Mexico is traditionally thought of as a country in love with machismo, and that fact can be seen in the Mexican writers who succeed in English—among them Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Octavio Paz. Yet there are many women in Mexico writing landmark literature, and this audio presents two of them. As part of the annual Litquake literature festival in San Francisco, the Center for the Art of Translation partnered with the Mexican Consulate to present two of Mexico's most vital female writers: Carmen Boullosa and Pura López Colomé.

In this first episode, Scott Esposito interviews Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They discuss editing the English version of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), procuring the rights to Roberto Bolaño’s works and editing Natasha Wimmer’s translations, and Stein's translation of Edouard Levé's book Autoportrait. Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito also chat about César Aira’s Varamo, László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.

Compared to Roberto Bolaño and the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, Horacio Castellanos Moya has attracted a devoted following in English with his first translated novel, Senselessness, about an embattled, displaced journalist charged with editing a 1,100-page report on the military’s massacre of Guatemala’s indigenous people. In this Two Voices event audio, hear translator Katherine Silver explain how this testimony, recounted in the broken Spanish of the Cakchiquel people, “infects” the narrators own colonial Spanish. She further explains how both languages proceed to subversively “infect” her own English translation