Astonishment by Cristina Peri Rossi / National Poetry Month 2021

 

                                Cristina Peri Rossi.

I have to thank my Facebook friend poet Jerry Pendergast for sharing this poem the other day.  It speaks to me in so many ways as a person trying with varying degrees of success to bridge transgenerational gaps and share dreams even without the sexual attractions it describes.

Cristina Peri Rossi is a  novelist, poet, translator, and author of short stories  born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972 when a fascist “civic-military” regime was terrorizing dissidents and leftists. She moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. And lives in Barcelona where Catalan nationalists are often at odds with the government in Madrid and which has a lively arts scene. where she continues to write fiction and work as a journalist and political commentator.

Solitaire of Love by Cristina Peri Rossi

Solitaire of Love

by Cristina Peri Rossi

Solitaire of Love, an achingly lyrical novel by internationally acclaimed Latin American writer Cristina Peri Rossi, explores the sense of emotional exile that sexual passion can evoke. Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi’s to be translated into English—the others are The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, and Dostoevsky’s Last Night—Solitaire of Love showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories.

The Fallen Angel by Cristina Peri Rossi

 

The Fallen Angel

by Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated by Mary Jane Treacy

THE ANGEL PLUMMETED TO THE EARTH exactly like the Russian satellite that while spying on the movements of the American Tenth Fleet lost height when it should have been thrust into a strong nine hundred and fifty kilometer orbit. It fell exactly like the American satellite that while spying on the movements of the Russian fleet in the North Sea also fell to earth after a wrong move. But while both of these incidents brought about innumerable catastrophes – part of Canada turned into desert, several types of fish became extinct, local people’s teeth crumbled, and neighboring lands became polluted – the angel’s fall didn’t cause any ecological disturbance. Because it was weightless (a theological mystery that cannot be doubted upon pain of heresy), it didn’t destroy anything in its wake, not the trees on the road nor the electric wires; it didn’t cause interference in TV programs nor in radio stations; it didn’t open up a crater in the face of the earth, nor did it poison the waters. No, it just settled down on the sidewalk and stayed there without moving, confused and with a terrible case of motion sickness.

Afters Hours by Cristina Peri Rossi

 

AFTER HOURS

by Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated from Spanish by Megan Berkobien

 

Nestled somewhere in La Mancha was a gas station, adrift in the vastness like a Moor in the desert. He wouldn’t have noticed it (he liked driving through the highways of Castilla like a man lost in sleep, with the pleasing sensation of being still in the womb) if it hadn’t been for the car starting to skid, much as if it were on an ice rink. “Damn it,” he thought, “we’re both old and tired. It had to happen sometime. It’s dying along the way, and so am I.” The crude, sparing, sallow gas station attendant told him that the car wouldn’t be fixed until the next day. What did he want to do? Either he could leave it or call a car service to come pick it up. He hadn’t paid his car insurance for several months. Problems with liquidity, as the economic journalists or people in bankruptcy say. Curious word. A rupture, from the Latin meaning “to break”—the bank was broken. Sometimes, while playing baccarat with friends, he would win the pot. He had always declared bankruptcy in the end. The dream of winning the pot ends with the penniless dreamer, ruined and exhausted, ground to dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Thinking about it, how long had it been since he had a good dusting between the sheets? Months. A year, maybe.

State of Exile / Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi

State of Exile: Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi

MAY 15, 2010

In 1972, Uruguayan novelist Cristina Peri Rossi moved to Barcelona, Spain, as a political exile.

At the beginning of your prologue to “State of Exile” you wrote, “If exile were not a terrible experience, it would be a literary genre. Or both things at the same time.” What can you say about exile as a literary genre?

Rumors by Cristina Peri Rossi

Rumors

by Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated from Spanish by Tobias Hecht

Toward the end of the twentieth century, rumors about the cities spread. Some people spoke of their demise, others of a strange rebirth from out of the rubble. Clandestine groups would whisper secrets about cities that were still inhabitable, where it was possible to walk, see a bird, explore a museum, or take in the color of the sky. But places like that were few and far between. Gradually, people started talking about Berlin. Not in public, in newspapers, or in social gatherings. The city's name came to be something like a code word, a mystical sign, a cipher for those in the know but meaningless for anyone else. Berlin was discussed in hushed tones, among close friends, in secluded rooms, in a moment of intimacy after lovemaking. In the muted light of a bedroom, for example, a naked lover might tell the woman at her side, "I've heard that linden trees still grow in the streets of Berlin and that there are swans in the lakes."

Fetishists Anonymous by Cristina Peri Rossi

Fetishists Anonymous 

by Cristina Peri Rossi 

Translated from Spanish by Tobias Hecht

On Saturday afternoons, I'm the only woman at the Fetishists' Club. Otherwise it's just men.

We meet on the weekends, before Sunday, stupid old Sunday, the gloomiest, most depressing day of the week. Sundays are a lost cause: reality plain and simple, unadorned. If you're lucky, you can sleep a little longer, between one noise and the next-the neighbor's shower, the elevator full of children (children are let loose on Sundays and there's no telling what can happen with all those exploding hormones), the telephone (which is always ringing to announce the ritual visit of your parents-in-law, someone's forgotten birthday, or that your great aunt who suffers from, among other things, the eighty years she's already been alive, is sick). The full weight of reality, that's Sunday, when you have incontrovertible evidence that your apartment is too small for four people and that lack of space creates hostility (or at least puts it on display), when you can eat paella or baked lamb, go to movies with your husband and feel lonely or go alone and feel lonely.

Ne Me Quitte Pas by Cristina Peri Rossi

 

Ne Me Quitte Pas 

By Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated from Spanish by Megan Berkobien

“I can’t seem to remember her,” the man said in anguish. “I can’t remember her face or her body or her voice—that voice that I once adored. I have this mental image that her voice was pleasing, but the sound isn’t there. Do you understand? How can you be in love with someone whom you can’t seem to remember? We’ve only been separated for six months.” (The psychologist jotted something down in his notepad that passed unnoticed by the man who couldn’t remember. Igor Caruso, a famous psychoanalyst during the ’70s, wrote a lucid and heartbreaking essay about the separation of lovers; he observed that separated lovers cannot remember the face of their beloved ones.)

The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize

Cristina Peri Rossi

 The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize

By David William
November 11, 2021

Narrator, essayist, poet and translator, Peri Rossi, a Uruguayan based in Barcelona after having left her country in 1972 due to the advance of dictatorships in the region, is recognized for books in which she has cultivated different genres, from novels, poetry, short stories to essays, always committed to contemporary social issues and traversed by that singular synergy between love and exile, her two topics.

Artists in Conversation / Cristina Peri Rossi by Carmen Boullosa

Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi

by Carmen Boullosa

BOMB 106

Winter 2009

Cristina Peri Rossi is the only woman associated with the Latin American Boom, which gained prominence in the 1970s. Peri Rossi, a first-rate author from Uruguay, had everything to be on par with the Boom authors: she was actively involved in the causes they supported during the ’60s and ’70s, was exiled for her political militancy twice, and was a close friend of Julio Cortázar’s. Her association with the Boom, though, is partial. It’s not that she didn’t share the penchant for fantastic literature that characterized a few of the Boom generation’s more prominent members—García Márquez and Cortázar, for instance. Mario Vargas Llosa never dabbled in this genre either and he has always been one of the Boom’s key writers. Peri Rossi’s writing—she has published over 37 novels, short-story collections, and poetry books, and is a journalist and political commentator for the public radio station Catalunya Ràdio—is as great as theirs. It’s that she either lacked or manifested (depending on who’s keeping score) something in excess: she is a woman.