One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.
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René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.
Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.
RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?
Natalia García Freire (NGF): It kind of made sense. Of course, the title in Spanish is connected to Mildred and her mystic relation with the wind, but A Carnival of Atrocities represents, for me, Cocuán; it is the whole town in a few words, and it captures what I felt when I was trying to get into that non-existent town. When the publisher told me, I thought it was perfect. I would have wanted to invent it myself for the Spanish edition.
I like it when the translation changes the whole book; in another language, it gives a different perspective. In this sense, I trust a lot in Victor as a translator, but also in the publisher, because they know the other language and that other culture better than I do.
RES: Natalia, your novel unfolds through many narrators, and each one offers an intimate view, a different view of the events. Was there a particular reason behind your choice to decentralize the narrator?
NGF: Well, at the beginning, I didn’t think about it that much. At first, I thought I was going to write the novel with just one or two narrators; I was writing Mildred’s story, but there was a point where I couldn’t write anymore. It was like she refused to speak to me. And then I started with Ezequiel, but it happened again: he refused. So I tried with different characters: with Manzi, Hermosina, Agustina. . . It was rather spontaneous, as if the whole town wanted to speak. Everybody wanted to say something, to tell their stories, to show what Cocuán is for each one of them. I ended up with these multiple voices, but there was something missing, there were holes in the story. So I chose Filatelio to give cohesion, because it made sense to me; he was the connection with Mildred. Anyway, I think that there is a lot of unconscious things that happen when you write, so I try to feel free when I write a novel. It’s more like intuition. I don’t think too much, I just write a lot and rewrite even more.
RES: Victor, how difficult it was to preserve that plurality of voices in the English edition?
VM: There were challenges, indeed. I was conscious that I wanted the voices to sound as different in English as they do in Spanish—and there were some key translator decisions that I made in order to either preserve them or finetune what I thought the English might sound like. So, for example, with Manzi’s chapter, I tried to avoid contractions in that chapter, which is something you don’t really have in Spanish; I thought that as he’s a priest, he might speak slightly different from the other characters. That is a small decision in the chapter, but things like that repeat throughout the book. With Baltasar, I tried to preserve the word guambrito, as well.
It’s a matter of trying to find the voice for each character. There is so much in Spanish already, so it was just a case of working out how to bring that into English. And I think it helps that I have worked on Natalia’s books and stories before.
RES: Actually, I wanted to ask you about that. You also translated This World Does Not Belong To Us, how did that experience shape your approach to A Carnival of Atrocities?
VM: Well, I think it gave me confidence. You know, I worked with that book, and it came out alright, so maybe I can do it again. And I think there are voices that feel familiar; there is an echo, perhaps, of Lucas, the narrator of that first novel. The setting as well; it is the sort of páramo I have worked with previously, so I felt like I somewhat knew it.
RES: And Natalia, what does it feel like to see your work translated into English—especially by Victor? Do you feel the translated versions reveal something new to you about your own writing?
NGF: Well, I always get really excited when I receive Victor’s translations. There is something about his work that I really appreciate: his decisions about rhythm, about the sound, about the language. For example, he mentioned the word guambrito some minutes ago, and his decision to preserve it reveals something about my work: that perhaps the sound matters. When I write, I do have in mind my grandma’s orality, her way of telling stories and talking, as if she had been singing all the time. I don’t know if I’ve successfully put that onto paper, but when I read Victor’s translation, I realized that it sounds great in English. He really listens to these narrators and understands their rhythm. Looking back, when I wrote my first novel, I didn’t know what was important for me—but reading my translated works, I realized that the translators knew.
RES: Victor, you have translated from both Portuguese and Spanish, but many of the novels and stories that you’ve worked on are from South America. What draws you to this region? Are there any particular qualities in these voices or settings that resonate with you as a translator?
VM: When I first became interested in translated literature, it was through Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers, partly because my uncle is married to an Ecuadorian, and I actually spent some time in Ecuador. So I’ve had this interest since I was young. Then when I was teaching English, I met a lot of Colombian students. Even though I grew up in Portugal, I was always interested in South America; I think it’s the literature that I find most fascinating.
RES: I ask because there are some recurring themes in South American and in Latin American literature as a whole, and in this sense, I would like to ask you, Natalia, about the violence and memory as they appear in your novel. What draws you, as a creator, to these territories? And I am not using the word “territories” lightly.
NGF: I think it is a mix of personal, cultural, and political things. When you are from Latin America, from Ecuador, everything is about territory. There are a lot of conflicts at the moment, regarding oil, mining, land—and even my idea of the sacred is related to the territory. So it’s difficult not to write with that personal or political experience of your country, because it goes through you. And with violence, it is impossible to overlook; it is not something that only comes from our government, it is embedded in our everyday lives. We live with anger and fear, and it is because of that violence. I think our Latin American literature has that substance; it is part of our tradition.
