Place: Mexico

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

The script writers seemed to juggle the fragmentary structure of the novel with the linear conventions of cinematic narratives.

Today, on Día de Muertos, Asymptote is resurrecting Asymptote at the Movies, our column on world literature and their cinematic adaptations. In a marvellously topical fusion, we’re returning with a discussion on Juan Rulfo’s beloved and widely acclaimed Pedro Páramo, and the film of the same name directed by Carlos Velo, who dared to take this complex and mystifying text to the screen. 

John Gavin, the American actor who portrayed Don Pedro in the film, likened Rulfo’s novel to Don QuixoteThe Divine Comedy, or Goethe’s Faust. What those books are to Spain, Italy, and Germany, Pedro Páramo is to Mexico. It’s a declaration that would seem hyperbolic if it weren’t corroborated by so many other literary masters and critics. In her preface to Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of the novel, Susan Sontag declared the novella “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” Borges declared it one of the greatest texts ever written in any language. In the following conversation, Assistant Editor Edwin Alanís-García and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan dive into the myriad thrills that arise between this pivotal work, and its strange and brilliant cinematic counterpart.

Edwin Alanís-García (EAG): It’s a tradition to watch Pedro Páramo on Día de Muertos. I’m not sure how or when this tradition started, but I liken it to how airing It’s a Wonderful Life is a perennial custom at Christmas. To be clear, I don’t mean that Día de Muertos is simply another holiday. It might be unjust to even regard it as a holiday; perhaps ritual or ceremony is more apt. However we label it, it’s one of Mexico’s most sacred and revered traditions, perhaps even more so than Christmas or Independence Day. A defiant celebration (literally, it’s a party for the dead) of the ubiquity of death, Día de Muertos acts as a sobering reminder that the only guarantee in life is that it ends. At the same time, it’s a festival to remember and honor the dead, especially our ancestors and those we have loved and lost. On this day, it’s said that the spirits of the dead can travel to our world, hence the importance of ofrendas, ritual displays where gifts are offered to the dead to welcome them home.

In a very concrete way, these sentiments permeate Juan Rulfo’s novel and Carlos Velo’s film: the realm of the dead and the realm of the living are constantly woven together throughout the story. We start with Juan Preciado at his mother’s deathbed, vowing to fulfill her dying wish. His mother’s voice takes him to a literal ghost town in search of his father, Pedro Páramo. Through the testimonies of the living and the dead (and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the two apart) we’re treated to flashbacks of a once thriving town and the tyrannical legacy of our titular villain.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Cultural commemorations and reconciliations of death seem to be mirrored across the world. In China, during a day of early springtime (a varying date on the Chinese calendar), we observe the Qingming Festival—heading to the graves of our ancestors to sweep and tidy up the grounds, burn incense and paper money, pay tribute. It is—in the same vein as Day of the Dead—an acknowledgement of the steep and synchronous passage between the realms we experience, and all the others we are offered only brief glimpses at.

Something I thought about was that—when sorting through the wreckages of a national trauma, there tends to be a reprise of narratives that amalgamate death and spirituality with day-to-day life. Day of the Dead, and what it means to Mexico, bring to mind a section of Robert Bolaño’s vividly wandering long poem, “The Neochileans”:

To the Virgin Lands
Of Latin America:
A hinterland of specters
And ghosts.
Our home
Positioned within the geometry
Of impossible crimes.

“Holidays” of remembrance are communal methods for managing the irresolution of death; when the abrupt disappearances of lives become a ceaseless tide, acceptance of its pervasion does not equate to understanding. Reading and watching Pedro Páramo brought to mind firstly the human impulse to fight against and disprove the terrifying concept of permanence. Death, our only pedestrian encounter with the eternal, is something that feels instinctually wrong for both its ineradicability and inevitability—perhaps because we have nothing to measure it up against, no certain qualifiers or records, a complete void of comparability. The persistence of ghosts, and spirits, and their continual autonomy and humanity, then, is an automatic salve for the mystifying absolution of death, and Pedro Páramo is such a brilliant dissolution of permanence, an astonishing textual disprovement of linearity and the limits of our living experience. I often find that cultures that incorporate spirituality more seamlessly into their daily philosophies are also generations that have suffered formidable violence. Along this vein of thinking, there are some who say that writing this book was Juan Rulfo’s way of protesting the failed promises of the Mexican Revolution. What do you think?

