“Who are my contemporaries?” Juan Gelman asks himself. Juan says that sometimes he comes across [people] who smell of fear, in Buenos Aires, Paris, or anywhere in the world, and feels that these [people] are not his contemporaries. But there is a Chinese who, thousands of years ago, wrote a poem about a goatherd who is far from his beloved, and yet can hear in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow, the sound of her comb running through her hair. And reading this distant poem, Juan finds that yes, these people—the poet, the goatherd and the woman—are truly his contemporaries.
–Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces