Julio Ortega: The fall of the great warrior empires

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Latin American writers on war and peace

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Julio Ortega
From The Land in the Day
Translated by Julio Ortega and Ewing Campbell

The migration was destined to grow because of successive social catastrophes that left thousands of survivors, fugitives who ran from history in search of new names. At the fall of the great warrior empires, the migration had already become a universal movement: entire populations seeking new lands and all of them joined in diverse migrant waves.

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First he studied potential places: distant towns, deserted shores, fields of pleasant tillage, countries in which neither war nor commerce has destroyed speech, places where one can escape and, at least in the solitude of an exacerbated conscience, act between the loss of a former land, which must be pertinent to him, and a chosen one in which he is a stranger. The world has been minutely divided, and it expects his acceptance of that fragmentation.