Alberto Ruy Sánchez
by Susanne Dubroff
At the reading of Mogador,
you are asked about your influences
and you mention Yourcenar,
. . . thus we each open our body to all,
surrender to all . . . and Becket,
who was rejected so much in English
that he started writing in French.
You explain that you boycott movement
in your novella whenever the action
gets too intense, that in the West they
always think of climbing, but you want
to think in terms of spirals, of having
already arrived when you begin.
To the question of whether your spirals
have anything to do with Yeats’s gyres,
you reply that your writing comes from
fragments, moments, women . . . one of them
perhaps getting off a bus, hurrying away.
Forty percent of Spanish words, you tell us,
are erotic, Baroque possibilities, which
can’t be translated, link to Arab resonance.
You brush by me in your wrinkled linen suit.
We’ve smiled at each other once or twice.
I don’t try to talk to you; the fragments suffice.
Copyright © 1995 by Susanne Dubroff
