"...language as a right to being."

Daniel Saldaña París on AI and translating Nellie Bly; María Luisa Puga, Pita Amor, Josefina Vicens; Cita Press in person; & more...

“What I try and do in my talks [with students] is rouse them so that each one discovers his language. Not necessarily so that they’ll love Latin-American literature, or even reading, although I really insist that the act of reading belongs to every individual, and that if our society gives it a little attention, it is still a pleasure to which we all have a right. I emphasize at every opportunity that in the act of reading there is a freedom that isn’t present in other activities.

What I want to stress is language as a right to being. Not to learn it in order to speak “beautifully” in the style of lawyers with their farragoes of rhetoric, who become real acrobats of meaninglessness. But language as a tool to animate our social customs, our history, our goings-on.”

— “From The Hidden Language,” María Luisa Puga, tr. Annette Cowart and Reginald Gibbons. New Writing from Mexico. Special issue of TriQuarterly (Fall 1992). Adapted from Itinerario de palabras (1987, with Mónica Mansour).

In early 2024, we put out a call for a literary translator to work with us on the Cita Press Literary Translation & Technology project. As a bilingual, open access, and feminist press, we had big questions about the application of machine translation tools when it came to literary translation. These questions were sparked by the claims of companies marketing these tools and the relative scarcity of translations—especially open-licensed translations—of older texts by women. They were also informed by our understanding of literary translation as an essential but often under-recognized (and under-compensated) art form. The scope of these questions goes beyond the reach of one small press and library, of course. But if, as María Luisa Puga puts it, we see “language as a right to being”—and Cita’s mission to make literature by women accessible as part of that right — it felt important to not avoid these questions, either.

For the project, Mexican writer and translator Daniel Saldaña París translated Ten Days in a Mad-House, journalist Nellie Bly’s account of her time undercover at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. In the process, he experimented with LLMs, comparing algorithmically-informed choices with his own aesthetic and political considerations. You can now read his reflections in the essay “Translation, AI and the Political Weight of Words,” translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, via Asymptote’s July Special Feature: “What AI Can’t Do.” The feature includes MacSweeney’s translator’s note as well as audio of Saldaña París reading from the essay in the original Spanish.

Diez días en un manicomio, the first book-length translation created specifically for Cita Press, is now available to read on our website (downloadable versions coming soon). As with our English-language edition of Ten Days, the book features illustrations by Dajia Zhou adapted from the original 1887 publication and a foreword by Mikita Brottman.

To celebrate the new translation, and to share a peek behind the scenes of the project that fueled it, we asked Daniel Saldaña París to answer some questions for us. You can find the interview below, along with updates on all the contributors we worked with on this book. And, as we enter Women in Translation Month, we populate the Cita Canon with new entrants suggested by Daniel and Christina.

An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

What initially drew you to Cita’s Literary Translation and Technology Project? What questions did you enter into the work with?

I was drawn to Cita’s mission. The idea of working with a feminist press focused on public domain texts was immediately appealing. I usually translate contemporary authors, so this felt like an exciting opportunity to engage with an older work, with all the challenges and rewards that entails.

I approach translation as a process of learning, and I was curious about what I might discover in a text written 138 years ago. I also came into the project with many questions about the role AI tools might play in literary translation. Like many, I had casually experimented with LLMs, but this was my first time engaging them in a sustained and critical way—trying to understand both their potential and their limits.

How did working on this project challenge or confirm your assumptions about the impact of AI tools on the practice of literary translation?

The experience deepened my understanding of what AI can—and cannot—offer a literary translator. I’ll admit I shared the initial anxiety many of us felt about these tools threatening our livelihoods. But this project helped clarify that the role of the translator remains irreplaceable. Some AI tools can be helpful under specific conditions, but they also raise serious ethical and political questions. Working with them in this context helped me see those complexities more clearly.

What made you choose Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House as a focus for this project?

I was struck by the book’s freshness and originality. Even though the discourse around mental health has evolved enormously over the past 138 years, Bly’s style of investigative journalism still feels urgent and relevant. The book reveals some of the foundations of the genre, and reading it helps explain the paths journalism would later take.

“I’m a better translator than any LLM precisely because I haven’t read millions of books…”

In the essay “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words,” you talk about how translating Ten Days in a Mad-House surfaced connections with works from other time periods/genres/places, such as Cristina Rivera Garza’s 1999 novel Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry; trans. Andrew Hurley) and the choreography of Mary Wigman (1886-1973). How do these kinds of dialogues feed your creative process? Do they influence the kinds of projects you take on next?

Absolutely. A translator is only as good as their readings and their ability to make connections across time, genre, and geography. I often say that I’m a better translator than any LLM precisely because I haven’t read millions of books: I’ve read a smaller, more curated group of works that have shaped my sensibility. That personal taste, that sedimented reading history, plays a central role in the kinds of projects I take on and how I approach them.

You have a fair amount of experience in translating works from the public domain, including books with a feminist perspective. In your essay, you talk about the challenges for the translator when it comes to contemporary approaches to older texts. Do you have any advice for readers when it comes to reading new translations of older works?

