Daniel Saldaña París talks to The Stranger about nonfiction, the intimacy of translation, and his newly released book, "Planes Flying over a Monster" by Katie Lee Ellison I bought the marketing for Daniel Saldaña París’s book, Planes Flying over a Monster, hook, line, sinker. A collection of translated essays about the many selves a single person can be over the course of their twenties? Drugs, travel, and the conviction that literature is a path through the greatest pains and toward understanding? And it’s in translation from the Spanish original? Wrap it up, cause I’m sold. I won’t lie: I was compelled to read this book and talk to Saldaña París because I’m an essayist who also writes about cities, addiction, and who is compelled by a Humpty-Dumpty belief in putting myself back together through the process of writing and composing my own book. As I told Saldaña París, his book gave me no easy answers, but reminded me that I have to find my own way through my story.  His collection is held together with doubt: The author challenges us not to believe him, giving us and himself the space to hear the same story differently next time (as is always the case isn’t it?), to make different conclusions about those same stories later, to dare to trust a speaker who claims again and again that they “might be lying.” This left me wondering if this was not the most honest you could be in recounting memory, the most honest you can be in constructing a self via story.   Saldaña París has been writing books for a long time. His two previous novels came out in 2016 and 2020, with another forthcoming in 2025. He’s also written two collections of poetry released in 2007 and 2012. But before all that, he was writing personal essays for magazines and had a column devoted to the form: Nonfiction was where it all started for him.  His accolades go on and on, but perhaps most noteworthy for this collection is that he’s a translator himself—a process he reveres as both an intimate relationship, and art in its own right. “I do believe that translating is also writing and it's also an experience of authorship,” he tells me, “in that you are bringing your personal world and experience into a text.” I spoke with Saldaña París from Seattle while he sat in a cafe in Mexico City with his blonde lab at his feet. We talked about his noise band (now defunct due to children and mortgages; he just turned 40; so did I), and how he’s been recording soundscapes as part of his writing lately. In fact, the title of the book centers around an auditory experience in his home city, on roofs with planes passing overhead. The way in which he describes Mexico City as ugly and disenchanting, as well as a place he loves, is a sentiment I share about Los Angeles, where I grew up: A despicable and filthy place filled with terrible history and secrets, as well as a landscape and culture(s), corners and moments that will forever have my heart.   [This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.] So, softball to start out: I'm curious how this collection came together. What made you decide to publish nonfiction? I've always written nonfiction, [so] I decided I wanted to see if I could put a book together. I started playing with themes and threads in common [with old essays], and realized I needed a few more to actually complete a book. So I wrote four essays [to do that]: “The Madrid Orgy,” the Montreal essay, “A Winter Underground,” and the last one, “The Assistance of the Sun.” With the English edition, because a lot of things have happened since the book came out in Spanish [in 2021], I wanted the book to reflect those biographical personal developments, [and created] a different structure for the book. It is a different book. It has a new essay, “The Assistance of the Sun,” one less essay than I had in the Spanish edition, and the order is different. I feel that, because it's autobiographical material, I can't stop working on it. Maybe it's part of this magical thinking that if I stop working on it, I will die or something, because it's so personal.  For example, I just wrote a longer version of “The Assistance of the Sun” that came out as a sound documentary in Spanish. I thought of using it for a future edition of the book.  You write about the miracle of writing itself. I'm curious if there are miracles you left out from the book or miracles you're striving for in the work you're doing now.  I love that question. Yeah, I have a lot of magical thinking around writing and literature. I do believe that sometimes things I write end up happening in the world. And that has been a little frightening. It's never very literal, but sometimes what I write in fiction happens in a distorted way. Like the upcoming novel that I'm writing that Christina [MacSweeney] is working on right now. One of the main characters divorces and moves back to his childhood home in Cuernavaca. I wrote that months before the same thing happened to me. I actually divorced and moved back to my parents’ house in Cuernavaca during the pandemic for a little while. I'm very aware of those coincidences.  So I feel that when I write nonfiction, because I mostly focus on the past and on my personal past, there's less of a chance for things to happen in the real world. And it's a different kind of miracle that operates because I'm working with things that already happened. The kind of magical events that can happen around nonfiction and working with my past have to do with reinterpreting the past and with rereading my own experiences under a different light.  