His Name Was Death is now finally available in English, in a fluid translation by Kit Schluter that preserves the tone and texture of the original.

The Baffler, Max Pearl
photo by Claire Mullen

Kit Schluter

Kit Schluter (Boston, 1989) lives in Mexico City. His acclaimed translations from the French and Spanish include books by Olivia Tapiero, Anne Kawala, Jaime Sáenz, Michel Surya, and Marcel Schwob.

cover image of the book His Name Was Death

His Name Was Death

by Rafael Bernal

Translated by Kit Schluter

With a contribution by Yuri Herrera

Never before in English, this legendary precursor to ecofiction turns the coming insect apocalypse on its head. A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a local Chiapas tribe, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl). When he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life—and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises the demon of alcoholism as well. Slowly recovering our antihero discovers a curious thing about the mosquitoes’ buzzing, “which to human ears seemed so irritating and pointless”: it constituted a language he might learn—and with the help of a flute and a homemade dictionary—even speak. Slowly, he masters Mosquil, with astonishing consequences… Will he harness the mosquitoes’ global might? And will his new powers enable him to take over the world that’s rejected him? A book far ahead of its time, His Name Was Death looks down the double-barreled shotgun of ecological disaster and colonial exploitation—and cackles a graveyard laugh.

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His Name Was Death is now finally available in English, in a fluid translation by Kit Schluter that preserves the tone and texture of the original.

The Baffler, Max Pearl
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