When the Mexican author and publisher Jazmina Barrera accepted an editor’s proposal to write a brief biography of the late Mexican writer Elena Garro, she leapt at the chance.
For decades, Garro’s reputation preceded her work. Born in 1916, she was well known in Mexico for her tumultuous marriage to the poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, and for her involvement with the 1968 student movement that culminated in the infamous massacre at Tlatelolco and in her exile from the country. But her body of work—spanning fiction, drama, poetry, and more—was, until recently, mostly out of print in Spanish and untranslated into English. (The University of Texas Press translated and published Garro’s novel Recollections of Things to Come in 1969.)
In recent years, Barrera noted, “there has been a large and explicit effort, among many areas, to bring her back into print,” pointing to the publishing program at Penguin Random House’s Spanish-language division, PRH Grupo Editorial, that has reissued most of Garro’s writings, including her Complete Stories and several of her novels.
Now, Barrera can include herself in the makers of the Garro revival. Last month, the San Francisco–based Two Lines Press, Barrera’s publisher in the U.S., brought out her biography of Garro, The Queen of Swords, alongside Garro’s first collection of short stories, The Week of Colors. The two books were released on November 11. Christina MacSweeney translated The Queen of Swords, first published last year by PRHGE imprint Editorial Lumen, and Megan McDowell translated The Week of Colors, originally released in 1964.
“You don’t hear as much about Latin American female writers of the 20th century,” says Barrera—not in comparison, she notes, to such male authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and Juan Rulfo. “Silvina Ocampo, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro: they are the missing pieces in the landscape of the 20th century. And they are just as good as the men.”
When Garro’s agent approached Two Lines with the manuscript of The Queen of Swords, which intertwines Garro’s life and work with Barrera’s own relationship to the author, editor-in-chief CJ Evans saw an opportunity to “bring back into the conversation a writer who had been largely forgotten.” Evans said that Two Lines, which focuses exclusively on translations, is especially interested in publishing international authors whose works have been overlooked “for all sorts of systemic reasons.”
This particular project emerged from literary relationships developed over years. Two Lines has been Barrera’s U.S. publisher since the 2020 release of her English-language debut, On Lighthouses; MacSweeney has translated all of her books with the press.
“As a publishing house,” says Evans, “it’s good for everybody when authors have homes.” The press’s focus on “young, up-and-coming authors who we think will be the defining authors of the next generation” allows it to invest in writers for the long haul, giving them the space, Evans’s theory goes, “to keep writing, keep doing interesting projects that range all over the place.”
Meanwhile, McDowell—who also translates Barrera’s husband, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra—came aboard to translate The Week of Colors not long after Barrera handed her an old copy of the story collection when she went to visit the couple in their Mexico City home. “I had never really read anything like it,” McDowell says. “I fell in love with her voice—her voices.”
Both Barrera and Garro have the wide range that Evans looks for in a Two Lines author. Barrera’s English-language offerings include books on lighthouses, motherhood, and embroidery, and Garro’s works straddle genres and invoke influences as varied as Surrealism, indigenous Nahua cosmologies, Buddhism, Theosophism, and more.
Though she is often associated with the style of magical realism, Garro frequently contended with the term, alternately embracing her status as one of its progenitors and rejecting it as a pigeonhole. “She had a complex cosmovision,” says Barrera. One of Garro’s points of discomfort with the “magical realism” label, Barrera adds, was that “for her, it was realism. She lived it as if it was realism.”
For MacSweeney, introducing Garro’s work to English-language readers constitutes a boon for the entire literary ecosystem, saying it’s “a very positive thing, to revive these books.”
