Julia Leverone-Paco Urondo

​Un hombre es perseguido, una
familia entera, una organización, un pueblo. La
responsable de esta situación no es la codicia, sino un
comerciante con sus precios, con la imposición
de las reglas del juego. Los empresarios, la policía
con la imposición de las reglas del juego. Por eso
ese hombre, ese pueblo, esa familia, esa organización, se
siente perseguida. Es más, comienzan
a perseguirse entre ellos, a delatarse,
a difamarse, y juntos, a su vez, se lanzan a perseguir
quimeras, a olvidarse de las legítimas,
de las costosas pero realizables aspiraciones;
marginan la penosa esperanza. Entonces
toda la familia, todo el pueblo, entra
en el nivel más alto de la persecución: la paranoia, esa
refinada búsqueda de los
perseguidos históricos y culturales.
Y ésta
es la triste historia de los pueblos
derrotados, de las familias envilecidas,
de las organizaciones inútiles, de los hombres solitarios, la
llama que se consume sin el viento, los aires
que soplan sin amor, los amores que se marchitan
sobre la memoria del amor o sus fatuas presunciones.

One man is persecuted, an
entire family, an organization, a people. The
entity responsible in this situation is not greed but
a businessman with a price, with an imposition
of the rules of the game. The entrepreneurs, the police,
imposing the rules of the game. Therefore
the man, the people, the family, the organization feel
persecuted. What’s more, they begin
to accuse one another, to betray
and slander one another, and together, in turn, begin
to attack chimeras, to forget their legitimate
and costly but attainable dreams;
they reduce pitiful hope. So
the whole family, the whole people, enter
into the highest level of persecution: paranoia, that
meticulous searching of the
historically and culturally persecuted.
And this
is the sad story of a defeated
people, of degraded families,
of useless organizations, of lonely men, the
flame that consumes itself without wind, the airs
that blow without love, the love that withers
on the memory of love or its fatuous presumptions.

​Francisco “Paco” Urondo (1930 – 1976) was an Argentine writer and militant of the FAR and Montoneros. He saw his activism and writing as inseparable, and was killed by the Argentine state at the start of the Dirty War. Urondo produced eighteen works of poetry and prose, including a novel, short stories, and essays, along with plays and scripts for the stage and screen. He is most famous for conducting an interview, while imprisoned, with the survivors of the Trelew massacre, published as “La Patria Fusilada.” His work has been otherwise untranslated.

Julia Leverone is an instructor of Spanish and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her poems have been placed in Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, B O D Y, Posit, and Sugar House Review. Julia has her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and translates from the Spanish. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, Boston Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and in América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. You may visit her website at: http://julialeverone.com/