At a ceremony in the Cipriani ballroom, on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, alongside translator Robin Myers, accepted the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her novel We Are Green and Trembling (New Directions, 2025), originally titled Las hijas del naranjel (Random House, 2023).
Cabezón Cámara’s speech was short and to-the-point. First, she announced she would be speaking Spanish, “because I know some fascists don’t like it” (we all know whom she was talking about, and she got a rousing ovation). Then she thanked her closest collaborators—her translator, agent, and editors—before finally giving thanks for Argentina’s system of free and public education: “Thank you to its workers, because without free and public education working-class people like me could never be here. Gracias, teachers, gracias.”
Cabezón Cámara defines herself as an activist: a feminist and a socio-environmentalist. Do these causes enter into her literary work? Yes and no. Or perhaps we could say: yes, but her texts are not propagandistic by any means. Instead, she implants these causes into her novels as part of her artistic creativity.
The author made her name through short stories and novels that address popular religiosity, marginality, political corruption, human trafficking, and demagoguery, and that call into question the traditional conception of romantic love: stories inhabited by travestis venerated as saints and squatter poets who set themselves alight, all within the province of Greater Buenos Aires, in a set of fiction works that came to be called her “dark trilogy.” The novel Las aventuras de la China Iron (Random House, 2017; translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh as The Adventures of China Iron) earned her international acclaim. There, she takes up Martín Fierro by José Hernández, the narrative poem central to Argentina’s tradition of gaucho literature, and gives it a twist, telling the story through the eyes of Fierro’s wife, who is barely even named in the original poem. Although this book deals with subject matter we might define as purely local and quintessentially Argentine, it was a hit outside her country. This leads us to think a text’s universality cannot be foreseen: it’s a matter of chance and surprise, of themes, mechanisms, and movements that are hard to anticipate, even in the act of writing itself.
In We Are Green and Trembling, she turns to the legend of Catalina de Erauso, known as “La Monja Alférez” or “The Ensign Nun,” a real character from the seventeenth century. This story comes to us through a problematic manuscript: the original, handed down by Catalina de Erauso in Madrid, was lost, and the oldest extant version of the text is a later copy from 1784. This distance forces us to read the story not as a faithful reporting of events, but rather as an autobiography permeated by the fragility of memory, invention, and narrative strategy.
The story’s opening act shows us a little girl confined to a convent from the age of four who runs away, not knowing her destination. She finds shelter in a chestnut grove in Donostia, where she cuts her hair and swaps her clothes for masculine attire. All at once, Catalina breaks her bonds to family, the cloisters, and female subordination. Her cross-dressing is not a secondary resource, but rather an existential metamorphosis that allows her to access public spaces and roles off-limits to women: mule driver, page, shopkeeper, soldier, royal official. Only as a man can she get into taverns, bear arms, and cross the Atlantic.
Her figure floats amid the rumors, exagerrations, and legends typical of the depictions of America that came to Europe during the colonial era. Paradoxically, the element that saves her life on several occasions in the story is the proof of her virginity: her intact hymen earns her generalized sympathy from the authorities and allows for favorable resolutions. Although she declares herself to be a woman at key moments, Erauso builds a new, stable civil identity, one approaching mystic withdrawal: a woman who has abandoned her sex—whichever it may be—to live, as a man, an autonomous and exceptional life. “The cards and drinks kept coming; I wager, what do you wager, I wager, what do you wager; daggers, friends intervening, the man awaiting me with his sword drawn on a shadowed corner, drawing my own, wounding each other, slaying him, fleeing once more.”
Back in Spain, King Philip IV, after hearing the tales of Erauso’s adventures, upheld his military rank and allowed him to continue using his male name. Something similar happened after an audience in Rome with Pope Urban VIII, who authorized him to continue dressing as a man. We know Erauso returned to the Americas, but after that we lose track of him. It is on this second journey that Cabezón Cámara picks up the trail of La Monja Alférez, imagining a possible continuation of his adventures, this time in the jungles of Paraná, which cover parts of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay—also known as the Selva Misionera.
The author makes no effort to rewrite or reinterpret an existing work: rather, she visits and revisits it, remaining faithful to the original. Here, we meet a character going by the name of Antonio, locked up for a crime he did not commit. This time, he is saved not by acknowledging his identity as a woman, but by the angelic song he dedicates to the Virgin Mary from his barracks cell. The captain is moved by the beauty of this prisoner’s voice and makes him his assistant. Antonio is able to escape thanks to his cunning and, as he flees, he brings two young Guaraní girls with him out of gratitude to the Virgin. As they make their way into the jungle, they are accompanied by a puppy, a mare and her foal, and two monkeys. These animals interact with the girls and Antonio, and in this interaction we see the first signs of the game in which the author is absorbed; in this story, there is room for humor, celebration, and extravagance.
From the start, we can perceive a connection to Las aventuras de la China Iron, which leads us to think that the author, whether consciously or not, prefigures her own literary projects. In both cases, the story is marked by a cross between colonial history, sexual dissidence, and foundational violence. But there is also a meditation on memory and fiction, and on the art of novel-writing: “What is memory, how can it be that I return to myself, to what I was, to what I smelled, to what I touched, to what I saw, and how is it that I find so much I had not found before? If I did not find it before, then is what I tell you true?”
