Posts featuring Laura Esquivel

Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of “Pierced by the Sun” by Laura Esquivel

"The white sheets she was ironing became a small movie screen on which images from that afternoon began to play out in front of her eyes."

From the award-winning author of Like Water for Chocolate comes a new tale of murder and redemption. For today’s Translation Tuesday showcase, we present the opening chapter of Laura Esquivel’s new novel, Pierced by the Sun, slated for release in bookstores on July 1.

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She could spend long hours dedicated to this work and show no signs of fatigue. Ironing brought her peace. It was her favorite form of therapy and she turned to it daily, even after a long day of work. Lupita’s passion for ironing had been handed down to her by her mother, Doña Trini, who had washed and ironed other people’s clothes for a living her whole life. Lupita would invariably repeat the ritual learned from her sacrosanct mother, which began with the spraying of the garments. Modern-day steam irons do not require an article of clothing to be moist, but for Lupita there was no other way to iron. She considered it sacrilegious to skip this step.

That night when she got home, she immediately headed to the ironing board and began to spray the gar­ments. Her hands trembled like a hungover alcoholic’s, which made the spraying that much easier. It was impera­tive that she concentrate on something other than the murder of Licenciado Arturo Larreaga—the delegado of her district, Iztapalapa—which she had witnessed just a few hours earlier.

As soon as the clothes were properly sprayed she went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, giving the water time to warm up. She filled a bucket with a copious amount of detergent and placed it in the shower. Before she stepped in she opened a plastic bag and immediately recoiled from the stench of the urine-soaked pants that were inside. She submerged the pants in the bucket and started to wash herself. She scrubbed away the cloying smell of urine that had emanated from her body, but the shame that was embedded deep in her soul remained. READ MORE…