Renowned Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s tender and meditative novel, Garden by the Sea, was our February Book Club selection. An essential name in postwar Catalan literature (and past Asymptote contributor), Rodoreda’s immersive yet subtle language is beloved for its captivating lyricism and simple, poignant depictions of everyday life. In these chaotic days, when many of us are looking to literature for comfort, the patient world of Garden by the Sea offers a quiet reprieve. In the following interview, assistant editor Alyea Canada speaks to the translators, Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño, a mother-daughter duo with a unique process and an unceasing admiration for Rodoreda’s singular style.
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Alyea Canada (AC): This is the second book by Mercè Rodoreda that you two have translated together. What drew you both to Rodoreda’s work in general and Garden by the Sea specifically?
Martha Tennent (MT): This is indeed the second Rodoreda novel we have translated together, since in 2015, Open Letter published our translation of her novel War, So Much War. I have always been an admirer of Rodoreda’s work, and for many years my apartment in Barcelona was just a couple of blocks from where she was born and grew up, in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood that figures in many of her short stories and in Garden by the Sea.
I started publishing translations of a few of her short stories, and that led, in 2009, to my translating her Death in Spring for Open Letter. At that time, I would say almost no one in the United States had heard of Mercè Rodoreda. Death in Spring is such a brutal, haunting book, but at the same time it is lyrical and painfully beautiful. Neither I nor Open Letter expected the book and the author to gain the following they have. It’s been amazing. Then I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate her stories, also with Open Letter. And then came the two commissions to translate jointly her War, So Much War, and now Garden by the Sea. No one has done more to promote the work of this exceptional writer than Open Letter.
Maruxa Relaño (MR): The chance to translate Rodoreda was a treat to say the least. Garden by the Sea is my favorite of her novels. I like the unhurried melancholy that imbues the writing; you can open the book wherever you choose and find yourself in a Mediterranean villa in the middle of one “long hot summer,” with its occupants wandering about aimlessly, sunning themselves and squabbling on the veranda, a life of perpetual waiting, where as you mention, nothing seems to happen and much goes unsaid. We were especially drawn to Garden by the Sea for the vision of behind-the-scenes domesticity provided by the quiet, observant gardener, and the slowly developing unease and intrigue as the protagonists move gently toward catastrophe. In my opinion, it’s the perfect novel for a digital detox . . . or a quarantine.
AC: This is a novel where very little action occurs on the page, and more of the story lies in what isn’t said or the overall atmosphere created by the narrator. Did this add any complications to your process? Were you ever concerned that these other layers of narrative wouldn’t come through in translation?
MR: If we were never worried about the lack of action on the page, it was because we, firstly as readers of the novel, were not bored or made impatient by its slow pace, we welcomed it. I think this slow pacing is also reflective of another literary tradition, in this case I mean the European novel in general, where writers seem less self-conscious about eschewing dictates such as making every word count, or having every sentence move the story forward. That’s why literature in translation is so relevant, in my opinion, as well as engaging with literary works that are not contemporary. It opens our eyes to what is possible, not only in literature but in outlook, in life.
MT: That said, if we were ever dealing with a passage that might appear to an Anglophone reader as unduly flat—English-language literature favors strong verbs, for example, much more than Catalan—we might tweak our choice of words in the translation, or try to give flight to our own vision of Rodoreda’s characters and text. This is what any translator does; finally, we reinterpret the novel, making it more relevant to the receiving culture when necessary. We need to remember that we are translating literature for reception in a different cultural and sometimes historical context, where literary values are not necessarily the same. As translators we will be held accountable to both the author and the English-speaking reader.
AC: Rodoreda is considered one of the most important modern Catalan novelists, yet she isn’t quite as well-known among English-language readers. Catalan literature has a vibrant history but has also experienced periods of political oppression and erasure, with almost an entire generation of Catalan writers in exile during the Franco regime. Even today, it seems that only a handful of Catalan writers have multiple books in English translation. What roadblocks do you see to Catalan authors being translated into English? How much do you think Catalonia’s politics and history have affected the dissemination of its literature?
MT: It’s always difficult, I think, to translate a work from a minority culture such as Catalan. The main hurdle is, of course, to be discovered by English-language editors, and there is the added problem that Anglophone readers tend to avoid literature in translation. Translating from Catalan means to compete in the vast market of world literature for what seems like only a handful of works in translations published each year—the famous three percent. Anglophone editors are much more familiar with the literary corpus of powerful cultures such as French or Spanish, or even Russian, and thus more likely to select from these languages when searching for a new book to publish.
Catalan language and literature, as you say, underwent dark periods of systematic oppression. Until 1962 practically no works were published in Catalan. Regaining a sense of confidence and legitimacy has not been easy. But things are looking up. There are a number of good translators working from Catalan today, and The Institut Ramon Llull, the cultural promotion agency of the Catalan government, is very active in helping the work of previously undiscovered Catalan authors reach a new public in translation.
AC: I’m always curious about the translation process, especially between co-translators. Can you describe your own process for us? How does being mother and daughter affect your working relationship?
MT: Most co-translators organize their work very differently from us. The great majority work along the lines of the Pevear-Volokhonsky routine: the one with the greater knowledge of the foreign language does the first rough draft, and the co-translator shapes it into a more polished final version.
MR: We have similar linguistic ability, and—although we’ve been told that our way of approaching a co-translation runs counter to the norm—we divide the text, each translating one half. After that, we carefully edit each other’s work, reading it against the original text, ensuring that we agree on our interpretation. We go through the text in this way, accepting or rejecting each other’s edits for several rounds of revision, discussing matters of style so that we are left with a cohesive voice, until we compile the text into one document for the final round of editing.
Being a mother and daughter team is a double-edged sword, it both complicates some things (the ability to remain firmly within the bounds of civility) and makes others aspects of co-working easier (you can actually say what you think, without mincing words!).
MT: This setup also gives us a good excuse to see each other, at least for the final round of edits, when we sit across the table from each other and go through the text together, often reading aloud. After we hit send, we open a good bottle of wine!
AC: Martha, you have worked primarily as a translator; Maruxa, you also work as a journalist, and both of you have lived between Barcelona and New York for a number of years. How has this collection of experiences and perspectives enriched your work?
MT: Actually, for many years I was a professor and dean of the School of Translation at the University of Vic, Barcelona, where I trained translators and interpreters, but ironically I had no time to translate myself. Only later did I really become a translator.
MR: I haven’t worked as a journalist in quite some time, but certainly the experience influenced my later work as a translator, although indirectly. It made me very aware of the danger of losing the reader to boredom, and the dispiritingly low word counts of tabloid stories gave me an eye for economy of language.
As far as living between cultures, I’d say it has enriched us mainly as people, making us more open to experience, more cosmopolitan in outlook, which can only be a good thing in my opinion. As Chekhov once said: “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”
Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño are a mother-daughter translation team. They have translated a number of works from Spanish and Catalan, including War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda and The Sea by Blai Bonet. They are both recipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for their translation work. Martha was previously dean of the School of Translation at the University of Vic, Barcelona. Maruxa was a translation editor for the Wall Street Journal.
Alyea Canada is an assistant editor at Asymptote and editor at Melville House. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
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