Throughout his literary career, Levrero resolutely denied that he had any such thing. He shied away from publicity, rarely left his house or even answered his doorbell toward the end of his life, and used to boast that he was impossible to interview because his voice didn’t show up on audio recordings—which he made sure of by speaking in an indecipherable murmur as soon as anyone switched on a tape recorder in his vicinity. And yet, despite his best efforts, he became something of a cult figure in Uruguay and Argentina during his lifetime. Enthusiastic readers and friends went to great lengths to get his work published, and his legendary literary workshops, which focused on liberating the imagination, produced hundreds of students who consider themselves his disciples. Ever since the publication of La novela luminosa in 2005, one year after his death, he has been heralded as one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century, and it’s been an honor and a joy to translate him.

ANNIE MCDERMOTT

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2018

1  Much of the information in this paragraph is taken from Jesús Montoya Juárez’s excellent book Mario Levrero para armar: Jorge Varlotta y el libertinaje imaginativo (Ediciones Trilce, 2013).

The Text

The Text

Empty Words is a novel formed from two different strands, or groups of texts. One, entitled “Exercises,” is a series of short handwriting exercises, written with no other purpose than that. The other, entitled “The Empty Discourse,” is a single, unified text that’s more “literary” in intention.

The novel in its current form was constructed as a diary. To the “Exercises,” which were ordered chronologically, I added the parts of “The Empty Discourse” that correspond to each date, using headings to separate the two. This solution was suggested by Eduardo Abel Giménez as an alternative to my previous method, which had been based on some fairly unreliable typographical variations.

Later, while editing, I removed a few passages and even entire “Exercises,” at points to protect my own privacy or other people’s, but always with the aim of making the text less boring to read. I also added the odd phrase or paragraph here and there to clarify the meaning of some references. Apart from these minor surgical procedures, this text is faithful to the originals.

M. L., COLONIA, MAY 1993

Empty Words

Prologue

Prologue

December 22, 1989

Something within me, which is not me, which I search for

Something within me, which I sometimes think is me, but

never find

Something that shows up for no reason, shines for an instant,

and then

vanishes for years

and years.

Something I also forget.

Something

which is close to love but not quite love,

which could be confused with freedom,

with truth,

with the being’s absolute identity—

but which can’t be contained in words,

considered in concepts,

or even recorded just as it is.

It is what it is, and it’s not mine, and sometimes it’s inside me