In the second part of a three-part series, Editor-at-Large Alan Mendoza Sosa continues his conversation with poet and translator Robin Myers. In this installment, they continue their discussion on multiplicity in translation, touching on canons in Spanish literature, conceptual writing, and collaboration. Read part one of the interview here.
Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): Have you felt that commercial interests interfere with what gets published and translated?
Robin Myers (RM): Always, although I find it hard to express exactly how, beyond my own intuitions and observations, you know? Definitely. I sense that certain authors become “hot” authors, and so other writers will get grouped together or hyped in response to them or in comparison to them. And of course authors in translation are very susceptible to being treated as automatically “representing” the country or even the region they come from, which is hugely problematic. Among many publishers there is a real interest in contemporary Latin American fiction writ large, which is obviously never a balanced playing field. With literature translated from Spanish to English, there are lots and lots of books being translated from Argentina, Chile, quite a few books from Mexico, and far fewer from other places. You know, very unequal.
AM: Usually very little, next to nothing from Central America, I would imagine.
RM: Totally, next to nothing. Yeah, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, I’d say.
AM: Sometimes Peru, maybe? Or not even.
RM: Yeah, Peru a little more recently. I’m thinking of Katya Aduai, Gabriela Wiener. But anyway, my hope is that as interest in translation as a field continues to grow, and with increasing advocacy for translators as artists, the range and multiplicity of authors who get translated will also keep growing. I think all of that is on the rise, which is thrilling.
AM: Why do you think it’s on the rise?
RM: I think there’s growing interest in reckoning with the idea of the canon in general, you know, as this set of books deemed worthy by generations of white male gringos who said, “This is what’s worth reading.” And across the board—in academia, in the publishing world, in the poetry world, in the fiction world—there’s this sense that such a vision is based on hegemonic prejudices that need to be taken apart. There’s a long way to go. I mean, just thinking about the US, the US is a place where there’s little literature in translation being read at all. And at the same time, there are a ton of multicultural writers who are publishing there. I feel like among many readers, and certainly among translators and a growing number of publishers, there’s an interest in expanding beyond American exceptionalism in literature, which still dominates. And there’s enough curiosity and acknowledgment of how narrow the scope has been for a long time. That goes hand in hand with growing skepticism toward the figure of the solitary author-genius. All writers and all writing exists in community, and the literary world is an ecosystem.
But yeah, I also think it’s important to stress how uneven the publishing landscape is for translation, for translations from different languages and cultures. If we look at the distribution of works in translation that get published, and also at the recipients of translation grants, historically, the largest numbers are from French, Spanish, and I think German, Italian . . . languages where there’re just proportionally way more books being translated than in many other languages, which means receiving more financial and institutional support.
AM: True, translations are unevenly distributed across languages. But even within languages, right? If we talk about French, for example, we can ask “whose French?”, is it just the French spoken in Europe or the French spoken in other countries? Also with Spanish, is it Iberian Spanish or Cuban Spanish?
RM: Yes, tracing those lineages of colonialism through language and literature. For sure.
AM: And it’s important and interesting to see how contemporary literary practices replicate those lineages.
RM: Yes, absolutely.
AM: But that’s a whole conversation to be had. I want to go back to you specifically, so we can leave this one for another day. Now, I would like to know: what has been one of the biggest translation challenges that you’ve stumbled upon?
RM: One I’d mention is a book of poetry that came out in Mexico not long ago as a bilingual edition but hasn’t been distributed much yet, by a young poet named Salo Mochon. It’s called Escardillo, or Caustics in English. It’s a book of extremely playful poems. Some are visual poems. There’s one structured like a series of interlocking dictionary entries. There are really heavily intertextual poems that draw from other languages, and they have what Mochon calls a “counter poem,” so each poem has a corresponding quote that is sometimes in another language and sometimes deliberated “adulterated” in translation on the facing side of the page. So it’s already in itself a really multilingual work. The poems present immediate challenges for translators. In the dictionary poems, for instance, each word in the dictionary is not going to correspond to the exact same word in the English dictionary. At first it was kind of terrifying to translate! But what was so fun and gratifying is that Salo encouraged me to go crazy, to treat the translation as a chance to think about what he was doing in each poem, and try to find another way to do something similar, but to really dispense in lots of cases with the idea of a textual correspondence. The book includes both the Spanish and the English versions in the same volume. But the counter-poems and many of the footnotes are completely different in each. It’s just a completely different bibliography. It’s probably my most experimental translation.
AM: When you talk about fragments and citations, I cannot help thinking about conceptual writing, a movement that started in the U.S. and championed writing poetry that included fragments from all kinds of texts instead of creating a poem from zero. Did you have conceptual writing in mind when you were translating Salo Mochon’s poems?
