I first came across Mateo García Elizondo in the 2021 Granta issue featuring the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists; the compilation included his short story ‘Capsule’, about a man subjected to life-long, unbearable suffering in an absurd, dystopian penitentiary system. Struggling to find their way in unwelcoming environments, from outer space to the famously liminal city of Tijuana, García Elizondo’s characters are often those who are marginalised, those we don’t even bother taking pity in, those who quietly tell their story while the world refuses to listen. With empathy but without sentimentality, García Elizondo grants the reader a privileged insight in the mind of his protagonists.
How to escape the eternal, unbearable present is one of the questions guiding the protagonist in García Elizondo’s 2019 debut novel, evocatively titled Una cita con la Lady, which follows a drug addict who is ready to leave the world of the living behind. Tired of losing and hoping never to return, he travels to his final destination, the small village of El Zapotal, accompanied by the last of his opium and heroin stash. The novel explores the blurred and unidentifiable boundaries between life and death, and as the protagonist wanders through the village, unresolved heartbreak from the past imposes itself, complicating the execution of his ultimate project. Awarded the City of Barcelona Award and previously translated into Greek, Arabic, Italian, French and Portuguese, Una cita con la Lady was published in June 2024 as Last Date in El Zapotal, in the translation of Robin Myers and from the Edinburgh-based Charco Press.
It was a pleasure to talk to Mateo García Elizondo, who is a big fan of Asymptote himself. Our conversation ranged across literature, screenwriting, meditation, the richness of the Spanish language, influences, and the privilege to work on non-commissioned projects.
Elisabeth Goemans (EG): Congratulations on the English translation of your novel, Last Date in El Zapotal. It’s not the first time you have been translated.
Mateo Garcia Elizondo (MGE): Thank you. Yes, the novel has been translated into various languages now, but the only ones I have been able to read are the French, English, and Italian—as well as the Portuguese version that came out not long ago.
EG: How is your relationship with Robin Myers, your English translator?
MGE: Well, with the French and the English translation I could meddle a little bit more with the translation, and it was a great pleasure to do that with Robin. I mean, Robin does all the heavy lifting, but I always tell her what I like. Sometimes she accepts my suggestions, other times she does not. And I always trust the translator.
EG: Is being translated into English, such a hegemonic language, different from being translated into other languages for you?
MGE: I was very happy to get translated into English because, as you say, it’s a language that a lot of people read. It means that I got to connect with another sort of readership. I really got into writing in a very Mexican Spanish, and Robin gets it; she does a very good job at translating it. Sometimes I feel like Robin’s version is better than the original.
Obviously some things don’t come out the same in English. There is a lot of wordplay in the original Spanish of Last Date in El Zapotal, and getting that right was a little challenging, but I think Robin pulled it off. I’m very happy with the translation.
EG: You studied Literature and Creative Writing in London and speak English and French. Do you feel like living between languages and cultures has influenced your creative process?
MGE: I believe it has. For a long time, I was really keen on writing in English. I love the English language, I read a lot in English, and I wrote a lot in English in my younger years. I still write more personal stuff in English. But now that I’ve gone through translations with Robin, for instance, I’ve realised that I don’t have the same sort of ease or emotional connection with the language. I couldn’t have written the novel in English.
Speaking other languages is always a doorway to other ideas. I think that you don’t think about things the same in French or in English. Sometimes I have ideas in English or even in French, and I work at translating them to Spanish. So I do think it helps with the creative process in general, even though I feel really settled in Mexican Spanish.
EG: Did you struggle to publish in Mexican Spanish?
MGE: I thought Anagrama (the publisher of the original) would be more keen on making it more of a Spanish-Spanish, and I thought they would want to tone down the Mexican Spanish, but I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that they were welcoming of it, and they didn’t make many changes in that sense. A few of the first readers were saying that it was very idiosyncratic, and it caught the attention of some, but it was never a problem.
I think publishers need to be open to different language varieties, because that’s the richness of the Spanish language; it is becoming a lot of different languages that we all can understand. I feel like the great thing about Spanish now is that even if you hear a Colombian, an Argentinian or a Spaniard, you always understand the language and you can always connect to it. I believe that every variety has a different personality.
Actually, I think translators suffer the most, because they have to translate into a sort of neutral Spanish. It would be interesting to have an Argentinian translation and Mexican translation of the same text and see which different aspects come out. That would be fun.
EG: Let’s talk about your novel. It’s often compared to Juan Rulfo, and your Wikipedia page says that Last Date in El Zapotal is a homage to Pedro Páramo. How do you feel about the comparison?
MGE: I think it’s a fair comparison, but it wasn’t my intention when I was writing it. When I realised, I reread Pedro Páramo to make sure I wasn’t treading on something sacred, and during that, I was surprised about how many connections there were between my novel and Pedro Páramo. I sort of assumed that it would somehow be a little bit of a homage. My writer friends used to say: you’re writing Trainspotting in Comala.
A few years before I wrote Last Date in El Zapotal, I was living in a very small and very sad town in Oaxaca. Juan Rulfo, who was also a photographer, spent a lot of time in that area, so I always like to think that it’s not so much the novel that influenced me directly, but rather that we hung around the same sort of places.
