Language: Spanish

Acts Against Fate: A Review of Cautery by Lucia Lijtmaer

Refreshingly, in Cautery, the stifling confines of gender in both past and present are treated in a way that defies easy essentialism.

Cautery by Lucía Lijtmaer, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, Charco Press, 2025

Last October was a particularly busy month for news providers in Spain. Deadly, climate change-induced floods ripped through Valencia; the desperate residents of Barcelona and the Canary Islands continued to protest against unsustainable levels of tourism and unregulated property speculation; and in Madrid, sleazy stories of coercion and coverups involving a prominent young politician rattled a progressive left-wing party to its core. Despite the depressing familiarity of such headlines, it almost seems portentous that all of these subjects appear in one form or another in Lucía Lijtmaer’s 2022 novel, Cautery. An accomplished writer and co-director of the acclaimed feminist pop-culture podcast Deforme Semanal Ideal Total, which tackles everything from critical theory to modern dating, Lijtmaer’s finger is firmly on the pulse of millennial Spanish society.

But Spain is the setting for just one-half of Cautery, now published in Maureen Shaughnessy’s English translation. It is a tale of two women, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and four hundred years of time. The first is jaded, in her thirties, and speaking to us from the Spain of the mid-2010s; she is obsessed with the idea of dying, often fantasising in great detail about the satisfaction she would derive from the mutual destruction of herself and her home city of Barcelona in an unstoppable tsunami: ‘It will take all the Pans & Company sandwich shops, the Liceu opera house, the tattoo artists on Tallers street. All the pseudo-authentic wine bars will flood.’

After this morbid millenarian daydream, we meet the other narrator, Deborah Moody, a real-life seventeenth-century Elizabethan anabaptist who actually is dead and buried, now appraising her own life from beyond the grave. The novel proceeds in paired-up chapters which jump between the two women’s worlds, a structure that invites us to draw comparisons across time and realities. In this way, cornerstones of the everyday—such as relationships and property—are stripped to their philosophical core as we contemplate what has changed and what, despite half a century of progress, remains the same.

In the almost present day, the speaker hints that a series of events has led her to move to the ‘scorched plateau’ that is Madrid in August, a large sum of money in hand. The move, she concedes in a tongue-in-cheek nod to the rivalry between the two cities, ‘is not so different from dying, after all.’ Strung-out in a kind of purgatory, she reflects acerbically on the superficial, middle-class sheen of her life ‘before’ and the catatonia of her present situation: ‘I suppose there was a time when it could have been said I was happy. I can prove it by the digital footprint I left online, the same transparent trail made by a slug.’ As darkly sarcastic as she is miserable, it is not long before she begins to address someone—a weighty ‘you’—and we intuit that there is heartbreak here, a romantic catastrophe which has flooded her life, leaving her shipwrecked and alone.

The Barcelonan’s ex turns out to be a sideburn-sporting hipster, one of many in the city who have ‘somewhat ambiguous university degrees and not much practical experience’. This point of tension, coupled with the fact that she out-earns him, becomes a pretext for the unravelling of the charming beloved to reveal his true, manipulative nature. ‘[O]nly when I am with you am I where I should be,’ she assures us, as he tightens his powerful grip on her sense of identity. Meanwhile, just to underscore the significance of this man’s sway, the ‘you’ in Deborah’s chapters is reserved for almighty God himself.

From her subterranean reverie, we learn that Deborah is herself no stranger to loss. A woman from a noble English family, she marries a wheeling-dealing businessman, only to have her fortune and faith in love squandered away: ‘. . . my husband had chiselled away at me, betrayal after betrayal, hardening me.’ Her impoverished circumstances lead Deborah to develop a tough resolve, and she eventually sets sail for the New World to start again in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reserving all of her devotion for her God and her cause. Still, even her enduring faith fails her in the end, and in death, her obeisance becomes tinged with bitterness. ‘I crossed oceans for you, just to end up buried underground like a worm.’