RM: I didn’t, actually. I mean, not conceptual poetry as a specific literary movement. And another interesting thing about Salo is that he’s a psychoanalyst by profession, so a lot of the texts he was reading as he worked on the book don’t come from “literature” per se. They’re works from philosophy or from psychoanalysis. It was interesting to work on a book of poetry whose frame of reference isn’t necessarily poetry at all.
AM: Yes. And I would like to explore this question about conceptual writing a bit further, especially because I’m interested in how connections between different poetic traditions can manifest, even though a writer might not know they are associating movements or traditions. For example, Sara Uribe’s book Antígona González borrows textual fragments from news, political theory, and police reports, texts not directly—or at all—related to poetry. And Sara always says that she wrote her book that way because she wanted to incorporate voices that she could not herself represent. The book, translated by J.D. Pluecker, has been incredibly successful in the U.S., no doubt because of its outstanding quality and relevance to today’s public discourse about violence. But I also think that part of the book’s fame in the U.S. relates to the fact that Sara’s composition technique can be regarded as conceptual writing, so it’s conversant with a local poetic movement. So, do you think about traditions or movements of poetry, and how do they impact your work if so?
RM: I don’t think much about movements because I don’t think I’ve translated a lot of poets that would do so for their own work. I do think about what register or container a poet is building and what that reminds me of, which definitely relates to tradition and with whether you are trying to participate in a tradition or push away from it. For instance, Isabel Zapata talks about how a lot of her most intimate and important readings were in English, whether written originally in English or translated into English. Mary Oliver comes to mind, and so does the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. So I do think about that, about how, in translating Isabel’s poetry, there’s already a conversation she’s having stylistically with the poets who’ve informed her, who are actually closer to the tradition that I come from myself. Whether or not I’m conscious of it, there’s a kind of unconscious kinship. Someone else I think about a lot in this way is the Venezuelan poet Adalbert Salas Hernández, who is also a translator from English, French, and Portuguese. The poems of his that I’ve translated are full of references to canonical works in all of these languages, some of which I’ve read and some of which I haven’t. Some are right at the forefront of my thinking, and some I may not even realize are there. So, in a way, the tradition becomes this tidal flow that is always acting on us, and there are times when we see everything that’s there and we make use of it, and other times that we’re just sort of floating along.
AM: And it’s also a matter of either the writer or the translator choosing to identify with certain references.
RM: Or even to exacerbate them.
AM: Right and speaking about influences, what critical theories or translation theories inform your thinking?
RM: To be honest, it’s only very recently that I’ve started reading translation theory or much theory at all. I’ve found it hard to find my way in critical work and kind of avoided it until now. But I’ve started working on a series of essays about translating poetry specifically, and it’s prompted me to read more than I had before. One person who’s been important to my thinking right now is Johannes Göransson, who is a poet and translator from Swedish. He has an incredible book called Transgressive Circulation, which is all about considering poetry a site of anxiety in the U.S. poetic landscape and the idea of the translation of poetry as a process that disrupts all of these precious ideas of ownership, authorship, and exclusivity. He is a major influence on me at the moment, and so is Joyelle McSweeney, who often collaborates with him. I also really love Kate Briggs and her book This Little Art.
AM: I really appreciate the idea of breaking with individual ownership. However, at the same time I’ve tried to question it from a queer perspective. For example, me as a queer person, do I really want not to be acknowledged as an author or translator when historically queer authors and translators have been silenced or pushed aside? I think it’s a complex struggle.
RM: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as someone who also identifies as queer. For me the idea of breaking with individual authorship is not so much about failing to acknowledge the translator but about opening up many other possibilities of engagement beyond the ways we’re taught to think about, you know, property and propriety and what is endorsed as the way to be, the way to create. It is important to change the way we see the canon as, like, this force of singular endorsement and maybe even consider translation as a role and as a dynamic that keeps changing all the time, something collaborative and even polyamorous.
AM: Exactly, I like that metaphor, because, really to consider the existence of a book as only related to a single author is not true. A book always results from the collaboration of many people. There are authors and translators, of course, but also editors, printers, people who made the paper, designers.
RM: Yes, and translation also makes that multiplicity visible in a way that contrasts with the idea that translation should be invisible.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator of both poetry and prose. Her latest translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), and The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing). She is currently working on a book of essays about translating poetry.
Alan Mendoza Sosa holds a BA degree in Comparative Literature in English and Spanish from Brown University, and an MPhil in Latin American Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature from The University of Cambridge. He is an incoming student at Yale University’s PhD in Spanish and Portuguese. He is interested in eighteenth century Hispanic Culture, the Latin American Avant-Gardes, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies, and Contemporary Hispanic Literature.
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