Posts featuring Guadalupe Dueñas

Translation Tuesday: “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas

They stroll through their empire, lords of the dead.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we reorient “vermin” to the top of the food chain in “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas. Our narrator embodies a voice of classism and privilege, a haughty position that is quickly undermined by an untouchable shoeshiner’s jovial memories of the rodents inhabiting a local cemetery. Conveyed in gruesome detail, the rats’ feast is a spectacle of awe to some (the shoeshiner) and terror for others (our narrator). One part memento mori, one part class criticism, Dueñas’s story serves as a graphic parable for nature’s indifference towards social conventions.

“Have you done this for long?” I absentmindedly ask the guy who’s giving my shoes a vertiginous shine.

The voice of an empty vessel responds:

“Oh, no! Only for about two years. For twenty I was a watchman at Dolores Cemetery. It was I who copied the death certificates. Yes, even I, in my circumstance, went to middle school and I have excellent penmanship.”

Twenty years! I look at the little man of indefinable age. At first glance, he was a young boy.

Skinny, hairless, and indistinct. With a shrunken blue-ringed eye that blinks on its own accord and a stranded pupil that despairs in a bloody broth filled to the brim of his eyelid. The left eye, though, one would think it had a different owner. His upper lip sags like the ruffle of an old blouse. His skull, divided by a dark vein that curves down around his face, resembles a sack hung by a cord.

He emits the stench of horse piss and a lasting, murky reek that disturbs even the trees. READ MORE…