Let’s start by talking about Latin American literature. How do you feel about the panorama of Latin American literature in general, and more specifically in terms of the possibility of it circulating in other languages?
Latin American literature has grown a lot in the past ten years. Not that I think people wrote any less before, or that these new generations are more interesting than the previous ones. It’s more to do with other factors, like the growth of independent publishers, fewer distribution monopolies, more contact among editors and authors in different countries. And there’s also a group of new readers who are much more important for the continuation of Spanish publishers, which means that more Latin Americans are being published in Spain, which in turn brings us closer to translations.
I also think it’s a good moment for literature in translation. I published my first book in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2010 that I was published in Spain, where supposedly the translation circuit started. In just two years I had around fifteen translations, and I remember even my own editors were surprised at those numbers, not just because I was an unknown author, but because it was a book of short stories. I remember that my case was talked about as a big exception. But in recent years there have been several cases of first novels, or even first story collections, that were immediately translated into English, for example. And what’s more, people read them, because some of these translations are also backed up by prestigious international prizes, which bring visibility beyond niche audiences. I think this also goes hand-in-hand with a reevaluation of the figure of the translator, which has gone from being a name hidden on the book’s copyright page to being placed on the cover, and even to acting as a sort of “editor,” in the sense that today some books sell because they are translated by star translators, and in many cases the translators are now included in these prizes for international novels almost as co-authors of the book. I completely support this movement.
Awards end up crowning a winner but feed the idea of a promise. How do you experience this double movement?
Why do writers talk so little about money, when it’s always necessary to have another job besides writing in order to buy enough free time to write? And time is one of the most expensive things in this world. I try to think of prizes as happening to the books and not to me. I’m grateful for them, and I know they provide important support for the books. But I’ve also been a judge several times, and I know that in many of these prizes, the thing that separates the finalists from the eventual winner borders on the arbitrary or circumstantial.
I want to return a bit to contemporary Latin American narrative. We talk about trends and even use labels to group authors under movements, like “Andean Gothic,” “Pampaen Gothic,” “Neo-rural,” autofiction, or whatever else. I want to know if your reading of the current panorama is marked by these categories, and, in particular, if you think it's interesting to draw a distinction in Latin American literature between what is produced on the continent and what is produced abroad.
I read my fellow authors from outside those labels. I do like the names, because there's something of appropriation in them—the gothic, but made in the Andes or the pampa. Also because there's a reevaluation of genre literature, of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, which are finally starting to be considered “literary.” But I’m not clear on the definitions, and I don't take those labels into account when I’m choosing books or analyzing them.
I’m interested in your question about whether there is anything that differentiates or unites the literatures that are written from outside our home countries. I wonder what happens with the versions of Spanish each of us writes in, how much it will impede the reader or a particular story—or, conversely, how much it will add—when we write in these Spanish variants spoken by those of us who live abroad, which are sullied from so much forgetting of words or borrowing of new ones, or from feeling the lack of words in other languages that we don't have a translation for in our own.
It seems to me that in these new generations that write from abroad, Spanish becomes something more like a personal language, a unique Spanish that is almost a map where you can read what cities these authors were born in, what traditions formed them, and where they are writing from now.
How do you inhabit and understand the idea of foreignness from the tension between nation and place of residence? The question is about a physical and subjective (bodily) position inhabiting a foreign place, but also about the possibility that language is itself an estrangement, an out-of-place. Or is language always foreign?
