The strange fate of translated books is to be published multiple times and for multiple audiences—sometimes years after their initial publication—as though for the first time. Often, this shift in context is obvious, sometimes it’s jarring, but occasionally I read an English translation and struggle to imagine the book being written at any other time but now. It’s that vital, that fluent, that present. The Dance and the Fire by Daniel Saldaña París, originally released in Spanish in 2021 and available in English as of July 2025, is a prime example of this phenomenon. It’s a story of friendship and love, growing up and failing to grow up, the romantic yearning to be an artist and the genuine effort of making art. All this is set against an apocalyptic backdrop of wildfires, water shortages, and rampant conspiracy theories in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The fact that The Dance and the Fire is also one of the rare books to have been published in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic while, coincidentally, dealing with questions of plagues—in this case, the “dancing plagues” that swept the 16th and 17th centuries—makes it all the more astonishing.

With The Dance and the Fire, París takes experimental leaps—juxtaposing voices, tones, and literary styles to tell the story of three childhood friends from Cuernavaca who find themselves there again. Natalia and Conejo never left, but Erre went to Mexico City to make it in the movies, only to move back in with his parents when his already unstable life fully crumbles. In the heat of a city that’s flooded with fire-and-brimstone preachers and one strong breeze away from being subsumed by wildfires on the horizon, the book gives equal space to each of the three voices. They examine themselves, their past and future longings, and then project those inner lives outward onto the world around them. It’s a heady novel of relationships and ideas that has not left me in the months since I first read it.

I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Daniel over Zoom about all this and more. We discussed his pandemic publication, the history of Cuernavaca, bringing physicality to writing, and the desire and sexuality that informs his third novel.

Willem Marx: The Dance and the Fire has three voices and three corresponding parts. That structure brought triptychs to mind. The number three is interesting because it invites comparisons between its constituent elements but also complicates attempts to define or draw clear oppositions between them. How did you come to three voices, three parts for the book?

Daniel Saldaña París: I work a lot with triptychs as a structure in general, but in particular for this book, it seemed fitting because of the love/friendship triangle between the three main characters. The three-part structure mirrored the complexity of the relationship between the three voices. But I wanted a triptych that wasn’t exactly a continuous line. The second narrator picks up the story from a point a little before where the first one leaves it. There’s continuity, but there’s also overlaying. 

I was reading a lot of personal diaries and journals at the time—I’m still reading them because I teach a class on diaries—and I see each of the three voices in the novel as an example of a different kind of diary. Natalia’s diary, or Natalia’s section, has more to do with the creative journal. She’s writing about her work and her choreography, but also about her personal life. The second part is more a diary of the body, and the third is more chaotic, more loose and playful. I wasn’t exactly replicating the format of a diary, but there is a hint of it in each section.

WM: The three characters each have elements of the artist—particularly Natalia, who’s a choreographer and dancer, but also Erre, a failed filmmaker, and Conejo, who treats conspiracy theories almost like an art form. Setting them against an apocalyptic, wildfire-raging environment, questions kept surfacing for me about what an artist does when the world’s falling apart around them. How does an artist respond to a fire burning their city down? Natalia seems to lean in and make art while the other two pull back in different ways.

DSP: It’s true that the three of them have an artistic sensibility. I wanted to talk about the marginal place that art occupies nowadays. In Mexico, artists used to have a more prominent role in society—it was similar to the French model in the way that artists became public intellectuals and would inform the public discourse. I feel that was left behind in the 20th century. Now, it’s unclear where the artist operates within society. I wanted to talk about that uncomfortable place, but with an optimistic twist. Even though we cannot really affect society or shape public discourse, we can still provide a way forward within the imaginary world. We can imagine possible futures. We can imagine different ways of loving each other, different ways of creating links and communities that are still relevant. Now, with the meltdown of communities and societies, we can still find ways to relate to each other in art. There’s a very dark side to the novel, but it also has a sliver of hope.

WM: I was struck by passages where Natalia describes her artistic process. She has a line about the experience of a project coming together, when connections between things proliferate: “The world ceases to be the hostile place it almost always is […] and becomes an endless meadow.” It’s a beautiful, hopeful image, especially in contrast to the actual world around her and the other two characters who largely fail to find beauty in their surroundings. I felt the book saying that it is possible to create meaning in art, even in an apocalyptic world, but that it’s a fragile possibility, one that can easily be lost. How do you think about this idea of meaning making in art?

