Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he’s left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery.
A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one’s origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness.
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Robin Myers is a poet, essayist, and translator. Among her recent publications are Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter, 2020), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), and The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions, 2021). Forthcoming translations include The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave), and Tonight: The Great Earthquake by Leonardo Teja (PANK Books). She was a winner of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders/Academy of American Poets). Robin’s poems have appeared in Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Mexico City, where she is working on a book of essays about translating poetry and a collection of poems.