Chapters (33)

No, I won’t turn into a bird. Even though Wild is the Wind, I’m sitting on the same wooden chair as when I began. But then, you can never sit down twice on the same chair twice. No, there’s another reason why I won’t turn into a bird: I’m not the one that has to be transformed. The transformation happened to this story.

A note on the text

Whenever possible, references to quoted texts were taken from existing translations. Here are the bibliographical details of this cited material, in order of allusion within Loop:

Alexander Vvedensky, The Gray Notebook, trans. by Matvei Yankelevich, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002.

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Ernest Kaiser & Eithne Wilkins, Cambridge: Exact Change, 1991.

Machado de Assis, ‘The Alienist’, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, New York: Liveright, 2018.

Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. by Giovanni Pontiero, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986.

John Cage, Transcript of story 1: Indeterminacy... Ninety Stories by John Cage, in Die Reihe No. 5, ed. by H. Eimert and K. Stockhausen, London: Theodore Presser Co., 1961.

Ovid, Heroides, trans. by Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Clarice Lispector, ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’, Complete Stories, trans. by Katrina Dodson, New York: New Directions, 2015.

Fernando Pessoa, ‘A morte é a curva da estrada’, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Emmanuel Bove, My Friends, trans. by Janet Louth, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986.

Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.

Director & Editor: Carolina Orloff

Director: Samuel McDowell

The text was designed using Bembo 11.5

and ITC Galliard Pro.

Copyright

First published by Charco Press 2019

Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF

First published in Spanish as Cuaderno ideal by Alfaguara (Mexico)

The rights of Brenda Lozano to be identified as the author of this work and of Annie McDermott to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-9164656-4-0

e-book: 978-1-9993684-1-8

Edited by Fionn Petch

Cover design by Pablo Font