Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it?

Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Álvaro, author of the trippy You Dreamed of Empires, explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cortés, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation—which Álvaro calls the book of Natasha—is longer, filled with changes and additions and revisions, and so translation becomes “another life for the book.” From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how You Dreamed of Empires blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. Álvaro links his work to Season 9’s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel’s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they’re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cortés (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, Álvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season’s signature question.

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View a transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, You Dreamed of Empires, Now I Surrender
• Nahua
• Natasha Wimmer
• Teresa Ariño, Anagrama
• Sergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• Octavio Paz saying New Spain was a kingdom in One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, translated by Helen R. Lane.
• Edward Said
• Lèse-majesté
• T. Rex, “Monolith”
• Gonzalo Guerrero
• The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
• José Emilio Pacheco
• Michel Foucault
• Michelangelo
• Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans
• Noam Chomsky
• Tlaxcalas