Susana Sanches Arins in Washington, DC

Spanish writer and teacher Susana Sanches Arins visits Georgetown University for a conversation and presentation about her book “And they say.”

Susana Sanches Arins joins the audience at Georgetown University as part of their invited writers series, where she will share her view about her latest translated novel, And they say. A colloquium on the novel, about the Francos memory and the Galician reintegration movement, as well as sharing her view on Galician, Spanish, and universal literature nowadays.

About the novel

And they say is a dazzling piece of writing by contemporary Galician writer Susana Sanches Arins. Suffering is a black stormcloud on a sunny day. The trouble with remembering is it can cause damage, but it can also heal. The translator of this book, the North American professor Kathleen March, suggests that And they say (Seique in the original Galician) is its own genre and what really matters is telling (recovering) the truth. It is a story of betrayal, unspeakable cruelty, and the odd (breathless) act of compassion. It is the recuperation of the collective memory of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and its aftermath, when fugitives were caught and bodies thrown into ditches, when it was dangerous to answer your door at night. It is an essay that records testimonies, acknowledged and anonymous, of some of the dark nights that characterize this period of Spanish history. It is poetic (if poetry can be cruel). It is also tragic, down to the repeated appearance of the chorus, which seems to reflect on, to reinforce, the central message: memory can be painful, but it is best acknowledged, so that the mourning can take place and the survivors can move on. This book, expertly collated, is a masterpiece of writing on the Spanish civil war, an essential piece in the puzzle of those years.

—Barnes & Noble

About Susana Sanches Arins

Susana Sanches Arins is a Galician writer and critic born in Vilagarcía de Arousa in 1974. She has published three collections of poetry, as well as two more recent books that blur the boundaries between poetry and prose. She is one of many authors to have begun to write in what’s called “reintegrationist” Galician, which envisions modern Galician with Portuguese orthography based on the historic kinship of the two languages, and as an act of resistance against the hegemony of Spanish.

Seique (2015, loosely translated as Hearsay) has brought her work praise from readers and critics alike, and was recently expanded for a second edition. In addition, it was translated into Spanish in 2019 and selected by the association of Madrid booksellers as their book of the year, which is not only a rare recognition for an author being translated from Galician, but even more so because reintegrationist writing is largely published by a very small press that rarely gets attention, even in Galicia.