Eduardo Galeano tells “the stories of ghouls and fools, voices I’ve collected in my dreamlike wanderings or heard in my wakeful dreams.” The Uruguayan writer, one of the directors of MoJo‘s International Fund for Documentary Photography, finds his narrative sources in the folklore of rural and urban Latin America, and eloquently works them into tales that enchant. From Walking Words, “Window on Arrival”:
Pilar and Daniel Weinberg’s son was baptized on the coast. The baptism taught him what was sacred.
They gave him a sea shell: “So you’ll learn to love the water.”
They opened a cage and let a bird go free: “So you’ll learn to love the air.”
They gave him a geranium: “So you’ll learn to love the earth.”
And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight: “Don’t ever, ever open it. So you’ll learn to love mystery.”
Walking Words, with woodcuts by Jose Francisco Borges, is due out in June from W.W. Norton & Co.