You have two translators for this book—Christina MacSweeney translated most of the essays, but the titular essay was translated by Philip K. Zimmerman. It feels like yet another layer of selves up for interpretation and perception. I was curious if you wanted to keep original translations from Philip K. Zimmerman for that reason.  I hadn't thought about it that way, but it definitely makes sense. I've mostly worked with Christina MacSweeney for my previous books. But Electric Literature commissioned “Planes Flying over a Monster,” and they had a translator already, Philip Zimmerman, and he did a great job with that essay. I didn't want Christina to translate the same text again, because it had been published and circulated somewhat widely.  But it's also very truthful to the spirit of the book. I wanted these two very different voices to come together as a way of adding an extra richness to the text.  Later in the book, you say “meaning is what happens between two people who… are capable of creating a climate of intimacy.” You were talking about a romantic relationship in that instance, but I'm curious if you see this kind of intimacy and meaning possible in other kinds of relationships. For example, there is incredible intimacy between writers and translators, especially when they’ve known each other a long time.  Yeah, absolutely. I've translated books myself and I have worked very closely with the authors. As an author, it's been the same experience. I've had a very intimate relationship with Christina MacSweeney. At this point, we've known each other for 10 years or so, and she's seen my evolution as an author, the change in my voice. So she's one of my first readers, even if she's not gonna translate it. I just send her everything because I like her and the closeness of her knowledge of my writing and my work. She notices things that I don't see in my own text. [This intimacy] can also be generated between the reader and the writer with the mediation of the text. And that's what's most interesting to me about literature: That it's a space of solitude, but an accompanied solitude where you are reading in your own house and have no contact with the world. And at the same time, you are hearing someone's voice in your head, or you are inhabiting someone's experience of reality in a way that's more intimate to me than, say, film or other art forms.  I always wonder about the translator side. I'm curious how you see those intimate relationships. Do you view them as reciprocal? To come up with a cheap comparison: The translator is a kind of therapist. There's little that the translator can give back of themselves in their role by necessity. And similarly with the reader to the author: They take what you give them, hold it, and make of it what they will. Do you feel like that's a false dichotomy? Is there actually a reciprocal nature to these relationships?  I feel that both activities, translating and reading, are creative and active, even though it's not to the same degree or in the same sense that writing is creative and active. But I do believe that translating is also writing—and it's also an experience of authorship, in that you are bringing your personal world and experience into a text. Even if it's not your own story—or if you're not deciding the plot or characters—you are deciding the words, the choices, and I feel that word choice is very heavily dependent on personal experience as well. So the fact that you choose one word instead of the other comes from a place of creativity and authority in the sense of authorship.  In the same way, I hear from readers who have encountered my work and tell me about their personal interpretations of the books. They are creative and sometimes unexpected to me. I love that moment of someone making the book their own and coming up with a different angle and approach that I hadn't considered. I think that's when the circle of literature is completed in a way, only when the reader gives back some of their personal experience. And if there's no one to complete it with a reciprocal act of creativity, it's not exactly literature to me, or it's not exactly art.  I was poking around Antonio Machado, the Spanish romantic poet from the turn of the century, after reading your book, and I found so much of what he writes immediately intersects with ideas in your book. These lines that I found, “the poet does not pursue fundamental I, but the essential you.” We're going to get into philosophy, perhaps, but, what makes the essential you? And what makes for the pursuit of an essential you?  That's a very interesting question. That's one of the questions that I keep coming back to, how, for example, when you're reading [your] diaries, there's an unfolding of the self. You are you, and at the same time you are a person reading your past selves. So there's this duplicity or unfolding of the idea of the self, the experience of recognizing some aspects of yourself and not recognizing other things when reading your diaries, a sense of “I am myself,” but also a space in which I am different from myself. That's what I look for in literature. It’s why writing is important to me, because it feels like it's my way of being alone. My solitude has to do with that distance that is created between the reader-me and the writer-me. So there's these two sides of the same person. And, I feel that I can breathe in that distance in a way that the space that opens up when I see myself from afar and when I write about myself and reread those experiences in the future, that space allows me to breathe differently and to understand myself and my life with some distance.