Posts featuring Christina MacSweeney

“An End of the World with More Movement and Fewer Screens”: An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

September 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

[I]f there is meaning and order, it’s not individually accessible—it can only be found in love and friendship.

Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, The Dance and the Fire, recently published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, is a sophisticated tour-de-force centering the ungovernable forces that nourish, propel, and destroy us. In it, three estranged childhood friends are reunited as wildfires close in on the city of Cuernavaca. Besieged by inexorable change and irretrievable intimacies, the trio narrates a carnivalesque Armageddon woven from dance plagues, religious fanaticism, and natural disaster. París’s cerebral, compassionate prose encompasses a vast range of lived experiences, including the domestic, the uncanny, and the beautifully flawed. 

The Dance and the Fire is a journey through the past and the present, heading into the unspeakable core of being human. As a fan of both his earlier essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster (also translated by MacSweeney), and this most recent work, I was thrilled to be able to speak with Saldaña París about his writing, its major themes, and inspirations in this interview.

Sofija Popovska (SP): In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you weave personal memories together with an eclectic mix of historical anecdotes. Natalia, the first narrator in The Dance and the Fire, seems to share your archival bent, and so does the father of the third narrator, Conejo. It looks like they process how they feel about where they are at the moment by engaging with stories from the past. What does this “historian’s compulsion” mean to you?

Daniel Saldaña Paris (DSP): It’s the way I experience places. I’m in New York City right now, for example, and when I walk these streets, I always remember that the first non-native inhabitant of Manhattan was a Black man from Santo Domingo who spoke Spanish and arrived with Dutch merchants. That detail reminds me how deeply my language is interwoven with this city, and it changes how I see the place. Archives are not dead tools; they’re the original augmented reality glasses.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2025

July 28, 2025  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Sophie Benbelaid, and Xiao Yue Shan

Some of our favourites from the latest issue!

With thirty-two countries and eighteen languages represented, our Summer 2025 issue is one of adventure, witness, intelligence, capaciousness, drama, mystery, and more. . . We are more dedicated than ever to this fundamentally compassionate work of building a truly global work of letters, which always starts with admiration and awe—so let our editors be your guide as they share the texts that most moved them from this rich compendium.

In what was deemed by both as a ‘never-ending conversation’, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Alda Merini if she had any unrealised projects. ‘Yes, of course,’ she responded, ‘I never made love to whomever I wanted to, those are projects that went wrong. Those are real projects. We don’t care about the rest.’ Flippant as this may sound, Merini has only spoken what she has proved in a lifetime of tumultuous, searing, and unbounded poems—that love is her occupation. Love as carnal as it is psychic, as perverse as it is sublime, as unconscious as it is sensational, as much worship as it is despair—in her corpus one finds thoughts racing across topographies in search of adequate metaphor, insanity driving a pin through the core of idea, or the erotic body tingling to the point of immolation. . . To throw the self into love, it seems Merini knew what that truly means; she wasn’t afraid of being taken over by ardor because, after all, it could only have come from her. Love was her fuel, her flesh.

As it is in these poems from Emptied of Love, brought about by a. Monti’s soaring, musical translation. At the very first line, we hear her: ‘Space, give me space—more space’. In other poets this may be read as a plea, but in Merini’s voice, it’s a demand. And with it comes reminder of love’s lawlessness, that it gives us permission to pursue what we want, that it gives clarity to what we believe we deserve. Love makes one bold, she demonstrates, and even in its failures, you mourn boldly, expansively. And it is there, mostly in the devastations of love, where Merini exacts her power. The collection from which these pieces are taken, Vuoto d’amore, is a deeply painful one, full of unrequited affairs of the heart, grief, disappointments, madness. They are grand emotions, and the poet understands that their largesse is best met with simple diction—so it is in the syntactical that she renders her immersive, surprising language:

until the sea submerges
this feeble flesh of mine
and I lie exhausted
on you who becomes the beach
and I, becoming wave,
you strike and strike
with Love’s oar.

READ MORE…

Announcing our October Book Club Selection: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

November 9, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

[A]n absorbing character study, driven not just by voice . . . but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth.

It is perhaps fitting (though regrettable) that our October Book Club announcement has been somewhat delayed: Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications is all about holdups. Via Christina MacSweeney’s seamless translation, the acclaimed Bogotá39 writer gives us a counter-formative tale that is both masterfully constructed and poignantly penned. In it, he exposes existential and political conservatism without dealing cheap blows, and introduces readers everywhere to a profoundly relatable narrative voice.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2020

Ramifications opens with a brilliant gambit; within a handful of paragraphs, it both sets up and crushes the prospect of a bildungsroman. A grown narrator feeds us the near-requisite opening, the painful loss at a much-too-tender age: in 1994 his mother, Teresa, flees their home in Mexico City, leaving ten-year-old him and teenage sister Mariana in the care of an oblivious father. Just a few lines later, though, we get a sharp taste of his current predicament—far from being the seasoned, thriving type mandated by the genre after years of fruitful struggles, he defines himself as “an adult who never leaves his bed.” 

The rest of the novel artfully explores the tension between the classic formative tale and its antithesis. Parts one and two delve into Teresa’s disappearance and her young son’s attempts to make sense of it, culminating in what could have been an archetypal “journey of self-discovery”—he tries to follow her to Chiapas, where she’s run off to join the budding zapatista movement. Part three, by contrast, hones in on the trip’s bland aftermath, both instant and deferred. It’s not as tidy as that, of course (the narrator jumps back and forth in time), but there’s an overarchingly grim shift from promise to flop. It’s made all the starker by a series of deliciously clever winks from the author: the protagonist’s childhood neighborhood and school are literally called “Education” (“Educación” and “Paideia,” respectively), and he’s thirty-three at the time of writing—an age that, for culturally Catholic audiences at least, can’t help but trigger unfavorable comparisons.

A disclaimer, lest readers think I’ve spoiled the plot: the novel doesn’t ride on events. It is, at its core, an absorbing character study, driven not just by voice (more on that later) but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth. READ MORE…