breathing, panting, running, the snow crunching under his feet, the streetlights giving him away in patches of shadow that, like dark beams, cut across the back doors of the buildings from which he fled, and you, there, reading, for multiple pages, breathed with him, trying to supply him with air, thinking if you read to the rhythm of his breathing—accelerated, intermittent as he climbed those eternal Eastern European stairways, a hushed panting in the ominous, vacant streets—he would reach his hotel room alive. For some reason, reaching his hotel room signified safety. I don’t remember why, which reveals that it must not have been a particularly good novel. But once, in Moscow, I think, when he made it to his hotel room after having escaped the agents of both the KGB and the CIA in a single afternoon, in one mad dash, the protagonist sits on the edge of his bed and remembers something his physical-education professor at Oxford had said: physical fitness, the trainer said, is not measured by the time it takes the runner to run a given distance, but by the time it takes the runner to recover.
Ever since, whenever I hear myself breathing in the dark, I remember that character, that phrase, the streets of Moscow where I’ve never been, and once my breathing steadies, once I calm down, I feel ready to keep on running.
It’s an idea that, from the moment I read the book, I knew I would someday use. For years, I didn’t really know how or in what to use it, but I was always sure I was going to use it. That’s why this memory takes up so much space, unfurling in a flash, like a freehand drawing, the sketch of entire capital cities, of rooms and perspectives misshapen by the panic, the night, and the imagination, of a time that no longer exists, or of two times, that of Eastern Europe and my own when I read it, which in turn encloses another world in the memories it conjures, the memory of school, of professors, and of unexpected lessons, which in turn brings me to that other memory, that of my own childhood, when I never knew anybody who could give me advice like that, except in books, like the one in which all of that happened, in which all was revealed, out of nowhere, like dreams of a life I never had, all of that, that infinite plotline of memory, unique as a fingerprint, came back to me in a second of being alone with the sound of my own breathing. Blinking in the dark is like thinking of a problem without solution. Nothing happens, and not even time can change anything. And yet my breathing grew easier. And as my tears dried and the memory of my dreams evaporated with them, I made a final effort to remember something about them: I hadn’t read anything in my dream diary, it struck me, about the story in which I was thinking of using that line. It was a story that was going to be called Bassani—really, at that time, all my stories were going to have the name of a writer as title; really, at one point, I’d dreamed that all the stories I’d ever write would have the name of a writer as title, something like how the names of towns appear on maps, something like a way to trace a map, marking two points that, connected, in the end, would reveal a sketch, a silhouette, my face in my library.
Bassani was going to be—wanted to be—the story of a young man who, fleeing Buenos Aires, arrives one winter night to a ranch on the pampas. He knows the house: he’s spent months there, some of his best memories still hold the glow of its kitchen in the morning, he’s started a fire in the living-room fireplace innumerable times, the oldest dogs that come out to meet him still recognize him, he knows the names of the trees in the garden that now the night seems to swallow, he could locate any book in the house’s library because he’d been the one to organize it years before, but, above all, he knows the owner of the property he was trespassing on to reach the house he would enter now as thief and son, the house that belonged to a man whose daughter he’d once loved the way you only ever love one person in your life, though perhaps, deep in his heart, he still loves her, though perhaps, the same circumstances that had him on the run would prevent him from ever really knowing. Upon entering the house that night he would reencounter all of that. One afternoon, long ago, standing in that same place he’s returning to now, he abandoned all of it, traded all of it to go off in search of something that seemed a vague and distant equilibrium, not fully comprehensible, precarious yet defiant, apparently unattainable. Now, he was coming back: he’d escaped Buenos Aires, and that night he stopped at that house as if it were his last chance, his last chance to see his life, to see his past, to see for the last time the person he’d been before losing sight of it for a long time, maybe forever. Maybe his last chance to safeguard what had been, to release it, and protect it from the person he’d become. The last thing he could do being completely himself.