The limitations of romantic love and its potential for corruption are key tenets of Cautery. As one woman is consumed by a nerve-ridden cynicism, the other gains a stone-like imperviousness, but both resemble a kind of ‘anaesthesia of the heart’—a self-preservation tactic against the serial disappointments associated with desiring straight men, identified by heterosexuality researcher Asa Seresin as a key feature of modern pessimism around heterosexual relationships. By making the two speakers numb to desire, at least while we encounter them, Lijtmaer carves out a unique space for the disappointed: dreamlike and detached from the noise of reality. Here, they can untangle their most rancorous thoughts, understand just how they came to be this way, and figure out where they might go next.

As the contemporary narrator’s recollections drift back and forth, the topographies of Barcelona and Madrid are referenced in chapters named for streets and neighbourhoods. The reader is thus invited on an erratically guided free tour around the specificities of this character’s crisis, as disorientating as it detailed. It makes for an interesting sensation, as the tensions of tourism are felt keenly throughout these chapters. Yet although she acknowledges the insidious encroach of Airbnbs and cruise ships, it is mainly her fellow locals who come under fire, as though she aims to distance herself from their pretentious, insular ways. ‘When it comes to their bars, Barcelona natives are unscrupulously racist, primer els de casa’, she laments, using the Catalan phrase in a pointed way that has doubtlessly raised eyebrows among knowing readers.

Lijtmaer addresses the complex dynamics of cultural identity at play in the city by painting her narrator as something of an outsider, despite the fact that she grew up there. At one point, the Barcelonan reveals that she only truly feels at home when visiting the clothing shop Zara; in the uncertain morass of her current situation, the best comfort comes from a global chain— soothing in its universality and predictability. Throughout the translation, Maureen Shaughnessy too maintains this tension between the local and foreign, resisting the temptation to over-explain and leaving breathing room for the reader to intuit. Those with some experience of Catalunya’s capital will know, for example, that when the narrator declares, ‘I take my pills. I drink water from the tap’, it subtly compounds the fact that she has given herself over to a haze of apathy. The tap water in Barcelona is so grim that drinking it is always an act of desperation.

How our cards are cast and the extent to which we can change them is another question asked in Cautery, the title itself invoking a wince-inducing intervention. In choosing a devout if disillusioned evangelist to provide the counter narrative to the sedative-addled contemporary speaker, Lijtmaer underlines the paradoxical similarity between a deterministic religion and a society that insists on our supposed liberties. Both rely on a faith—the former in God’s grand plan, and the latter in the power of the individual—which ultimately ignores the myriad structural and discriminatory forces at play.

In Salem, Deborah meets the striking Anne Hutchison, a religious mentor whose boundless energy is poured into preaching to the women of the town. As transfixed as Deborah is, Anne has a somewhat confusing attitude towards the subject of free will, telling her congregation of women that ‘we cannot act against fate, we cannot change it’, while insisting to Deborah that she is the ‘mistress of [her] own destiny’. The counterintuitive nature of encouraging the women’s autonomy while admitting their subjection to a higher power feels like a familiar trap; to my mind, Lijtmaer is ridiculing the false comforts of choice feminism—the idea that simply being a woman means that any decision one takes is, by definition, feminist. By writing the story of a self-made colonial landowner, she admits the white feminist urge to laud such figures as role models based on their gender alone, while highlighting the futility of doing so. Even Deborah recognises the irony of it all: ‘Anne’s a saint now, too, and I can’t help but laugh. People are idiots. Only the cloak of time covers all us women who’ve suffered this ridiculous and inane glory, this sanctimonious glory. What good does it do us, once we’re all dead?’

Refreshingly, in Cautery, the stifling confines of gender in both past and present are treated in a way that defies easy essentialism. Instead, Lijtmaer takes aim at the material conditions which dictate feminine ideals, the institutions conspiring to keep them wanting but unable to achieve the transcendence they are promised—forever victims of Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’. Especially interesting is the treatment of friendship between women in the novel. In Deborah’s world, she and Anne interpret and debate the scripture, bonding over their shared beliefs with fervour and plotting to start their own colony of women. Similarly, the women of Barcelona pore over Instagram posts and anecdotes of promising first dates in minute detail like ‘raucous birds’. The narrator soon realises: ‘This is the monogamy party. I had forgotten. Now I belong to this club. I haven’t always been part of it. But it’s better to belong here than not to. It gives purpose to everything.’ In stark terms, Lijtmaer lays bare the progression from a society where rebellion meant seeking freedom through faith, to a world where our own aspirations are shaped and curtailed by patriarchal capitalism, accumulation, and the feverish protectionism of the nuclear family—despite all the strides made towards liberation.