There were many other influences as well, of course. William S. Burroughs was the big writer on heroin that I had read. I was also thinking a lot about Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which has this very decadent character but it is very tender and sad and funny at the same time. Another influence was Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground.
EG: Apart from the authors who influenced Last Date in El Zapotal, who do you admire?
MGE: I admire different things about different authors. I always come back to Camus and Kafka, and to Dostoevsky for his sad but very endearing characters. Part of me is also very inspired by horror fiction. I love Shirley Jackson, I love Thomas Ligotti. I started reading with Edgar Allan Poe and his disquieting narratives. And then there are the romantic poets and their dreamy, imaginative aesthetic. At some point in my early adulthood, I was also reading the Beat generation and they really inspired me. I admire Hemingway as well for saying so much with so little.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Albert Cossery, an Egyptian-French author who writes about down and out characters, bums and drop-outs. I like stories about losers and about coming to terms with being a loser.
EG: I wanted to ask you about your use of time in your writing. In ‘Capsule’ and Last Date in El Zapotal, I felt like the present moment is very important, as if the text were a meditation of the present moment, even though the present is uncomfortable and not a nice place to be.
MGE: Yeah. it’s interesting that you mention that. I was trying to follow the thinking of a character in real time. I like this idea of being unable to escape the present, and the characters are always trying to escape the present, whether by reminiscing, hallucination, or fantasy—but they never manage. When you’re reading, you’re always in that painful or uncomfortable present.
EG: A logical follow-up question is asking you about how you create space in your writing. I feel like you often make use of liminal spaces. Not only in Last Date in El Zapotal and ‘Capsule’, but also in your short story ‘Soul Smuggling’ and the film Desierto.
MGE: It’s funny that you mention Desierto as a liminal space. I’d never thought about that, although I always say that I like writing about liminal spaces. For me, a liminal space is more to do with consciousness than space itself, but space is always sort of a reflection of that state of mind or that state of being, which I hadn’t thought about in the context of Desierto. But you’re right, it takes place in a border region, which is also a liminal space.
I do try to be very clear on what the space looks like when I’m writing. I always try to have a map of where the story takes place. If that map is confusing to me, I make it confusing in the story. The space in which the story takes places is always sort of a reflection of the consciousness, so the space itself is not as important as the character’s state of mind.
EG: In your novel, we follow the thought process of an addict. The war on drugs is a highly discussed topic in Mexican society, but also in other Latin American countries. In Belgium, the country where I live, drug abuse is often discussed from a political or political perspective. Last Date in El Zapotal provides a radically different perspective on drug addiction.
MGE: Yes. Most drug narratives, including in Mexico, are centred on traffic, law, and the more thriller-esque aspects of the drug world. No one thinks an addict is interesting, while for me the most interesting part of that equation is the addict and what he goes through.
EG: Can tell us about what you are working on at the moment?
MGE: I’m working on a few different projects. This year, I was lucky enough to be hired to write screenplays, so I’ve mostly been doing that. I’m writing a very theatrical screenplay, which is tough: it’s very allegorical, and the majority of the time it is just two characters inside a room, so it’s very dialogue-based, which is a new thing for me. It’s an interesting challenge. I’m also working on the script for a feature animation film of a short story by a Latin American writer, which is an adaptation and a rewriting at the same time.
Working on those projects, I haven’t had much time to work on my stuff, but in the time I do find, I’m writing some fantastical nonfiction stories, which could be considered crónica especulativa, so a sort of speculative, narrative journalism. You could also call it a sort of horror journalism.
EG: I’m curious to read it when it comes out. It sounds like you have a lot of very exciting things going on, but if time and money were no issue, what would your dream project be?
MGE: I’m developing an idea for a novel and I would like to sit down and write it. That’s my dream project, and I believe that if you have a dream project you should go for it, because you might not get the time or energy or whatever to do it at a later point. Right now, it’s still not very clear to me how I’m going to go about it. I don’t want to say too much about it because then people ask you: ‘what’s up with that novel you were writing?’
EG: Of course, I can imagine that! I think that maybe the most innovative work maybe still comes from non-commissioned projects?
MGE: I think so, because that’s where you really work on the themes that interest you, where you try to experiment, where you try things that other people are not expecting for their projects and commissions. But if you’re willing to try it, you will either fail or succeed gloriously.
Mateo García Elizondo (1987) was born in Mexico City, studied Creative Writing and Literature in London, and lived in a small town near Oaxaca for some time. His fondness of Mexican Spanish stands out in his writing, whereas the diversity in his reading list is testament to the transnational influences in his writing. His travels between countries, languages, genres, and formats all speak to the fundamental role of translation, both in the interlingual and the intersemiotic sense, in his poetics and career.
Elisabeth Goemans, originally from Belgium, is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches the transnational circulation of Argentinian women’s writing. Elisabeth has an MA in Western literature and an MA in literary translation from the University of Leuven. She published on translation, migration literature, and bibliodiversity, and was a guest writer for De Standaard, a Belgian newspaper. Elisabeth is also a teacher of Dutch literature, and co-editor for the upcoming volume Affect in Translation, to be published by Leuven University Press in 2025.
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