First, he would enter the kitchen. He doesn’t have much time, he must continue traveling south, disappear beyond the horizon. It’s already too late to try to leave the country—the owner of that land could help him, but he’d never ask nor accept his aid: to do so would be not only to lose what little he had left but to renounce it—he’s cornered, and his only chance is to become invisible, to vanish before they can find him. He would find the kitchen dark and would move through it as if it were his childhood bedroom, as if the present were a memory taking shape before him. He would let the past find him, sheltered by the whisper of the refrigerator, the color of the oranges on the table, the lavender smell of the recently washed curtains. He would drink a glass of water—he would be thirsty, but it would also be a way to delay a little longer—and when at last he decided to enter the living room, not knowing if there was anyone in the house, just then, something unexpected would happen: his life would be decided, as so many lives are, by an unforeseeable detail: a draft of air would slip past him and slam the door before he could go in. A draft of air that was, for him, a wind that had caught and passed him by. A wind that blew outside, that came from far away, from farther away than he had come, a wind that’d raised waves on the ocean, that’d careened hundreds of kilometers across the pampas, and that would continue on unabated to climb the Andes, a wind that, without pausing, amused itself by slamming that door in front of him, denying him the last thing he could do in his life before leaving it all behind for a long time, maybe forever.
Of course he would still open the door and move into the living room, but the crash of that door slamming would linger in his heart like a premonition, like a bad omen. Once inside, he would find the owner of the house, a man who loves him like a son, he would find him in the living room, lost in thought, in a business deal or in prayer, maybe both. They would recognize each other immediately. He, the way you recognize a familiar face across time. The man, without surprise, as if he’d always known that one day he would see him again, as if he’d been waiting, every night for a while now, to see him walk in. They would speak. It would be a brief exchange, at once dry and affectionate, like the kind you have with a noble but defeated enemy. In this case, the young man would be the defeated one, but that wouldn’t matter. Without saying so, the man would lament the times the young man had to live through, there would be a trace of reproach in his words, not for the young man but for his illusions, his inability to escape the temptation of the life that now brought him back in this way, just passing through. The man speaks to him at once with indulgence and severity, the way one only talks to someone they love like a son. Does the young man love him like a father? It’s not that simple. The man, like the house, like the land, pulses powerfully in the heart of his childhood, but also in a dark fire where his rancor, his rage, and his innocence all blend together. And yet, he’s the one who, after all, needs that moment. Between the two of them, it would seem, a pact exists not to talk about her, about the woman they both love, one as a father, the other as the past. Without breaking their pact, the young man would say something insinuating not his regret, but his wish that everything had been different. He would think he was lying, but the way to the truth is more complex. Finally they would say goodbye. The man knows the young man would never accept his help, or so he believes. He still sees a gleam of pride and a gleam of fear in his eyes as the young man leaves. Finally they would embrace, and fortunately there’s no need to describe everything they were embracing, everything each of them was embracing in the other and in himself in that embrace.
All of that would happen, and the young man would continue fleeing south and would, without knowing it, follow the trajectory of the wind that’d gone on ahead of him that night. He would flee and hide out for weeks in the houses of acquaintances, in towns where hospitality is mistaken for suspicion and vice versa, in uninhabited places where roads don’t reach, he would flee with an intermittence that would become rhythm, until one night, when he goes into a town to buy provisions, he finds himself surrounded by his pursuers.
Crouched among the thistles, besieged by the thorns, like a thousand insidious storylines, panting in the darkness he wishes he could melt into, he’ll remember something he once read: physical fitness isn’t measured by the speed one runs, but by the time it takes one to recover. He’ll remember the exact location in the library of the book in which he read it, in that ranch house he left behind. He’ll remember the moment the wind went on ahead of him: he’ll remember not having felt it, he’ll remember his surprise at the slamming door, his impotence in the face of a sound he should’ve been anticipating, he’ll remember the slamming door and having thought the same thing as when he read that book: speed is not in the legs, but in the mind. What now? he’ll think. And he’ll feel the wind blow across his body. He’ll feel the wind close his eyes and continue on its way.

