\n“Invented Memoir” by Manoel de Barros, translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI leaned into the morning the way a bird leans and a vision appeared: the afternoon running behind a dog.<\/em> I was fourteen. The vision must have come from my origins. I don’t remember ever seeing a dog outrun the afternoon. I made a note of it anyway. Such leaps of the imagination are what make our speech more beautiful. I made a note in a phrasebook. By this point, I was already saving visions like this one. I had another that month, but first I should tell you the circumstances. I transported parts of my childhood between the kitchen wall and the yard. I pretended to put a yoke on the frogs behind our kitchen. We understood each other well. I fixed things so the frog’s skin matched the color of the ground. It seemed right, since they were of the ground and grimy. One day I said to my mother: A frog is a piece of the ground that jumps.<\/em> She said I was mixed up, that a frog isn’t a piece of the ground. Now that I’m older, I think of the prophet Jeremiah. He was so distraught at seeing his Zion destroyed and dragged through the fire that a vision came to him in his home: even the stones in the street were crying.<\/em> Later, calmer, writing to a friend, he remembered the vision: even the stones in the street had cried. It was such a beautiful sentence because there was no reason in it. He said this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/256.jpg\")
<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"