Our November book club selection, Franco Morábito’s award-winning Home Reading Service, is a fast-paced tour de force rife with twists and turns. It seems fitting, then, that its discussion should touch upon various forms of change and movement. In the following abridged interview, Editor-at-Large Josefina Massot and translator Curtis Bauer talk about the possible shifts within an author’s oeuvre, the back-and-forths between translation drafts, the significance of a character’s subtle motions, travel’s impact on a poet’s work, and movement as great poetry’s defining trait—understood, among other things, as its ability to move us.
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Josefina Massot (JM): I read somewhere that you discovered Morábito’s work through El idioma materno (2014), a collection of short pieces that he originally wrote for Argentine newspaper Clarín. You said you found it different from anything you’d encountered before; that it instantly struck you as something you wanted to engage with. What was your first reaction to El lector a domicilio? Did it seem to follow some kind of line relative to Morábito’s prior work, or was it fundamentally different?
Curtis Bauer (CB): It’s a great question—thinking about the movement an author can have across different kinds of work. I immediately loved El lector a domicilio, and I found it very “Morábito-like” in that I didn’t know what to expect but when it happened, it somehow made sense. What I love about his work, whether it’s the short prose pieces or stories or this novel, is that (and I believe you wrote about this in your review) the characters are just average, run-of-the-mill people that don’t seem to have such interesting lives—but of course they do. Morábito finds that aspect to them, or rather, he exposes it; he shows us that we’re surrounded by interesting things taking place all the time.
JM: I think that’s a good point, and for me, it’s one of the most appealing aspects of the book; the other is that it’s very much centered around poetry—there’s Fraire’s poem (which you did a stunning job of translating), a very whimsical piece by Gianni Rodari, and in between the two, all this varied prose. Given that you’re a poet yourself, and that you’ve translated both genres before, what was it like dealing with the two within the scope of a single work? Did you find that you shifted from one headspace to the other? Or was the translation process overarchingly similar?
CB: I wish! The Fraire poem seemed to change throughout the book, because it appears in different sections. I gave myself this framework or “rule” where I couldn’t go back and look at what I had translated previously, so I just tried to translate from memory as I was moving through the drafts. With each draft, it would change, and when I’d go back and look at the beginning of the book, I’d question my choices.
I started out translating poetry, and I still do, but it was the hardest part about translating this book. It does indeed require a different headspace for me, a different pace or breath, although I also recognize some similarities in how I translate the prose: I’m listening to the rhythm of the sentence, and I think about repetitions of sounds and other issues that a poet naturally takes into account. At any rate, yes, the Fraire poem was the most difficult part overall; I was making little tweaks to it up until the last edit, and I’m really thankful to my editor at Other Press for allowing me to do that.
As for the Rodari, it’s actually different in the Spanish original. I think I may have translated it directly from the Italian, because Morábito truncates it in the Spanish. In the novel, Eduardo talks about certain parts of the poem, certain rhymes, with the Vigil children; he has them moving their feet to the rhythm, and I didn’t think it was enough to have these seemingly deaf kids reacting to just a few fragments. Initially I was focusing only on preserving the poem’s meter, but my partner is a linguist and insisted that I do the end rhyme as well. So even though it’s more playful than the Fraire poem, it was equally as difficult to translate.
JM: One of the other things you did a brilliant job of translating, as I highlight in my review, is the novel’s humor. Morábito has an amazing sense of humor, and it’s so wide-ranging: it can be very subtle and ironic at times, but then also kind of slapstick. At one point in the novel, the narrator claims that when you’re reading humor, you need to immerse yourself in the story to really capture the situational tone—and, like rhyme and meter, comedic tone happens to be very different in English and Spanish. Did that present its own challenges?
CB: Just being aware of the fact that the novel is funny in Spanish is a huge amount of pressure. You can try and translate a joke because it’s really brief, but capturing humor over an entire novel is definitely a challenge. Take, for instance, Eduardo’s encounters with Jaime, the assistant at the family furniture store. Jaime is such a sour character, and Eduardo secretly wants to jump on him and beat him up at every turn. It’s not just about the humor there, but also about the silences—what the characters don’t say. How do you have a conversation where something is conveyed through a glance? When Eduardo meets Güero at the restaurant, he keeps getting up and sitting back down, and there are these small interactions like moving his beer, emptying the bottle that’s already been emptied, etc. Those small gestures helped me gauge how a certain tone or emotion could be conveyed, and they also helped with the humor. His interactions with the waitstaff at the restaurant are another case in point—he takes on a kind of ironic, sarcastic tone with the new waitress who doesn’t toast his buns the way he likes it, and he complains about it to Father Clark . . . There’s all this back-and-forth, which on the surface seems easy to translate, but it took a lot of revision to make it go smoothly. And again, for me it had to do with the silences: the listening, the waiting, the pacing—how it sounds in English and how that compares to the Spanish. One way to capture that is by reading the text out loud, of course. I read a lot of it out loud to see if it was actually humorous, or if the irony was coming across.
