Zuberino

“To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.”
― David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black

“He had a heart attack here in Montevideo, barely lived to tell the tale. There is something like a Bermuda Triangle here, it’s not to be underestimated. It’s kind of the B-side of the River Plate, the side that’ll eat you right up. If you can’t handle it, it’ll kill you. You have to be careful with Uruguay, especially if you come thinking it’s like the countryside in Argentina only everybody’s good, there’s no corruption, no Peronism, you can smoke pot on the street, the cute little country where everyone is a good person and friendly and all that bullshit. If you’re not paying attention, Uruguay will fuck you in the ass.”

“Enzo!” said Clara”
― Pedro Mairal, La uruguaya

“To the kids, this extravagant convoy might even seem normal. They’ll have to see ordinary trains, at other times in other places, do you realise just how magical this caravan of gypsies is. A few years in Europe will suffice for them to recreate the landscapes handed down to them by their patriarchs and discover that their life is just a chronicle foretold. Then these men of maize will only have to write well to get the Nobel Prize for poems of love and songs of despair.”
― Ramón Chao, The Train of Ice and Fire

“Walls that had been attentively decorated with whatever was at hand; a home lined with plaster and a molding painted blue and red; little ornaments that hung on the walls, testifying to a loving care whose foundations had now been eradicated; traces of female-wisdom-hath-builded-her-house, paying close attention to myriad details whose time now had passed; an order intelligible to someone and a disorder in which somebody at his convenience had found his way; remnants of pots and pans that had been collected in a haphazard fashion, as need arose, touched by very private joys and woes that a stranger could not understand; tatters that made sense to someone who was used to them—a way of life whose meaning was lost, diligence that had reached its negation, and a great, very deep muteness had settled upon the love, the bustle, the bother, the hopes, and the good and less-good times, so many unburied corpses.

But we were already tired of seeing things like this, we had no more interest in such things.”
― S. Yizhar