DSP: Maybe because I come from the world of poetry—I started writing poetry in my early 20s or even before—I have this sense of literature and art in general, as an almost mystic experience. It has a spiritual undertone. There’s nothing more marginal than poetry, so it’s a strange place to be speaking from, but I truly believe that poetry connects us with something. This sense of intuiting coincidences, of everything coming together, seeing the connections behind reality and starting to understand how things relate to each other in less obvious ways is part of a poetic attention to the world. 

At the same time, if you see it from outside, it appears very similar to mental illness. It’s a kind of paranoia where things seem to be connected when maybe they are not exactly connected. I wanted Conejo to have this fascination with conspiracy theories because the artistic process is similar—it could be mistaken for something conspiratorial—but it’s different. In art, there’s an attention, a way of pausing and absorbing the world that connects us with something deeper.

WM: I’m thinking about the way Natalia’s choreography ultimately plays out—she describes an awkwardness in the movements. The dance isn’t smooth or fluid, the pieces don’t fit together like in Conejo conspiracies. There’s a kind of blockiness to it, which might be beautiful but is not a beauty everyone sees.

DSP: That’s true. The difference is that in art, things aren’t perfect. It’s not possible to understand art as a linear narrative like conspiracies. It’s way more subtle, there’s something kind of off, and I think that’s also the beauty of art—it comes from the inadequacies and awkwardness.

WM: I hear the book’s triptych structure resonating—the overlapping, uneven borders between the three parts manifests this idea of art’s beauty and awkwardness. 

On a different note, there’s an apocalyptic energy in the book. Beyond the wildfires, it’s very much about a specific kind of plague—and it was released in Spanish in the middle of Covid-19. On the one hand, I wonder about the experience of publishing a book in that environment. And on the other, what was it like to hit the moment on the head in such a strange way? 

DSP: It was really strange. I had this fellowship from the British Library to do research in order to write a book, so I was in London in March 2020, reading a lot about epidemics—medieval dance epidemics, laughter epidemics, these episodes of mass hysteria—when the pandemic started. I flew back to Mexico City before everything collapsed—the library was already closed so it didn’t make sense for me to stay in London—and I finished writing the book in Mexico in the first weeks of the pandemic. I was in lockdown, so it was perfect for me to finish the draft. And then, because I submitted the book to the Herralde Prize, it came out shortly after. I didn’t have a long time to revise it…in Spanish language publishing, books are published much faster. 

It was interesting because, in the book, I had imagined an end of the world that had a lot of physicality, a lot of presence of the body. The whole thing with the dance and the pain that Erre suffers. It was all about bodies, whereas the end of the world that we were experiencing was disembodied. It was all Zoom calls and being away from each other—in a way, it was the opposite pandemic. I was writing from my mom’s house in Cuernavaca and craving more physicality, more presence of the body, so I would go to the garden and dance by myself. I would film myself dancing and then write and describe some of the movements. It was important for me to incorporate movement and dance and my own body in the writing. I was sick sitting in front of the computer and typing.

WM: Had you used dancing and physicality to inspire your writing before, or did the book inspire that idea? 

DSP: It was the book, and now I’m doing it more. Well, walking has always been a method for me. I’m obsessed with the French Situationists so I do a lot of dérives in Mexico City and other cities. I write a lot while walking—I take my notebook or a voice recorder and go out into the city.

WM: What brought you to look at the medieval epidemics—the laughter and dancing and other plagues that you were researching?

DSP: I learned about them many years ago, when a friend of mine pitched a brief essay about mass hysteria. I was working as an editor for Letras Libres magazine. The idea stayed in the back of my mind for years and didn’t do anything with it. Then, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis—I had been in a lot of pain for five years. After that, I went back to dance, to theater, to doing things with my body and I remembered these episodes of dance epidemics and started reading about them. I was reading a lot about the context of the dance epidemics in the Middle Ages, there was always an environmental aspect to them. They usually happened after long droughts, after periods of famine and other disease epidemics. It seemed to me that there were a lot of echoes with the present: We are living through an environmental crisis, a societal crisis, the power of organized religion and the oppression that comes with it is more and more present. 

