Jose Manuel Prieto

Cuban novelist José Manuel Prieto and Mark Weiss, poet, translator, and editor of the bilingual anthologyThe Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, recently conducted an email interview on the reasons for undertaking this, or any, anthology and the issues involved in its making.

Of all the Mexican writers of my generation, Sada is the one I most admire, for his highly rigorous technique, the unequaled density of his prose, his steel-solid aesthetic sensibility.

At the river port there were six freight cars carrying sacks of salt, at a hundred rubles per car for unloading them. If you worked by yourself, the hundred rubles were all yours; if you split the work, you got fifty.

“I’m sure I have suffered much more and experienced much more poverty than many of those who go around today feeling sorry for themselves. But no one has ever heard me complain at conferences, or found these laments in my books. One should be more modest, and less arrogant than that.”