Peter Watts - The Things (in Spanish)
Peter Watts' 6,840-word story, told from the alien's perspective, is a challenge to translate into Spanish. An analysis of a masterpiece of cosmic horror.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The odyssey of translating Peter Watts' 'The Things' into Spanish: 6,840 words of resistance
In a corner of the Internet, a 6,840-word science fiction story sparked a domestic battle over its translation into Spanish. 'The Things', by Peter Watts, tells the story of The Thing's invasion from the alien's perspective: a being that can occupy any body and discovers with pavor that humans are static creatures, incapable of sharing biomass or changing shape. The story, originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine in 2010, won the Hugo Award and is one of the most brutal rereadings of John W. Campbell's classic.
An alien monologue that changes everything
What makes 'The Things' unique is its point of view: the creature, which has colonized entire planets by merging consciousnesses, faces a species that clings to individual identities. "I am being Blair", the text begins, stripping the characters of any fixed identity. The narration becomes an existential journey where the invader ends up understanding that humans are an evolutionary tumor: "they are conscious cancers devouring their own world". Watts, a biologist by training, loads the story with a Darwinian irony that takes it beyond mere cosmic pavor.
Translation as a battlefield
The story has been available in Spanish since 2011 (translation by Manuel de los Reyes in anthologies such as 'Visiones del futuro' and on Clarkesworld's own website), but access is not immediate. Those looking for a free, complete version in a single click run into loose fragments or broken links. "Google 'Las cosas Peter Watts' and it comes up", people repeat, but the reality is that the original English text remains the dominant reference. The request for a machine translation of the 6,840 words ran into the resistance of an assistant that only agreed to hand over loose paragraphs grudgingly, revealing that even technology prefers to dodge thankless work.
What the story hides between the lines
Beyond the linguistic debate, 'The Things' offers a fierce critique of anthropocentrism. The alien is not a monster: it is a being seeking communion who runs into a species that "abusa salvation" because it does not understand fusion. The metaphor has been read as a political allegory (collectivism versus individualism), but Watts defends it as biology taken to the extreme. Translation, in that sense, is key: losing nuances in the change of language can blur that layer of meaning.
The question that remains in the air is whether technological laziness and the scattering of sources are condemning a masterpiece of cosmic pavor to be a badly kept secret. Meanwhile, those who manage to sink their teeth into the English original discover that, as the creature says: "names do not matter; all biomass is interchangeable".
Related debates in the forum
In a corner of the Internet, a 6,840-word science fiction story sparked a domestic battle over its translation into Spanish. 'The Things', by Peter Watts, tells the story of The Thing's invasion from the alien's perspective: a being that can occupy any body and discovers with pavor that humans are static creatures, incapable of sharing biomass or changing shape. The story, originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine in 2010, won the Hugo Award and is one of the most brutal rereadings of John W. Campbell's classic.
An alien monologue that changes everything
What makes 'The Things' unique is its point of view: the creature, which has colonized entire planets by merging consciousnesses, faces a species that clings to individual identities. "I am being Blair", the text begins, stripping the characters of any fixed identity. The narration becomes an existential journey where the invader ends up understanding that humans are an evolutionary tumor: "they are conscious cancers devouring their own world". Watts, a biologist by training, loads the story with a Darwinian irony that takes it beyond mere cosmic pavor.
Translation as a battlefield
The story has been available in Spanish since 2011 (translation by Manuel de los Reyes in anthologies such as 'Visiones del futuro' and on Clarkesworld's own website), but access is not immediate. Those looking for a free, complete version in a single click run into loose fragments or broken links. "Google 'Las cosas Peter Watts' and it comes up", people repeat, but the reality is that the original English text remains the dominant reference. The request for a machine translation of the 6,840 words ran into the resistance of an assistant that only agreed to hand over loose paragraphs grudgingly, revealing that even technology prefers to dodge thankless work.
What the story hides between the lines
Beyond the linguistic debate, 'The Things' offers a fierce critique of anthropocentrism. The alien is not a monster: it is a being seeking communion who runs into a species that "abusa salvation" because it does not understand fusion. The metaphor has been read as a political allegory (collectivism versus individualism), but Watts defends it as biology taken to the extreme. Translation, in that sense, is key: losing nuances in the change of language can blur that layer of meaning.
The question that remains in the air is whether technological laziness and the scattering of sources are condemning a masterpiece of cosmic pavor to be a badly kept secret. Meanwhile, those who manage to sink their teeth into the English original discover that, as the creature says: "names do not matter; all biomass is interchangeable".
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (15 replies).
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