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Posts published by “Manuel Vicent (translated by Louis S. Bedrock)”

Jorge Luis Borges: The Vision Of Amber

Being blind and a poet is half way to Homer. If in addition, the blind poet is Argentinian, the path can't be very long. It isn't necessary to sail treacherous seas, nor follow chalky trails…

Graham Greene in the Côte d’Azur

Spread out along the bay, Nice was an old fashioned city with a certain dilapidated look to it. It had become a kingdom of blue-haired grandmothers and deeply suntanned old men, all wandering the English…

Dorothy Parker in New York

During my first trip to New York, just as if I had been a Syrian arriving in Nero’s Rome, it was necessary to fulfill certain unavoidable rituals: see Picasso’s Guernica at MOMA; cross the Brooklyn…

Paul Gauguin

Around 1870, at the tender age of 25, when he closed his office every evening, Paul Gauguin would leave the Berlin Bank, where he worked as a liquidator, and cross the Rue Laffitte puffing on…

John Huston

In the biography of a writer there is a moment in which fascination with literature unites with, even surrenders to, the mythology of cinema. When I was 16 years old, I ran away from home…

The Bullfight

On these dusty grounds, every year more than 30,000 fighting bulls are publicly beaten, pierced by gaffs, dragged by the neck with a rope, burnt alive by tar bullets, and beheaded in the midst of…

The Dynamiter With A Cig In His Lips

The entire French Resistance against the Nazis can be encapsulated in this film sequence: a man—a loner, standing and leaning on his bicycle, smokes a cigarette alongside of the railroad tracks. He carries a newspaper…

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