Sergio Chejfec

Heather Cleary

When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator's thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in the explosion and he begins to tell their story hoping to reanimate his lost friend and relive the time they spent together. Sergio Chejfec's The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance and friendship by one of Argentina's modern masters.

The Planets

Luis Felipe Fabre

Recital of the Dark Verses

María Ospina

Variations on the Body

At the intersection of translation studies and Latin American literary studies, The Translator's Visibility examines contemporary novels by a cohort of writers  including prominent figures such as Cristina Rivera Garza, César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Valeria Luiselli, and Luis Fernando Verissimo  who foreground translation in their narratives. Drawing on Latin America's long tradition of critical and creative engagement of translation, these novels explicitly, visibly, use major tropes of translation theory  such as gendered and spatialized metaphors for the practice, and the concept of untranslatability  to challenge the strictures of intellectual property and propriety while shifting asymmetries of discursive authority, above all between the original as a privileged repository of meaning and translation as its hollow emulation. In this way, The Translator's Visibility show that translation not only serves to renew national literatures through an exchange of ideas and forms; when rendered visible, it can help us reimagine the terms according to which those exchanges take place. Ultimately, it is a book about language and power: not only the ways in which power wields language, but also the ways in which language can be used to unseat power.

Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction

The Translators Visibility

Oliverio Girondo

Part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, the first English publication by a Latin American legend

Heather Cleary

Books

Your next favorite book is out there