New and On View: Mudlark No. 27 (2005)

Knocking at the Doors of Heaven
(Golpeando a las puertas del cielo)

Twenty-Five Prose Poems by Maria Rosa Lojo
translated by Brett Alan Sanders

Maria Rosa Lojo was born in 1954 in Buenos Aires, the daughter of
Spaniards; her father, a Republican from Galicia, had exiled himself to
Argentina after the Civil War. She is a Doctor of Letters of the
University of Buenos Aires, and, in addition to her activity as a writer,
does literary research for CONICET, the National Council for Scientific
and Technical Research, which has its headquarters at the university. She
also directs two research projects at the Universidad del Salvador, where
she offers a doctoral seminar. In addition, she co-ordinates the
international team of researchers that is working on the critical edition
of Ernesto Sabato's _Sobre heroes y tumbas_ (On Heroes and Tombs) for the
archival collection at UNESCO. She has been a lecturer and a visiting
professor at both Argentine and foreign universities, and acts as a juror
on both national and international competitions; she is a permanent
contributor to the Literary Supplement of _La Nacion_. In her capacity as
a writer, she takes part in a number of international literary congresses
and book fairs. Her published work in Spanish includes three books of
poetry and several volumes of short fiction, novels, and non-fiction.
These prose poems are from _Esperan la manana verde_ (1998). Her prose,
representative of the so-called "new historical narrative," includes the
novels _La pasion de los nomades_ (1994) and _Las libres del Sur_ (2004)
and the short story collection _Amores insolitos de nuestra historia_
(2001).

Brett Alan Sanders is a writer, translator, and teacher living in Tell
City, Indiana. He was born in Indiana in 1958 and spent a couple of years
in Argentina at the end of the '70s. His own short prose has appeared
previously in print and online in such places as New Work Review, The
King's English, Spectacle, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, River
Walk Journal, and The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. His novella A
Bride Called Freedom was published in 2003 in a bilingual edition (English
text with Spanish translation by Sebastian R. Bekes) from Ediciones Nuevo
Espacio, an online publisher of print-on-demand literature and academic
studies in Spanish, English, and bilingual editions
(www.editorial-ene.com; also available from www.barnesandnoble.com and
www.amazon.com). Sanders has completely translated _Esperan la manana
verde_ (Awaiting the Green Morning), is nearing completion of _La pasion
de los nomades_ (The Passion of Nomads), and has translated two of Lojo's
short stories. Aside from the poems appearing here, another appears in
Rhino (2005), and more are forthcoming there and in The Drunken Boat and
Hunger Mountain as well. A short excerpt from The Passion of Nomads
appears in New Works Review (January-March 2005). His translation of a
story by Sebastian Bekes is scheduled to appear in the April-June edition
of that same journal.

Spread the word. Far and wide,

William Slaughter

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