I think readers should expect a translation—regardless of when the original was written—to speak meaningfully to the present. Language is always evolving, so when I translate into Spanish, I aim for the living, breathing Spanish I hear around me. That said, readers of public domain texts should also be attuned to the historical context and vocabulary of the time. I’d encourage readers to stay open, and to allow the text to resonate today while also offering a window into the past.

As an author, you’ve worked with translator Christina MacSweeney on your two most recent books to be translated into English. For the Cita project, you were primarily working as a translator, and then you saw your own writing on the experience translated by someone with whom you’ve worked closely. Did anything about these shifting roles in one project surprise you, as a translator and/or as a writer?

Yes, it was a new experience for me. I usually keep my work as an author and as a translator separate, so it was fascinating to have those roles overlap within a single project. One of the most rewarding aspects was receiving feedback on my essay from Christina—someone I deeply admire, and who, interestingly, has never worked with AI tools herself. We had a rich and thoughtful conversation about the implications of these technologies for our field.

This August marks over a decade of celebrating Women in Translation Month. Who are some women writers of the past you’d like to see translated from Spanish to English, and/or English to Spanish?

Someone should translate María Luisa Puga’s Pánico o peligro into English: it’s one of the best novels ever written about Mexico City. I’d also love to see a new, more widely available translation of Josefina Vicens’ El libro vacío. Going the other direction, we need fresh translations into Spanish of Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes. Their works deserve to be read anew.

From Christina MacSweeney: Translation of works by Latin American women has seen a rise in the last decade, but I'd love to see a collection of Pita Amor's poetry (and a biography of her wonderfully eccentric life) and in contemporary fiction, there's a great collection of short stories by the Argentinian writer Valeria Tentoni that I feel should appear in English: Furia diamante.

On Diez días Contributors

Daniel Saldaña París is a Mexican writer based in New York and Mexico City. He is the author of the essay collection Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Planes Flying Over a Monster; Catapult, 2024) and the novels En medio de extrañas víctimas (Among Strange Victims; Coffee House Press, 2015) and El nervio principal (Ramifications; Charco Press, 2020). In 2017 he was named in the Bogota39 list of best Latin American writers under forty.

Saldaña París’ latest novel, and his latest book to be translated to English is El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire; Catapult), translated by Christina MacSweeney and now published as of this past Wednesday! The Dance and the Fire follows three old friends reconnecting amidst catastrophic wildfires; one character becomes immersed in a project inspired by the work of German expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman. The research for this novel in turn influenced the Diez días translation, as referenced in “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words.”

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator of Latin American literature. She has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Jazmina Barrera. Her co-translation (with Philip Zimmerman) of Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Planes Flying Over a Monster; Catapult, 2024) by Daniel Saldaña París was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and her translation of the author’s story “Rosaura at Dawn” has been included in the 2025 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. She also translated Saldaña París’ latest novel, El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire; Catapult, July 2025).

Queen of Swords, MacSweeney’s translation of Jazmina Barrera's hybrid biography of Elena Garro (La reina de espadas), will be published by Two Lines Press this November. Autobiography of Cotton, her translation of Autobiographía del algodón by Cristina Rivera Garza, is out in February 2026. MacSweeney is also currently co-translating, with Julián Herbert, Está haciendo tarde by José Agustín for New Pony Press and is translating a collection of short stories, Terrestrial (Terrestre), by Cristina Rivera Garza for Random House.

Mikita Brottman, who wrote the foreword for Ten Days in a Mad-House (which has been translated to Spanish by Daniel Saldaña París), is an author, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is the author of over a dozen books spanning genre and topic and has been called “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” (The New York Times Book Review). Her latest is Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

Dajia Zhou is an illustrator, cartoonist, and visual designer. Her work includes illustrations, event posters, book covers, and comics, and 2D animations.

See the May 2024 Cita Press Bulletin for more from Mikita and Dajia, and on the English edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Further Exploration

• Asymptote Journal’s July 2025 issue, with the special feature “What AI Can’t Do.”

• La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Laura Kanost (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Made available via the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.

• The Language of Dance by Mary Wigman (Wesleyan University Press, 1966). Part of the NEH/Mellon Open Books Program.

• fragment 4, Mary Wigman, Hexentanz, composed 1914; recorded circa 1930.

• “Breathing Life into Language: The Collaborations of Christina MacSweeney,” by Nathan Scott McNamara for Los Angeles Review of Books.

• “The Annotated Nightstand: What Daniel Saldaña Paris is Reading Now, and Next,” at Literary Hub.

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month we celebrate three writers whose art and legacy calls for wider translation, as recommended by Daniel Saldaña París and Christina MacSweeney. Next month, we’ll continue the Women in Translation theme, so please write to us (info@citapress.org) if there is someone you think we should highlight!

