Today’s #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn’t even available for sale anywhere yet. It’sÌę

“Sis, I want to tell you about the river. ÄąčœŽ«Ăœ me in the river. It makes me shiver, tremble. It makes me laugh. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this alive . . .”

Rute is no stranger to displacement and loss. As a child she and her older sister, Dina, were subject to their mother’s romantic whims, moving from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend. Then, when the sisters were in their late twenties, Dina disappeared. In the decade that has since passed, Rute has become a husk of her former self, going through the motions in work, life, and love, composing daily letters to Dina in the hopes they’ll one day see each other again.Ìę

When the sisters’ biological father, JĆ«le, dies, Rute unexpectedly inherits his country property. Curious about this man she’s never really known, she takes the opportunity to flee the city, the people, herself. But once in the countryside she meets Matilde, the young, single mother from next door who (along with her brother Kristof) was practically raised by JĆ«le. Rute learns about JĆ«le, a generous soul whose door and heart were always open to those less fortunate.Ìę

Haunting, sparse, and echoing Scandinavian greats like Kjersti Skomsvold, Laura Vinogradova’sÌęžéŸ±±č±đ°ùÌęis a tightly crafted work that defies resolutions and endings, instead hailing the importance and beauty of the personal journey to one’s internal truths and external freedoms.

ÌęThe book isn’t quite available for preorder yet, but stay tuned, and we’ll let you know when it is!

Before

Dina likes Rute’s place. There’s a warmth to it. The kind of warmth that is oblivious to the weather outside. As soon as she steps into her sister’s apartment, Dina takes off her boots and socks and stands for some time, barefoot, soaking up the warmth. Rute has heated floors; Rute has everything.

—What are you doing? Rute laughs.

—Have you been outside?

—No, I’ve been working. What is it?

—The wind, little sister, the wind.

—There’s wind in here, too, Rute laughs again and blows into Dina’s face.

Laura Vinogradova

Then they drink coffee. Rute orders a pizza. Dina’s eyes wander around the kitchen; they hungrily take in every beautiful detail, because Rute’s place is beautiful. Warm and beautiful. Sometimes Dina wants to call her out on it. Tell her she’s spoiled. Tell her Stefans has spoiled her. Because Dina can’t escape. She can’t escape the cold, the loneliness. And sometimes she feels like she can’t even try. Can’t be free, doesn’t deserve to be free. And then she gets angry at Rute. Because Rute shouldn’t be living in an apartment like this. Shouldn’t have heated floors or love, shouldn’t be stringing fairy lights from all the shelves.

Rute has a jar of kombucha fermenting on the windowsill. When Dina sees it, she chokes on her coffee and laughs while wheezing.

—What’s that? she points to the jar.

—Kombucha, Rute says.

—Why is there lace over the top of it? Dina laughs again.

Rute pouts and says nothing.

—It reminds me of something. Dina grows thoughtful and stops laughing.

—Kombucha? Rute’s voice drips with sarcasm.

But Dina shakes her head. The pizza is delivered. The sisters eat, their fingers greasy, and forget about the kombucha.

—Walk me out? Dina asks, but Rute shakes her head.

—I want to get a bit more translating done.

They hug each other tightly; Rute blows Dina a kiss, and the door closes behind her.

After that, everything happens too fast to make sense of it. Too fast to scream, too forceful to fight back. Dina gets off the No. 6 tram at the Mārkalne stop and heads for home. The street she’s walking down is quiet and empty, with a few cold cars and a red minivan parked along the side of the street. It’s a snowless, windy January, and Dina retreats deeper into her scarf. It happens in a second: three men jump out of the van, grab her, and pull a bag over her head. They lift her like a rag doll and toss her into the back of the van. No screams. No movement. Dina freezes and gives in having, at some point in her life, stopped fighting back.

She lies silent in the back of the van and tries to think. Is she hurt? Will she survive this? Will it happen quickly? But she can’t think clearly. Her goddamn mind is trapped in this bag. Everything is trapped, even her fear. She doesn’t feel afraid. What she feels are her pants, wet, cold, plastered to her skin. She’s pissed herself. They seem to have left Riga because the van is driving straight, smooth, and fast. Dina is curled up into a ball, lying in her own urine, with a bag over her head. Suddenly, she realizes what Rute’s kombucha reminded her of.

*

At the time, Dina would have been around ten years old. One day their mother, without a word, had taken her and Rute to live with Aigars. No, we’re not going back home, their mother had told the girls, and they never brought it up again. Their mother loved Aigars just as much as she’d loved Vladimir before him, and Igor before him, and Jānis somewhere in between. Aigars wasn’t bad, he left the girls alone. He never spoke to them, and the girls quickly learned to remain silent. If they talked or laughed, it meant a black eye for their mother. Their mother loved Aigars even with her black eye, so the girls weren’t worried.

