A Fragment, by Roberto Burgos Cantor

Emiro Martínez-Osorio and Julio Olaciregui

PORTFOLIO: LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Translators’ Note:

This passage is a translation, into English and French, of the opening fragment of Roberto Burgos Cantor’s novel El patio de los vientos perdidos (1984). Like many other writers of his generation, in the 1960s Burgos Cantor read works by the most notable Latin American novelists of the 20th century, including Julio Cortazar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Gabriel García Márquez. However, unlike his predecessors, when he published his first novel, Burgos Cantor didn’t open his work with an epigraph, a note to the reader, or a table of instructions; instead, he began it with a fragment containing his ars poetica.