We present here three excerpts from an essay by Spanish writer David Jiménez Torres, author of two monographs and two novels, as well as an accomplished essayist and Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His long essay El mal dormir: Un ensayo sobre el sueño, la vigilia y el cansancio (2022)—translated for the Translators' Corner as “Bad Sleep: An Essay on Sleeping, Wakefulness and Exhaustion”—won the Non-Fiction Prize from Libros del Asteroide. The text meditates on the experience of persistent trouble sleeping: bad sleep allows people to live relatively normal lives, but irrevocably changes one’s relationship with the day, the night, with work, and with the people around us, especially those we share our bed with. Seamlessly navigating the personal and universal, Jiménez Torres creates his own theory on the poor sleeper and what might be gained from trouble sleeping. [Adapted from the introduction written by the translator Joseph Rager].
