Empty Pool by Isabel Zapata: The Powerful Essayists of Latin America
Empty Pool de Isabel Zapata. Las poderosas ensayistas de Latinoamérica
Adriana Pacheco
A simple internet search about the tradition of writing essays in Latin America reveals a long list of names like: José Martí, Andrés Bello, Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama Lima, and the indispensable Carlos Monsiváis; all of them men.
Of course, the landscape changes when the search includes the term “women essayists” or “female writers.” A few names appear—though not many always the same ones— and they are often mentioned briefly and without depth. ChatGPT shows slightly more creativity when asked for “names of Latin American women essayists,” providing a list of ten writers that includes Silvia Molloy, Marta Traba, and Victoria Ocampo, among others, but still largely repeating that same list of familiar names.
The results from these online and ChatGPT searches highlight the vast gaps and biases in how the literary genre of the essay is understood and recognized. First, it reveals the void in acknowledging and identifying women writers who have significantly contributed to the field. Second, it betrays the persistent need to assign gender to literature, requiring one to specifically ask about women to obtain results, which should not be necessary when discussing literature as a whole. Third, it underscores the lack of a comprehensive survey of the literary landscape to identify contemporary writers and the countries from which they are writing.
Authors like Soledad Acosta de Samper, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Rosario Castellanos, Beatriz Sarlo, and the indispensable Margo Glantz and Angelina Muñiz-Huberman—along with many others from the Caribbean named in books like Mujeres ensayistas del Caribe Hispano: Hilvanando el silencio (Women Essayists of the Hispanic Caribbean: Weaving Silence, 2007)—are just glimpses of a genealogy of great essayists who inspire contemporaries such as Irene Vallejo, Betina González, Sonia Cristoff, Verónica Gerber, Jazmina Barrera, Vivian Abenshushan, and, of course, Isabel Zapata.
Isabel Zapata is who I want to write about today as my starting point into the conversation about contemporary literature. What prompted me to do so is the reissue of a gem of contemporary essay writing: Empty Pool. This reissue, now exclusively in English, comes from Hablemos, Escritoras and Literal Publishing—a press founded in Houston, Texas, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The book was originally published in a bilingual format in 2019 by Editorial Argonáutica under the title Alberca vacía (Empty Pool), and this edition features Robin Myers’ translation. Myers has also translated other works by Zapata, such as In Vitro (Coffee House Press) and A Whale is a Country (Una ballena es un país, Editorial Fonógrafo, 2024).
As with other books, getting Empty Pool to the United States and into the hands of English-speaking readers became an obsession for me from the moment I first read it in 2019 to prepare for my interview with Zapata. Reading it left me with that sense of empathy and learning that her works always evoke, as does her first novel Troika (Almadía, 2024), the story of a dog, a girl, and a caregiver.
This translated version of the book not only enriches the collection of translated literary works of superb quality from Spanish-speaking countries but also showcases the richness of contemporary essay writing in countries like Mexico. Voices like Brenda Ríos, Vivian Abenshushan, Liliana Pedroza, Marina Azahua, and Gabriela Jauregui exemplify contemporary Mexican essay writing.
Empty Pool is also accompanied by photographs that the author uses to explore themes such as the possibility of conversing with a mother who is no longer present through the notes she left in the margins of her books. “Reading the books of my mother means talking to her.”
The book also takes us on a journey through the work of notable writers to demonstrate that the way we read begins with how we organize and collect books in a library, an act in which book lovers reveal their eccentricities and how these change throughout their lives. “Library is a collection, and collection means a state of constant construction.”
This book can also be considered part of writings in the Anthropocene era, where many writers focus their gaze on animals and nature. The author returns to this theme, as she had previously done in her poetry collection A Whale is a Country, stating that literature can build bridges of empathy between humans and nature in a way that only literature can achieve.
These essays now take us to other animals: dogs, octopuses, birds, dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants. In discussing them, Zapata shows how humans are determined to speak about what we see, the ways we connect with them, and how they teach us about sentimental life or mourning our dead. The story told in the essay “A Brief Chronicle of Canine Virtues” is a good example, exploring the extent of dogs’ loyalty, only to suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that this may simply be a coincidence of their entirely animal and non-human behaviors—or that perhaps there’s something in us that idealizes their actions.
In “In Praise of Nosferatu,” she considers the possibility that an octopus’s intelligence may be close to that of humans, though our smallness will never allow us to fully understand it.
