To read the “New Wave” of Latin American literature in Tehran is to read a text that arrives already altered twice. When a novel by Ariana Harwicz travels from the raw, unbridled shores of Spanish to the restricted landscape of Persian, it does not simply undergo a linguistic shift; it survives a double sanitization.
As a translator who spent several years navigating the narrow corridor of relay translation—relying on the English bridge to access these voices—working directly from Spanish to Persian now affords me a vantage point that is as privileged as it is unsettling. In my recent conversation with Harwicz for Full Stop, I described her prose as a “syntax of anxiety.” This is a language where the very structure of the sentence—its stuttering rhythms and nervous tension—mirrors a character’s trauma. Yet, having once inhabited this very intermediary space that defines much of Latin American literature in Iran today, I have witnessed how easily this anxiety evaporates within the relay.
What reaches the Persian reader is often a shadow of a shadow: a text made legible in New York and moral in Tehran, with the author’s original voice muted in transit.
II
The English editions of Harwicz’s work are, by all standard metrics, masterful works of prose—fluid, evocative, and justly acclaimed. Yet, in the realm of body-centric literature, this very fluency acts as a double-edged sword: the success of these versions as standalone English novels often necessitates a quiet erasure of the source’s original, abrasive tension.
This institutional sanitization begins in the editorial offices of the Anglophone metropole—primarily London and New York. Even in the most avant-garde publishing houses, translation is rarely treated as a comparative act. Without a rigorous, word-for-word check against the source language, the manuscript is surrendered to the drive for monolingual fluency. The editor, often estranged from the source tongue, focuses solely on how the text “breathes” in English, prioritizing a version that feels “natural” at the expense of the author’s deliberate, jagged strangeness. This is a commercial necessity—an attempt to ensure the text’s survival in a crowded marketplace—but it carries a profound, hidden cost.
Translating a writer as defiant as Harwicz demands real editorial courage. This is not a conscious conspiracy of censorship, but a systemic failure: when “readability” becomes the primary metric, the visceral architecture of the original is the first sacrifice. In Harwicz’s universe, the word is not merely a vehicle for the story—it is the story. The decision to soften a blow into a touch does more than alter a sentence; it shifts the entire tectonic plate of a character’s psyche.
The more “impure” and linguistically unstable the prose, the more aggressively it is smoothed. In Perder el juicio (Unfit), Harwicz warns against the impression of being a “lombriz solitaria.” In Spanish, this is a biological pun: literally a “solitary worm,” it is also the common term for a tapeworm. It evokes a parasitic loneliness living inside the body—a clinical disgust. The English edition flattens this into a sociological label: “loner.” The infection vanishes; the discomfort is neutralized.
Beyond biology, entire systems of imagery are tamed. Harwicz describes in-laws watching a scene “like lynxes” (…ven como linces). In Spanish, the lynx is a nocturnal predator—alert, feline, and carrying a Gothic menace. The English rendering replaces this with “eagle eyes.” By substituting a nocturnal predator with a common daylight idiom, the original’s animalistic tension is evacuated. Specificity is traded for recognizability.
Inevitably, this linguistic softening extends to violence. When Harwicz lists the charges of domestic abuse—including “trompadas”—she evokes heavy, brutal blows with a fist. A trompada shatters; a slap merely stings. By choosing the latter, the translation “disciplines” the violence, making it domestic rather than explosive.
Physical violence in these texts is inseparable from economic desperation—a reality that is similarly refined. When the narrator considers hiring a hitman, Harwicz uses the phrase “poca plata”: dirt cheap, highlighting the chilling insignificance of human life. The English edition renders this as a “reasonable amount of money.” With this single phrase, the chilling vacuum of the periphery is filled with the transactional logic of a bank clerk.
This same logic tempers even the dehumanizing coldness of the State. In a social worker’s report, Harwicz uses the term “progenitora”—a clinical, biological term for “female parent.” The English translation softens this back into “mother.” Harwicz wanted the reader to feel the protagonist’s total emotional erasure by the system; the English “Master Copy” restores a sentimentality that the author had carefully stripped away.
Ultimately, the editorial filter retreats from the messy, uncontainable reality of the physical body. When Harwicz speaks of peeling off the children’s “piel” (skin)—a corporeal metaphor for filth inseparable from the body—the English renders it as a mere “layer.” The biological disgust is bleached; the infection is scrubbed away in favor of a clean, domestic image.
But the impulse to domesticate penetrates the very architecture of the self. In Harwicz’s original, psychological alienation is embedded in the syntax. Observing the women’s changing rooms, she writes: “imagino la manera de ponerse la malla al revés” (I imagine the way of putting the swimsuit on backwards)—a disembodied observation where action occurs without a clear actor. The English translation, however, forces a grounded subjectivity: “I imagine myself putting the swimsuit on backwards.” The English language, ostensibly uncomfortable with this decentered structure, forcefully injects an ego into the sentence.
This is more than a stylistic choice; it is a fundamental misreading of the maternal gaze. In the original, Harwicz uses the masculine plural “los” just before this phrase, making it clear the narrator is imagining her children’s chaotic ritual. By injecting “myself,” the translation “corrects” the grammar and, in doing so, “cures” the protagonist’s dissociation. It transforms a haunting obsession with lost children into a moment of self-reflection, erasing the clinical detachment of the original.
