Author: SEPOULVEDA LOUIS
Translation: ACHILLEAS KYRIAKIDIS
My memories start from the day I fell in the snow. At one point I fell out of the bag and no one from the herd heard about it. The icy wind was scattering my weak barks and I made my way behind the horses, but I was drowning in the snow. Darkness had covered the mountains when I woke up terrified by a wet and lukewarm tongue licking my muzzle to my tail while, at the same time, a nose smelled of me. That lukewarm tongue that licked me dispelled the fear, and as I had recovered a little from the frost, I let some powerful teeth grab me by the neck without hurting me. So I went up to a cave, and there, my savior, a jaguar, gave me the warmth of his large body. " It is difficult to be a dog in the service of a group of people who treat you harshly. It is difficult to be chained to a tree and not miss the distant time you played free, accompanied by a small Indian… It is difficult to forget the day you found yourself lost in the snow, when you believed that the end had come σου. It's hard to forget that you owe your life to that jaguar that fed you when you were a puppy. But life has its ups and downs, and the German Shepherd, who was called Faithful, and starred in the (fourth) children's story of Luis Sepulveda, is confronted with a harsh reality reminiscent in many respects of the neglected and marginalized tribe of the Mapuche Indians - a tribe from which originates from Sepulveda itself, and constitutes one tenth of the population of Chile. The story of a dog called Pisto seeks the universal value that testifies to the very name of the protagonist (Afmaou = Faithful in the Mapuche language), who, in addition to being faithful and brave, proves that he also has an infallible memory… "I wanted to write a hymn to loyalty and friendship to support in my own way the Mapuche tribe who live ignored and marginalized by all the governments of my homeland. The book is written in the first person and speaks in the voice of the protagonist dog. It is the first time I have told a story by putting an animal in the place of the narrator, but for the first time I have also tried to condense in a very few pages the situation experienced by a large portion of the population of Chile. "It took a lot of hard work to compose the history of an ethnicity in six sentences, and I had to read a lot of social anthropology books to turn information into literature." Λ.Σ.