With my eyes open in the dark, I thought about Bassani as if I were reading it, and though I could no longer remember my dreams, I remembered­—I no longer remembered: I knew—there was no room in them for that story. Was that supposed to mean the story was doomed to accompany me for the rest of my life like a torment, the way the memory of the things we did accompanies us? Does a fiction we never write live on inside us like the ghost of a story that doesn’t exist? But Bassani was not­—I knew now—a ghost that would stalk me in my dreams. Maybe, on the other hand, it was a medium. What else is a memory, if not that? I preferred to let it go. For once, I had the chance to aid oblivion. I could, once and for all, let everything that formed part of me go. I released it and watched it move away, the way I once watched a dream I’d decided not to write down move away.
When it had gone, a slight but unexpected shift in the air made the darkness suddenly mournful, but, at the same time, somehow lighter, as if I’d just shared the last wish granted a condemned man.
Silence drifted in the wake of some irrevocably gone thing. It was what remained after the death of a ghost. The ghost of a ghost.
Then I sensed that there was someone else in the house. I knew I should look over at the desk, the black-covered book was still there, only now it was open and somebody was reading it. The silhouette, its relief emerging like braille across the surface of the dark house, was familiar but not fully known: he had on a leather jacket, wore glasses, and read with the same ease that he breathed. I stared at him one, two, three seconds, and only then, as if the notebook included instructions to close it and turn to face me, he did so and sat there waiting, privately delighting in how taken aback I was to see him.
Of course I knew him. Of course I recognized him. We’d met a few years before he died. Back then, he already lived in Europe and had managed to become the best Latin American writer of his generation, though secretly, I believe, his ambition was actually to be the best Argentinean writer.
He looked at me as if the time that’d passed since we’d last seen each other couldn’t be measured. As if time were but a substance, or the sensation of a substance, something that’s made or that fades away, like what air does with wind. Something that since the last time we’d seen each other had ceased to matter.
He moved his head, indicating the bookcase, as if asking what I was working on, but then, instead, he asked what I was thinking, what was keeping me up at that hour.
I told him I was burying things, letting them sink, I was painting the pages that couldn’t be erased black.
He looked at me with greater attention, but at the same time, the opaque gleam in his eyes gave me the feeling he already knew what I was talking about. It was a feeling, I think, he gave anyone the first time he looked at them: he already knew you a little more than he should, and you would never really know him.
The best and the worst of the world gets buried, he said. Or that’s what I heard. Or that’s what I wanted to hear. Burying, sinking, letting go: we all cross the limit of our ability to confront things in our own way. But in any case, he said something we agreed on: the best and the worst gets buried.
While I thought about that, he got up from the desk, walked over to the armchair on the other side of the table, and sat on one armrest: an intermediate point, a brief visit.
At last, I knew, I would be able to talk about what doesn’t exist but is there, about what exists but isn’t there, about all of that which begins to exist where the imagination barely reaches, a place woven of the same cloudy substance that unites sleep and wakefulness, that space made of time, that luminous darkness where the mind is weightless, where it runs over itself, and vanishes as soon as it thinks it.
Our conversation was the same.
We talked about the lost beauty of the world. About the beauty buried, by the earth or by oblivion, a beauty the world no longer knows, a beauty probably impossible to recover, a beauty that was horrifying, because of the horror recovering it would awaken. I told him of the sculpture of a young woman, discovered on the outskirts of Rome during the Renaissance: its beauty was so great that men fought to see it and made pilgrimages to it, as if it were a sacred tomb. Frightened by the hypnotic power that pulsed in the marble, terrified of the unknowable mystery of that girl, Pope Innocent VIII ordered it to be reburied, and she was never heard of again.
We looked at each other (it’s hard to look someone in the eyes in the dark): both of us would’ve given anything to see that statue, but at the same time we knew that it was already too late, that our eyes were too worn out.
He told me then that he’d been to a town in Romania where there were still land mines that’d been buried during the war. He told me that in the town they have a name for the children who step on them and die: a name for children killed in a war that ended years before they were born. They even have a cemetery for them. He told me it was the most beautiful cemetery he’d ever seen.
He told me sometimes they buried the children with a book about the war so that when they grew up, they could understand why they’d died.