I mostly live in a big Latin American bubble, so yes, my Spanish is very corrupted. In Berlin, my friends are mostly Mexican, Chilean, Spanish, Venezuelan, Colombian. And I am very conscious of how much, from the point of view of a more Argentine reader, this completely de-naturalizes my Spanish. I live outside my country, but as soon as a new story starts to come together in my head, my whole imagination immediately travels to Argentina. In some way, I’m still anchored there. So, my characters are above all Argentines who, when they open their mouths, speak strangely. Several years ago, when I was writing Kentukis (2018; Little Eyes, 2020), this scared me a bit. I thought, what is the most natural movement? Should I shoehorn my real Spanish, the one I speak now, and artificially change it every time my characters speak? Or should I let my new Spanish flow and accept that estrangement in the reader? The question scared me because I didn't feel comfortable in either of those two extremes. I was afraid because I thought the solution was neutrality. I think that the naturalness I’m looking for is not an answer that lies in one Spanish or another, but in the specific language that belongs to each book.
The idea of estrangement in language leads me to think about strangeness as that which erupts into an apparently normal order. In your stories, strange things happen, but they are also inscribed within realism. What reflection can you make on this, and on the genres you work with, or flirt with?
Strangeness does not contradict realism. I remember I spent my teenage years reading U.S. realists, and my friends, who knew my greatest gods in those days were Ray Bradbury and Kafka, and that back then I only wrote fantastical stories, asked me confusedly why I was so obsessed with Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and John Cheever. I felt that the strangeness came when the “real” or the “normal” was called into question, and that the construction of this idea of realism was as important as the event that broke it. You have to have something to break in order to break something, right? Plus, what is reality in fiction? Normalcy? Is it what is socially acceptable as possible and known? If social pacts don’t include the whole world, what is literature for, if not to get a glimpse of all that is strange? I think that even in the most realistic stories, fiction always begins when something strange or unexpected happens.
I’m interested in mentioning a recurrent theme in your stories. Or more than a theme, a pairing: the mother-daughter pair. I’d like to ask you about the relationship between that bond as a literary subject and the two previous concepts we explored: foreignness and estrangement. Is there a connection there?
Maybe, yes. Sometimes people ask me why I’m interested in that relationship, since I’m not a mother. I feel I have to justify myself and say things like “I chose not to be a mother,” and, especially, convey that there are no regrets around that choice. But if there’s no problem at the personal level, why do I return to that relationship? And that’s where your question strikes me as revealing, even: it’s the foreignness, it’s curiosity. I don’t know how interested I am in writing about a forty-three-year-old woman who lives and writes in Berlin—that’s what I have my life for. What interests me is everything that I am not. Mother, father, Korean, German, boy, horse, old woman. Foreignness is always estrangement and distance. And distance helps me see more calmly, it gives me the time I need in order to understand.
Since we’re on the topic of maternity, I’ll take this chance to talk about Distancia de Rescate (2014; Fever Dream, 2017), and to praise its film adaptation. It’s public knowledge that you worked a lot on the adaptation alongside Claudia Llosa. I believe you studied film in college—did you feel that process to be a return to the medium?
Yes, I did study film, but in my head the movement was always toward writing, I never thought about actually making movies. What I wanted was to understand how films are written, I wanted a major that was always asking the question of how to tell a story, and a film major responds to that from all of its disciplines. From the text, the image, photography, editing, sound. But I remember very well that I was aware I was undertaking an almost autodidactic movement. While everyone was thinking in terms of film, all my references, exercises, and goals were literary.
It was during those years of studying film that I started to attend literary workshops in Buenos Aires, I wrote and published my first book of stories, and, in fact, I finished my degree without ever getting involved professionally in anything that had to do with film.
When Claudia Llosa suggested that we adapt the novel together, I felt it was a great challenge. I learned a lot from the experience, and it was often a sort of springboard—in a lot of our meetings we got distracted talking for hours and hours about the intersections between film and literature, about our own theories, about forms, structures, resources. Going through these ideas with someone who comes from the world of stories but who works with such different materials turned out to be very productive later for my own writing, and I think the same was true for Claudia.
Do you think film has influenced your writing?
