. Swartest night stretched over wretched men there
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
. lightless region of subtle horrors
. Going up that river…It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.
Ezra Pound, “Canto I” and “Canto II”
. impetuous impotent dead,
. unburied, cast on the wide earth
. thence outward and away
. wine-red glow in the shallows
. loggy with vine-must
Ezra Pound, “Canto III”
. his heart out, set on a pike spike
. Here stripped, here made to stand
. his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered
Augusto Monterroso, “El dinosaurio”
. When he woke up the dinosaur was still there.
Galway Kinnell, “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible”
. Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
. A heap of broken images where the sun beats
Galway Kinnell, “The Porcupine”
. puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned / on willow flowers, poplar catkins….
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
. Looking into the heart of light, the silence
. Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (retranslated by me from the Spanish original)
. Up and down the hill we went, but always descending. We had left behind hot wind and were sinking into pure, airless heat.
. The hour of day when in every village children come out to play in the streets
. Hollow footsteps, echoing against walls stained red by the setting sun
. Empty doorways overgrown with weeds
Rilke, Duino Elegies (loosely retranslated from Juan Rulfo’s free translation of Duino Elegies)
. knowing they cannot call upon anyone, not men, not angels, not beasts
. astute beasts
. this uninterpreted world
. voices, voices, thinks listen heart, listen like only the saints have listened before
. how strange it feels to not be on earth anymore
. angels forget if they live among the living or among the dead
. toilsome to be dead
Jerzy Andrzejewski, The Gates of Paradise (loosely translated from Pitol’s Spanish translation of the Polish original, and retranslated by me into English)
. they walked without chants and without ringing of bells in a closed horde
. nothing could be heard, except the monotonous sound of thousands of footsteps
. a desert, inanimate and calcined by the sun
. he touched the sand with his lips
. the sky was stained with a violet silence
. in a strange country, under a strange sky
. far away, as if in another world, thunder resonated heavily
To the best of my ability, I have quoted, cited, and referenced all works used for this novel—aside from the boxes, embeddings, retranslations, and repurposing of the literary works in the third-person narrative thread of the novel, which I cite above.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
1Courtesy of Humane Borders
2© Felix Gaedtke
3By J. W. Swan (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
4Courtesy of Kansas Historical Society
5Geronimo and fellow Apache Indian prisoners on their way to Florida by train. 1886. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
6Image courtesy of the Hofstra Hispanic Review; poem © Anne Carson
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Lost Children Archive Page 34