Being Time

Being Time [with Spanish original version] by Luis Cruz-Villalobos (Hebel Ediciones & Cross-Cultural Communications, Antípodas Collection, 2026). Translation by Kathryn Herd.

• "It is a book of the human sensory experience: "The world is a poem / that cannot be read straight through [...] the world is a poem that kisses / not only the ear but also the chest / It is a surrealist / abstract yet also simple poem / The world is a minimal poem / of only a single line." It is through that experience-together with philosophy and time-that we arrive at subthemes also deeply rooted in the deepest arteries of this work: the unease that loving arouses, as for example in the poem "Stormy": "You torment me / as I torment you. [...] Minotaurs who want, / at times dark and labyrinthine, / to devour our joy," the poetic obsession that at times becomes a prison of words, as happens in "Knots": "I am locked inside poetry [...] I am trapped in beauty," or death with its different prisms: "My death / our death / Be late / do not come / until the end / the true end / the really last one. / When there is no longer / any poetry," which appears in "Abrupt Elegies." Also solidified in the human soul, Greek pathos accompanies us with the same slowness as we read-the kind of pathos that only human beings can experience as part of their vital becoming. A pathos that Luis brings toward us and drives us into, striking us as he goes, like a persistent sculptor, toward the poetic knots of the artist's distinctive style." Diana Forte (Revista Abril)