Before she published her first novel at age 47, Josefina Vicens (1911-1988) had built an influential political career that included leadership positions in organizations and political parties related to agricultural workers’ rights and social justice in Mexico. She began writing about political issues in the late 1930s before transitioning to screenplays. El libro vacío (The Empty Book) was published to much surprise and acclaim in 1958, eventually winning the prestigious Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, a Mexican literary award judged by past winners. A meditation on the difficulty of writing, El libro vacío is considered Mexico’s first “metanovel.” Her second and final novel, Los años falsos, wasn’t published until 1982, but it too made a major impact on Mexican literature. As translator and writer Lacey Pipkin explains in Asymptote, it is hard to access the existing English translations of either novel, despite their influence. In fact, even the Spanish-language versions were scarce until a reprint in 2019. Pipkin observes: “In reading them, I grew more and more astonished that Vicens’s lucid, restrained prose exploring the anguished inner worlds of men at odds with their public selves is not more widely read.” [“Josefina Vicens’ Empty Books” by Lacey Pipkin, for Asymptote]

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a Mexican novelist and diarist. As a young woman, she spent ten years traveling and living abroad, with significant stints in London, Paris, Rome and Nairobi. This period would have a lasting influence on her writing. Her first novel, Las posibilidades del odio (1978), interrogates the legacies of colonialism in Nairobi. Her third novel Pánico o peligro (1983) won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia. Her last novel, Diario del dolor (2004), was about living with pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis. She ultimately published 11 novels, four short story collections, many works of nonfiction, and four children’s books. Puga traveled around Mexico as a lecturer and workshop leader for participants of all ages, chronicling these experiences in published writing (including the translated excerpt quoted at the start of this issue). She always kept a diary, and often returned to earlier notebooks make revisions; many of her books grew out the reflections in her personal writing. After her death from cancer, her family donated her papers—including 327 personal journals—to the University of Texas at Austin. At this time, none of her book-length works have been translated into English. [“María Luisa Puga: A Life in Diaries” by José Montolongo, from Portal]

Last month, Cita highlighted Sappho, who Plato called ‘the tenth muse;’ this month, we celebrate writer, poet, icon Pita Amor (Guadalupe Teresa Amor Schmidtlein, 1918-2000), who has been named la undécima musa (the eleventh muse). The youngest of seven children and sister of Carolina and Inés Amor, the founder of La Prensa Médica Mexicana and director of the Galería de Arte Mexicano respectively, Pita grew up as a privileged child with a knack for both mischief and literature. Her niece, Elena Poniatowska, writes of her after her death, “As a girl growing up in the house on Abraham González Street, she never learned what her sisters knew to perfection: good manners…the only surrender she ever consummated was to herself.” While the public would demonize her over scandals from her personal life, the brilliance of her work which sought to “talk about God, about anguish, about death” would transcend any public concerns, installing Amor as a mythic icon of poetry in Mexico. Her first book, Yo soy mi casa (I am my home, 1946), discusses her upbringing and social position. Her next twelve volumes of poetry are verses written in classic traditional form. When Amor published Sirviéndole a Dios de hoguera (Serving as a bonfire to God, 1958), there were rumors that five-time Nobel nominee Alfonso Reyes had written the work for her. Reyes himself praised the work, telling Amor that she had “grabbed the nucleus of poetry.” Amor became a mother at the age of 38; her son, who had been adopted by her sister, died at the age of just one and a half. It would be a decade until Amor returned to the public stage, beginning to write and recite again, but rebuking any questions about her personal life. Poniatowska writes, “Pita Amor sang to God and she herself was God.” Despite her fame and literary stature, her voice has not yet reached English ears. Now we ask of her: “Dear God, don’t delay, or, do you want me to go to you myself?” Spanish to English translations by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez.¹ [“Guadalupe Amor: Popular, Outrageous Mexican Poet” from the LA Times Archives, 2000]

What Else?

• On July 26, Cita editorial director Jessi Haley facilitated a round table event at The Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA. “Exploring Asian American Women Writers” used the legacy of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton as a jumping off point for engaging with books and archival materials from a range of authors from TSRL’s collection. You can find a list of books and links to related materials at this link.

• More IRL Bay Area news: we’ll be at Litquake 2025! We’re exhibiting at the Book Fair (9/28) and participating in a panel (10/14), so keep an eye here and on the forthcoming Festival Schedule for details.

From “Décimas a Dios” by Pita Amor:

Dios, invención admirable,

hecha de ansiedad humana

y de esencia tan arcana

que se vuelve impenetrable.

¿Por qué no eres tú palpable

para el soberbio que vio?

¿Por qué me dices que no

cuando te pido que vengas?

Dios mío, no te detengas,

o ¿quieres que vaya yo?

-

God, the admirable invention

created out of human anxiety

and from such arcane essence

that it becomes impenetrable.

Why are you not palpable

to the arrogant who saw you?

Why do you tell me no

when I now ask you to come?

Dear God, don’t delay,

or, do you want me to go to you myself?

(translated by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez)

1. Elena Poniatowska. “Pita Amor in the Arms of God” in The Women of Mexico’s Cultural Renaissance: Intrepid Post-Revolution Artists and Writers. Translated by Elizabeth Coonrad Martínez. Pages 110-131 (2023). From the original Spanish, «Pita Amor en los brazos de Dios» from Las siete cabritas (2000).