Screen Shot 2022-10-06 at 12.52.29 AM READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Carmen Boullosa

Earth is a ball in disjointed flight. / The illuminated celestial sphere / is a sudden shot. / The cosmos trembles, the planetary spins jerk.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we bring you a selection of poems from Carmen Boullosa, one of the most dynamic and prolific writers in contemporary Mexican literature. The haiku-esque “Dry Rain” discovers a scene of natural beauty in Brooklyn, leading to a final image that is both concrete and abstract. In “Puy de Dôme,” our speaker addresses the seemingly ageless French volcano which has outlived its ancient temple—and perhaps even the temple’s gods. And in the elegiac “The Match,” our speaker witnesses the tragic death of Italian footballer Piermario Morosini, whose final moments on the field are recounted with profound sorrow and admiration. As with her novels, Boullosa’s poetry (here translated by acclaimed writer and translator Lawrence Schimel) spans an eclectic range of aesthetic styles and sociocultural themes, traversing national borders in pursuit of a shared humanity.

 

Dry Rain

Rain of flowers in Brooklyn.
Minute white petals fall
heralding
the spring,
bathing us
without water
in fresh                                                                                           hypothetical laughter. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Who Will Win the International Booker Prize?

One of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse [is that] . . . a particular book wins . . . because it ticks . . . marketing-friendly boxes.

The long-awaited announcement of the International Booker winner is finally around the corner, and with a shortlist explosive with singular talent, the gamblers amongst us are finding it difficult to place their bets. To lend a hand, Asymptote’s very own assistant editor Barbara Halla returns with her regularly scheduled take, lending her scrupulous gaze to not only the titles but the Prize itself—and the principles of literary criticism and merit.

In my previous coverage of the International Booker Prize, I mentioned that there is always an element of repetition to the discussions surrounding it; quite honestly, there are only so many ways one can frame the conversation beyond mere summarizations of the books themselves. I find myself hoping that each year’s selections will reveal some sort of larger theme looming in the background, giving me at least the pretense of a cohesive thesis statement. I think that was definitely the case with last year’s shortlist and its explicit concern with memory, but considering how English translation tends to lag behind each book’s original publication by at least a couple of years, it was probably a coincidence. I’ve had no such luck with the 2020 shortlist; most of my attempts at finding a common theme have felt like a stretch.

In an attempt to avoid making this simply a collection of bite-sized reviews, I want to talk about one of my least favorite strands of Booker discourse: the tedious—sometimes almost malicious—assertion that if a particular book wins, it does so not because of its “literary merit,” but rather because it ticks a number of marketing-friendly boxes. Maybe it has been translated from a language that rarely gets published in English, or perhaps it seems particularly relevant to our present, directly tackling racism, homophobia, or misogyny. Regardless of the source of such a statement, it has this irritating “political correctness is ruining literature” thrust to it.

Now, in the past I have relied on “non-literary” clues to try and guess the Booker winner, and to some extent, I still do. However, in my mind, whenever I try to glean the winner using such external factors, I do so based on a few assumptions. First of all, while not all shortlisted books will necessarily be my favorite or even to my liking, the judges at least believe them to be great books, and the winner might indeed be different under different (personal) circumstances. In fact, despite what some detractors of contemporary fiction might say, there is plenty to love about the books being published today, and in the presence of so much good literature, taking into account “external” factors is only natural. After all, as translator Anton Hur recently tweeted, in response to an article arguing against a translated fiction category for the Hugos, “Literary awards ARE marketing tools, they should be used to solve MARKETING PROBLEMS.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from the United States, Sweden, and Mexico!

This week our editors bring you the latest news from Sweden, where a new edition of Nobel Prize-winner Nelly Sachs’s Swedish translations has been published; Mexico, where cultural centre Casa Tomada has continued its remarkable response to the coronavirus situation with a series of author events; and from Boston in the United States, which has lined up exciting programming this summer. Read on to find out more! 

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

This summer, Swedish publishing company Faethon released a new collection with the poetry of German-Swedish Nelly Sachs. For the first time, all of the most prominent Swedish translations of her poetry are presented together in one book. The collection includes classical translations by poets such as Gunnar Ekelöf and Erik Lindegren, as well as new interpretations by Margaretha Holmqvist, who also was a friend of Sachs. The book also presents thorough commentaries by Daniel Pedersen, professor in comparative literature, and an afterword by poet and translator Eva Ström.

The Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 in Berlin and fled together with her mother to Sweden in 1940 where she lived until her death in 1970. Sachs had a long friendship with Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, who used her contacts with the Swedish royal family to enable Sachs and her mother to escape Nazi Germany. In Sweden, Sachs lived with her mother in Stockholm and it was at this time that she became a poet of note. She remained active as a writer and a translator for the most part of her life. In 1966, Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.”

READ MORE…

Contemporary Indigenous Poetry: Xun Betan on Tsotsil, Turkeys, and Aguardiente

. . . when he writes, it is often with an audience in mind, namely, the future generations of Tsotsil speakers.

Tsotsil is a Mayan language spoken by the indigenous Tsotsil Maya people in the Mexican state of Chiapas and it is in danger of extinction. When writer and translator Shyal Bhandari went to the state for several months to investigate contemporary indigenous poetry, he quickly discovered the poet Xun Betan, who has been fighting hard to keep the language alive in literature. In this essay, Bhandari recounts his meeting with Xun Betan and introduces the pivotal work he has been doing through his writing, publishing, and workshops.

Over the few months that I was in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico, I heard the name Xun Betan brought up plenty of times whenever I asked about contemporary indigenous poetry. “Tienes que hablar con él”—they told me I had to talk with him and that he is involved in many interesting projects, including a poetry workshop for young Tsotsil Maya writers that he runs at his house in the city. They informed me that he is a “unique individual” (in the best sense of the term), almost always to be found wearing traditionally embroidered shirts and his trademark sombrero.

So, when I saw a man dressed exactly like that, smiling and nodding along at the launch event for an indigenous poetry anthology, I thought, “Could that be Xun?” The spokesperson from the editorial Espejo Somos gave him a shout-out, confirming my hunch. At the end of the event, I swiftly approached him about the possibility of sitting down to talk and, to my delight, he suggested coffee the following morning. Anxious to make a good first impression, I arrived punctually, against my nature. I found a well-lit table in the centre of the café and ordered a cappuccino made with pinole (ground-up corn). By the time I had finished my coffee, it was 11:20 a.m. and Xun was yet to show. I was hardly surprised. So, it had to be that at the exact moment I resigned myself to the sobering thought that he had completely forgotten about our meeting, he walked through the door. Naturally, I told him I had only just arrived, hoping he wouldn’t pay much attention to the empty coffee cup beside me. It turned out that we have friends in common. I don’t care if it’s a cliché—the world is a very small place indeed. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest news roundup from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico!

This week our writer’s bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico. In the UK, Oxford Translation Day welcomed past Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes to talk about her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurrican Season. In Argentina, the rising cases of COVID-19 have prompted the Fundación Filba to organize virtual classes with well-known Latin American writers. In Mexico, booksellers are finding innovative solutions to reach readers as the stores remain closed. Read on to find out more! 

Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor, reporting from the United Kingdom

Every year, research center Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation hosts Oxford Translation Day, consisting of workshops, readings, and talks, as a prelude of sorts to the award of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize on the June 13, at its home base of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Given this year’s unusual global situation, Oxford Translation Day is taking place online over the span of several weeks. We are particularly looking forward to Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes’s talk on her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions), which we’ve featured here and here, on June 13. Another event that seems particularly intriguing is poet and translator A.E. Stallings’s discussion of two contemporary Greek female poets, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Kiki Dimoula, also on June 13. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas

They stroll through their empire, lords of the dead.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we reorient “vermin” to the top of the food chain in “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas. Our narrator embodies a voice of classism and privilege, a haughty position that is quickly undermined by an untouchable shoeshiner’s jovial memories of the rodents inhabiting a local cemetery. Conveyed in gruesome detail, the rats’ feast is a spectacle of awe to some (the shoeshiner) and terror for others (our narrator). One part memento mori, one part class criticism, Dueñas’s story serves as a graphic parable for nature’s indifference towards social conventions.

“Have you done this for long?” I absentmindedly ask the guy who’s giving my shoes a vertiginous shine.

The voice of an empty vessel responds:

“Oh, no! Only for about two years. For twenty I was a watchman at Dolores Cemetery. It was I who copied the death certificates. Yes, even I, in my circumstance, went to middle school and I have excellent penmanship.”

