Buenos Aires | The Common

Tethered Hearts

November 5, 2025 Dispatches

From Buenos Aires, Argentina

For Eduardo Rios Pulgar,

San Telmo rings through me, like an unlived memory from a distant past. All colors, linden trees, worn down buildings, from the last century and the one before it, next to towering cement. The Argentinian Peso crumbles like the Lebanese Lira. We collect its ruins at the casa de cambio, our American dollars grotesque in the face of this country’s protracted collapse. The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues. Dregs of a time where French architects flooded the city and left their prints along its urban landscape.

Excerpt from Before It Disappears

April 6, 2023 Fiction, Translation

Blurry photo of people crossing the street on a sunny day

By SYLVIA IPARRAGUIRRE
Translated from the Spanish by EMILY HUNSBERGER

The following is a translated excerpt from the novel Antes que desaparezca by Sylvia Iparraguirre, published in 2021 by Alfaguara.

—

Unannounced, the past invades the Russian literature class one autumn morning in Buenos Aires. I’m facing one of the windows of the museum library, talking about Pushkin. It’s raining outside and I allow myself a few seconds’ pause—after all, I’m the one teaching the class—to linger on the beauty of the rain falling on the sculptures in the modern interior courtyard, the clear water sliding down the bronze.

Translation: The Men Go to War

November 7, 2022 Fiction, Translation

Story by TOMÁS DOWNEY

Translated from the Spanish by SARAH MOSES

The piece appears below in both English and Spanish.

Translator’s Note

When I first read Tomás Downey’s story, “Los hombres van a la guerra,” I reread it. This was the ending’s doing: it called into question all that came prior, as the best endings do (I think here of Alice Munro). So I had an ulterior motive for translating the story: I wanted to understand how Tomás had put it together, how he’d written towards that ending. I’m not convinced I’ve figured it out. But in a sense, translating the story was studying it, and I hope that something of the circular way it works makes its way into my own writing. I hope, too, that readers of “The Men Go to War” have a similar experience: that the ending directs them back to the beginning for a second read.

— Sarah Moses

Exile

October 28, 2020 Fiction, Issue 20, Issue 20 Fiction, Translation

By CLARA OBLIGADO
Translated by RACHEL BALLENGER

On December 5, 1976, I arrived in Madrid from Argentina. I flew Iberia airlines, caught the plane in Montevideo because I was afraid of the disappearances happening at the border. I left wearing summer clothes, as if I were a tourist heading for the beaches of Uruguay, then, two or three days later, landed in Madrid, where it was winter. My father and sister saw me off. It took me six years—the years of the dictatorship—to return.