Madrid | The Common

Translation: Poetry by Esther Ramón

December 2, 2021 Poetry, Translation

Translated from the Spanish by EMMA FERGUSON

Poems appear in both Spanish and English.

Translator’s Note

Esther Ramón, born in 1970, lives in Madrid and taught one of my very first writing workshops at various café tables in Lavapiés more than a decade ago, where she skillfully introduced me and fellow students to what it could mean to truly collaborate, to be interdisciplinary, to do more than look at a painting while writing a poem and instead to enter into the methods and mindsets of different mediums, seeing the world not only in a different language (in my case) but with a more creative intention. She continues to be a collaborator with other artists and it feels meaningful to translate her work, in a sense collaborate too, and become involved in her poetic world so many years later.

Plenty

October 6, 2021 Dispatches

By KATHERINE L. HESTER

Madrid, Spain

I chose my frutería not by its quality—how could I know that before I’d sampled its three types of peaches (red, yellow, squashed into donut-shapes), its abundance of tomatoes, its fuzzy orange nisperos?—but because of its old-fashioned tiled façade.

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.

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Translation: Poetry by Esther Ramón

Plenty

Exile

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