There was a long, dense silence, as if something had sucked up all the words, as if all the dead had, at the same time, inhaled the air of the living.
What would they find centuries from now: books or bones? What would they learn of us when they found the mutilated bodies of children clutching books? I asked him, or we asked each other.
We talked of the number of books that lie buried. We talked about how the same thing happens to books as to the dead: only recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, did the number of people living on earth surpass the number of people buried under it, like how the number of books we can read surpasses the number of books we lose.
He told me that he’d once dreamed of a literature that could write itself. He said he dreamed of it until one day, on a winter afternoon in Girona, he’d met a medieval scholar who spoke of something like that, something similar to what he’d been dreaming. A scholar who spoke of a long poem, twelve books in all, of a complex and invisible structure, held together by a web of internal connections, of a mathematical nature, that allowed the poem, though more than half of it was missing, to be fully reconstructed. A poem that was, literally, capable of writing itself.
I said that today’s literature should aspire to something like that, to a kind of writing that’s simple but not easy, something like the pre-Socratics.
He looked at me. He looked at me and smiled one of those smiles where the eyes glow like the burning tip of a cigarette, as if he’d inhaled mint, as if I’d posed the right question for his answer.
We talked of the pre-Socratics. I told him that, in a book published after he died, Borges wrote of someone: “He is a pre-Socratic: he has the whole past in front of him.” I said, unlike other works and other authors, we had no doubt retained the best of the pre-Socratics: the fragments that survived are, in a way, like the underlined parts of their works.
He said the pre-Socratics had always struck him as the superheroes of thought: heroes who, without any apparent effort, managed to penetrate things to the core.
He asked me which pre-Socratic I liked best, and it was as if he’d asked me who my favorite superhero was.
I said Thales. I said I found it fascinating that his only surviving quote included everything. “Everything is full of gods,” he said. And I smiled. Who wouldn’t want to go down in History with a line like that, a line that even now can be neither proven nor refuted. We talked then about all those who’d never attained that: all the works lost to the centuries, turned to dust in Alexandria, hidden like secrets in the sands of Egypt. We talked about the lost books of Homer and what would’ve become of Western literature if we’d known that his first epic poem had been a comedy, dedicated to a madman. Did Homer’s Greeks laugh at or with, or did they use another preposition? Did they laugh at the afflicted or mock the affected? Would we laugh if were we able to read it?
We talked about other books we would’ve liked to read, books waiting in an urn not yet discovered. And we talked about the writers we barely knew, writers who survived their books, writers of whom all we have left is a shadow in the lives of others. We talked about Menander, or what remains of Menander. Menander, who the past tells us was sui generis, surpassed only by Homer. Menander, read for so many centuries, and lost now who knows where. Ignored only by a writer’s worst enemies: his contemporaries and his present moment. Menander, of whom all we have left is what he said, one day, tired of losing to his adversary Philemon—apparently, the two Greeks coincided in Time—at drama festivals, demanding to know: “How do you not blush every time you beat me?”
We laughed. We laughed without thinking about what we were going to say after, we laughed until our laughter faded away, little by little, like bubbling sand.
There are still pre-Socratics, he said then. And he removed a notebook from his jacket pocket, a small notebook, like a forest animal, opened it, and read me a line:
“If one night you had a date with our shared lover, would you rather see me leave her house as you were entering, or see me enter as you were leaving?”
I laughed again. At first I thought it was a good quote to open a book with. But then I thought it was more than that: like all good quotes, an entire book fit inside of it.
We laughed again, and I felt pleased with myself for not having spoken before thinking about what I really thought.
In Hollywood, entering second would be a comedy, I thought. In a nineteenth-century novel, a tragedy. In the nineteenth century, the protagonists entered first. In Hollywood, they entered second. But I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t convinced about what I thought, and I felt like that was good.
The house remained dark, but the laughter had given the air a transparency, like the clinking of glasses or the idea of someone swimming by the light of the moon. His figure, still outlined atop the armrest, made a motionless gesture, an ineffable gesture, as if he were looking at his watch without moving a muscle, and then, standing up, he said he had to go.
