Valeria Luiselli - Sidewalks

Valeria Luiselli (1983–)

There are writers who invent cities and take possession of entire eras, wielding their pens with the sword-edge of genius: the London of Johnson and Chesterton, the Paris of Rousseau or Baudelaire, Joyce’s Dublin. There are others who, by force of reading, solitude, and tranquil hours, conquer literary territories, philosophical paradigms, impossible spaces: Montaigne’s tower, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s cell, Chateaubriand’s tomb. Others construct stories like extraordinary palaces or desert islands that they then inhabit, like one more character in the warp and weft of their own plot — perhaps Sebald, Bolaño, Pitol, and Vila-Matas are of that ilk. There are a few who, with the patience of a gardener, cultivate the art of the aphorism throughout a whole life and watch it bloom — late, perhaps, but fully — beneath their feet: such is the case of Wittgenstein and an Italo-Argentinian whose name I can never remember. And there are yet others who, dedicated to the arduous task of clearing the weeds from their own language, end up putting down roots in apparently desert plains, which are, in fact, rich in poetic humus: the sun-beaten piles of broken images T. S. Eliot describes in his London Wasteland.

I, who have rather fruitlessly attempted some of those things, now have the joy of being an official resident of one of the most literary of cities, though neither through the blessing of a graceful pen nor the fidelity of the muses. And, worse still, not even through the sweat of my brow and fist, but because of a terrible — although very frequent, hence, unglamorous — ailment of the bladder: the ignoble bacterial cystitis. But in fact, it comforts me to think that if I die before my time, at least I’ll have taken up false permanent residence in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, and will thus be able to fulfil my wish to be buried in some relingo, perhaps not far from Joseph Brodsky, in the commoners’ section of the cemetery of San Michele.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY has an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and specializes in Latin American fiction. Her translations have previously appeared in a variety of online sites and literary magazines. She has also translated Valeria Luiselli’s novel, Faces in the Crowd .