I discovered this on Matthew Stewart’s excellent blog Rogue Strands and was bowled over by it: the great Julio Cortázar reading his prose poem “El Aplastamiento de las Gotas.” Enjoy!

Here’s Paul Blackburn‘s wonderful translation, from Cronopios and Famas:

FLATTENING THE DROPS

I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it rains. It rains all the time, thick and grey outside, against the balcony here with big, hard, clabbering drops that go plaf and smash themselves like slaps, slop, one after the other, it’s tedious. At the moment there’s a little drop appears high on the window frame, and it stays there shivering against the sky which splits it into a thousand smothered glitterings, it goes on growing and totters, it’s going to fall now, no it doesn’t fall yet. It’s hanging on by its nails, it doesn’t want to fall and you can see that it’s gripping hanging by its teeth meanwhile its belly is swelling it’s a big drop already, what a fat one and suddenly whup, there it goes, plaf, effaced, nothing, a wetness on the marble.

But there are those that surrender and suicide immediately, they emerge on the window frame and hurl themselves down from there, it seems I can see the quaver of the leap, their little legs giving way and the cry that intoxicates them in that nothingness of falling and annihilation. Sad drops, rounded innocent drops. Goodbye drops. Goodbye.