Ariana Harwicz

In Ariana Harwicz’s latest novel, Perder el juicio (published in English as Unfit by New Directions, 2025, translated by Jessie Mendez Sayer; with a Persian edition also expected this year), the syntax functions as a crime scene. It is a narrative of “radical emancipation” where a woman, hunted by the law and her own impulses, kidnaps her children in a desperate act of reclamation. Harwicz’s prose is non-domesticated, jagged, and suffocating—a “cardiac arrhythmia” that refuses to let the reader breathe. Beyond the domestic tragedy, the novel confronts a macrocosm of institutional cruelty, where the language itself becomes a survival mechanism against a society that seeks to kill women while they are still alive.

Most recently, Harwicz’s work has seen a surge of global interest, with a high-profile film adaptation of Die, My Love generating significant resonance, including within Iranian literary circles. In this conversation, we explore the “syntax of anxiety,” the power of literature, the “miracle” of translation, and her profound solidarity with Iranian women.

Our exchange unfolded in Spanish against the backdrop of Tehran’s digital isolation in February 2026. As I worked to bring Harwicz’s visceral prose into Persian, these dialogues served as a vital bridge. All translations from Spanish to English in this text are my own.

Miaad Banki: In Unfit, as we delve deeper into the narrative, the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between thought and dialogue, become so blurred that the very language of the novel seems to be collapsing. Do you believe that conventional, linear narrative is no longer sufficient to reflect the contemporary psyche, or did the “delirium” of your characters necessitate this fragmentation?

Ariana Harwicz: That is a profound question that precisely hits the mark of the artistic operation I attempted in Unfit. The fact that you frame it this way tells me the novel was read with a great deal of complicity—with the narrator and with me.

I don’t have a closed answer. I think several possibilities can coexist. On one hand, I always need a language that fits the psychic needs of the characters. As you noted, there is a form of collapse in them, an opposition to convention, to the world, to society. They are characters in flight, in conflict with the law, with mandates, with established norms. For that, I need a tongue that is equal to those thoughts: unconventional, non-domesticated thoughts. A non-alienated language. A language in a state of subversion.

I wouldn’t say it’s an opposition between classical and contemporary art. Contemporary art can also be deeply alienated. I am interested in the attempt to reflect contemporary anguish—giving it a shape without neutralizing it. If I were a painter, I would seek an alchemy in colors to find the exact tone. In literature, that calibration is done with the tongue: tightening, tuning, and straining the language until it can sustain the psychic intensity of the characters without betraying it.

Your prose in this work feels like a cardiac arrhythmia. The obsessive use of commas and sudden leaps don’t allow the reader (nor me, as your translator) to breathe. How deliberate is this “breathlessness”? Do you want the reader to physically experience the same suffocation that Lisa suffers?

Rhythm defines a work. It’s not just the speed at which a sentence is read. It’s something deeper: like galloping on a horse, moving at full speed. It’s not just the music of the phrase, but what happens inside the words. Reading them as if they were biting, devouring, or inhaling each other, with a different cadence, like poetry read aloud. That rhythm is the heart of the work.

In Unfit, the characters are always in danger. A woman flees the law, kidnaps her children, with her husband and the gendarmerie at her heels. You cannot narrate this with a comfortable language dictated from a bourgeois armchair. The language must follow the rhythm of danger; it must translate the state of mind, the agitation, the very core of the work. It is a vertiginous exercise, and I want the reader and the writer to be in this together.

Of all your novels, this is the first where the protagonist has a name (Lisa). In most of your works, characters float in anonymity. Why give her a proper name here? Is it an identity, or a label for a victim headed for sacrifice?

It’s true; giving a character a name is an exception in my work. None of my previous protagonists had names, and likely, many future ones won’t either. In this case, the exception responds to the character’s situation: she is being hunted by the National Gendarmerie and the Police. There are records, IDs, and passports. There was going to be a “wanted” poster, like those reward notices in movies.

I felt it was necessary to give her a first and last name because she is being actively searched for. It’s a matter of the law, of the clandestine, of the danger that comes when your name becomes public. However, it remains a literary game. It is an invention, an artifice; it doesn’t imply that the character “believes” she is actually named that. It’s more of an excuse provided by the book so that she can be hunted.

You have always been critical of “neat” and politically correct literature. Your characters commit morally disturbing acts. Do you believe the writer must reclaim the right of their characters to be “monsters”? Is literature the only space where we can afford to be truly impudent?

It’s not that I seek out or have an obsession with the monstrous. It’s simply that literature takes life as its model. And life is monstrous. Humans can enjoy torturing; they can be diabolical, butchers… but they can also be kind and altruistic. Literature, like all art, has no other mission for me than to travel from monstrosity to goodness in the human heart, back and forth. But if there is one place where one must not censor oneself, it is in art, isn’t it? If there is one place where there should be no social punishment, it is in art.

Some ask me why I am interested in translating works with such a load of rawness and bitterness. Now I ask you: Why do your works systematically refuse to offer any classical hope? Is it the duty of literature to be faithful to the chaos of the world rather than a consolation?