I saw him standing there: his clothes weren’t as baggy as the last time.
Don’t go, I said.
He stopped.
I have something for you, I said.
He stood still, but looked at me with sadness, and a well-concealed shadow of anger, as if he was disappointed that, in the end, I hadn’t understood that where he was going he couldn’t take anything I gave him.
I walked over to him, and when I was close enough to shake his hand, I said:
A joke.
He smiled:
I’m listening, he said.
It’s the joke of the magic martini, I said then.
In a bar on the top floor of a hotel, a man is having a drink. He’s well dressed, wearing a suit and glasses, with a briefcase at his feet. Through the entrance at the opposite side of the bar, a beautiful woman enters, and after looking the place over, she chooses him. She walks over to the bar and sits two stools away. There is something implied by the way she moves. He looks at her, she smiles. He smiles back, then she points at his drink and asks what he’s drinking. A magic martini, he says. A magic martini? she asks, surprised. Yes, he says. What’s magic about it? she asks. He, lifting the glass, asks her to watch: then he takes a sip, sets the glass back down, and, without blinking, levitates from the stool, flies over the whole room, and returns, settling back into the seat where he’d been. The woman is stunned. And that happens with every sip? she asks. Yes, of course, the man says. Watch. And he drinks again from the glass and levitates once more. This time, he flies out a window, takes a spin around the building, comes in through another window, and lands back on his stool. The woman is blown away: And can I order one? she asks. Of course, the man answers, and with a gesture signals the barman. Hey, Jimmy, one of these for the lady. The barman prepares and serves it to her. The woman, smiling, takes a sip, walks over to the window, and jumps into the emptiness. Thirty floors below, she crashes into the pavement and dies. The man, who watches the scene from the bar with his martini in hand, smiles. The barman, with a gesture of reproach, says: Oh, Superman, you’re a real son of a bitch when you get drunk . . .

Still standing there, I heard him laugh. He laughed with his eyes closed, as if he were rewatching what I’d told him, as if in that way he was making it his own, as if he were recording dozens of details I hadn’t given, to be included when he told it, if it was possible to tell a joke where he was going. Then he laughed a little more, his eyes wide open now, and said:
Now I do have to go.
I knew he had a date. I could tell he was going to see a woman he already knew, but not too well. It was exciting to see him hurl himself into love the way a sailor throws himself from a burning boat into the sea.

I was alone again.
The house was still dark, but the transparency of the air seemed to radiate a glow, like the memory of light that lives in everything. There was nothing else for me to do. Outside, the night was vast.
I went out onto the balcony and looked up at the stars. All together, they seemed to know something I didn’t. But each one, viewed separately, looked much like each of us: scattered in time, glimmering in the darkness, burning up everything to flicker fragilely, like the flame of a candle, waiting for someone, there outside, perhaps long after we faded away, to look to where we once were and catch a glimpse of us.
I went back inside. I got back in bed. I shut my eyes. And I let myself fall into a dream that I already knew but no longer remembered, like a book read long ago and all that remains now is the happiness of having been inside it.


Juan Ignacio Boido (Buenos Aires, 1975) is an Argentinian writer, journalist, and editor with a degree in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has published articles, interviews, essays, and stories in magazines such as Granta (Spain), Playboy (Mexico), and Página/30 (Argentina). For over a decade, he has been the editor of Radar, the influential cultural magazine from the newspaper Página/12. He currently works as the editorial director of Penguin Random House Argentina. In 2012, he published his first book, El último joven, which includes short stories and a novella.

Will Vanderhyden is a translator of Spanish-language literature. He has translated work by Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, Juan Villoro, Laura Fernández, Camila Fabbri, Juan Ignacio Boido, among others. His translations and writing have appeared in such online and print publications as Granta, Two Lines, the Literary Review, the Arkansas International, BOMB, Purple, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He received a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in 2015 and National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships in 2016 and 2023. In 2018, his translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction.

Illustration: Kevin Sampsell.

 

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Shortly after Leaving It All Behind