Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.
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Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?
Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.
María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.
MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.
RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?
MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.
MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more.
RF: It’s interesting you mention about how in the Montserrat Roig, you took parts that were more closely linked to your own experience, your own knowledge. Was there anything in particular in this book that you really strongly related to? The complicated grief, the uncomplicated motherhood, her silence. . . How did you connect to those themes?
MB: I think the fact that you bring up the uncomplicated nature of motherhood in this text is really fascinating, because currently, there are quite a few books coming out from Spain and in Spanish throughout Latin America, about motherhood and how difficult it is. Even from Open Letter in the past couple of months, we’ve had Katie Whittemore’s translations of Wolfskin and Mothers Don’t. Those are both really challenging books about motherhood and not wanting to be a mother—all the things that you might not want to say. Whereas with The Left Parenthesis, it’s like: look at this bright little thing shining in the sun helping me to get through whatever this bullshit is. I think it’s a really nice addition to the line-up of different texts coming out now about motherhood. I’m a foster mom, and I don’t plan on having my own biological children, so I think this probably means a lot of different things to me. I know we were talking to Kaija, the editor of Open Letter, who had just had a baby, and the book really resonated with her in a different way, but for me, I was so happy to see that uncomplicated view of motherhood, because it’s so beautiful. It’s exactly what I want motherhood to be in a lot of ways—even if it’s not completely representative.
MCH: I’ve never been a mother, so I guess what resonated with me was the mothering of masculinity in this book—the idea of having to rethink one’s position in a relationship. There’s a tendency to mother one’s significant other, and as such, the main character places all these different limits on herself, but also on her husband.
The idea of how you reconstruct yourself in light of loss is also a really big theme. You can see it progress really slowly—in walks, in visiting churches. The writing style also emulates this sensation of purpose, of how being in this space would help her emerge from this death—that of her husband, but also the person who existed before she became a mother. That’s something I’ve been through, not as a mother, but as someone who’s had to rebuild herself after in the wake of toxic masculinity.
RF: As this book is a work of autofiction, did you have any interaction with the author?
MB: We didn’t actually speak to her much until the end, when we started asking clarifying questions. This is one of the least personal relationships I’ve had with an author, which is not a bad thing. But certainly, we hadn’t had the chance to ask her about what it meant her to write this book.
MCH: Personally, I didn’t have as much of a relationship with her because I was afraid this was going to be an author who was going to impose her style on the translation. I’ve had a few experiences recently in which commissioners of translations, afterwards, made significant changes—to the point that I was embarrassed to share the work. But I just met Muriel last week in Barcelona, and she was so nice! She also recently wrote to us to say how much she loved the translation, so I guess we could have had more of a relationship during the process.
RF: Do you think the fact that this book is really personal made you hold back slightly?
MB: Definitely. Of course, it’s autofiction so it’s not a direct comparison or projection of her life, but it is very personal; that’s what is great about it, but it does make the work more difficult. Sometimes you need that remove in order to delve into those big feelings.
RF: What was the most challenging translation issue? And what was your favourite part of this book?
MB: My favourite part is definitely when the narrator starts to take herself less seriously as a writer and mother. There is a part on page twelve when she says: “Then she gets sleepy again and, with her in my lap, while she sucks and snores softly, I sit at the table with my laptop to write this piece of shit.” For me, that just encapsulates what it means to be creative. I don’t believe that there are just people who walk around making poetry with every step. Being creative in the world is frustrating; thinking creatively and thinking critically means that you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and you’re going to write shitty things sometimes. And I think that is the first point in the book where the sense of play is made evident—because the book is ultimately playful, and that’s what I love most about it.
MCH: Although this is a short book, translating takes a long time. This book is such a meditation, and I think that’s what we loved about it when we first read it, but during the translation process, it can get a bit much.
Probably my favourite thing about it is all the different people it contains. It’s multigenerational. I also love its magical realism—how the reader can just be immersed in the premise of another world.
MB: What we discussed the most was how to render her descriptions of a woman’s body. We had to decide when to use “tit”, when to use “boob”, and when the starfish is on her vagina, it was kind of “vacuum sealed”—though obviously we didn’t use that word. There were all sorts of words relating to the body that we wanted to keep sensual, but they all have so many resonances in English. It plays to the problem that a mother’s body is not often thought of as sensual, but Muriel is really trying to say that this breast is both a mothering thing and a sensual thing. Walking that line in translation was a little more difficult than I thought it would be.
RF: Would you say that your impression—although this may be simplistic—is that this is a feminist book?
MB: I definitely think it’s empowering. It’s not a new conversation, either in Spain or elsewhere, about what it means to be a woman and mother, and yet, in certain places, these conversations need to be happening more—especially at the dinner table with people that might not always want to talk about these things. We know there are people in our lives that don’t like talking about toxic masculinity, for example. They don’t want to confront such concepts, but this is a book that is meant to help us bridge that.
MCH: Also, just the fact that this book is highlighting the woman’s psyche is feminist in and of itself. I don’t know if Muriel identifies as a feminist, but I do think any literature that gives importance to women and their feelings is feminist, because it’s so against the grain of what we view as universal literature. This is a book that empowers women going through moments that are often considered private, like the first few months of motherhood, and pregnancy, and the domestic.
RF: Are there any specific challenges about translating from Catalan to English?
MCH: I did my master’s thesis on the Catalan-English language pair and what it is to translate poetry, so I think one of the main challenges is to go beyond literal translation, to avoid simply using cognates when they present themselves. But I think also, despite all the efforts to create Catalan grammar books and in universities, the fact of Franco’s really long rule means it can be harder to find the meanings of some idioms and local ways of speaking. I often found myself having to text a friend and ask, “have you ever heard this phrase?” It’s much less documented than Spanish; you really need to have a social circle to answer the questions that come up.
MB: For me, because I came to Catalan through Spanish—and learning Galician as well—I see them as a matrix that cannot be separated. I think many Catalan speakers would agree with that. Ignoring the realities that languages live together, albeit not always harmoniously, doesn’t do any good.
Still, with this book and with Goodbye Ramona, we wanted to italicise the Spanish so that it would seem foreign and leave the Catalan un-italicised—yet, the editors of both texts rejected the idea. The hard part is that we know all these languages, so it feels natural to us, but in someone else’s hands, it would read very differently if the foreign words weren’t italicised. I have always tried to mark the differences when I translate a text of multiple languages, but unfortunately, sometimes the differences get erased when the text makes its way into English. It’s frustrating, because we as translators are always looking for new ways to experiment, but generally, the way publishing works is that there is English and there is “foreign”.
MCB: There’s one character, David, who speaks more Spanish, and in some parts I was tempted to leave the Spanish in because I think a lot of people—at least in the US—would understand what it means, and it would give a mixed quality to the text. But it would also make the Spanish shine through, rather than the Catalan.
MB: And it isn’t just Spanish, it’s Andalusian, which is a very particular type of Spanish, carrying its own baggage just like Catalan. And, of course, there are many variants to Catalan too. This is one question that we’re still experimenting with: how do you capture all the lives of languages across translation? Ultimately, you need to think about your audience first and foremost.
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