JM: You mention that you paid a lot of attention to a number of small visual gestures (the grabbing of the beer, the getting up, etc.). I find that fascinating, because one often hears translators talk about the importance of sound, of reading out loud as you say, but not so much about the importance of image—of visualizing certain scenes in one’s head as part of the translation process.
CB: I’m hugely visual. I have to do it that way. I listen to the text, too, of course; as a poet, I need to hear how words sound to my ear, but also how they feel in my mouth. I speak with the Castilian Spanish accent, and Fabio has been great in teaching me to think or hear and see the language from a different perspective. He does a fantastic job of creating a scene, and that helped me a lot in visualizing it so that I could bring it out in the translation. I was constantly thinking about how these characters should sound, what kind of attitude they might have, how it would come across, what Eduardo looked like when he’d make some snide remark or other; I could picture him flinching, for instance, which isn’t in the book. That’s part of what I do in order to understand how a scene is going to work. I have to see it.
JM: I like this idea of language being heard but also felt in the mouth—of being embodied, in a way. I think it’s especially important since we’re talking about a very sensual, sensory book . . . Like Morábito, you’ve moved around quite a bit: you grew up in a farm in Iowa, later went to Texas, now you spend part of your time in the Basque Country, and you’ve also lived in Argentina, Mexico, etc. Each of these places has its own specific flavor. I’m interested to know how moving between languages, but also between all these cultures and sensibilities, has affected your work as a poet and translator.
CB: I just read one of Lydia Davis’s essays from her new collection, featured on LitHub. She was talking about translating Madame Bovary and one word that had caught her attention, but then, as she wonderfully does, she went off and started talking about the advantages of translation at large. I’m in total agreement with her that we should translate not only because it enriches our language and experience of language, but also because it allows us to adopt the language of the writers we translate. I think of all the different authors I’ve engaged with; their language is now a part of me, as is their point of view on the world. It is something that I own—a part of my repertoire. And that’s such a valuable, beautiful thing. Our worldview can change by reading books, of course, and even more by translating them or living in different places, so what I write about, how I approach a subject, is in a constant state of transformation.
JM: It’s wonderful to hear you talk so passionately about the authors you’ve worked on—to say that they stay with you long after you’re done translating them. That’s the dream, I suppose!
CB: The dream, yes, but also the worry, because Fabio does not at all sound like Jeanette Clariond, even though they’re both living in Mexico, and Maria Sánchez does not write like Luis Muñoz or Juan Antonio González Iglesias; they’ve got these very different voices, and my worry is that they’ll end up sounding alike in translation. I hope I’m not using the same language or making the same decisions with different writers.
JM: I wanted to go back to the book a little bit. In a way, it can be viewed as a poetics of poetry, because there are so many statements about what poetry is or should be. We’re told, for instance, that according to Eduardo’s father a good poem should have the “three ps: purpose, prowess and prudence.” In a word or two, what constitutes a good poem for Curtis Bauer?
CB: That’s a great question. I’ll go with movement. There are, of course, different ways to understand that. On the one hand, something needs to happen in a poem, and that requires motion, be it narrative or lyrical. Then there’s also the poem’s internal movement, which can be rhythmic or linguistic: how do we move through language? It’s something that I think about a lot with my own work but also as an editor, when I’m reading translations. In addition, there’s the question of whether the piece moves me. It may sound like a cliché, but I think there’s something of import there. We must have some kind of reaction to a poem; otherwise, it’s just scribbles on a page.
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry collections, most recently American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019), forthcoming in Spanish translation as Selfi Americano by Vaso Roto Ediciones (November 2021). He is also a translator of poetry and prose from Spanish. Curtis has given readings, lectures and taught workshops in Spanish and English across the US and in Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela and Spain. Most recently, he has taught writing workshops in Spanish—for Lines & Spaces, a literary partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa—and in English for 24 Pearl Street, through the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and the Translations Editor for The Common. He divides his time between Spain and Texas.
Josefina Massot is a freelance writer, editor, and translator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied philosophy at Stanford University and worked for Cabinet Magazine and Lapham’s Quarterly in New York City, where she later served as a foreign correspondent for Argentine newspapers La Nueva and Perfil. She is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the US, having previously contributed to the journal as an assistant managing editor and editor of the blog.
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