In 1987, as I was finishing Cold Tales (my translated collection of almost all the short stories Virgilio Piñera’s had published before his death in 1979,) two posthumous collections of his stories were published in Cuba: El fogonazo and Muecas para escribientes. Which is to say that by the time my first book of translations was published it was already sorely incomplete. And to make matters worse, this book has been out of print for over two decades.

It took me thirty-seven years, an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, and a commitment from New York Review Books to publish an expanded edition of Cold Tales, but I have finally returned to where I began as a literary translator to at last ‘finish the job.’

The expanded edition of Cold Tales will include 25 more stories by Piñera, most translated into English for the first time, ranging from his first recorded story to one of his last, and including one story, which I recently ‘rediscovered,’ that hasn’t been republished in Spanish since it first appeared 1944. The expanded collection will also include my thoroughly revised and corrected translations of the 43 stories by Piñera that appeared in the 1987 edition of Cold Tales: a total of 67 stories, ranging from one paragraph to 30 pages long.

In April 2024, following my visit to Havana and Piñera’s archives at the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba, I discovered that both of Piñera’s posthumously published collections of stories, El fogonazo and Muecas para escribientes were edited dramatically and in some cases partly rewritten by Piñera’s unofficial literary executor, Antón Arrufat. Thus, my translations of stories from these collections, based on the original typed manuscripts as Piñera left them upon his death, will be the first time they will be published in any language in the form he intended them to be read.

Here is my translation of one of the stories that will appear in the expanded Cold Tales, originally published in BOMB in 2007: “Belisario” (Click on title to read.)