I was also thinking a lot about the rise of Protestant churches in Latin America—during the Cold War, the CIA had programs to send evangelical churches to parts of Latin America where left-wing politics was associated with Catholicism because of the theology of liberation. In Cuernavaca, we had a left-wing bishop who was connected to liberation theology and close to a lot of revolutionary movements. It seemed to me that the way evangelical churches were growing in Latin America echoed with the way the Catholic Church exerted power in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. I wanted to establish that parallel. 

WM: We see Natalia doing a similar level of research in approaching her choreography. There’s a layered feeling in the prose, I could feel the density of ideas underpinning her words. 

DSP: Natalia’s section is the more autobiographical part of the book. I wanted to convey the feeling of writing a book and the feeling of how this very book that you are holding was written.

For a novel, I always end up doing a lot of research that doesn’t end up in the book. I use writing as an excuse to read and study and go deeper into a specific subject. I have more fun if I do it that way. Of course, if I were to put all the research in the book, it would be impossible to read. It would be too heavy and cerebral, but I want to believe that there’s a hint of those readings and of those reflections behind it.

WM: At the level of streets and geography on the page well, Cuernavaca is vivid. It’s also a place you know very well. In writing about it, was there a desire to say something about the city? 

DSP: I am very interested in the way cities are organized in layers—there’s this layer of fiction. You superimpose the readings and fictions you know about that city onto the city itself. When I’m in New York, it’s obvious because there are so many movies and books about New York. You see the city and recognize places you’ve seen in movies and read in books. But there are less books about Cuernavaca. Of course, there are a few. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which gave me my epigraph, is one of the books most commonly associated with Cuernavaca. It also has a friendship/love triangle between two male characters and a woman—I wanted to replicate that, but make it current, bisexual, more complicated, and apocalyptic. 

Cuernavaca is also a good example of many social problems Mexico faces, be it narcoviolence or the greed of companies that are using up all the drinkable water. There are a lot of fights around water in Cuernavaca. That was interesting to me because I traced it back to the conquistadors and how Hernán Cortés, when he took Cuernavaca after taking Tenochtitlan, built the first sugar cane plantation. He basically cut down a whole forest north of Cuernavaca. That has had an effect on the climate ever since—It has an effect on how we perceive the climate in Cuernavaca now. The decimation of the natural environment in Cuernavaca started with colonization.

WM: How are you involved in the translation process of bringing your books into English?

DSP: Now, I’m pretty involved. Christina MacSweeney is an amazing translator, I’m very lucky to have worked with her from the beginning. We don’t see each other often, but we correspond a lot and she’s very good at posing questions. Now, I send her my books before some of my friends—I want her reading. So she’s become more of an artistic collaborator of mine. I am a translator myself—I translate from English into Spanish—so I think I am attuned to her work and to the challenges of translation. I read her translations very thoroughly and try to give more feedback even than she asks for. It’s a very nutritious process.

WM: Finally, I want to ask about desire in the book. There’s a lot of it. Beyond the specifics of the love triangle, there are so many lines that treat desire in this gorgeous, elevated register. Conejo calls desire the “god capable of assuming any form.” Erre says, “Only love can quench the fires.” I was interested in the way desire feels mythical, almost unreal, but also like a possibility of salvation. 

DSP: I think there’s an autobiographical explanation to that. I had been in a heterosexual relationship for a long time and it wasn’t really working. I have been a bisexual man since I was a teenager, but I was not very much in touch with that. At some point, I brought it up within my relationship and it was not something I could explore in that frame or moment of my life. I feel that frustration in the book. It has to do with this mythical aspect of desire you were talking about—for me, desire is directly related with the mystical. The fire in the novel is a destructive element but it’s also an element of purification. A force that attracts and repels the characters, the way some of us experience desire. And it also has to do with belonging, the sense of belonging to a community, which is something I felt very strongly when I was a teenager. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had found a group of people that had similar interests to me. Of course, later on you have responsibilities, you distance yourself from that way of interweaving your life with a community. I was seeking that feeling in the fiction.