Gravesend, the name of the town which Deborah founds after years of battling to make her mark in the New World, is the place she was eventually buried. It goes without mention in the novel, but the sepulchral signposts of ‘Calle Calvario’ (Calvary Street) and ‘Puig d’Ossa’ (Bone Hill) wink at us from the first and last chapters of the book respectively, and a recurring preoccupation with marble slabs leaves us with the certainty that we are all heading for the same place. And yet, the image of the cautery and its cleansing sizzle is referenced time and again: a potential for intervention. Revisit the disheartening news stories mentioned earlier, and you’ll also find investigative journalists demanding answers from complacent Valencian governors, a population’s fierce refusal to be subordinated under the boot of vulture funds and greedy landlords, and the bold testimonies of a few indignant, irrepressible women, urging for justice despite the repercussions on their personal lives. Cautery closes with a wicked act of revenge on the part of the Barcelonan narrator, and though the ethics of her actions are murky, it is an indication that she is finally wresting control over her own life. ‘A life of my own, I don’t say it. My own, I don’t even think it.’ Perhaps it is also a reminder to the dejected among us that, as desperate as things seem, we’re not dead yet.

Maddy Robinson is an English writer and translator from Spanish and Russian. She holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and her work has appeared in publications such as The Kelvingrove Review, From Glasgow to Saturn, El Diario and Pikara Magazine. She lives in Madrid.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and Romania!

This week, our editors-at-large take us from memorial ceremonies in Kenya to a colloquium in Brussels, exploring the life and legacy of celebrated literary figures, exciting prize nominations, and cross-cultural events. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Palestinian writer and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah has been nominated to the longlist for the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, better known as the “American Nobel” for its global reputation and the extent of its sway in the world of literature. Nasrallah’s much-acclaimed novel, Time of White Horses, stands as the only Arabic-language novel among this year’s nine distinguished finalists, another significant achievement for Arabic literature in the international arena.

Presented biannially by the University of Oklahoma’s World Literature Today, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary achievement in all genres and languages. The winner, who will receive a $50,000 award, will be announced at the Neustadt Lit Fest in October 2025.

Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses is a sweeping narrative charting the course of Palestine from the twilight of Ottoman rule to the earth-shattering convulsions of the 1948 Nakba, all refracted through the lens of an imaginary village. The book, celebrated for its blend of documentary realism and imaginative storytelling, has previously been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is celebrated for its nuanced analysis of collective memory and identity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

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What’s New in Translation: June 2025

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and Latin America!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on the global literary scene. In the Philippines we celebrate the anniversary of the country’s most significant superheroine, and in the United States scholars of Latin American and Caribbean literature convene to discuss methods of promoting alternative and countercultural literary production.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the Philippines’ iconic komiks superheroine Darna, honouring a dramatis personae turned cultural cornerstone. Created by writer Mars Ravelo (1916-1988) and artist Nestor Redondo (1928-1995), Darna debuted on 13 May 1950 in Pilipino Komiks #77 during the ‘Golden Age of Comic Books.’ The character has since headlined fifteen movies, four primetime television series, stage plays, video games, and more, securing her status as a queer pop icon and an emblem of the nation’s unyielding spirit.

The story centres on Narda, a working-class girl with mobility impairment who transfigures into a flying superheroine by swallowing a stone carved with ‘Darna’ and shouting her name. The stone, originally from another planet, remains in her body, with only her grandmother and younger brother Ding, her sidekick, knowing her secret. José B. Capino, in Contemporary Asian Cinema (2006), outlines Darna as ‘arguably one of local cinema’s most popular and representative figures,’ comparing her with America’s Wonder Woman. Unlike Diana’s aristocratic (even demigod) roots, Narda’s working-class, disabled background reflects her Global South origins. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: My Tender Matador

Lemebel clearly also believed in the power of the image . . . but the film does have to contend with a material reality. . .