For me, as I grow older, nature and the animals that inhabit it become more meaningful. Birds hold a special place for me, perhaps because of their peculiar beauty, their rituals, or their enviable freedom, to see everything from a distance, from a far-off, aerial perspective. This fascination makes the essay “Notes on Birds” particularly beautiful, especially Zapata’s thoughts on the terms used to name them. For her, the correct term is ave rather than pájaro, as the former speaks of movement while the latter suggests stillness. “Ave makes me imagine the animal in the air, while pájaro makes me picture it perched motionless on a branch.”
Today, when cell phones have become repositories of images and proof of our modern obsession with capturing everything—I must confess that I have an absurd number of over 20,000 photos and videos on my phone—the essay “Against Photography” reminds us of the reflections of critics, thinkers, and writers on photography’s capacity to preserve memory. “More than preserving memory, photos replace it.” Zapata revisits the idea of the innocence of photography in selecting and capturing a moment as it happened and suggests that photographs actually extract a fragment of life. “There’s something predatory in the act of taking a photo.”
The theme of translation is fundamental in Zapata’s work. For example, she often mentions how fortunate she is to work closely with her translator, Robin Myers, who shares her perspective on language and deep knowledge of Mexican Spanish. Myers, in addition to being a translator, is a poet who lived in Mexico for many years, an experience that undoubtedly contributed significantly to her translation of Zapata’s and other Mexican writers’ works, such as Rosa Beltrán.
In Empty Pool, Zapata dedicates a section to translation, addressing it with irony—for instance, recounting how Nicanor Parra decided to translate Russian writers into Spanish despite not speaking Russian, or how Baudelaire translated Edgar Allan Poe without mastering English. This essay is both an acknowledgment of this complex and delicate art and an exploration of how it can create new worlds, as she notes about Ezra Pound, who went beyond translation to creation. “As a translator, Pound didn’t transform. He created.”
Just as translation can broaden our vision of the world, essays do the same: once you’ve read them, you’ll never see life the same way again. For example, after reading Empty Pool, I’ll never view a buffet the same. It will now be an image of our contemporary reality that confronts us, like all things modern, with the dilemma of choice, the doubt of unlimited combinations of dishes, the absurdity, ambition, and even ridiculousness of combining foods that never should have been together. In this essay, Zapata dialogues with other essayists who have questioned the use of contemporary practices, tools, and objects that make us social beings, as writers like Margo Glantz have done in essays about shoes or hair. “I am still overcoming my fear of making a fool of myself at a buffet.”
The essay “Silent Reading” is beautifully written, discussing how reading has changed over the centuries, from being something that is done aloud to becoming silent and introspective. Today, we mostly read in silence, reflecting a modern individualism that seeks a moment of intimacy. But Zapata, as always, offers another perspective, confessing, “When no one was watching, I read aloud.”
The book concludes with the essay “Ways to Disappear,” the chapter from which the book’s title, Empty Pool (Alberca vacía), originates. In it, she reflects on pools that, when empty, can signify abandonment, become art installations, serve as skate parks, transform into gardens, or become sites of terrible events—or magical places where only the innocence of children can see things invisible to adults, as in the poem from Principia by Elisa Díaz Castelo. Zapata recounts her own pools, the ones that have accompanied her over the years, as well as the stories and people in her life intertwined with them. “There were other pools in my childhood.”
A glimpse into the essays Zapata writes in Empty Pool is just a brief look at the themes, names, and references she mentions, and at the many paths she takes to guide us through the cultural history of the world and her own. She explores the things we have and the ways their absence transforms us even more. “We are transformed by things that vanish.”
Today, I invite you to read Isabel Zapata, a powerful voice among the contemporary essayists of Latin America, to let yourself be transformed by the meticulous and delicate way she weaves words, bringing us back to that place inhabited by literature where we, as readers, are invited to stay awhile.
Adriana Pacheco, PhD. es investigadora y es escritora. Fundadora del Proyecto Escritoras Mexicanas Contemporáneas y la fundadora y conductora de la página web y podcast Hablemos, Escritoras. Es coordinadora de los libros Romper con la palabra, violencia y género en la obra de escritoras mexicanas contemporáneas y Rompiendo de otras maneras, cineastas, periodistas, dramaturgas y performers. Es investigadora afiliada de LLILAS, University of Texas, Austin, miembro de Advisory Board del Texas Book Festival y fue miembro y chair del International Board of Advisors en la Universidad de Texas, Austin. Su Twiter es @adrianaXIX_XXI
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