Untranslating Lemebel

Pedro Lemebel (2011) | Sebastián Tapia Brandes / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The cover of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Penguin Classics, 2024) features a collage centered around an edited photograph of a man dressed as a saint, crowned with a halo of syringes, each one filled with a watery red substance that looks like blood. This punk Virgin Mary impersonator is Chilean artist Pedro Lemebel, in costume at the 1994 Pride Parade in New York; the book is a new collection of his selected essays, short stories, and reflections, translated by Gwendolyn Harper.

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles selects and re-edits Lemebel’s writings from 1996 to 2012. These forty-plus texts, written in the tradition of the Latin American chronicle, are organized into broad categories: homosexuality, life under dictatorship, the AIDS epidemic, and the dawn of democracy in 1990s Chile. This structure offers English readers a first map of Lemebel’s universe. 

To translate Lemebel faithfully into English is no easy task. Unlike Pablo Neruda or Roberto Bolaño—Chilean writers who, in different ways, adapted their styles to circulate within European literary expectations—Lemebel never catered to an international gaze. The writer and artist, who died in 2018, spent his life rejecting assimilation into Anglophone culture and social categories he felt imposed on his people by Global North hegemony. 

“I’ll never write in English,” Lemebel declared: “With any luck I say, Go home.” Harper navigates the challenge deftly; A Last Supper of Queer Apostles was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Translation Prize in 2025. 

The artist, for example, refused to use the term “gay,” most often preferring instead “loca”—the Spanish word for “crazy lady,” common in the argot of queers and cross-dressers in Chile’s barrios in the 1970s. This term is preserved in the original Spanish throughout the book. As Harper explains in her introductory note, “The word loca, repeated again and again, accrues almost the quality of an incantation in Lemebel’s work.” 

Throughout A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, Lemebel pushes against Western literary conventions and what he sees as the afterlives of colonial expansion. The syringe halo featured on the book cover, for example, was worn in a performance of defiance. With it, he carried a sign with the (perhaps intentionally) broken English statement, “CHILE RETURN AIDS,” by which he meant: I bring these infected syringes back to you, to return the AIDS that cruising American tourists brought to our shores. This key element of Lemebel’s Pride performance, however, did not make it onto the cover of the new Penguin Classics edition.

In the story “The Abyss of Sound,” which features Lemebel’s speculative theory about pre-Incan analphabetic systems of knowledge, Lemebel decries what he saw as the pretensions of modern libraries, brought to the Americas through colonization. He laments the erasure of native oral histories, noting that “cultural memory cannot be properly stored in libraries where the only thing that echoes is the word SILENCE printed on a plaque.” 

A concern with sound runs through the collection, as colonization, dictatorship, and the AIDS epidemic all introduce their own sinister silences in the form of things rendered unspeakable, unnamable, or straight-up erased. In the short story “Black Orchids,” Lemebel tells the real-life story of a celebrated Chilean writer who would host her glittering literary parties while, in the basement, her military husband tortured dissidents. “Possibly they [the guests] couldn’t tell whether a scream wasn’t just part of the dissonant disco music,” Lemebel writes. 

For the artist, the Western disco track must be considered alongside other pernicious imports, like the arrival of AIDS and Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup against socialist Salvador Allende, in 1973.

Lemebel’s writing style may be deemed excessive by some Western critics. In his review of the translated collection for 4Columns, critic Jeremy Lybarger characterizes Lemebel’s style as “florid to the point of camp.” Harper’s translation recognizes, though, that Lemebel’s linguistic extravagance is an intentional part of his critique of coloniality. For example, in “Night of Furs,” a short story that depicts the last New Year’s Eve for the locas before Pinochet and the AIDS epidemic, Lemebel explicitly describes their shared deliriums as “baroquely enriched discussions.” In fact, there is something in his writing that moves much closer to the baroque, specifically the Latin American colonial baroque, than to camp. 

The colonial baroque was a vernacular fusion of European and Indigenous art. Made of wood and paint rather than marble and gold, the colonial baroque absorbed the European baroque movement’s religious motifs, excesses, and theatricality and remade them through Indigenous symbols and traditions. This syncretism is what allowed for the Indigenous cultures to resist erasure.

Lemebel’s use of baroque in his texts creates a space in which marginalized people are richly depicted and centered, resisting erasure with romance and enchantment. 

In “Loba Lamar’s Last Kiss,” Lemebel tells the story of Loba Lamar, a friend he tended to in her final days dying from AIDS. The artist’s baroque style here works not only as an excess of style but as an excess of affect, conjuring the power to transmute death into something lifegiving. Lamar, a loca, imagines herself impregnated with AIDS, and the author invites us to share in the transformative vision. 

“The deranged Loba transformed AIDS into a promise of life,” Lemebel tells us, “imagining that what she carried was a child incubated in her anus by her lost love’s fatal semen.”

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles remodels the baroque wit for the twenty-first century, reminding us how to tend the bridges between Global North and South without the former subsuming the latter.