RIP Amparo Dávila, who died on this day five years ago.

Just last month I read Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson’s excellent translations of Dávila’s stories in New Direction’s The Houseguest and Other Stories. ND’s promotional copy compares Dávila’s short, sharp shocks to Kafka, Poe, Carrington and Jackson, a list to which I’d add Kōbō Abe, Cortazár and Lispector. In other words, Dávila specialized in that breed of the uncanny and mysterious born exclusively of the domestic and ostensibly comfortable. New Directions published the collection in 2018, two years before Dávila’s death at 92 in the early days of the first COVID lockdowns. I can’t help but wonder what the world looked like at that time to the writer who gave us lines like “The daily exercise of suffering gives one the gaze of an abandoned dog and the color of a ghost.”

The same year Harris and Gleeson’s translations saw publication, Dávila shared an excerpt of an unpublished piece titled “La semblanza de mi muerte”:

May I not die on a cold Winter day and leave shivering from cold and fear into the unknown that world of shades. Not like that. A faceless being walking endlessly by my side or that awaits around the corner. And that unfathomable mystery that we cannot uncover and that anguishes and disrupts existence. I want to leave in a sunny day of a green Spring full of sprouts and birds and flowers to look for my Garden of Eden, my lost paradise and enjoy the fruit of the vine and the fig tree, the perfume of the blossomed cherry and orange trees, the warmth of the sun that never sets.