Translating notable American books into Spanish has been a reliable and lucrative strategy for several independent presses in Spain and Mexico—especially Sexto Piso, founded in Mexico City in 2002 by a group of friends just out of college. When they convened to decide on the name for their new venture, some of the proposals were so “unconvincing” that according to Santiago Tobón, editorial director of the publisher’s Madrid office, one of them said he would rather jump from the sixth floor—el sexto piso—of the building than adopt any of them. With that, Sexto Piso was born.
“Over time, we began to think of the name as a way to conceive of the world of independent publishing,” Tobón says. “A leap into the void—a risky bet.”
The bet has paid off. Between its offices in Mexico City and Madrid, Sexto Piso now has 35 employees and publishes 50 titles a year, while also operating a distribution business in Latin America. In the past two decades, Sexto Piso has made a name for itself by helping Spanish speakers “enjoy stimulating books from around the world,” Tobón says, explaining that his colleagues “believe in publishing authors of different nationalities and backgrounds” as something of a mission. The press’s backlist makes that clear: a whopping 80% of its titles are translations, many from English but also from Chinese, Russian, and Swedish and other languages.
Sexto Piso has “always been committed to translations,” Tobón says. Among the publisher’s earliest titles were Spanish-language editions of novels by American writer William Gaddis, including Mariano Peyrou’s 1,100-page translation of his 1975 National Book Award winner JR. From the U.S. alone, the press has published such luminaries as Renata Adler, Ted Chiang, Vivian Gornick, Leslie Jamison, Rebecca Makkai, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jesmyn Ward. Next month, it will publish one of its buzziest import titles yet: Ismael Attrache’s translation of the latest novel from Katie Kitamura, Audition, which Riverhead will put out in the U.S. this week. Sam Birmingham, director of international rights for Trident Media Group, which represents Kitamura and has secured nine other translation deals for Audition, says that the author “is in incredible company at Sexto Piso.”
Along with publishing translations of contemporary authors, Sexto Piso has also brought American classics to Spanish-speaking readers. This spring, the publisher is releasing James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, also translated by Attrache, which marks the first new Spanish-language translation of the classic since the 1972 Esther Tusquets edition from Editorial Lumen. Under dictator Francisco Franco, who was in power from 1936 until his death in 1975, Spanish censors imposed heavy cuts on Baldwin’s novel. Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, a professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Glasgow, called the new edition “much more accurate and careful.”
Elsewhere in Europe, publishers of translations worry about competition from imported English-language originals. In Spain, this is less the case, since readers prefer Spanish editions—with one notable exception. “Many of Sally Rooney’s readers opt for the original version,” says Roberta Gerhard, fiction editor for Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Barcelona, which has published the Irish novelist in Spain and Latin America since her 2018 debut, Conversations with Friends. Gerhard notes that because “a significant portion of Rooney’s readers are fluent or highly proficient in English,” there is high readership in Spain for Faber’s editions, which are distributed in Europe. Still, Gerhard says, Rooney remains one of PRH Grupo Editorial’s bestselling authors, with nearly 200,000 Spanish-language copies sold across formats for the four titles in Spain.
This year, Madrid-based Capitán Swing will publish translations of Clint Smith’s National Book Award–winning How the Word Is Passed and Pulitzer Prize winner Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America. And last year, Barcelona-based Blackie Books published the top-selling book in Spain: a single-volume translation of Michael McDowell’s Blackwater series, a horror saga first published in the U.S. in the early 1980s, which has become a runaway hit in Europe. According to CrimeReads, Blackwater had been long out of print in the U.S. until a 2017 reissue from Valancourt Books, which sold just a few thousand copies; meanwhile, in Spain, the book has sold more than 700,000 copies in the past year alone.
Bringing English-language books to Spanish readers has put these publishers in a curatorial role, handpicking titles from abroad that they see as fitting their editorial brands. Blackie’s most recent pickup, a translation of Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr!, is emblazoned with a sticker on its cover that reads in Spanish: “This is an IMPORTANT book for us, and we believe that it will be for you too.” Sexto Piso takes the same approach when assembling its international list. Describing his curatorial ethos, Tobón says, “We envision a restless and curious reader.”
Jeremy Wang-Iverson is a literary publicist living in Barcelona.
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