Deep Vellum’s blurb for Pergentino José’s short story collection Red Ants (published in English in 2020) identifies it as “the first-ever literary work originally written in the Sierra Zapotec language to be published in English”.
this immediately presents the reader with two problems. first, the named translator, Thomas Bunstead, does not, as far as I know, work from Zapotec, and, indeed, the front matter lists the work’s original title as Hormigas rojas (“red ants” in Spanish), strongly suggesting that this translation was done in relay via Spanish (we are taking Deep Vellum at their word that there was, in fact, a Zapotec original). who did the Spanish translation? I assume it was José himself, as hopefully a translation-focused press would name the intermediate translator if it were someone else. it is, however, even more frustrating than usual that a translation-focused press has apparently opted not to acknowledge self-translation as an act of translation.
the second problem is that upon investigating Hormigas rojas (Almadía, 2012) it seems to be a monolingual Spanish edition, and at least the metadata available in the University of Toronto library’s listing for the book gives no indication that these stories might have been translated from Zapotec (the UNAM catalogue agrees). again, I am taking Deep Vellum at their word that these stories were, in fact, translated from Zapotec, though José’s bio notes that he also works in Spanish. I see a few possibilities here:
Mexico has had a small but surprisingly lively field of publishing in Indigenous languages, and José’s own earlier bilingual collection shows that publishing a bilingual collection (even if not a monolingual one) is within the realm of possibility for Mexican publishing. nonetheless, in the interest of assuming good faith I am proceeding under the assumption that option #3 is what’s happened here. this leaves me frustrated that there is no information about the stories’ original places of publication, a problem I’ve encountered before with collections of speculative fiction in translation (looking at you, Verso). I have been thinking lately about something John Clute says in his review of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, that “wrong dates are damaging to anyone's reading of any text of the fantastic”; I won’t belabor the point here/now, but I’m increasingly inclined to agree with him.
anyway. bibliographic questions aside, this book slaps.
Red Ants is not precisely linked short fiction — though a number of the stories seem at least obliquely connected and two, the first and the third-to-last, seem to have the same progatonist — but there are such strong tonal and thematic connections that it feels like a linked collection. there are several throughlines.
almost all of the protagonists are either looking for someone (and rarely finding them) or being looked for (often by state or state-like power). Red Ants could, I think, be productively read alongside conversations about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States as it brings its readers again and again to disappearance. the collection opens with two stories about searching for someone: in “From Inside”, the narrator (perhaps a ghost) hides during his search for a woman named Lisnit only to be found by two mysterious women (possibly also ghosts); in the title story, “Red Ants”, someone tries to report a missing woman to the authorities (she does not stay missing).
all of the stories integrate some element of the speculative, typically supernatural (the blurb describes the collection as “stories that update magical realism for the 21st century”). a subset of these seem to draw on traditional Zapotec literature and perhaps religion, and I am not equipped to disentangle which parts of the book are speculative and which parts are realism-with-Zapotec-characteristics, but I suspect that there is something speculative going on throughout even when José is using aspects of Zapotec cosmology and literature. in this vein, I was particularly struck by two of the longer stories in the eollection: “Prayers”, the one story that feels science-fictional, though not in any explicit way, which follows a man traveling through a city ruled by the despotic Padre Edgardo and his Sentinels; and “The Priestess on the Mountain”, which — like a few of the other stories — seems to be set in a kind of alternate reality where Zapotec social and political structures are dominant and which is just a really compelling speculative concept in its own right, a priestess who finds her prophetic abilities have vanished after the birth of her daughter, leaving her unsure what to make of her life.
many of the stories are concerned with violence against Indigenous people, but typically obliquely. “Red Ants”, where the protagonist is confronted by official indifference about the missing woman, is perhaps the most explicit on this front, but the stories return repeatedly to questions of land and especially the monoculture plantation and the forms of economic exploitation it enables. here the most explicit is probably “Room of Worms”, whose protagonist watches the bamboo forests of his home inexorably cleared to make room for a coffee plantation.
all of the stories are elusive, elliptical. the vibes throughout this book are impeccable — unsettling and unsettled desperation and resignation reign, and I loved it. most of the stories are quite short — the shortest is two pages and the longest is only fifteen; the average is around eight. the longer stories were, broadly, the highlights for me, but the short ones are also very good.
you should definitely go get a copy of this book and show that there’s a market for more of José’s stories (whether translated from Zapotec or Spanish), because I really want to read them.
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