The idea of publishing Conversando con Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, originally published in 1967 under the title Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, arose from a friend who gave me Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp, the English version of this interview, telling me that I would enjoy each of its pages. I then asked some friends to help me with the translation. The content was translated by different people, with different fonts, in different circumstances, cities and countries. For example, María Gutiérrez translated “I am living the life of a waiter” in the New York subway, during her daily commute home. Richard Moszka translated a fragment of “A window to something else”; Manuel Rocha did the same in his Parisian attic in Tlalpeña. Laureana Toledo was in charge of “Through the Great Glass”, in Oaxaca, and Abraham Cruz Villegas of “I like breathing more than working”, in his native Ixtapalucan. The choice of font was up to each translator; and it was also their decision to use formal or informal speech in the way in which Duchamp and Cabanne refer to each other. Such an exercise of appropriation seemed to me a way of bringing a new inhabitant to our language: Marcel Duchamp.
“These pages propose the reinvention of an author, brought to live in Mexico City”. -DO.
