Senselessness is the English translation of the 2004 novel Insensatez, originally written in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 by Honduran

Honduras

Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...

 writer Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya

-Life and work:Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. His family moved to El Salvador while he was only a few years old. He lived in San Salvador until 1979, and since has resided in Toronto, San José, Mexico City and Frankfurt. He has also worked as a journalist.Castellanos...

. Senselessness was translated by Katherine Silver and published in 2008 by New Directions Publishers

New Directions Publishers

New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin. The company was incorporated in 1964 as the New Directions Publishing Corporation and operates from New York City, and its books today are distributed by WW Norton & Company. Its...

. The translation was short-listed for the 2009 Best Translated Book Award

Best Translated Book Award

Best Translated Book Award is an annual literature award given by Three Percent, the online literature magazine of Open Letter Books, which is the book translation press of the University of Rochester. It is awarded to the best original translation published that year. A long list and short list...

.

Plot

A sex-obsessed lush of a writer is employed by the Catholic Church to edit and tidy up a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of the indigenous villagers a decade earlier. The writer becomes mesmerized by the poetic phrases written by the indigenous people and becomes increasingly paranoid and frightened, not only by the spellbinding words he must read, but also by the murders and generals that run his country. The country, never named, is identifiable as Guatemala through the mention of two presidents, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo and Efrain Rios Montt.

External links

• "Transator Katherine Silver discusses "Senselessness" Center for the Art of Translation