Why is it that I don’t want to leave?
Celebrating the publication of Tomás Downey’s Diving Board, translated by Sarah Moses.
Today marks the official publication of Diving Board, a short story collection from the incredible Argentine writer and translator Tomás Downey. It was brought to the press and translated by one of our very favourites, Sarah Moses, the English translator1 behind Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz and all of Agustina Bazterrica’s work.
For a project that has resulted in a lot of uneasy sleeps, working on this book has been a joy. With an original Spanish bibliography comprising three story collections and a novel, Diving Board is Tomás’ first full-length collection translated into English, though one of his stories was featured in Through the Night Like a Snake and one story each has appeared in The Offing and The Common. But it’s not a straight translation of an existing collection. Instead, Sarah and Tomás wove together nineteen stories from across his oeuvre. And Tomás gracefully allowed us to suggest substantive changes to the stories along the way, one of which he co-translated with Sarah. It was a deeply collaborative process and the resulting book, with gorgeous design by Jazmin Welch, is a career highlight for this editor/publisher.
—Norm Nehmetallah, publisher of Invisible Publishing
A note from the translator:
Tomás Downey and I met through a friend when he was looking to have one of his stories, “The Place Where Birds Die,” translated into English. I liked this story: the sincere and matter-of-fact voice of the girl who tells it, the way she perceives her parents and sisters—it seemed like such a true portrayal of a child’s sensibility. And then there was the feeling of something approaching, the story accelerating, suspense building. And the unexpected ending that cast an eerie light on what came before it. Constants, I would learn, in Tomás’s stories. I went on to read all of them and the wish to translate them was as much about wanting to spend time with them as it was about studying them, attempting to understanding how Tomás manages, with a few strokes, to depict the nuances and complexities of relationships, to write a story that “dissolves into its mysteries rather than revealing them,” as rough ghost Joseph Schreiber so wonderfully put it.
Diving Board, out today from Invisible Publishing, contains our favourite stories from Tomás’s first two books, Acá el tiempo es otra cosa and El lugar donde mueren los pájaros. At their heart, I think the stories are about human ways and relationships, but also, there are mysterious clouds, shape-shifting plants, ghosts, and goofy beings from another planet. And there is awe, surprise, the worldly and the otherworldly; in short, life itself, in all its specificity and absurdity.
—Sarah Moses, translator of Diving Board
Tomás Downey writes from the edge of the abyss. A little girl disappears midair; a horse grows from a seed; a war widow receives a visit of condolence, over and over and over again. In “The Astronaut” a man has become weightless, bobbing around on the ceiling, nauseated every time he is brought down and tethered to the earth. But the question here is not “how” or “why,” it’s “what happens next?” The astronaut wonders “Will I burn like an asteroid or drown in the void of space?” just as all of Downey’s stories reside in that threatening, destabilizing moment when all connection is lost. The world is filled with an ever-thickening mist, an old love haunts the living, making fruit rot in the bowl, and resolution isn’t offered or even sought—the human condition is queasy, fretful, absurd. All we can hope for is the leap into the unknown.
Tomás Downey is a translator, screenwriter, and the author of Acá el tiempo es otra cosa, El lugar donde mueren los pájaros, Flores que se abren de noche, and López López. His stories have been translated into Italian and English, and have appeared in magazines such as The Offing and The Common, and in the anthology Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories. He was born in 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lives.
Sarah Moses is a writer and translator from Spanish and French. Her translations include Tender Is the Flesh, Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, and The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, among other awards. Her collection of short fiction, Strange Water, was published in 2024. Sarah lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from.
Praise for Diving Board and Tomás Downey:
“Opening Diving Board is like waking in a white room with no doors or windows. A question resonates as one reads these stories: How did Tomás Downey place me here so perfectly, and why is it that I don’t want to leave?”—Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh and The Unworthy
“Bizarro fiction is not a genre: it’s a disturbing variant that hides a vague threat, that leaves the reader feeling something between awe and unease. Tomás Downey is an expert in this type of story: cursed childhoods, fantastical plants, sudden deaths, cruel plagues. Via the most brutal realism and the most surprising fantasy, his stories reveal a strange world and a solid storyteller [who writes] with remarkable control, but is capable of moments of intense madness.”—Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night
“Some of the afflictions Downey’s characters face in these stories are emotional, while others are uncanny in their origins. That juxtaposition makes for an even more powerful sense of alienation; in other words, what happens when the source of your existential dread turns out to be as familiar as the back of your hand? These stories turn on recognizable bonds shifting gears into something else — and pushing these characters towards unwanted epiphanies.”—Tobias Carroll, Vol.1 Brooklyn
“Downey’s haunting, weird tales tend to linger, leaving a discomposing sensation in their wake. But they leave one wanting to move on and find out where his imagination will wander next. His stories have appeared in a number of English language publications, but now with this collection, translated in clear, clean prose by Sarah Moses, a broader introduction to the eerie landscape his characters inhabit is available in one volume.”—Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
“…Tomás Downey’s genius lies precisely in the fact that he’s never talking about other worlds, not even metaphorically. This is our world, only shifted a millimetre to the right, shaken ever so slightly, but ours…”—Munir Hachemi, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos
Sarah is a talented writer of original English language fiction, too. We can’t say enough good things about her collection Strange Water from our friends at 1366 Books.