RES: I wanted to ask you about your relationship with the land as a whole, because in A Carnival of Atrocities, nature isn’t just there. It breathes and exist as an agent that, ultimately, eats the town. Do you see nature as a character in its own right?
NGF: Indeed, nature is a character. I wanted to mention this earlier, but I don’t have an established sacred thing in my life. I was raised as a Catholic and there is an Indigenous history in my family, but I lack that, so I’m always trying to understand the sacred as related with nature. What I see in my country, in the páramo or the islands, is something really big that I cannot understand. So when I write, I try to build that relationship with nature; I try to build something sacred with language. I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something. And, currently, there are important discussions in Ecuador about nature, as well. In our constitution, nature has rights, so we are constantly asking what we’re doing to it, and if there are any other ways in which we can relate to nature and our land.
RES: I read an interview you did some years ago about the Spanish edition of this novel, and you said that as mestizos, we don’t have a sense of belonging, as we exist between Catholic and Indigenous worldviews. To explore that with words is not an easy task. And, in this sense, I would like to know if this has proven a challenge for you, Victor; there are so many ideas, shades, colors, nuances that are part of Latin American literature.
VM: There was definitely a challenge. I think, specifically, in the idea of mestizaje and the way the novel seems to explore it. My reading is that it borrows themes from Catholicism, from the Bible, but reworks them in a Latin American way. I found lots of echoes of stories from the Bible—to the point that I went and read the Old Testament, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. For example, you have the brothers, Ezequiel and Victor, who are almost like Cain and Abel, and they travel into a forest that has been planted over the old forest. That, I believe, is an echo, a way of iterating that beneath the new is the old that was there, as a sort of beginning or origin. And with the indigenous themes as well—at one point Manzi, the priest, is talking about how difficult it is to control the people in Cocuán, because they have previous beliefs that have merged with Catholicism. But they are not proper Catholics either, they don’t understand religion as the Europeans do because they still hold these other ideas and superstitions. I found all of that really interesting, and I was very conscious of it.
NGF: I want to say something about all the references of the Bible—I was raised as a Catholic, and I attended a college of nuns, who were really persistent with the Bible. Everything we read was the Bible. It was more important than literature, and it became the great book of stories for me. Maybe that is why I include a lot of references. But it also shows how strong Catholicism is in Latin America; everything has to do with it, from our houses to our schools.
RES: Victor, given the fact that you read the Old Testament to further understand these stories, do you see your role of translator as a mediator, as a communicator, as a re-writer of the book?
VM: Well, it’s something in between those three. It is a rewriting of the story to some extent, because you are working in a different context, with a different language, but I try to preserve as much as I can from the original, even if it might be slightly difficult for an English reader to grasp. For instance, I noticed in one of the reviews that they made all of these connections to Biblical stories, but very few others have commented on that. It’s hard to have a real appreciation of the novel without being aware of those religious themes.
RES: What do you hope that English speaking readers take away from this book, from your translation?
VM: Well, I hope they enjoy the variety of voices; I hope they enjoy what I’ve tried to do with Natalia’s writing and the language itself; and I hope they can feel comfortable with not understanding everything that’s happening in the story, because I think it’s a book to be discovered. In my case, the more I worked on it, the more I realized all these connections. At first, I know it can feel like a fever dream with a lot to take in, but the connections appear the more you think about them. That, I think, is what a good book should achieve.
RES: Is there another novel that you would like to translate?
VM: There’s one that I’ve been trying to find a home for a while: O Plantador de Abóboras [The Pumpkin Planter] by Luís Cardoso. It’s from East Timor, where they speak Portuguese, and it’s about the story of the country: how they were first colonized by the Portuguese, and when they left, the Japanese invaded during the Second World War, and then the Japanese were kicked out, but Indonesia took over, and then they were finally free. But Cardoso is rather critical of the postcolonial government that came into power. I’ve described it as One Hundred Years of Solitude but in East Timor, and it does have elements of magical realism. I would certainly love to find a home for that book.
RES: What about you, Natalia? Are you currently working on another project?
NGF: Well, I recently published a collection of short stories, and Victor knows about it because he has read all of them. And now I am working on a new project, maybe a novel, but I do consider myself a slow writer.
Natalia García Freire was born in Cuenca, Ecuador in 1991. She teaches Creative Writing at Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. García Freire’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong to Us, was published in English by World Editions and One World in 2022; it won the English PEN Translation Award, was nominated for the Tigre Juan Award, and selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019. It has been translated into Italian, French, Turkish, and Danish. A Carnival of Atrocities is her second novel published by World Editions.
Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s master’s programme in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Luís in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia García Freire’s This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.
René Esaú Sánchez (Guerrero, México. 1997). Journalist and translator. He writes about politics and culture weekly for the Mexican magazine Vértigo. He has translated Iris Murdoch into Spanish and Rosario Castellanos into English. He has also collaborated with publications such as Periódico de Poesía, Reflexiones Marginales, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Currently, he serves as an editor-at-large in México for Asymptote Journal and studies an MLitt in Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews.
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