Lorna Scott Fox

I translated Carlos Dada’s account of Emmanuel Ngu, who drowned near the end of an epic journey towards the United States from Cameroon (LRB, 8 October). Even if Ngu had made it, it’s unlikely he would have found freedom and safety. An October newsletter from the excellent Refugee and Immigrant Centre for Education and Legal Services (Raices), based in San Antonio, Texas, reports:Hundreds of Black...

It’s not entirely true, as Benjamin Kunkel states in his welcome piece on Roberto Bolaño, that ‘Distant Star concerns the sole poet in Bolaño whose work we are able to read’ (LRB, 6 September). The Savage Detectives, being the definitive novel about the Mexican cultural scene of the 1970s, is also a roman à clef. Having lived in Mexico City, I recognised several friends and acquaintances,...

In Spain, a word for ‘child’ is chaval or chavala; it’s both shorter and more grown-up in Mexico, where chavo, chava means ‘teenager’ or ‘young person’, with many colloquial uses beyond that age. Chavos banda are the stylish young gang members of Mexico City. The origin is Romany.

I don’t know why Ian Birchall (Letters, 5 June) thinks I was being ‘dismissive’ in calling Victor Serge’s muffled deviations from the Comintern line on Germany ‘ultra-leftist’ – nothing wrong with that in my view. But he is right to qualify the tendency. Serge, I wrote, had been sent by the Comintern to analyse the German Revolution, but what follows – ‘which he did often, from an...

Argentine society is no doubt plagued by a particularly feeble brand of machismo (anything from the novels of Manuel Puig to the current President), but the tango-strutting woman whose waist is ‘about to break’ (LRB, 14 December 1995) is getting neither ‘laid’ nor ‘killed’. She’s going to perform a flashy movement in a dance with dazzling scope for power and sensuality all round. The...