Pedro Lemebel, the iconic Chilean activist, essayist, and artist, wrote only one novel in his lifetime: My Tender Matador, a gloriously romantic narrative of repression, radicalisation, and infatuation. It tells the story of a trans woman—named only as the Queen of the Corner—and her brief love affair with a leftist guerilla named Carlos, taking place amidst the waning years of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime. Juxtaposed with comic passages that satirise the shallowness and greed of the dictator and his wife, the novel is a bold expression of selfhood and resilience that incisively wields Lemebel’s entrancing prose against the ugliness of tyranny.

Nearly two decades later, in 2020, Rodrigo Sepúlveda took this subversive novel to the screen, with Alfredo Castro starring as the exuberant Queen. Commenting on the material’s continual legacy and relevance, the director decisively noted Lemebel’s revered status and pivotal role: “If civil unions exist today and gay marriage is being discussed in Chile, it’s because of how Lemebel fought during the dictatorship.” One year after the film was released, Chile passed its legislation of marriage equality with an overwhelming majority.

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we discuss these two works in conversation, conjunction, and deviation, with the mediums of literature and cinema making their distinct determinations on the narrative’s conceptualisations of beauty, politicisation, and imagination.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): My tender matador! From the original Tengo miedo torero, Katherine Silver gives us an English title that preserves sound over literality, with the Spanish meaning something more like: ‘I’m afraid, bullfighter.’ These beautiful [t] and [m] alliterations anticipate the lush whirl of images that unfurl in both Pedro Lemebel’s 2001 novel—’Like drawing a sheer cloth over the past, a flaming curtain fluttering out the open window of that house in the spring of 1986. . .’—and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s 2020 film adaptation.

Like Silver’s title, the film’s opening scene translates Lemebel’s plot for beauty over ‘faithfulness’: the scene is Sepúlveda’s own creation. It starts in media res with a drag performance in a discothèque in Santiago, Chile—all sequins, jewel-toned light, and close-ups of the enraptured, laughing audience. They include our protagonists, the Queen of the Corner and the young, mysterious, militant Carlos, who meet for the first time later that night when he saves her during a police chase.

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Talk about an elegant set-up: Sepúlveda effectively foregrounds the story’s central conflicts—on both personal and political axes—within the context of queerness and resistance in Pinochet’s authoritarian Chile, in less than a minute and in a setting that Lemebel did not write, but left to the reader’s mind. The beauty of Sepúlveda’s translation for the screen, a medium that serves visibility, hearing, and action, is also its concision. What other methods have you noticed Sepúlveda use to translate Lemebel’s text? How else has My Tender Matador molded to film?

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from India, Bulgaria, and Mexico!

This week, our editors-at-large interview an Indian translator to better understand the local impact of international prizes, report on the opening of an Umberto Eco-inspired bookstore in Bulgaria, and celebrate a major 20th-century writer in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kolkata

The literary community in India has been celebrating this week because Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize. This marks the second time that a book translated from an Indian language has received this prestigious award. The first was Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which won in 2022. Anton Hur, one of the judges this year, described Heart Lamp as “daring, textured, and vital.” I wanted to find out how the book has been received in the translation community in India, so I briefly spoke with Sayari Debnath, a culture journalist at Scroll and a translator from Bengali and Hindi to English.

I asked her how the translation of Heart Lamp stands out to her compared to other recently translated books in various Asian languages. Sayari mentioned that she was quite surprised by the translation when she first read the book. “There are plenty of phrases that were translated literally and Deepa Bhasthi chose to retain some of the Kannada words too,” she said. “It took some time to get used to but as I read on, I realised what it was doing to my own tongue – there was a “chataak” in the language, or what one could also call spice/sourness/pungency. My mouth was imbued with a flavour I couldn’t really place. I thought that was quite an interesting feeling. However, I did tell Deepa that at first, I wasn’t sure about what she was trying to do. She told me she ‘translated with an accent’ — that’s new, I think.” READ MORE…

A Sacred Collaboration with Nature: An Interview with Natalia García Freire and Victor Meadowcroft

I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something.

One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.

Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.

RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?

READ MORE…

Along a Spine of Dreams: An Interview with Judith Santopietro on Nahuatl as Heritage Language

I attempt to have my writing reflect the process of not having inherited a language due to colonization.

 Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa (translated by Ilana Luna and published by Orca Libros in 2019) was sketched by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi as “a book that dialogues with nature” with “a sensitivity that picks up on the sublime, the cosmovision, the song and the spiritual elements.” Through those poems, Santopietro enables her readers to hear Incan hymns from a distance while marveling at the mountainscape of the great Andes. Her debut poetry collection, Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010), was praised by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón in Indigenous Cosmolectics (2018) as a mold-breaking contribution to Nahua women’s poetry, in league with Yolanda Matías García, another Nahua poet. In mediating on her heritage language and its capacity to evoke such vivid scenes, Santopietro reveals: “I experiment with the language, Nahuatl, into my poems to recreate sounds, rhythms, and even some memories of my foremothers.’”

In 2004, Santopietro, whose writings in Spanish have elements of the Nahuatl, Quechua, and Aymara languages, also founded Iguanazul, a translingual literary magazine that promotes the oral literatures and traditions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The publication has since featured vital contemporary voices such as Irma Pineda, Macario Matus, Inti Barrios, Martín Rodríguez Arellano, Celerina Patricia Sánchez Santiago, Esteban Ríos Cruz, Mikeas Sánchez, and Kalu Tatyisavi—in both original texts and Spanish translations. Following this intersection between languages and heritages, individual expression and political representation, I spoke with Santopietro on how Mexikano as a silenced heritage percolates into her original writings in Spanish as a Nahua descendant, the collection Tiawanaku, and how she probes into displacement, language extinction, and indigeneity. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You write mainly in Mexican Spanish, your mother tongue. Your writings, however, borrow from other languages such as Quechua, Aymara, and most especially your heritage language, the Nahuatl of Mexico’s largest group of indigenous peoples, the Nahua. Could you tell us more about these choices, political, ancestral, and beyond—as a poet, essayist, and translator?

Judith Santopietro (JS): Yes, as you mention, my mother tongue is Mexican Spanish—which is so close to the Nahuatl language because of all the influences that remain in our daily speech, like the diminutives that show affection. We say, “¿quieres agüita?, ¿se te antoja un tamalito? ¿te sirvo un chocolatito?”; and without realizing it, Nahuatl words slip in.

Beyond the lexicon that has remained in Mexican Spanish, there are also other, more specific manifestations like forms of healing, prayer, sowing, cooking, and even the arrangement of space in my aunt’s house, all of which led me to make the political, ancestral decision to study Nahuatl—which is called Mexikano in the town where my paternal family is from. My aunt once told me that my grandmother Otilia spoke Mexikano, but unfortunately she died young, and I couldn’t hear her speak. Still, that was doubtlessly another reason I decided to study this language.

I wasn’t immersed in the natural listening-learning process of this language because after her, no one else spoke it, but Nahua stories and beliefs remained in the rural-indigenous region where my family comes from, and they have completely influenced my writing to this day. That’s where my decision to consider myself a Nahua descendant comes from. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from the Philippines, Canada, and Guatemala!

This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.

The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024. READ MORE…

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

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Elementalia: Chapter IV Air

There was more to the word than Indra thought. There was more in the air.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Inspire, from the Latin inspirare, in- + spirare, to breathe.

 

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Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire

A dark chorus . . . unfurling a portrait of an unraveling community.

In Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire’s latest novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, rising from the landscape is a swirling, multivocal, and vivid portrait of a small town torn apart by prejudices and suspicion. There may be something rotten buried deep in the earth—but perhaps it is history itself. With an expert, distinguished lyricism translated melodiously by Victor Meadowcroft, García Freire aims her incisive sights on the violence and hatred that pervade amidst dissenting belief systems, gesturing towards the ways a limited, desperate existence can further inhibit our shortsighted perspectives.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, World Editions, 2025

There is something about a fictional town that allows their inventors to bend the rules of everyday life—to infuse these imagined destinations with magic, tragedy, and often fear. In novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the respective towns of Macondo and Comala have become canonical spaces to reflect on death, family, faith, tradition, and the world itself. Natalia García Freire’s A Carnival of Atrocities is no exception: in the fictional town of Cocuán, myth, brutality, and poetic cruelty intertwine.

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Blog Editor Highlights: Spring 2025

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…