We are excited to announce the release of Professor Juan Vitulli's new book, My German Swimming Pools / Mis piletas alemanas.
An Argentinian professor arrives in Berlin in the middle of a pandemic winter without knowing a word of German. Lost in the language, he finds his only safe territory in the water: he sets out to cross the city by swimming in its public swimming pools, tracing an imaginary canal that connects these artificial bodies scattered throughout the urban geography. Mis piletas alemanas (My German Swimming Pools) is a book about the foreigner and their relationship with what they do not understand. Each swimming pool — from the functionalism of Lankwitz to the art nouveau splendor of Charlottenburg, from the melancholy Mariendorf to the Olympic one where Jeanette Campbell won her silver medal in 1936— becomes an exercise of impossible translation: swimming is the only way to fully inhabit a place where the language expels him. But it is also a book about repetition as a method, about how the regular movement of the body in the water can order the days and, perhaps, the writing itself. With humor, precision, and a perspective that oscillates between urban chronicle and personal drift, Juan Vitulli constructs a liquid map of Berlin where the ghosts of the past coexist with old people who swim slowly, grumpy lifeguards, threatening swans, and the constant promise of a summer that never quite arrives. A reflection on rootlessness, translation, and that universal
language only spoken underwater.