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Issue 35
Featured Translator: Robin Myers

My Son Holds Out His Hand at the Threshold of Sleep

  • by Andrés Neuman
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  • September, 2025

When you’re about to fall
asleep, my son,
you always seek my hand,
I know not if as a gradual goodbye,
or invitation, maybe,
to the other side.

What I do know,
angel of my wakeful hours,
is that this, on my skin,
becomes a consequential act,
undoubting closeness facing the abyss;

I mean to take it with me
at the moment’s edge
like a talisman between my fingers.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

 

My Son Holds Out His Hand at the Threshold of Sleep

Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, translated by Robin Myers, is available now from Open Letter.
My Son Holds Out His Hand at the Threshold of Sleep
Love Training by Andrés Neuman, translated by Robin Myers, is available now from Deep Vellum.
My Son Holds Out His Hand at the Threshold of Sleep
A Father Is Born by Andrés Neuman, translated by Robin Myers, is available now from Open Letter.

 

Photo: Muhamad Harun Rabiyudin, Unsplash.
  • Andrés Neuman

Photo: © Rodrigo Valero

Andrés Neuman (1977) was born and spent his youth in Buenos Aires. The son of exiled Argentine musicians, he moved with his family to Granada, Spain, where he later taught Latin American literature at the University of Granada. He has received the Premio de la Crítica, the Antonio Carvajal and Hiperión Prizes for poetry, the Premio Alfaguara de Novela, and the Firecracker Award, granted by the U.S. community of journals, independent presses, and bookstores. He was a finalist for the Premio Herralde and received special mention from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the forerunner of the Man Booker International Prize. He was selected by the British journal Granta as one of the most outstanding new fiction writers in Spanish. Dedicated to poetry since his beginnings as a writer, he is the author of verse collections such as El tobogán, Mística abajo, No sé por qué, and Vivir de oído, all anthologized in his most recent title: Casa fugaz (Poesía 1998-2018). He has published the novels Bariloche, La vida en las ventanas, Una vez Argentina, El viajero del siglo (Traveler of the Century), Hablar solos (Talking to Ourselves), and Fractura (Fracture); books of short stories like Alumbramiento and Hacerse el muerto; the satirical dictionary Barbarismos; the Latin American travelogue Cómo viajar sin ver (How to Travel without Seeing); and the heterodox treatise on the body Anatomía sensible. His books have been translated to more than twenty languages.

  • Arthur Malcolm Dixon
headshotarthurdixoncroppededited1

Photo: Sydne Gray

Arthur Malcolm Dixon is co-founder, lead translator, and Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. His book-length translations include the novels Immigration: The Contest by Carlos Gámez Pérez and There Are Not So Many Stars by Isaí Moreno, both from Katakana Editores, and the poetry collections Intensive Care by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza and Wild West by Alejandro Castro, both from Alliteration Publishing. He works as a community interpreter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where from 2020 to 2023 he was a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

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