I’m sure there are film influences as well in what I write, but those are harder for me to read. I’m aware of the specific books that could have influenced almost all of the stories I’ve written; I remember books, images, situations from my own daily life, but I can’t make that link with film, I really feel as if it’s in another world. It’s as if, between film and literature, the rules, stories, and tools with which a story is told were continuously in contact, but not their material, not the substance with which they are told. Film happens with the materiality of our real world; even a science fiction film is constructed with the material world that surrounds us. Literature happens in the reader’s head. It can be as visual and material as film, but the reader’s emotional charge reshapes everything with a power that to me is unparalleled.
You spent years giving workshops in Berlin. Are you still doing that?
I still give workshops but no longer in my house, as I used to do in Buenos Aires and Berlin. I give seminars at universities, like in the Master’s of Creative Writing at the Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, or the Frei Universität in Berlin. The decision to move from home workshops to the university has to do with the fact that, on the one hand, I feel like workshops help me take a more theoretical look at what I usually do from intuition, they force me to think about problems that have to resolve into worlds, tones, stories, and styles, which I wouldn’t naturally gravitate toward, and from which I always return with new information. They give me a lot of energy, I’m always very excited when I’m giving a workshop. To share my thoughts about literary processes out loud, and to expand on them with a working group, seems like a really necessary thing to do—I don’t think I will ever stop teaching. But the problem is that if those workshops last a long time, as the workshops in my house did, I feel like my head starts to work more on my students’ texts than on my own. And I don’t think that’s good.
It’s interesting to point toward a recurrent question in literary workshops: the question about how to make a living from this, how to make literature not just a passion or even a way of life, but rather a livelihood (that is, literature as it relates to the market and the work force in a capitalist world).
The big problem is how badly paid creative writing is, and there aren’t many solutions to that. If we subtract the twenty or thirty bestselling writers you can find in each country, most authors don’t make a living from writing, but rather from literature—that is, by writing articles, giving classes, workshops, or working at publishers. All of which are also badly paid jobs, so you have to have several of them to make a full salary, and then there’s not much time left over for writing. When people ask me why I moved to Berlin, I think they expect me to talk about this wonderful multicultural city with its wide open spaces, full of parks and lakes and the largest Ibero-American library. But the truth is that I stayed in Berlin precisely for the money. For all the free writing time that this city gave me.
Finally, I’d like to know what you are interested to find in the women writers of your generation, and in what ways you think your literature is somehow in conversation with them.
I look for the same thing in women writers as in male writers: a strong, brave, and open literature, one that leads me to places and ideas I never experienced before, and that will help me understand the world I live in. It wouldn’t occur to me to ask them for anything different in terms of their output. As for their nature as writer-women, I think by now we have a kind of tacit agreement about how to move in this environment that has always been mostly male, and that has changed so much in recent years. One important thing is the agreement not to participate in anything where being women would force us to form a separate group again. And I think it is in the discovery of this new possible space, and in the jostling we’ve had to do every once in a while to make space for everyone, that I’ve felt most in dialogue with other Latin American women writers.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Florencia del Campo
Samanta Schweblin (Buenos Aires, 1978) won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection Seven Empty Houses (Siete casa vacías, 2015). The translation of her debut novel, Distancia de rescate (2014; Fever Dream, 2017), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her other books include the story collection Pájaros en la boca (2010; Mouthful of Birds, 2019) and the novel Kentukis (2018; Little Eyes, 2020). She lives in Berlin. The original, longer version of this interview originally appeared in Spain’s Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 864 (Junio 2022).
Florencia del Campo (Buenos Aires, 1982) has lived in Madrid since 2013. She has published the novels La huésped (2016; The Guest), Madre mía (2017; Mother of Mine), and La versión extranjera (2019; The Foreign Version). Her books of poems are Mis hijas ajenas (2020; My Distant Daughters) and Las casas se caen en verano (2022; Houses Collapse in Summer). She organizes creative writing workshops and collaborates in various cultural media.
Megan McDowell
Megan McDowell's translations have won the National Book Award and been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.