This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!
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Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”
From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.
To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.