Carried Across: 6 Books to Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month & International Translation Day
Red Letter Day by Doug Argue
“Carried across” is the root of “translate,” from the Latin trans (across) and ferre (to carry). Every book on this list has made that crossing twice: once from the writer’s mind onto the page, and again through a translator's hand into English. As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month alongside International Translation Day on September 30th, we are spotlighting the writers and translators who’ve carried Hispanic and Latin American feminist writing across centuries. From a 17th-century nun who wrote what can be considered amongst the first great feminist defenses of women’s right to education, to contemporary Mexican and Ecuadorian writers reworking horror and testimony into something entirely their own. Through the work of these brilliant translators English readers can delight in these dazzling books too.
The Answer / La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell
The Answer is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s impassioned response to attempts by church officials to silence her Written from a Mexican convent in 1691, Sor Juana’s furious, brilliant defense of women’s intellectual life, and arguably the first feminist manifesto in the Americas must start the list. Arenal and Powell resurface what other translations overlook in this edition: Sor Juana’s lucid awareness of gender, attention to diction and humor. A foundational feminist text.
The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present edited by Angel Flores and Kate Flores
A bilingual anthology spanning centuries of Hispanic women’s poetry, both of established poets and those that are rediscovered, printed with the Spanish original and English translation facing each other on the page, this book embodies the ethos of this list, carrying over centuries of the evolution of feminist thought, canonical poets, and those that refuse to be forgotten.
The Iliac Crest, by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker
In this gothic identity-destabilizing novel from one of Mexico’s most acclaimed living writers, two mysterious women enter the home of an unnamed narrator on a stormy night. What unfolds is a dark, uncanny, and formally daring excavation of the relationship between gender, language, and its destructive power.
Human Sacrifices, by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated by Frances Riddle
Ampuero embodies the tropical gothic in this short story collection. The Ecuadorian writer confronts machismo, inequity and violence in this collection, where an undocumented woman is held hostage after answering a job posting, outcast boys drown while surfing, a couple is trapped in a terrifying maze. In these twelve stories machismo and capitalism do the haunting.
Medea Sang Me a Corrido by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches
A thrilling revision of a mythological icon, Madea Sang Me a Corrido features Madea, a deity with a punk-rock flair, ancient and beautiful, multitudinal in all the ways that count. Set in a mythical, yet all too familiar Aztlán, where cartel and military violence collapse into each other its inhabitants struggle to survive, but are no longer unaccompanied.
Feral by Gabriela Jauregui, translated by Heather Cleary
Diana learns her best friend, Eugenia, has been murdered during an archeological dig at the ancient site of Teotihuacán, setting off an investigation by a tight-knit group of women to uncover the mystery behind her death. In this modern retelling of the Greek tragedy of Iphigenia set in modern day Mexico, Jauregui boldly imagines the feral boundless possibilities of the future.
