Happy Birthday, Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolaño was born today in 1953, and I’m rereading this little excerpt from A Public Space’s Fall 2011 issue, in which Bolaño takes stock of his dreams:

28. I dreamt I was sixteen and Martín Adán was giving me piano lessons. The old man’s fingers, long as the Amazing Rubber Man’s, plunged through the floor and played a chain of underground volcanoes.

29. I dreamt I was translating Virgil with a stone. I was naked on a big basaltic flagstone and the sun, as fighter pilots say, hovered dangerously at five o’clock.

30. I dreamt I was dying on an African terrace and a poet named Paulin Joachim was speaking to me in French (I only understood fragments like “consolation,” “time,” “years to come”) while a hanged monkey swung from the branch of a tree.

These are ultra-Bolaño, so very good. [APS]