Editor’s Note 6.2

With this issue The Mercurian moves to a new publishing format that we hope will be more pleasurable to the eye as well as provide a platform for greater access to the work of our contributors. I want to extend my gratitude to my Editorial Assistant Sarah Booker for taking on the majority of the…

On the Other Side of the Sea

By Jorgelina Cerritos
Translated by Margaret Stanton and Anna Donko

Cerritos’ concern with the theme of identity, not as an ethnic construct, but rather as an existential angst, is expressed through techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd such as the lonely desk on an isolated beach, Dorotea’s insistence that her lone client gets in line and the obsession with documents as proof of existence, documents that cannot be obtained without, ironically, other documents.

The Kittens

By Críspulo Torres
Translated by John Thomas Howard

For them, for all Colombians who have lived through the conflict, there is no silence whatsoever; there is only the endless report of bullets, the continued sound of explosions going off in the distance, and the sirens and the screams that accompany these things.

Wealth

By Arisophanes
Translated by Karen Rosenbecker

First, I bow to the sun, grateful to see his radiance again, then to the famous soil of Pallas Athena and all the land of Cecrops which has received me, a weary wayward wanderer, come back to her own native shore, to the glory that is Greece and the grandeur that is home.