Most of the poems quoted throughout the novel are my own translations, which have now been translated into English by my translators. In other words, they are small fits of collective admiration toward their respective authors. My foreign compatriot the writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock used to view our homeland as an immense ongoing translation. I wonder if this could be applied to all countries, including the imaginary ones.
I would like to thank Matías Chiappe, Vanina Colagiovanni, Sergio Drucaroff, Garth Greenwell, Paz Posse, José Ángel Rodrigo, Víctor Ugarte, David Unger, and Silvia Valls for their generous contributions. As well as Alexandra Carrasco, Fernando Iwasaki, Julieta Obedman, Ana Pellicer, Carolina Reoyo, Pilar Reyes, Eloy Tizón, the editorial teams at FSG and Granta, my translators Nick and Lorenza, my father, and my brother for their thorough readings. I’m thankful to my grandmother Dorita, for remembering the lost music of the word shammes. To the hibakusha double Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a stranger whom I would’ve been thrilled to meet. And to the painter Hans Thoma, for writing this variation of an ancient epitaph attributed to Martinus von Biberach:
I come from who knows where,
I don’t know who I am,
I’ll live who knows how long,
I’ll die I don’t know when,
I’m going who knows where,
I wonder why I’m happy.
—A.N.