Samanta Schweblin is the most acclaimed of a new generation of Latin American authors. Born in Buenos Aires, her short stories are collected in Mouthful of Birds and Seven Empty Houses, the latter awarded the 2022 US National Book Award for Translated Literature. Writing on topics as diverse as pesticide, femininity and the home, Schweblin is also the author of Fever Dream, a haunting, hazy novella shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She spoke in Spanish with our editor, James Appleby .
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I wanted to start with your new collection, Seven Empty Houses: the domestic space, the facade, the back garden where things are hidden. Why is the home such good territory for the fantastic and the frightening?
The first great tragedies of our lives take place when we’re children, within the family. They mark us forever. But I think it’s also because home is where family is, and family is so hard to escape from. Who doesn’t have family? If we’re here today, it’s because we have family. It’s fascinating because it’s compulsory, but also because it’s often where we’re most loving, and where we care unconditionally.
There’s also something about the structure of a home: the physical construction of the places we live. They’re so rigid! To me, contemporary life requires so much flexibility – constant change – and yet those houses are always the same, year after year. You can wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom in complete darkness, then back to bed. Everything we do without thinking, everything that thoughtlessly repeats: that’s fascinating to me as a writer.
Is this why you’re interested in dreams and daydreams? They often appear in your work.
I’m not interested in dreams themselves, but I love the daydream of reading. That’s why I’m interested in the sense of the surreal, but not the surreal. For me, there’s no more attractive way of thinking about the world than those moments when the impossible seems to occur in reality. Extraordinary things, I mean – things that never happen. Maybe you’re in a public square in the afternoon, when three people, each walking in different directions, stop at the same moment to take off their coat. That’s what fascinates me: the moments of reality when you’re forced to ask: is this real or not?
I wonder if that fascination with the boundary of real and surreal is linked to the role of children in your writing. Why such focus on childhood and innocence?
To be truly innocent means to not yet have taken decisions. Ethical decisions, I mean. Moral decisions. Once you’ve taken those decisions, it’s very hard to get away from them. It seems to me that in both childhood and old age, there’s an authenticity that we lose in normal adult life. Through our innocence, we can see things as they truly are; see them without our prejudices.
I’d like to ask a little about your native language. I’ve heard you speak in interviews about the geographical variety of Latin American writing. Do you feel you have a relationship with the Spanish language or with Argentinian only?
You know, I left Argentina at the age of thirty-five and went to live in Berlin. Until that time, my relationship had been with the Spanish of Buenos Aires – not even the Spanish of Argentina. That was the whole world to me. Only later would I think of how provincial it all was.
Berlin opened up the world of Latin America. It was like changing my nationality: oh, so I’m Latin American now? And now I almost feel more Latin American than Argentinian. Ok, I’m Argentinissima: I’m not turning my back on my past. But I feel a much stronger sense of community with Latin America after living abroad. It’s broadened my language but, uncomfortably enough, loosened my grasp on how people speak in Buenos Aires.
And that’s what I work with. I’ve been away ten years, and my language just doesn’t sound like the capital anymore. Now I write in a Spanish that is always a little old-fashioned, and always out of place.
I actually wanted to ask you about dialogue. So many of your stories start with a single spoken line: ‘They’re like worms.’ Or, ‘Where are your parents’ clothes?’ What do you want from the speech in your stories?
Dialogue is crucial to me: I’d say it was the most poetic part of my stories. It cuts through a story in a way that prose just can’t. I couldn’t tell you why.
The type of dialogue I like is… refractive. Ah, I know! You know those things… they have to have a name. When you’re on your bike and you see them in the road. They’ve got no light of their own, but when a light hits them, it shoots off in all directions. Cat’s eyes! That’s refractive dialogue to me. It has to work both in the text and the context of the story, but it also has to refract in the reader’s head: wait, are you talking about this? Or this? Or even this?
Talk to me a little about your relationship with your English translator, Megan McDowell. Many of our readers will know your work, including its dialogue, through her voice.
My experience with Megan has always been extraordinary, but English is still the most uncomfortable language for me to be translated into. It’s the only other language that I can understand a little – and it’s difficult to think that someone is translating your world after so many hours fighting with the individual words of a sentence.
But it’s also an important experience for the original writer, because you come to realise that a book can even improve in translation. We writers often think that our book is the perfect object – that it couldn’t be better. But of course it could, and it could be worse too! It’s crucial for an author to realise that a book is a more fluid thing than it appears.
You said you felt Buenos Aires was provincial, but perhaps the real provincials are English speakers, given how few books we read from abroad. What’s been the influence of translation on your life as a writer and reader?
Translation is the language that Argentinians read most. As if translation were a language in itself, because the Spanish of translation… it’s weird. It’s not ours. And sometimes it’s not even good! You’d be reading the best literature possible – French, German, US, Russian – all surviving in that same strange Spanish. Sometimes, especially in the past, I could hardly understand it, and I loved it all the same!
From the cover quotation of Fever Dream – Mario Vargas Llosa, who in 2014 called you “one of the most promising voices in modern Spanish” – there’s an implicit connection between the Boom and your own generation. But when you read short stories from contemporary Latin Americans, it can feel like their style is a rejection of that past. What’s your own relationship with García Márquez, Cortázar, and the others of the Boom?
I have a kind of granddaughterly relationship. It’s very healthy – they weren’t my parents so I didn’t have to kill them, if you want to get psychoanalytical. It was always a relationship of admiration – lots of it. They were my first experience of Latin American literature – I remember reading Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero and it broke my brain.
But they were old already! I wasn’t interested in copying them. And what’s happening now is very interesting: people are talking about a new Latin American Boom – but we say no, this isn’t a Boom, because after a Boom comes silence. I don’t want to downplay the quality of those authors – they were hellishly good – but the Boom was also a commercial event. And the fact they were the first Latin American authors to be read in Europe, well, it’s left a mark on my generation.
It can annoy us sometimes, because this second Boom is a Boom of women, and we don’t write that kind of literature. Things have changed so much. This isn’t a new economic Boom: it’s the other half of humanity. And there’ll be no silence after that.
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You can find out more about Samanta Schweblin on her website or by following her on X and Instagram. Seven Empty Houses, translated by Megan McDowell, is published in the UK by Oneworld Publications.
X @sschweblin
IG @samschweblin
This interview was conducted in Spanish before being translated into English by the editor. The original transcript can be read on the blog at www.interpretmagazine.com
Photo credits: Alejandra López
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