“Nunca me he preocupado por que mis libros...” / Dolores Dorantes

“I’ve never worried about my books...”

I’ve never worried about my books crossing borders. I’ve never thought my work has to cross borders. It would be an exhausting and disappointing task. If I can’t even manage to get a book published in my own country, how am I going to make an effort toward having my work appear somewhere else. The path one’s work takes is unpredictable, and the writer can do nothing to direct its course. It’s likely a writer will make an effort to get his work out to the entire world, so that he gets published throughout the Americas and nothing will guarantee that “something will happen.” Can anyone imagine Antonio Lobo Antunez making an effort to have his books reach Spain, for instance? And yet someone read Lobo Antunez and liked him and gave him a contract and edited him and translated his work and, now, thanks to that good taste I can read him. All Antonio had to do was write his books. It’s the only thing a writer should do. Any poet can get his work out all over the world before it advances on its own, but it’s absurd to think that by means of that simple action we will be Neruda, or Vallejo, or Julio Cortázar. If Gorostiza and Velarde are barely known in our own country. Trying to move ahead of one’s own work is useless, boys, you’re wasting your time. Those things, just like poetry, happen naturally.




{ Dolores Dorantes, Tabla sin asidero, January 2009 }