The novel is assembled out of different voices and points of view that intersect and, sometimes, interrupt each another: what happened in the barracks before and after the escape, the journey through the jungle, and a letter that Antonio is writing as he flees, addressed to his aunt, the prioress of the convent where he was shut away as a child. “I know I wish to tell you of these things, of how I was first a prisoner and then a hunter as I traversed the world, walking and riding horseback and rowing or hoisting sails or astride a mule, and I came to know a freedom that I was, had always been, will always be?—denied.”
Through this letter, Antonio tells the story of his life since the day he left the cloisters behind. Thus, Cabezón Cámara rewrites the character’s biography, making use of turns of phrase apparently from the Spanish of the Siglo de Oro. There is play and evocation in her use of language, a playfulness that seems to amuse the author; there is a new luminosity here, in comparison to her previous work. The meter of that age intertwines with the Guaraní and the Jopara spoken by the little girls when they interrupt the letter-writing. Their interruptions are rife with questions: “Mba’érepa?” the youngest repeats. Why?
And so, Antonio finds himself obliged to explain countless things: Does fire hurt? What is a king and a kingdom? They ask him about God and creation, about the origins of lightning and thunder, about gunpowder and Spain. Is the jungle a country? Through his care for the girls, his assumption of responsibility, we glimpse the possibility of a new transformation in Antonio: the possibility that he might redeem himself.
We find prayers and songs, fragments of Don Quixote that enter into a fitting dialogue with the novel’s tone, with its lyrical density, with its blend of registers, its intersection of languages, and its ties to the neobaroque. The novel’s ambiance is born of stylistic complexity, of finely-crafted syntax. Cabezón Cámara reminds us, as we read each of her pages, that the book is a living artefact thanks to the word, and her careful choice of each of said words generates images, stories, and atmosphere. This atmosphere extends beyond the novel’s protagonists and takes effect in the jungle, which assumes its own identity as yet another character: the jungle and its inhabitants also observe what is happening; we see through the eyes of a vulture in flight, who “returns to the sky, coasts serenely. It never lacks for food. It never lacks for anything. The world unfurls at its talons, crazed with beauty.” We see through the density of the living trees, through the sound—the presence—of the jaguar, the orchids, the white flowers and lilacs, the moss, the river, the rain, and the mud.
“…the jungle seethes, full of eyes; life surges inside it as lava surges in volcanoes, as if the lava were trees and birds and mushrooms and monkeys and coatis and coconuts and snakes and ferns and caimans and tigers and trumpet trees and fish and vipers and palms and rivers and fronds, and all other things within it were amalgams of these primary ones.” An all-encompassing, superior presence, threatened by the clash between two cosmovisions: the barbarism that came along with the conquest.
This radical work with language, which follows a path already notable in her previous novel, adds new layers to contemporary Argentine literature. Cabezón Cámara faces the use of language with boldness: the musicality of her prose and her characters’ speech becomes one of the text’s virtues. But it can also become a barrier. At times, her writing’s movement becomes trapped in the thick webs she weaves: its rhythm, progression, and efficacy are interrupted. The reader may wonder if this is a deliberate contradiction, since the character of Antonio—possessed of a strength that brings with it paths of conquest through the Americas, battles in the Arauco War, a trail of corpses, duels, and aventures—is himself subject to a course of action that tends to be static, as is the case during his flight through the jungle. The language shines, but, despite this, the plot scarcely unfolds. Perhaps it is the author’s intention to suggest that, in the midst of the jungle, of a natural world of such depth, human movement is subject to its surroundings. It is just one link in a larger chain. This might lead us to conclude that we are faced with an atmospheric, musical work—one which reveals a world, an age, and its happenings as if on an enormous canvas. And we must extract the events and the mechanics of their movements through patient, detailed observation. The sound of the words serves to hold up the plot: “He sailed the river’s skin in his skin, by night, when even the vultures sleep. Floating on his back in warm waters. The captain was losing rank and insignias. He surrendered to a tender current. Yacaré yrupés level with his benevolently weeping eyes. Flowers.”
Such observations exude the story, and perhaps Cabezón Cámara’s obsessions, and, why not, her causes as well.
These causes become more visible and are used in new ways or reinterpreted when the book is translated, thus reaching readers in other markets—in this case, the English-language market. Translating a book built around linguistic experimentation must be no mean feat. Bringing the author’s intentions and stylistic decisions through to English, when the novel’s central game is rooted in its original language, may seem an impossible barrier to penetrate. But once the task is done—carried out by Robin Myers—it brings with it an expansion: new meanings begin to surface. Therein lies, perhaps, the phenomenon’s nucleus. Translation does not universalize the text: it shifts it. And in this shift, Latin American literature becomes not more legible but more visible: “a queer baroque satire,” “a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center.” This shift goes beyond the book, becoming part of its consequences, like the consequence of watching the book’s author along with its translator in the Cipriani ballroom on Wall Street, walking onstage to receive the National Book Award and, with charm and boldness, giving thanks for Argentina’s system of free and public education. An education that instilled in her one of her main obsessions: the use of language, of Spanish, of the written word as a mechanism by which to express her own voice: to preserve collective memory, a critical vision, and the possibility of imagining a different future in the face of Latin America’s precarity. Good education as a mechanism of justice and resistance.
“Gracias, teachers, gracias.”
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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