There is always something deeply unnerving and mysterious about the end of summer, which is not a mystery of time, but of place and its relation to where we stand or lack standing. George Oppen has a couple of verses that capture this sensation, even though he was far removed from the summer in this particular poem: “the self is no mystery / the mystery is that there is something for us to stand on”. And where exactly do we stand in the passing of summer? How do we voice this passage? This surely not a geographical location or territory, but the most primordial place that humans have to stand on: the habitation in language. So, the clear and opening of summer is a specific type of relationship that brings us closer to its voice. This is beautifully treated in Andrea Abreu’s novel Panza de Burro (2025), where read moments such as these: 

“Y volvía pa detrás y pesaba de nuevo con el dudo ven vive una aventura agamos 1000 lokuras voy aserte caricias ke no san inventario. Y entonces miraba a Isora  pensaba que a lo mejor, como no era capaz de carcarila como se acariaban o se abrazaban otras niñas podía hacerle caricias ke no san inventao y pasarle la mano por la parte de atrás de las rodillas o deslizar los dedos por encima de las costra de sus ûnas de los pies o rozar los revoltillos de carne que le salían por encima de las bragas” [1]. 

If on the surface Panza de burro is about the bodily proximity with her friend Isora, what the climatological phenomenon of the “panza de burro” (literally translates as the belly of the donkey that refers to the insular descent of humid clouds into the landscape) brings to bear is the experience of the idiom. In this sense, the dialectical rhythm of Canarian Spanish of Panza de burro is a decisive reflection to free language as an experience of proximity in the wake of this inexorable climate condition of summer. In the English language – curiously not so in Spanish – the expression “dog days of summer” is the idiom that refers to the boredom experienced by the end of summer.

This is a one of a kind of boredom that is fully immersive, lagging in a time that is both dead and not yet alive; a time of stagnation or decay, which is why in Swedish language it is referred as rötmånaden or time of the rot. The panza de burro of dog days of summer cannot longer be conceived as the dies caniculares that guides one’s destiny as in the frescos of Villa Farnesina. On the contrary, these days of suspended action and boredom is an attunement to the interiority of language and how language can be felt similarly to those clouds that cut through the mountains in the Canary islands leaving behind a spectacle of grey and formlessness. 

In Abreu’s Panza de burro, this phenomenon is explored at the most visceral and somatic level, that of the skin. And yet, a more precise way to see these transformations in the coming and turning of language into the spiritual region of the world. It is this experience in language that automatic machines will not be able to translate, as it lacks the abode of that “perpetual holiday” in the words of Cesare Pavese, and that we feel as the fleeting eternity of summer. 

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Notes 

1. Andrea Abreu. Panza de burro (Barrett, 2025), 81.