Bloemsierkunst Cyro
Slow Reading Club

At flower shop Bloemsierkunst Cyro, visitors were able to pick up a free publication with translations in thirteen different languages of Si muero en la carretera (1970) by Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera. This is the result of a collective translation session with Charlois residents earlier this year, led by the Slow Reading Club, a reading group founded by Henry Andersen and Bryana Fritz.

In February 2025, Slow Reading Club met with residents and together they translated the poem on the spot into Amazigh, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese and Russian. There, translating a poem became an alibi for a conversation about language. Si muero en la carretera is a deceptively simple poem about the impossibility of expressing death in language. When Piñera wrote it, he had been blacklisted from publishing in his home country of Cuba, due to his out homosexuality and increasingly critical stance toward the Castro regime. Since 2021, Slow Reading Club has been authoring bootleg translations of Piñera’s work, responding to various local contexts.

The occasion of Het Zuid Manifest is the most ambitious of these translations, emphasising the diversity of languages present in Charlois. Like all translations, this became a chance to think about the relationship between the context in which the poem was written and the socio-political context in which it was translated.

You can download the full pdf publication here.