As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).
In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.
Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.
‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges
When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.
I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted.
Charco Press is the only publisher in the English-speaking world exclusively dedicated to Latin American literature, and although some may find that too ‘niche’ or specialised, I believe it would take several lifetimes to translate and publish the vast array of wonderful literature that is being produced in the region, or that has been produced in the past and never translated. Indeed, most of the authors that we publish have not appeared in English before—even though they may have been around for decades, been awarded national and international awards, or been published in many other languages. I’ve spent many years asking myself why, getting frustrated at the lack of Latin American names in UK bookshops and libraries. Eventually, I decided to actively transform that why into a no more.
I live in a constant state of translation, and not just in linguistic terms. I am (and always will be, I feel) a foreigner in Scotland, but the truth is that I am a foreigner in Argentina too. I don’t speak like the people around me, neither here nor there. I have somewhat lost my fluency in the ever-changing porteño vernacular, and I haven’t (yet!) totally gained it in Scottish. However—and I am sure a lot of readers will identify with this—everything I do is an act of translation. I translate my mother’s cooking when I’m in my Edinburgh kitchen, I translate my youth when I sing and reminisce, I translate when I think, plan, dream. I translate the sadness of uprootedness when I tell my daughter about dulce de leche and calesitas and jacaranda trees, letting an ineffable sense of home seep through.
All this is reflected in Charco’s mission. How can we translate an entire idiosyncrasy or collective memory—the very significance of being Latin American? It is simply impossible, of course. Nevertheless, we can try to approximate worlds, and translating literature is certainly one way to do this. That is why, when translating fiction, we are translating so much more than the words that make up a self-contained universe. We are translating human experience, and therefore, inherently, a geopolitical, social, and historical framework (in addition, of course, to the purely subjective, emotional experiences of individual beings in the world). I firmly believe that what matters when translating a literary text is not word-for-word, comma-for-comma transcription, but rather the tone as it unfolds, the atmosphere. The echo that reverberates even in the silence of a voice, the unique voice that the author has been able to apprehend.
I was recently talking with translator Annie McDermott about the work of Selva Almada, and we agreed that one need only read a couple of sentences—where there is, for instance, no mention of sounds or temperatures or the characters’ surroundings—to feel the heat, the humidity, the suffocating environment in which these characters tend to be placed. Without any mention of living creatures, one can hear the chirping of insects, the buzzing of flies. The text infiltrates our body. If that special quality is not translated, if the translator cannot feel that, then the translation will not be a good one. And what is that quality, exactly? The essence of a text? Its silence? Its poetic soul? I don’t really know how to name it. I do know, however, that as readers we experience it, and as translators we are compelled to write it, because the text is now in us, it inhabits us.
The Argentinian poet Alicia Genovese describes tone as a kind of chemistry, a density that permeates through words—a certain air, ‘a vapour, a fluid.’ ‘Tone,’ she writes, ‘transforms words, it reverts, widens, weakens their meaning. Tone is the voice that words acquire, their modulation, their relative displacement away from a meaning that is raw . . . Tone is the place of crossing, the intersection between the sequence of words and emotion’ (from Leer poesía: lo leve, lo grave, lo opaco, FCE: 2011). When I think about translating, and indeed when I translate, I am drawn to capture this place of crossing, this intangible, unnameable intersection between words and emotions that Genovese mentions. More than a thought, again, it is an intimate perception, which I then try to shape into this new form, the translated text.
Walter Benjamin famously dwells on the task of the translator, and reminds us that if a translation sets out to merely communicate, to be a kind of intermediary between the original text and its target audience, it won’t be ‘good’; he claims that it shouldn’t be a new work of literature, either. I would add that its voice and tone mustn’t replace the original ones and load them with the translator’s subjectivity (which is very different from the subjective choices translators make). Translating is an art form, and as such, it should be free; however, within that freedom, what needs to prevail is an utter sense of respect and fairness towards the original, without which the translation could not exist. A perfect form of resistance, and perhaps also of love.
Charco Press embodies something of what I’ve tried to describe here, a need to translate a certain essence, an intersection, in a way that is fair and does not build generalised misconceptions or false canons that only serve the industry. We try to give English-speaking readers at least a partial representation of the awe-inspiring array of Latin American literary voices, always in their best possible renditions. Maybe that is why we have gained a reputation as being overly meticulous with our translations; it came to us as a criticism, but I think it is the best possible compliment.
Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature, who has published extensively on Julio Cortázar as well as on literature, cinema, politics, and translation theory. In 2016, after obtaining her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and working in the academic sector, Carolina co-founded Charco Press where she acts as publishing director. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International 2018, and of its sequel Feebleminded as well as of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate. In its short life, Charco Press has received several awards and nominations, including Creative Edinburgh Start-Up of the Year (2018) and the British Book Award—Scottish Regional Prize (2019). Carolina herself was named Emerging Publisher of the Year (2018) by the Saltire Society.
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