The Queen of Swords

In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life. Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research – the correspondence, photos, and books – serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work. Who was Elena Garro, really? She was a writer, a founder of ‘magical realism’, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and the I Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination. The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

Author Biography

Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She is the author of six books in Spanish: Cuerpo extraño, Cuaderno de faros, Linea nigra, Los nombres de los animals (a Children’s Book), Punto de cruz and La reina de espadas. She has also co-written the books Nuestro plan de fiesta (with Camila Fabbri) and Rituales para la amistad (with Daniela Rea and Elvira Liceaga). Her books have been published in nine countries and translated to English, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and French. This is her fourth book translated by Christina MacSweeney and published by Two Lines, including Linea Nigra, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Autobiography Prize. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.

In addition to Christina MacSweeney’s work with Jazmina Barrera, she has translated works by such authors as Elvira Navarro, Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to several anthologies of Latin American literature. In recent years, her translation of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch was shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize, Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island was longlisted for a National Book Award, and Clyo Mendoza’s Fury is currently shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company.