This week, our editors report on a workshop centred around disaster writing in Mexico City; a literary festival with themes of urbanism, gentrification, personal history, and war narratives in Milan; and the passing of two groundbreaking translators in the Philippines.
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico
I used to live with my mother in a small apartment in the eastern part of Mexico City. One day, my bed suddenly shook. I attributed it to a passing truck—but the movement started to feel suspiciously long and, when I realized what was happening, I grabbed Cookie, my dog, and ran out of the building. That day was September 19, 2017, when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook central Mexico, taking the lives of more than three hundred and sixty people, affecting over thirty thousand; it caused the collapse of thirty-eight buildings in the city, and damaged more than twelve thousand. Strangely enough, the earthquake struck on the same date as another historical quake in Mexico City thirty-two years prior, and, worse still, just a few hours after the ceremony commemorating the thousands who had died back then.
Writing from disaster is strange: it is an exercise in personal memory, in archiving, a hybrid between literature and journalism. What matters are the hours, the clothes you were wearing, what people told you, what you held in your hands. And precisely because this year marks forty years since the 1985 earthquake and eight since that of 2017, the Institute of Geophysics and Literatura UNAM—both institutions of the National Autonomous University of Mexico—have organized the workshop Zona de riesgo (“Risk Zone”), which seeks to recover, through creative writing and sound production, the collective memory of two of the most significant events in the country’s recent history.
The workshop is open to students of all levels, and through interviews, reconstruction of testimonies, consultation of newspaper archives, and even audio production, participants will create fictions, mini-reportages, mini-documentaries, soundscapes, or hybrid pieces reflecting on a city that continues to live in a risk zone. The workshop’s activities, which began on September 18th and will end on the 30th, are led by researcher and editor Rodrigo Martínez Martínez and professor Catalina Armendáriz Beltrán, who has specialized in writing from survival and resilience.
In writing from disaster, we speak from personal affect while trying not to lose the objectivity demanded by history. In a world increasingly exposed to human and natural catastrophes, workshops like Zona de riesgo are—and will be—ever more necessary. If we can imagine what we would grab in a disaster situation (I grabbed my dog and forgot my keys), it is worth even more to imagine the words we might find once the dust and the noise have quieted.
Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy
Literature can give us tools to bridge the gap between our awareness of the past—lodged deep in the text-resistant gulf of historical facts and subjective experiences—and our agency in the present. Last weekend, the two-day literary festival 2084 Pensiero Stupendo offered Milan a space to collectively explore this possibility. Curated and organized by Milan’s Belleville School of Writing, the event was held in a former auto workshop turned cultural venue on the south bank of the river Martesana—one of the city’s few remaining waterways and a symbol of a neighborhood that, along with a handful of others, this place still resists the rampant gentrification reshaping Milan since the mid-2010s.
The city’s infrastructural and social transformation—and, more specifically, its marketing, led as much by the city council as by the media—was the premise for the urban policy scholar and journalist Lucia Tozzi’s critique. In Pensare Milano (Thinking Milan), Tozzi underscored how narratives of Milan’s attractiveness as an upscale, cosmopolitan metropolis—crafted largely to lure foreign capital and investment at the expense of residents—were built on the silencing of public debate. This decade-long regime has only recently begun to cave in, thanks to outspoken critics such as Tozzi herself, who in 2023 wrote L’invenzione di Milano: Culto della comunicazione e politiche urbane (The Invention of Milan: The Cult of Communication and Urban Policies). The impact of government- and media-backed narratives was likewise central to Nathan Thrall’s speech on the genocide in Gaza, titled “Pensare la guerra” (Thinking War). His was an appeal to move beyond condemning political leaders and to confront “the disconnect between the severity of what’s happening and what we’re all even contemplating doing.” For the Jerusalem-based Jewish author, essayist, journalist, and Pulitzer Prize winner, literature’s essential function is to pose “deeper questions about our own complicity.”
Looking back at our histories—especially when they bring discomfort rather than solace—is not only a way of making sense of reality, but also a means of embracing the harshness of its violence and understanding it as integral to our being. In recent years, writer and activist Brigitte Vasallo has been engaged precisely in this kind of work. With Pensare le radici (Thinking Roots), a hybrid lecture-performance, she presented her investigation into the disappearance of the peasant world following the so-called “economic miracle” of the 1950s—that is, the advent of capitalism in post-WWII Italy and Francoist Spain. As the daughter of farmers “expelled from the countryside” who were “denied everything . . . including their own history,” and later, as a teenager, was cast out of her home for “not complying with gender norms,” Vasallo’s reconnection with her origins is part of a broader practice of historical questioning, rooted in fieldwork and sustained by the richness of diasporic languages, oral traditions, and cross-generational memory, all of which will culminate in a book forthcoming in 2026.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
The Philippine translation scene is mourning two distinguished literary translators, Herman Manalo Bognot and Wystan Salarda de la Peña, both of whom passed away on 24 August 2025. Both were cornerstones of the University of the Philippines-Diliman’s Department of European Languages, cementing a legacy of cross-cultural solidarity.
Professor Herman Manalo Bognot (b. 23 November 1964) was a champion of Russian language and culture in the Philippines. For the longest time, he was UP Diliman’s sole professor of Russian, a position he stepped into after graduating with a master’s degree in Philosophy from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. His trailblazing work includes translating Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1886 classic, Преступление и наказание (Crime and Punishment), directly from Russian into Filipino, which was published by the university’s Sentro ng Wikang Filipino as Pagkakasala at Kaparusahan (2020). He also translated essays on music history, such as one on folk orchestra instruments—domra and balalaika—by the Russian musician Inessa Gareeva of Yekaterinburg, and contributed an original short fiction and a translated chapter from Dostoevsky’s Братья Карамазовы (The Brothers Karamazov).
Professor Wystan Salarda de la Peña (b. 17 December 1963) was a household name in Hispanophone Philippine literature—a proponent of the modern resurgence and scholarship of the formerly flourishing literary tradition. A former deputy director of the 101-year-old Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española and recipient of the French government’s Ordre des Palmes académiques, his expertise was sought globally. His Filipino translation of nineteenth-century Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós’s realist novel, Doña Perfecta: Isang Nobela (published last year by Ateneo de Manila University Press’s imprint, Bughaw), is critically and popularly celebrated. As a poet, he also published a collection, Líneas copiadas del cuaderno de un poeta muerto joven, in Spain through Editorial Hispano Árabe’s Colección Oriente in 2022.
Together, Professors Bognot and de la Peña brought novel outlooks on the world, and influenced generations of Filipino translators and thinkers to come.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature (September 12, 2025)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature (September 5, 2025)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature (August 29, 2025)