For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Cas… - Marjorie Agosín

Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices.

And we prepared quickly for sleep. The mist crackled in the deep heart of the travelling night. We, too, were of a cross-roads, wounded by the pleasure of watching. We were in Austria and I thought of the wounds of my grandfather and of the music of Mozart, like a stream, like a litany, like a fragrance. Then I learned perhaps to be happy in those hospitable, desolate meadows, because the war had erased every trace of scars and only in certain looks were hollow aches and the calamity of dead children still preserved. (beginning of "The Eiderdown")

In the face of fear and death these testimonies say "no" to silence and to the fate of all the people missing in a subhuman and diabolical world. What would the political history of Argentina have been without the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with their white kerchieves embroidered with the initials of their disappeared loved ones? Would the world, so often indifferent and astonished, have learned about the almost 30,000 people who disappeared in Argentina during the "dirty war"? From these spoils, writers, activists, and ordinary citizens constructed a language against authoritarianism, a language that accuses, denounces, and feels; words are the fundamental weapon against indifference, fear, and forgetfulness.