Posts featuring Camila Sosa Villada

Yet So Alive: A Collection of Groundbreaking Latin American Horror Stories

April 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

The horror in all of these stories slithers in stealth . . .  it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024

For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.

Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.

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Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

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Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

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The Feral Tenderness of the Margins: On Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls

August 18, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rubén López

Bad Girls isn’t an optimistic perspective on travestis’ life but a mirror of the grotesque that we are forced to see and feel.

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Other Press, 2022

The night belongs to the marginalized, the outcast, the exile. It is here, amidst the shadows, that Camila Sosa Villada unveils the world of the travestis of the small Argentinian city of Córdoba. The daily tragedies encoded on the bodies of her companions are the backbone of her novel Bad Girls, but so too are moments—brief as a stab—brimming with beauty in which life on the margins does not seem impossible after all.

The English translation of the Spanish original, undertaken by Kit Maude, begins with a semantic manifesto by the author on the reappropriation of the word “travesti,” a Spanish slur used in the nineties to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a feminine gender identity. Sosa Villada, who herself identifies that way, rejects the idea of sanitizing her existence and that of her companions with other categories such as “trans women” or “transsexuals.” On the contrary: “I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn,” she declares emphatically. To identify herself in other terms would mean to erase her life and all the baggage of living in a society capable of using violence to reassure cisheteronormativity.

Bad Girls is an autofictional story, and the author serves as our narrator, recounting the time in her twenties during which she had to do sex work to survive. The novel begins one cold night with a caravan of travestis looking for customers in Sarmiento Park when an extraordinary incident occurs: Auntie Encarna—their 178-year-old leader—saves an abandoned child from a certain death in a ditch, “like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal.” The child’s symbolic birthing has a visceral impact, as are most of the author’s descriptions in the novel. Her style can be described as what the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán called esperpento (roughly equivalent to “grotesque”), which is a literary technique used to examine the systematic deformation of reality by accentuating its most atrocious attributes. Sosa Villada’s prose constantly takes us to the limits and highlights the crudest details: “To thank her, he showed the dead snake that dangled from his knees,” is how she describes an elderly man seducing a prostitute. “She reached out for it and weighed it up like an artisanal salami at a country fair.”

After saving the child, Auntie Encarna decides to keep him despite opposition of the group. It is a transgression to the most conservative values engrained in Latin American (and indeed, most Occidental) societies: the rupture of the traditional family as the chosen family of travestis become the caretakers for Twinkle in Her Eye and endure the hatred of a neighborhood willing to terrorize a loving collective to defend their idea of how society should be organized.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Josefina Massot, and Kristina Tatarian

News this week from Argentina, Armenia, and Hong Kong!

As the scope of literature continues to take in the shifting realms of experiences and global relations, our editors from around the world report the latest updates, from festivals, activisms, and the spotlighting of vital voices both new and familiar. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last week, we mourned the loss of the great Sergio Chejfec, whose work spanned grammars, genres, and geographies. Chejfec spent his time between his native Buenos Aires and New York City, where he lived and taught at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. During a 2018 interview with Télam, he spoke about the impact of migration on his work: “In my experience, moving from one country to another accentuates the passage of time: the gap isn’t merely geographic. Exiles are far away from their countries, but also from the network of simultaneities they were accustomed to while living there; notable among these is language.” Fortunately, gaps and absences can be bridged through translation. Chejfec’s works are available in French, German, Portuguese, and English, and US readers can delight in them via Open Letter.

Meanwhile, Other Press is on the verge of releasing Kit Maude’s rendition of Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (incidentally, Sosa Villada’s latest has just come out in Spanish). Equal parts gritty and tender, Bad Girls narrates a trans woman’s exploits at the margins of society; a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020, it’s bound to take America by storm. The award’s previous winner, Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, just out from Catapult, was also widely celebrated upon its reception. The novel, translated by Thomas Bunstead, follows an auction house employee on the trail of an elusive forger; like Gainza’s The Optic Nerve, it draws from art and literature to great effect. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Poupeh Missaghi

The latest literary news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran!

This week, our writers bring you news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran. In Argentina, book fairs have moved events online and well-known trans writer Camila Sosa Villada has spoken about the benefits of trans literature; in Sweden, newspapers have been publishing full-length novels as a daily series for Summer; and in Iran, a new book of letters by Abbas Kiarostami has faced publication rights controversy. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Co-Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

This year, the 46th annual Buenos Aires Book Fair was postponed indefinitely. The spring gathering, predictably, had to adapt to limitations imposed by coronavirus, but the change of plans was nevertheless a huge loss to the booksellers and industry professionals who rely on the blockbuster event, which attracts upwards of 10,000 visitors over the course of the fair. However, Fundación El Libro, the organization that puts on the fair, opted to go a different route for its children’s book fair. That programming will be held virtually, beginning this coming Monday, July 20, and continuing through the end of the month. Organizers promise hundreds of digital activity opportunities for children and young adults, which may provide welcome relief to parents.

Even with the book fair on hold, other efforts to promote Argentine literature around the world continue. Programa Sur, one of the most robust programs of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world, was developed in 2016 to offer grants to incentivize small and medium publishers abroad to release Argentine books in translation. Since its inception, the program site boasts that “over 800 foreign publishers from 46 countries have applied for support in the translation of 1,060 works by more than 380 Argentine authors into 40 languages.” The program is accepting applications through September.

Those stuck at home in Argentina and abroad, looking to keep their finger on the pulse of literary news and views, may turn to news organization RED/ACCIÓN’s weekly newsletter, Sie7e Párrafos (“seven paragraphs”). The Tuesday newsletter features readings and commentary on literature and nonfiction books, as well as occasional updates on the publishing industry. One recent issue featured a short interview with trans literary star Camila Sosa Villada. Interviewer Javier Sinay asked what the opportunities are for trans literature and what trans literature can contribute to the world. She answers, in my translation, “What happens when writing runs counter to the established canon? A kind of rupture in the peace promised by the rules of good writing . . . Now, you have the opportunity to read something unexpected, about unknown worlds and knowledge you never imagined.” Her answer underscores why the postponed book fair is such a loss and why Programa Sur remains so important. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 20, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden and Janani Ganesan

This week, news of trans literature in Argentina, an inaugural book fair in Patagonia, and awards season in India.

Our editors report on literature’s integral role in political resistance and in supporting underrepresented voices, as feminist and trans theory workshops are organized in Buenos Aires and fuegino literature is promoted in Patagonia. In India, our reporter leads us through the awards season successes, celebrating many translated titles.

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last month, a primary election that predicted a decisive win for the opposition in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections sent the economy into convulsions, and the peso’s precipitous drop in value made headlines around the world. Amid the debate around the country’s future, the candidates have been conspicuously quiet on an issue important to many Argentine women: abortion, which remains illegal in most cases. But where the politicians are silent, Argentina’s women are not. Anfibia, a digital magazine of literary journalism launched by the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, is offering a workshop to challenge dominant ways of knowing and to provide women with tools to narrate experiences of violence. Also in this year’s lineup is a four-part workshop and practicum on trans theory, which seeks to answer whether it’s possible to develop a collaborative theory of the trans experience to guide, not only personal creativity, but also policy. Trans literature has won acclaim in Argentina recently. Rising literary star and trans writer Camila Sosa Villada, for example, unites literature and performance. According to a recent profile, “Camila is poetry onstage and puts her body on paper” (my translation). Her book Las malas was showcased at this year’s Feria del Libro in Buenos Aires, the largest book fair in Latin America. READ MORE…