“After all,” Bolaño writes, “literature doesn’t exist anymore, only the example of it.”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245434

Translating the Abyss

A guide to the void.

BY JEFFREY YANG

"In his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999 (Bolaño would die of liver failure four years later), he said, “So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces 
you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier 
than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger.” The facets and 
designs of this danger, its depths and madness and aesthetic ends, is what Bolaño’s books gravitate toward. He is like a surgeon searching for a warm heart in a corpse that can be transplanted into the open chest of a reader. The apocalyptic in his books is the apocalypse of our times (the one we’re in or the one ahead we’re causing) but paradoxically, or not, it’s an apocalypse where there are survivors. What saves them isn’t a spaceship or a bomb shelter, but a pathetic dinghy called literature floating on the seas of existence — they even emerge from the abyss smiling, the abyss that expands as Distant Star is an expansion of the last chapter of his Nazi Literature in the Americas. “After all,” Bolaño writes, “literature doesn’t exist anymore, only the example of it.” And one hears floating up within the fathomless rift an echo of  laughter...    "