Nowhere is this editorial discomfort more profound than in its encounter with mortality and geography. A mother’s distress is described as “estado cuatro” (stage four)—a terrifying diagnosis equating mental collapse with terminal illness. The English edition retreats from the morgue to the therapist’s couch, rendering it as a “nervous breakdown.” A raw, biological ultimatum is replaced by a generic psychological trope. Even geography is flattened: “espacio zafral”—a term rooted in the grueling history of Latin American sugar harvests—becomes a vague “seasonal space.” The local ghost is exorcised at the altar of global legibility.
This is not a mere quibble over synonyms. While most critics focus on the architecture of the sentence, they often overlook the molecular politics of the word. A word is not just a building block; it is a micro-history. To replace a jagged, historically-laden word with a smooth, global equivalent is to perform a silent eviction of the author’s reality. In such body-centric literature, the sentence is a physical extension of the body. To “correct” a fractured sentence or to “refine” a repulsive word is to perform a linguistic lobotomy. We are not just losing meanings; we are losing the author’s right to be difficult, to be ugly, and to be untranslatable.
III
If lexical choices reveal one layer of intervention, structural decisions expose another. Striking examples appear in the work of Brenda Navarro, which I recently navigated while translating her into Persian. Just as the anatomical body is sterilized in Harwicz’s prose, the narrative body undergoes a similar surgery in Navarro’s. In Empty Houses (Casas vacías), the poetic fragments that function as the narrative’s emotional lungs are largely excised. Meanwhile, in Eating Ashes (Ceniza en la boca), the original’s four massive, suffocating sections—designed to induce a sense of breathless claustrophobia—are fragmented into numerous short chapters.
This is what I call “Pacing Domestication”: providing the English reader with frequent “exit points” and breathing spaces. It is a form of structural Valium, turning a desperate marathon into a series of polite sprints. For the relay translator in Tehran, the architecture of the book has been fundamentally compromised before the first Persian word is written.
IV
While the English filter performs a soft sanitization, the Iranian filter enforces a hard one. The most damaging effects emerge from their interaction. In Tehran, the body exists within a strict regime of restriction, and it is here that the prior intervention of the English text becomes chillingly consequential.
Consider what I call the “syntax of scars.” Harwicz describes jeringas (…con jeringas) scattered across a forest floor—a stark, industrial image of addiction. The English version renders this as “needles,” introducing a sylvan ambiguity that softens the “social filth.” By the time this image reaches Tehran, the institutional censor encounters a word that no longer insists on its own violence. The edge has been taken off before the state even arrives.
But the most disturbing consequence of this English intervention occurs with the physical body—the ultimate red line for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad). When describing the confusion of dressing her children in urine-soaked clothes, Harwicz refers bluntly to their anatomy: pito and cola (penis and rear). The English edition neatly sidesteps this anatomical urgency, focusing instead on the garment: the biological reality is reduced to a misplaced “flap.”
In this pre-sanitized state, the English translation has unwittingly acted as a proxy for Ershad. The relay translator inherits an image already stripped of the physical reality the state seeks to erase. The visceral truth of the body is buried beneath a convenient aesthetic compromise, allowing the institutional censor to finish a job that began in an Anglophone editorial office.
V
These transformations unfold within an Iranian publishing industry where print runs have dwindled to a mere hundred copies. In a country outside the Berne Convention, publishing often becomes an act of localized resistance, yet this precarious environment also incentivizes dangerous shortcuts. The grim economics of a hundred-copy run cannot sustain the labor-intensive process of direct translation from the original tongue. Instead, they favor the path of least resistance: a market of redundant, mass-produced “relay” versions. In a landscape saturated with English translators—whose rates are suppressed by oversupply—English functions as the commercially expedient bypass, displacing the rarer and more costly specialist of the source language.
In these conditions, the ethical responsibility of the translator becomes acute: translation as an act of restoration. Those hundred copies must function as a sanctuary for the text, not as a site of its further erosion. Economic constraint does not justify aesthetic compromise. To accept the degradation of the source is to participate in a form of censorship rooted not in ideology, but in convenience.
The practical solution is a methodology of radical skepticism. We must treat the English “Master Copy” not as a destination, but as an unreliable, suspicious map. It requires reading against the apparent fluency of the English text, identifying where the prose has been polished into compliance, and reconstructing the original’s abrasive edges through a cold, forensic reading.
VI
In our conversation, Harwicz quoted Fernando Pessoa: “Literature is the proof that life is not enough.” When the literature that reaches us is already anesthetized, life becomes even more insufficient. The Iranian reader deserves more than a sterilized echo; they deserve the arrhythmic pulse of Harwicz’s syntax and the abrasive immediacy of Navarro’s language.
To translate under these conditions is to resist both domestication and erasure. It is an insistence that literature remain a space where the body is not written out of existence and where language retains its capacity to unsettle. Otherwise, the translator’s bridge becomes nothing more than a filter of convenience. For translation to remain meaningful, the bridge must not lead to the safety of the shore; it must lead directly into the heart of the tornado.
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