To write in Spanish is for me a gesture of survival, and because of translation my memory has now become a part of the memory of others. Translators … - Marjorie Agosín

literature is the only way to preserve memory. I mean, it's like the queen, the king of the preservation of memory. You look at monuments—I just saw the monument of [Robert E.] Lee—you look at the monument of Sadaam Hussein is gone, a lot of historical monuments are going to be vanished according to wars, earthquakes. The only thing that remains are words.

Quite close together, in the warmness of shared bodies, they dared to dream of the sea. Some imagined it as the deep well of the soul; others sketched it out like the face of a drowned man, weighed down with broken seaweed and shells. (first lines of "First Time to the Sea")

Poetry, which is always with me and brings me to privileged horizons and uncertain but always true pathways