Kaija Straumanis

The sisters didn’t have their own room at first, instead sharing one with their mother and Aigars. They were set up on the floor behind the wardrobe, with a quilt to sleep on and a small night light. But it was still dark. Each night, Dina had to listen to their mother’s panting and snoring, and Aigars’s moaning. Dina and Rute wet their “bed” on the very first night. Dina had been embarrassed to tell their mother, but she worked up the courage and finally did. The girls were given a clean sheet, but the same thing happened the next night and the night after that. Dina woke up on a quilt that was wet and a sheet with a large yellow stain on it. She pulled on her jeans and went to school, but she could feel that damp cold on her legs the entire day. She didn’t say anything to their mother again—they didn’t have that many clean sheets, and their mother was busy. Aigars wanted to spend every second with her. He didn’t like it when she wanted to play with Dina and Rute.

The girls spent several months sleeping behind the wardrobe. They wet the bed every night. Sometimes they couldn’t tell if it had been only Dina, or only Rute, or both of them. They’d study the stains on the sheets, trying to make sense of it, but what did it matter? Either way, the bed was wet. Either way, it stank. Either way, they had to sleep there again. Every morning Dina would pull back the sheet and hope it would be the last time, that everything would dry out and she wouldn’t wet the bed anymore. But she did. And so did Rute.

Then they got their own room, and in the process of moving them their mother saw their sleeping space for the first time. She saw the piss-stained sheets. The cotton quilt they used as a mattress had started to mold. Their mother said nothing; neither did the girls. Urine isn’t something you talk about.

Having their own room was better. They had their own beds and were given special mattress covers to go under the sheets. Dina’s bed stayed dry the first few days, and she was happy because she thought she’d conquered bed-wetting. There was one morning when Rute’s bed was wet, but she was still little. She couldn’t hold it in.

One night, Dina woke up needing to pee. But the toilet was outside, and to get to it, she’d have to go by Aigars’s room. What if she woke him and he got angry? What if he took it out on their mother? Because he did that when he got angry. The times he got angry like that it seemed that their mother didn’t love him after all, but that wasn’t true. She did love him. She’d cry, rub ointment on her bruises, and go on loving him.

Dina got an idea. On the table was a jar of water used for rinsing paint brushes. She’d pee in there. She squatted, positioned the jar under herself, and tried to aim in the dark. She filled it completely, a bit of warm urine dripping onto her hands. But Dina was pleased with her solution. Her bed would stay dry, and she wouldn’t reek at school. She found a few more jars in the courtyard and secretly stashed them in their room. She filled those, too. When she ran out of jars, she peed into a vase that was in the girls’ room because Aigars didn’t like vases. And when she ran out of vases, she peed in the bowl that sat under the flowerpot.

On rare occasions she would take the jars out to empty them. Very rarely. And so, the urine-filled jars would turn dark, cloudy. They looked like jars of kombucha. Now she remembers.

*

The van stops. Dina is dragged outside and through the bag she can feel the damp sea air. She recognizes it because Vladimir, whom her mother had loved, had lived by the sea. The sea air makes up a bit of her childhood air. We all start at childhood. She takes a deep breath of the damp air and savors it. And there’s a sharp pain on the back of her head. Then darkness.

River by Laura Vinogradova, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis, will be available from Open Letter Books in the summer of 2024.

This week’s music is “” by Ben Hopkins, one of the greatest songs of 2020.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . You can where you’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions, make comments, or correct inaccurate statements. Here’s where you can find the complete reading schedule.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions

You can also support this podcast andÌęallÌęof Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

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Music featured on this episode (all from albums released in 2007) includes “,” “,” “,” and “.”

This series will continue biweekly through the end of the year, covering all twenty-five winning BTBA books (poetry and fiction) culminating in a Best of the BTBA award chosen by YOU, the listeners and fans, at the end of 2021. Stay tuned to Three Percent for additional posts, interviews, analysis of translation trends, and more.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

This week’s music is “Twin Cinema” by The New Pornographers. (It should not have taken eight episodes to realize how fitting this song is for this season.)

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . You can where you’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions, make comments, or correct inaccurate statements.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions.

You can also support this podcast andÌęallÌęof Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of Spanish-language SFT by women, so at least there’s that. With novels and stories exploring such themes as mass surveillance, cannibalism, and nanobot rebellion, readers who hadn’t yet heard about these texts are in for a treat.

*

The beginning of the year brought us three short SFT texts—two from Mexico and one from Cuba. Bibiana Camacho’s “,” translated by Cecilia Weddell and published in World Literature Today, tells the chilling story of a woman who realizes that her reflection is not her own. This awareness comes first as she gazes into her bathroom mirror, and then while she’s riding the metro: “I touched my chin and cheeckbones, and though I felt my fingers’ contact, I felt that I was stroking a stranger’s face, one that belonged to some other woman.” Eventually, the chaos that starts to unfold outside of her stalled train mirrors the woman’s fear and panic at this unexpected change in her appearance.

