I read a lot of books in Spanish and Portuguese for my work as a freelance literary translator, and it’s very rare for me to read a novel and like it so much that I am gripped, possessed practically, by a desire to translate and bring it to the world. That’s exactly what happened in the winter of 2020—simultaneously very eventful and completely formless— when I first read Vicente Luis Mora’s novel Centroeuropa with zero context or expectations. I didn’t even know Vicente’s name at the time. I’m excited every time I remember that I did indeed end up translating the novel and found not one but two publishers (the US edition comes out from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2026, more than two years after the UK edition).
Centroeuropa is that rare novel that fuses a dedication to experimentation with a riveting story, immersive world-building, and many memorable characters. It’s also full of hidden, mathematical patterns and what YouTubers call “Easter eggs.”
Vicente and I spent the first few weeks of January 2026 exchanging questions over email (sadly, we’ve still never met in person). We discussed translation, the ethics and merits of lying, Vicente’s influences (and the writers he is emphatically not influenced by!), the genius of Spanish Medieval and Renaissance writing, and my own weird hang-ups about being a translator. —Rahul Bery
Rahul Bery: Vicente, what on earth possessed you to write an experimental novel, containing a whole load of hidden procedures and rules, about 1820s Prussia?
Vicente Luis Mora: I’m never sure why I decide to write a book. Ideas come to me all the time, dropping down to the ground like dead leaves. I don’t know why some of these ideas take root and grow and bloom in my head, unable to escape until I have finished writing them. In the case of Centroeuropa,I had the image of some frozen bodies that wouldn’t thaw in the sun or the heat. I could see that they were soldiers. And everything else followed on from that, as if that story and those characters had always been inside me, paralyzed, waiting to sprout through my writing. I set it in Prussia because, when I had the idea, I was reading Before the Storm by Theodor Fontane, and I felt that this country, a country that no longer exists, was an ideal country to write about. But I decided to set the novel in an earlier time, when Central Europe was deciding between remaining anchored in the ancien régime or moving to a new worldview: liberal, democratic, open. It was a critical moment, from which, in a certain way, all Europeans come, and so it seemed very interesting to me as a narrative space-time.
Given that you could comfortably translate commercial novels, why did you decide to specialize in unusual and experimental Spanish-language authors?
RB: Haha, well, that’s not entirely true: I have translated the relatively commercial David Trueba and the extremely commercial Fernando J. Muñez. But I take your point! The answer is that I don’t just like translating per se; I’ve never done any commercial (medical, legal, marketing, etc.) translation, and couldn’t, even if it was offered to me. So, the simple answer is that I translate because I like reading and I like writing, and Spanish (and Portuguese) are the languages I know best. Ultimately, I would rather translate the kind of literature I like reading (and wish I could write myself!). But the funny thing is, the first time I read Centroeuropa, it wasn’t the experimentalism that attracted me about it, but rather conventional things: the style, the story, the characters, the world-building, the mystery. I knew it wasn’t a normal novel, but it was only after reading your blogpost about it (‘How I wrote Centroeuropa‘), and then immediately rereading the book, that I realized how deeply experimental and procedural it was. The truth is, I don’t like literature that is experimental just for the sake of it; the beauty of your version of experimentalism is that it serves the work of art, rather than the other way around. After all, are the ludic and mathematical structures that determine Centroeuropa so different in nature from those at play in a detective novel, or a romance?
To my mind, Centroeuropa occupies a space similar to that of great twentieth-century French experimental writers such as Perec and Roussel and, in our era, to Latin American authors like Aira and Katchadjian. Do you see it as part of these traditions? Were those authors a direct influence on your novel?
VLM: Several critics have linked Centroeuropa to Roussel or Perec, but there is no relationship with them (I know that they didn’t influence me because I’ve read both of them). One misguided reader mentioned Hopscotch, another novel that can’t have influenced me because I put it down not long after starting to read it (I really like some of Cortázar’s stories, but I don’t think longer pieces were his strong point). Nor were Aira and Katchadjian models for me, though I have written about and admire them. Not one of the names mentioned influenced the mathematical experimentation used in Centroeuropa. In fact, Spanish Golden Age poetry is behind its structure: Garcilaso de la Vega (whose third eclogue is structured according to the proportio aurea of Fibonacci’s mathematical sequence), Fray Luis de León, and, above all, Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo. That perfect metric that sounds “natural” is the model I was looking for: I wanted to construct a novel as if it were a sonnet. A work in which the numerical patten is the riverbed that allows the current of the prose to flow smoothly.
