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Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!

The entry below is by George Henson, a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, contributing editor for World Literature Today and Latin American Literature Today, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma.

by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)

Chad���Ĵ�ý�s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 72%

Chad���Ĵ�ý�s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 16%

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum, as does publishing. The death of Roberto Bolaño, Latin America���Ĵ�ý�s enfant terrible left such a vacuum.

Every agent, publisher, reviewer, bookseller, and even reader, has been searching far and wide, high and low, in every nook and cranny of Latin America for the next Bolaño, a new literary wunderkind that will fill the void created by Bolaño���Ĵ�ý�s untimely death. In fact, the search for the next Bolaño has been a boon, providing American publishers, literary translators, booksellers, and readers a new crop of fresh, talented Latin American writers: Valeria Luiselli, Yuri Herrera, Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Daniel Saldaña París, to name but a few.

Among the names that emerged as possible heirs to the Bolaño phenomenon is that of Andrés Neuman, whom Bolaño himself seemed to have anointed when he wrote that ���Ĵ�ý�the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.���Ĵ�ý� Then came the Hay Festival���Ĵ�ý�s Bogotá 39 and Granta���Ĵ�ý�s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, a list���Ĵ�ý�in book format���Ĵ�ý�whittled down from 39 to 22.

It is worth noting that none of the names that appear on these lists appears on this year���Ĵ�ý�s BTBA long list. To be fair, some were nominated, while others made the long list in years past. But, still, their absence from this year���Ĵ�ý�s long list is telling. To borrow a Spanish idiom, ���Ĵ�ý�Brillan por su ausencia���Ĵ�ý� [They shine by their absence]; in English, ���Ĵ�ý�They���Ĵ�ý�re conspicuous by their absence.���Ĵ�ý�

If such a list existed today, there is little doubt that the author of En medio de extrañas víctimas would make the cut. Just as there is no doubt that Coffee House Press, publisher of Among Strange Victims, the English translation, has attempted to anoint Saldaña as Bolaño���Ĵ�ý�s heir apparent. Witness the novel���Ĵ�ý�s logline: ���Ĵ�ý�Slackers meets Savage Detectives in this polyphonic ode to the pleasures of not measuring up.���Ĵ�ý�

The novel���Ĵ�ý�s title is taken from the epigraph���Ĵ�ý����Ĵ�ý�On park benches, among strange victims, the poet and amputees come sit together,���Ĵ�ý����Ĵ�ý�written by Arthur Cravan, the Swiss poet, pugilist and avant-gardist whose bohemian life���Ĵ�ý�and a series of forged passports���Ĵ�ý�took him from Switzerland to France to Spain to the United States and eventually to Mexico, where he died under strange circumstances in Mexico.

The novel revolves around Rodrigo, a young functionary, a ���Ĵ�ý�knowledge administrator,���Ĵ�ý� a title he has invented for himself, who works in a museum, a slacker to borrow from Coffee House���Ĵ�ý�s tagline, who���Ĵ�ý�s content to go through life without making any decisions. Or what there is of his life.

My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another. What���Ĵ�ý�s in between deserves another name. Sundays don���Ĵ�ý�t count: they consist���Ĵ�ý�I���Ĵ�ý�m exaggerating here���Ĵ�ý�of twenty-four wasted hours of which I will remember nothing the following day, and that following day, Monday, marks the beginning of the reign of inertia, whose only function is to carry me along smoothly, as if floating on a cloud of certainties, to the next Saturday. What���Ĵ�ý�s more, on Saturday���Ĵ�ý�s I masturbate twice.

To move the plot, Saldaña employs a common novelistic trope, mistaken identity, in which Cecilia, the museum director���Ĵ�ý�s secretary, slips our young slacker a note saying, ���Ĵ�ý�I accept.���Ĵ�ý� Thereafter, we learn that someone posing as our young protagonist proposed to Cecilia. To build a twenty-first-century novel around such a clichéd trope could have easily derailed, careening into pratfalls and platitudes. Saldaña, however, is too good a writer. That is not to say that there is not a thread of humor in this novel. Writing in Factor crítico, Goio Borge describes the humor this way:

[Saldaña���Ĵ�ý�s] tools are a brilliant syntax, the ability to achieve recurring images of great force, a set of relationships among plot elements that go beyond a merely forced structured, and humor, a corrosive humor that never gives way to belly laughs, but continues to show itself in every phrase in the book, charged with a sardonic irony that offers readers no respite[.]

In 2015, I had the pleasure of translating an essay written by Daniel for Literary Hub, titled ���Ĵ�ý�Sergio Pitol: Mexico���Ĵ�ý�s Total Writer,���Ĵ�ý� to coincide with the publication of my translation of Pitol���Ĵ�ý�s The Art of Flight. I say pleasure because Saldaña���Ĵ�ý�s admiration for Pitol is equal to my own and because his prose was truly a joy to translate. Clean. Measured. Unsuperfluous. But also, because there is something uncannily Pitolean about this novel. And that is a very good thing.

Saldaña���Ĵ�ý�s translator, Christina MacSweeney, is no stranger to BTBA readers. Her translations of Valeria Luiselli���Ĵ�ý�s Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth were finalists in 2015 and 2016, respectively. In an interview with Words Without Borders, MacSweeney was asked about being a British translator (MacSweeney received an MA in translation from the University of East Anglia) who translates Latin American Spanish into American English. Her answer:

With Among Strange Victims, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive ���Ĵ�ý�bloody���Ĵ�ý� (my translation of pinche) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with ���Ĵ�ý�damn.���Ĵ�ý� But the problem was, I���Ĵ�ý�d already used ���Ĵ�ý�damn���Ĵ�ý� in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on ���Ĵ�ý�frigging,���Ĵ�ý� which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.

At first read, MacSweeney���Ĵ�ý�s rendering for pinche seems off. Admittedly, the thought that pinche might have been rendered as ���Ĵ�ý�bloody���Ĵ�ý� was even more jarring. As a frequent translator of Mexican writers, I���Ĵ�ý�m often called on to translate pinche. After further consideration, I decided I liked MacSweeney���Ĵ�ý�s choice. There���Ĵ�ý�s something refreshing about it. As all translators know, expletives and swear words present all kinds of challenges, having to do with many factors, dialect, geography, generation, context, tone, register, etc., not to mention pinche is multivalent. It can be used to express something that is negligible, defective, of poor quality, having little or no value, austere, and even unusually big. It can be used to express contempt, scorn, mockery, and even pity.

In the end, I like translators who teach me something about translation, who give me new solutions to old problems. MacSweeney is one of those translators. Her translation of Among Strange Victims is clean, measured, unsuperfluous, just as is Saldaña���Ĵ�ý�s prose. Consider the following fragment:

The small office he had been designed was, indeed, full of pigeons. The birds lived in four cages piled one on top of the other, blocking the only external window. Velásquez explained that the office had belonged to an agronomist who, one fine day, had declared himself to be ill and never returned. His student had received the news with complete indifference, and no one had made any effort to discover his whereabouts. After a few months he had been dismissed, and the caretaker confessed that the agronomist had left him in charge of a number of pigeons.

MacSweeney���Ĵ�ý�s translation achieves everything a translation should. And there���Ĵ�ý�s something remarkable in that. Prize-worthy, in fact.