This story is about shifting identities on multiple levels. As translator Cecilia Weddell points out in her accompanying essay “Translation as Masquerade,” the author’s name itself is a pen name, taken up because it is the author’s beloved grandmother’s name. Furthermore, “The Other Woman” can only be rendered into English via translation, which, in this case, is done by a woman who is not the author. As Weddell notes, Camacho’s story is both the same and different in English translation—recognizable yet different from the original, a reality that lies at the heart of translation itself. And yet, according to Weddell, “I cannot say if my translations are as good as what they re-create, but I know the work can be done well.”

*

Malena Salazar Maciá’s “,” translated by Toshiya Kamei for The Future Fire, is a dreamlike fantasy about a woman who grows up in a forest, sheltered from everyone and everything by her grandfather. Upon his death, she escapes and wanders into a city, where she is forced into marriage by a cold, unfaithful man who ultimately abandons her. Eventually, she makes her way to the sea and couples with a mermaid, who helps her give birth to herself as the mermaid she always felt herself to be.

Salazar Maciá’s second story in English this year, “,” also translated by Toshiya Kamei but published this time in Clarkesworld Magazine, is the tale of a nanobot rebellion.

Nanobots of various types, originally designed to “instill in us the traditions handed down from our ancestors many millennia ago,” wind up turning against their human hosts. One woman takes it upon herself to bring them back into line and save herself in the process. The author’s two other stories in English were published in 2019 onÌę SFinTranslation.com and in Mithila Review.

*

May and August of this year brought us two books by women authors from Argentina: by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell) and by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses). Like Schweblin’s earlier works in English—Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds—Little Eyes is a disturbing and surreal text that invites us to rethink our everyday reality. Set in a world that could be our own in just a few years time, it imagines that people can go out and purchase the equivalent of a small stuffed animal (called a “kentuki”) that also has cameras for eyes, wheels for legs, and a motor. Inside of that creature is technology that allows a person on the other side of town or the other side of the world to direct it and give it commands. The owner of the creature knows this, and the person “inhabiting” the creature knows that they know this. And because this is Samanta Schweblin, we know that nothing good will come of this arrangement. Eventually, kentukis proliferate and their owners begin to see them as more than just mobile cameras, but as living creatures with rights and desires. The human connection to technology that it doesn’t fully understand, however, leads to unanticipated horrors.

Speaking of horror, Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh offers us a world in which a virus has made animal meat inedible. Forced to look for other sources of protein, humans quickly turned to cannibalism, legitimizing it by using genetically-modified humans that are raised and slaughtered like the animals before them. One day, the protagonist, who works in one of the processing plants, falls in love with one of the humans he’s supposed to “harvest” and the moral questions that have been forcibly stifled in this new world burst back out into the open.

Alternately surreal, dreamlike, and horrifying, these works of SFT by Spanish-speaking women authors show Anglophone readers just how diverse and intriguing this literature is. And there’s certainly more to look forward to in the coming years.

Garden by the Sea by MercĂš Rodoreda
Translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent
230 pgs. | pb | 9781948830089Ìę Ìę| $15.95

Review by Kira Baran

Originally published in 1967 in the Catalan, Garden by the Sea is just one of several works that has earned twentieth-century author MercĂš Rodoreda international recognition over the years.

Mercù Rodoreda’s eventful life—one of difficult lessons and equally difficult experiences as someone exiled in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War—superbly enlightens Garden by the Sea. The book acts as a testament to her clear grasp of the universal patterns in which people interact, no matter their social class or cultural context. In this way, Rodoreda’s works are perfect candidates for translation; national borders and social barriers prove no obstacle to Rodoreda’s realistic characterization as informed by her authentic understanding of human nature. For this reason, Garden by the Sea joins Camellia Street, Death in Spring, War, So Much War, and The Selected Stories of Mercù Rodoreda in the list of books penned by this author and published by Open Letter.

In true Great Gatsby fashion (or perhaps more aligned in modern times with Downton Abbey), the story is narrated by an omniscient yet unlikely side character: the gardener. Appropriately set by the seaside, the story finds itself submerged in social circles as it dives deep into murky waters, bypassing high society’s superficial appearances and deriving its narrative from the accounts of domestic servants rather than the elite they serve. Small talk quickly turns into big consequences for these seemingly minor characters, as secrets surface and the past comes to light.

True, this gossip-fueled account of life in 1920s Spain is sure to leave the reader chuckling at points. But it also leaves the reader contemplating to what extent ill-gotten knowledge, social obligation, friendship, and responsibility for the welfare of others are—or should be—interconnected. Guilt and innocence, knowledge and action, come into question as readers are left pondering all the potential ways the story could have ended but didn’t. What makes this novel special is that it is just as much about what is excluded from the storyline as what is included—something the gardener knows all too well.