When we read a novel, a world unfolds in our minds: fiction constructs a universe in our brains, sometimes made of elements and decorations of our own making, originating in our own experiences.
Rahul, when you translate a novel, are you translating the text or a mixture of the text and that mental landscape generated by reading it?
RB: Vicente, I love that you’re highlighting the genius of Spanish Golden Age literature. I studied Don Quixote and medieval/early Renaissance Spanish literature at university. To be honest, I wasn’t excited about the prospect, but I ended up loving it. I already knew that the Spanish invented the novel and modern realism but I didn’t know they had basically invented postmodernism and metatextuality too! Borges has that essay where he talks about all the tricks at play in Don Quixote: Quixote and Sancho coming across people who have read bootleg versions of the first part of the novel; meeting a prisoner who has met Cervantes himself; the whole ruse that it’s actually a translation from the Arabic. But then I discovered that a lot of that stuff was happening a lot earlier, in La Celestina, in the Book of Good Love, in El Cid.
To answer your question, though, I think I have quite a low opinion of myself as a translator, as a sort of lesser artist, a craftsman at best. I don’t mean to say that I think all translators are that, but sometimes I feel that I really am just working on a sentence-by-sentence level and can’t see the forest for the trees. It varies massively. For example, sometimes I have translated books I haven’t read before beginning the translation, something a lot of my colleagues also do. But with a book like Centroeuropa, that myopic kind of translation would be impossible, because the structure of the book is integral and, for example, I would never have been able to translate it without knowing more about why and how you wrote it. With regard to the mental landscape, I can’t think of a book I’ve read in recent years that I experienced in such an intensely visual way. The frozen soldiers, the dog that turns out to be a wolf, the balloon rising in the sky, the dam made of bodies; my desire to translate the novel was driven by a need to bring those images to new readers and led to the first time I successfully pitched a novel to a publisher.
You’ve stated that Centroeuropa is not a historical novel; you prefer the term “archaeological.” At the same time, I loved the way it brings the past to life so vividly, in a way that resembles what the best historical fiction achieves. I felt that I could taste the white beer drunk by Redo and Jakob and felt shivers down my spine when the myopic Redo puts on glasses for the first time and sees the world in all its detail. Was bringing the past to life in this way one of your intentions? What do you think of the historical novel as a genre? Are there any you like?
VLM: Centroeuropa is indeed an archaeological novel, because I see culture as being formed of strata. Most of these strata are buried, and the act of unearthing them is a way of giving them a voice, letting them speak. When those frozen bodies spring up in the novel they say many things, so much that no one wants to hear them. Those bodies shout, without making a sound. Culture works that way. According to Freud, the unconscious is also stratified and works through archaeological layers; that’s why I am interested in that archaeological metaphor for the layers of the unconscious. Because those buried bodies are like Europe’s unconscious.
Then there is another theme, what Michel Foucault called the archaeology of knowledge, that I was interested in exploring: to see what might remain of Romanticism, to examine what lives on today from that moment of change, how it has evolved, what we have gained, what we have lost; what idea of belonging existed back, the origins of the idea of achieving a highly organized Europe with lower duties on agricultural and farm products, that idea of opening up borders to contribute to regional development. I think it’s important to think about this today, especially now, when three superpowers seek to divvy up the world and Europe has been left in the middle of nowhere, defending its old principles.
Sometimes I doubt the power of literary writing to change the world, because those who have power do not read (or seemingly only read bestsellers on the topic of war).
Do you think translation can help society through the exchange of ideas? If you were interpreting at a meeting between two leaders, would you manipulate their words, so that they would quickly reach consensus and sign a peace agreement? I would! But of course, we authors don’t mind telling lies: it’s our job.
RB: Vicente, I love the idea of an interpreter saving the world by intentionally mistranslating the words of a bellicose tyrant! And if I was in that position, I totally would!
I am actually quite skeptical about any claims that literature is good for you or makes you a better person—or the subclaim that reading literature in translation makes you an even better and more empathetic person. It’s just patently untrue, not to mention insulting. (I do, however, cling to the belief that reading in three languages is helping my brain and will protect me in old age!) I am also agnostic as to the idea of “accuracy” in translation. It helps that Centroeuropa is more like poetry in some ways. I had to balance accuracy to the original sentences with a perhaps more important imperative, related to chapter length and repeating some of the ludic techniques you employ throughout the text.
If translation is, as Kate Briggs called it, a “little art,” and if writers, the great artists, can steal and lie liberally, then surely we, the minor artists are allowed to commit a few minor trespasses of our own . . . And maybe together our benign lies and trickery can change the world!
