as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self. - Marjorie Agosín

if we don't record this, through language, I feel memory vanishes. It's like almost—who said that, Virginia Woolf or someone—"What you don't put down doesn't exist." And that has been my preoccupation, my obsession, really.

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 are not traitors, as the proverb says, traductores, traidores--but rather splendid friends in this great human community of language.

I think the decoding of things, the passionate intellectual need to understand, is part of Jewish sensibility. (2016)