Posts featuring Daniel Saldaña París

What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

9781646222315

Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 7, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Eva Wissting, and Thuy Dinh

Literary news from New York, Vietnam, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on Spanish poetry readings in New York, new Vietnamese translations of classic Japanese novels, and the Gothenberg Book Fair in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

 Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York

Though I usually report from Mexico City, I recently moved to New Haven to begin a PhD program at Yale. However, relocating has not prevented me from engaging with Hispanophone literary communities, particularly in New York City, a creative hub that connects people from all over the world, and where literary readings in Spanish are common.

The first event I attended was a multilingual poetry open mic at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. Hosted by Spanish poet Marcos de la Fuente, the soirée “Se Buscan Poetas / Poets Wanted” takes place every last Wednesday of the month. It brings together poets from New York and beyond, who sign up to share their work to the Bowery’s attentive audience. I went on Wednesday, August 31, and participated both as spectator and reader among other emerging Spanish- and English-speaking poets. The event opened with a performance by De la Fuente and actress Clara Francesca. They set the mood for the night with a dramatic interpretation of the bilingual poem “Solstice,” published in the anthology Poetryfighters (Ultramarina Editorial, 2022), assembled by De la Fuente himself. The reading was both exhilarating and engaging. Beyond simply voicing words from the book, De la Fuente and Francesca modulated their expressions and walked around the stage in synchrony with the content and rhythm of the text, creating moments of emotional and aural tension that excited the audience, more like a concert or play than a traditional poetry reading. In addition to hosting the monthly open mic, De la Fuente also directs the New York City part of the Kerouac Festival, an international poetry, music, and performance celebration that takes place in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. Earlier this year, the festival featured the Chilean writer and Asymptote contributor Arelis Uribe.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Julia Sherwood, and Kristina Tatarian

Literary festivals, translation contests, and more from Mexico, Armenia, and the Czech Republic!

This month has seen the publication of new essays in Mexico highlighting the importance of editors, literary festivals in the Armenian capital, and the screening of restored screen adaptations of Czech literary classics. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community has not been discouraged by the global pandemic. February is already blooming with a host of literary events and new publications, some of which—announced early to build excitement—will reach readers later in the year.

On February 4 and 5, the fourth edition of the Kerouac International Festival took place. The event featured poetry readings and performances, showcasing work that disturbs traditional boundaries between visual art, music, and literary creation. The festival takes place every year in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. This year, the lineup included several nationally and internationally recognized poets. Among them was Hubert Matiúwàa, who has been translated by Paul M. Worley for Asymptote. Poet Rocío Cerón also participated in the festival, presenting performances that blurred the lines between digital art and poetry. Shortly after the Kerouac Festival, she also kicked off a solo video art and poetry exhibition called Potenciales Evocados (Evoked Potentials), hosted in the convent where Early Modern poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived.

Four hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Querétaro, another event of international importance took place: the publication of Editar Guerra y paz (Editing War and Peace) by the independent publishing house Gris Tormenta. Written by Argentine editor Mario Muchnik, the book is part of Gris Tormenta’s Editors Collection, a series that highlights the work behind designing, planning, and putting out a book.

Finally, February also brought thrilling news to writers. Translated by seasoned Asymptote contributor Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldaña Paris‘s novel Ramifications was featured in the longlist of the Dublin Literary Award. Similarly, poet, translator, Asymptote contributor, and champion of contemporary literature in Spanish Robin Myers had her poem “Diego de Montomayor” selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2022.

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Translation Tuesday: “Airports” by Daniel Saldaña París

June 22, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Louis Sanger

on horseback / caught between one era and another

Selected in 2017 as one out of thirty-nine most promising Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París is no stranger to our pages—read our review of his “exquisite” novel, Ramifications, for a start. This Translation Tuesday, we introduce to our readers another facet of Saldaña París, with a curious aviation-themed poem from the collection La máquina autobiográfica rendered in Louis Sanger’s translation. Curious because nothing takes flight: the poem’s airports are empty, its turbines are violent. What soars instead is the poem’s dynamic syntax which zigzags through a word’s widening valences, where Saldaña París defamiliarises for us the everyday uses of the word and the world. There is no timelier moment than today to reconsider what we know of the poem’s titular space.  

Airports

(1)

Empty airports.
Themselves, I mean.
But also: with hundreds.
Hundreds who could.
Or could have been, but weren’t.

Airports themselves, no?
containing all times.

What is there to say about “grain of the voice”—seed:
say the truth
about the unsaid. (Listen.)

For example, a voice that sows fields of sorghum
in front of
unorganized fields:
cities seen from above.
The plane does what it has to, like I said,
better late, even late in the day
with a sun that sets this late:
all I love
is visible, and growing old. READ MORE…

Music, Midribs, and Mexicanisms: Christina MacSweeney on Translating Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications

November 26, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s hard to judge characters as a translator . . . because you’re living with them. They're part of your life.

Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!

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!

Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?

Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.

I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.

JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.

CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change. 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…

Meet the Publisher: Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press

June 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

It’s a well-known fact that I am often drawn to books that tear your heart out and stomp on it.

Coffee House Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and essays. Since 2014, with the publication of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney), the press has sought out authors from Latin America and farther abroad. Coffee House Press is also a nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists on Books in Action projects that expand the relationship between reader and writer. Over email, Chris Fischbach, CHP’s publisher, and Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, discussed the press’s interdisciplinary collaborations, how they discover books by Latin American authors, and some of the titles in translation readers can check out.

Sarah Moses (SM): How did Coffee House Press come to be?

Chris Fischbach (CF): We were founded by Allan Kornblum in the early 1970s in Iowa, and we were purely a letterpress venture back then, publishing poets from both Iowa and from the New York School, where Allan had moved from. In the early 1980s, Allan moved the press to Minneapolis, where it became the first press-in-residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. A couple years later, we incorporated as a nonprofit, became Coffee House Press, moved down the street, and started publishing trade editions (fiction and poetry) as well as continuing our letterpress work. I joined the press as a letterpress intern in December of 1994 and was hired as an editorial assistant in August of 1995. I became publisher in 2011.

READ MORE…