Resguardo personal por Paloma Pedrero [Personal Claim Check: English translation]

You can find the original in Spanish here [although this translation is based on the version found in Aproximaciones: al estudio de la literatura hispánica, Sexta Ed. by Friedman, Valdivieso and Virgillo]. A list of other works by Paloma Pedrero can be found here.

Resguardo Personal por Paloma Pedrero; Personal Claim Check by Paloma Pedrero

Dramatis personae: Marta, the wife; Gonzalo, the husband

Dining room of a modest house or apartment. The furniture are typical of a rental apartment: unpolished, impersonal and cheap. There is very little decoration. In the living area there are signs of a recent move. Turning on the light, we see Marta. She is dressed and made up, although in her face there are marks of weariness. She opens her handbag and finds a piece of paper that she places on top of the counter the telephone rests on. She was going to dial but regrets it and hangs up. She sits on the sofa next to a cardboard box from which clothes that she has gently placed there are peeking out.

Más sobre escaleras por Julio Cortázar [traducción de inglés/English translation]

Original in Spanish here. This translation was largely done by reader Maria Villa, with slight modifications were made by me dependent on my own interpretation of the text.

Thanks to Maria, here is the information for where you can find the Spanish original in hard copy:

Julio Cortázar, Último round (Tomo II), Siglo XXI, Madrid, 2009 (1969), pp. 222-224.

More about stairs by Julio Cortázar

Somewhere in the bibliography of which I have no desire to call to mind, it was explained that there are stairs for climbing as well of stairs for going down. What was not mentioned then, however, is that there might also be stairs for going backwards.

Users of these practical artifacts will understand without excessive effort that any stair might go backwards if you ascend giving your back to it, but, in any case, what’s at stake here is the result of such an unheard of process. You may do a test with any external stair —once you overcome the initial feeling of unease, or even vertigo, you will discover in each footstep a new field that not only belongs to the one of the previous step, but also corrects, criticizes and broadens it. Consider how just shortly before that, the last time you have climbed up that same stair in the usual manner, all this background world was abolished by the stairway itself and its hypnotic succession of steps; in contrast, climbing backwards would be enough, so that a horizon limited at first by the garden wall now jump to the small field of Peñaloza, encompassing then the Turkish lady’s mill, explode in the poplars of the cemetery, and with a bit of luck, arrive at the actual horizon, the one defined for us by our third-grade teacher. And the sky, the clouds? Count them when you are at the peak, drink the sky that falls upon your face as if through a gigantic funnel. Maybe later, when you turn on your feet and enter the upper floor of the house to your domestic and everyday life, you will learn that there also you should have looked at many things in that way, that also in a mouth, in love, in a novel, you should have walked up backwards. But be careful, it is easy to trip and fall; there are things that would only turn visible to you as you climb up backwards, and others that won’t give in, afraid of that ascension that forces them to undress to such extent; obstinate in their own level and in their mask, they cruelly take revenge of those who walk up backwards to see the world in a different perspective, the little field of Peñaloza or the poplars in the cemetery. Be careful with that chair; be careful with that woman.

United Fruit Co. de Pablo Neruda [English translation]

United Fruit Co.   [please google for original in Spanish if you need it]

When the trumpet sounded,
all was prepared in the land
and Jehovah parceled the land
to Coca-Cola, Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
the United Fruit Co.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.

Flores de volcán de Claribel Alegría [English Translation of Flowers from the Volcano by Alegría]

Flowers from the Volcano [first page of original here, unable to find full poem in Spanish online due to copyright laws, but then again, I didn’t try very hard]

To Roberto and Ana María 

Fourteen volcanoes rising
in my remembered country
in my mythical country
that day to day I invent
fourteen volcanoes of foliage and stone
where strange clouds detain sometimes
the screeching of a lost bird
Who said that my country was green?
it is more red
it is more gray
it is more violent:
Izalco bellows
demanding more lives
The eternal Chac Mool
that collects blood
and those which drink the blood
from Chac Mool
and the gray orphans
and the volcano drooling
all that incandescent lava
and the dead guerrilla
and the thousand betrayed faces
and the children who look on
to tell the story.

El etnógrafo por Jorge Luis Borges [traducción en inglés/ English translation]

Después de estudiar por mi examen final por la clase de sociología, pienso de repente en este cuento sobre la investigación cualitativa y la etnografía en particular. Aquí tiene un cuento muy corto de Borges y mi traducción original. [Original in Spanish, here]

The Ethnographer by Jorge Luis Borges

The case was recounted to me in Texas, but it had happened in another state. It concerns a lone protagonist, although in all the stories, the protagonists are thousands, visible and invisible, alive and dead. He was called, I believe, Fred Murdock. He was tall in the manner of the Americans, not blonde nor brunette, with an ax-like profile and of very few words.

La continuidad de los parques por Julio Cortázar (Continuity of Parks English translation)

This story was where the namesake of this blog originated, so I thought it would be nice to share. It is not a word to word translation, nor am I a professional translator. I love this story which was why I translated it, a much better version than mine can be found here.

Continuity of parks (original in Spanish)

He had begun to read the novel a couple days ago. Having abandoned it due to urgent business, he revisited it when he was returning by train to his country house, allowing himself to be slowly absorbed back into the plot through the depiction of the characters. That afternoon, after writing a letter to his attorney and discussing with his butler about an issue of sharecropping, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study that overlooks a park of oaks. Comfortably seated in his favourite armchair, his back to the door so as to lessen the irksome possibility of intrusions, he let his left hand caress again and again the green velvet of the chair and began to read the last chapters.

La gloria de los feos por Rosa Montero traducción en inglés [The glory of the ugly ones, English translation]

Aquí tiene la versión original en español: Rumbos, Curso Intermedio de Español p.203

**Esta traducción fue solamente para la diversión y no se debe usar por tarea sino como una guía.

The glory of the ugly ones 

I noticed Lupe and Lolo; it has been many years, but they were, without a doubt, the strange ones of the neighbourhood. There are kids that were different ever since they were born, and they know this and suffer because of this difference. They are those kids who always fall during recess; who walk like lost souls [lit: souls doing penance] from group to group, begging for a friend. It was enough for the teacher to call them to the chalkboard for the rest of the class to erupt in laughter, although in fact, there is nothing comical about them, other than the fact that they are victims meekly accepting their fate.

Pecado de omisión [Sin of omission] por Ana María Matute (Traducción en inglés/English translation)

Aquí tiene una traducción breve de un cuento de Matute que acabo de estudiar por mi cuenta para la clase de literatura española en la universidad. No es una traducción buena porque hay elementos en la historia que en este momento de escribir, todavía no entiendo. Entonces, disfruta la traducción y ¡usa con cuidado! ¡OJO! (no es siempre se traduce palabra a palabra, sino por la comprensión).