I cannot contradict or be angry with what you say, but it hurts me, because if literature and music should offer anything, it is consuelo—consolation. That is the great word.

It is a consolation that, curiously, is given to me by the greatest pessimists: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Bernhard, or Wagner. Even the gloomiest, like Kierkegaard, console me. Their lucidity is, in itself, a form of consolation. I don’t believe in “messages.” In art, there is no message. I find militant works—works that pretend to teach me something or educate me—deeply depressing. I don’t want to be educated; I want to be emancipated and adult enough to observe for myself the nuances of beauty and the horror of life. I don’t seek to reflect chaos; I try to show what constitutes the human soul. The human soul is Rembrandtesque. And it is not exactly a joy.

Your texts often remind me of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: that narrative complexity and descriptions that resemble beautiful yet delirious paintings; the same madness of rebellious characters. Do you consciously engage with the “stream of consciousness” tradition while writing, or is it something more visceral?

No, I wasn’t conscious of the “stream of consciousness” while writing. That theoretical framework and those literary labels always come later, once the interpretations and exegeses of the books start appearing. Just as it’s said of the Impressionists or Expressionists: they didn’t know they would later be called that or belong to a movement. I applied a literary device thinking about the writers whom critics say I’ve appealed to—Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Proust, or Clarice Lispector. Yes, I feel close to them, but more in relation to the depth and the way of observing the consciousness and the world of the characters, not for the technique itself. The stream of consciousness is, in fact, a form of radical introspection that allows direct access to the immediate perception of the characters

As your translator into Farsi, I often feel that your images are not written on paper but sprout from the very roots of the Spanish language. Some phrases seem too wild to be domesticated by another tongue. Do you think about translation while writing? Does it worry you that in migrating to a language as distant as Farsi, this “linguistic savagery” might be polished away?

I am deeply moved by this question because it touches the heart of the work: translation. As someone once said, without translation, all works would be provincial. We owe the universality of literature to translations.

Translation is an art, a miracle, an almost supernatural act. Moving from one language to another is not a bureaucratic transaction. There are those who take it literally or technically, as if artificial intelligence could do it. Yet, it remains artisanal work. As you say, it involves exercising a certain violence from one language to another, and sometimes that violence is simply impossible to introduce. But that is the great theme: translation is philosophical because it works with “untranslatability.”

My novels are already the result of translation on several levels: a translation of what is lived into what is written, and then the double translation of the one who translates the text, and so on to infinity. And, well… I don’t know if what I’ve just said can even be translated. Translation is philosophical because it works with the impossible, and musical because it requires a singular ear that hears what others do not.

Following the impact of the film adaptation of Die, My Love (which generated significant resonance within Iranian literary and cinematic circles), what capacity do you believe cinema has to capture the abstract, mental core of your novels? Do you consider every literary universe suitable for translation into images?

I come from cinema. Before literature, before philosophy or theater, I studied film. For me, literature is a sort of return to cinema through a “back door.” I like cinema through the prism of literature. I don’t know if film can translate every book, but in reality, yes, because translating is always reinventing. Any work—even the most avant-garde or impenetrable work by Joyce—should have its parallel in images, even if only as a delirium. It’s like someone executing an “impossible” musical score; there will always be someone who takes that risk.

In Iran, women have been fighting for years for basic rights, such as child custody. What message do you have for those who will witness Lisa’s desperate, manic struggle not to lose hers? To what extent do you believe literature can pave the way in such arid social and political conflicts?

One of the cruelest forms of torture toward women is taking away their children. We know this: all theocracies, dictatorships, and totalitarianisms do it. This is what has happened in Iran. Circumventing censorship to appear in Iran is an act of extreme difficulty. That is why I am so moved that an Iranian woman might feel reflected in the desperation, the howls, and the madness of Lisa. I understand the situation in Iran: how they kill women while they are still alive—psychologically and emotionally. This is what systems that hate women do. The dictators in Argentina did the same: they stole babies and gave them to other families. My heart is with them, and my literature is too.

To the Iranian public, you are a new and mysterious voice. A reader approaching your universe for the first time might wonder: how much of this pain is drawn from the author’s “real living”? Do you believe that to move a reader’s heart, the writer is obligated to sacrifice part of their own memory and personal experience into words?

I don’t know if “sacrifice” is the word, but to write, one must flee from life, and to live, one must flee from writing. One is always fleeing from writing to live, and fleeing from life to write. That is the precious, hypnotic, virtuous circle from which one cannot escape. Of course, one must sacrifice certain afternoons, certain nights, some dawns—serving the master that is writing, and vice versa.

Final question: Why literature?

Because, as Fernando Pessoa said: literature is the proof, the confirmation, that life is not enough.

Miaad Banki is a literary translator and university lecturer based in Tehran. He received his PhD in Literature and is the authorized Persian translator for Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Navarro, and Fernanda Trías. His work focuses on “non-domesticated” and subversive voices that challenge social and linguistic boundaries. He is currently at work on the forthcoming Persian edition of Harwicz’s Unfit and Navarro’s Empty Houses. You can find more of his work at miaadbanki.carrd.co