A Place In Mind

Several summers ago, I taught writing at a wonderful place called the Putney School in Vermont. My evening workshop was called A Place in Mind. As the spring flooding of the Duna recedes, summer is taking over in Budapest - as always, my thoughts turn to taking stock of the academic year.

I'm very proud of the wonderful collection, Invisible, that I curated this year at Central European University. It's an experiment with multi-lingual publishing, as it contains prose and poetry in Bulgarian, Hungarian, English, Slovak and Spanish. Only at a university like CEU would this be possible.

What a small and wonderful world it is. Three PhD students are currently serving as the student organizers of the Blank Pages Society - one is a talented playwright, who happens to have been in a public speaking debate with an amazing doctor I know from the WIL program. The other two are Argentinians-- reading their Spanish reminded me of my translation project, long shelved while other projects took precedence.

It's time now to revisit Maria Condenanza's La Espera - a triumph of the fusion of form and content that I discovered in 2002 while in Uruguay, and which I began to translate in 2006 at Columbia with the amazing Esther Allen.

I'm excited to see how my relation to the Spanish language will change now that I've been immersed in Hungarian daily life for one year, and especially while I am immersed in Luo this summer in Kenya.

La Espera is about waiting, about a journalist who is imprisoned for political reasons under the junta in the 1980s. But it is ultimately about how the mind can transcend one's physical surroundings.