Twenty years! I look at the little man of indefinable age. At first glance, he was a young boy.

Skinny, hairless, and indistinct. With a shrunken blue-ringed eye that blinks on its own accord and a stranded pupil that despairs in a bloody broth filled to the brim of his eyelid. The left eye, though, one would think it had a different owner. His upper lip sags like the ruffle of an old blouse. His skull, divided by a dark vein that curves down around his face, resembles a sack hung by a cord.

He emits the stench of horse piss and a lasting, murky reek that disturbs even the trees. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2020)

From hypermedia performances to publications, Asymptote staff have been keeping busy—even under lockdown!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s co-translation, with Sean T. Reynolds, of Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem” is now out with Seagull Books.

Executive Assistant Austyn Wohlers, who has just been admitted into Notre Dame’s MFA program in Fiction, recently published a story, “Lila,” in Short Fiction.

Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO) will be presenting in late May a Twitter-based (@GraphPoem) hypermedia performance preview of a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology he is editing in French and in English translation and in early June an interactive coding computational poetry performance at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Robert Perišić’s novel No-Signal Area, out recently with Seven Stories Press, was reviewed by Ken Kalfus in The New York Times.  

Editor-at-large for Guatemala José García recently published the final instalment of a four-parter about the migrant caravan at The Evergreen Review. Click here, here, here, and here for the full series.

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood recently translated an essay by Czech journalist Apolena Rychlíková for the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe published by Comma Press in March 2020.

READ MORE…

Beauty and Violence: Sophie Hughes on Translating Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

I belong to the school of whatever produces a text that doesn't sound like it has been squeezed through a mangle to get to where it is.

A few months back, I read Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes in its original Spanish in only two short sittings. The Mexican author’s breathless prose almost demands this; putting the book down feels like walking away from a friend who is ripping you, between gasps, through one of the most harrowing stories you’ve ever heard. Among the myriad feelings I had on finishing the book was a combination of pity and excitement for the poor but lucky soul that would translate it. Perhaps you’ve already heard the list of Melchor’s stylistic choices: endlessly winding sentences, paragraphs that last chapters, and a slew of slang that even some Mexicans might need to ask their filthiest-mouthed friend to translate from Spanish into Spanish. Happily, in the end, it was Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions who brought this torrential narrative downpour to English readers, giving it the carefully considered translation it deserves.

The following interview with Hughes is as much about the practical element and the psychological toll of translating such a dense work (both in technique and in content) as it is about the field of translation and the modern relationship between the Spanish and English languages. For this reason, my questions are a bit scattered, but fortunately, Hughes’s answers are not!

—Andrew Adair

Andrew Adair (AA): Were you met with claims of “untranslatability” when people heard you were translating this work? Did you have this doubt yourself?

Sophie Hughes (SH): Not untranslatability in so many words. There is a tweet floating around somewhere—written in Spanish and sent to Fernanda and methat I think sums up the general response to the book’s translation:

“How do you translate Hurricane Season? Incredible job by the translator if she managed to even remotely reproduce the feeling of reading the original, especially when she isn’t jarocha [from Veracruz] or Mexican and doesn’t understand half of it.”

Hurricane Season has been something of a literary sensation in Mexico and Latin America, striking cords and hitting nerves with many readers, so it makes sense that some of them should respond emotionally to its translation, even feel protective over it. It’s a difficult book, but I knew what I was getting myself into, and actually, the way the prose is structured, without paragraph breaks and with very long, circumambulatory sentences, made the translation quite a compulsive activity, even when the content was grueling or the slang particularly thick. It is meticulously written in the original, which usually makes a text supremely translatable.

AA: On the subject of doubt, do you ever question whether you’re the right person for the job? Not as a question of skill but rather, sensibility?

SH: I regularly suffer from crises of confidence. In this case, though, I did and still do feel I had the right sensibility for the job: I finished reading Temporada de huracanes with a head full of beautiful images, not just violent ones. I could not shake, for example, the passage describing a group of young men being admired by a lustful onlooker as they worked the sugar cane fields; an image that seems to slip the bonds of the nightmarish reality of the book’s world (pages 18-19 of the New Directions edition). I also found acute moments of catharsis dotted throughout the book, which add light and shade to its otherwise stubbornly miserable action—something like Mrs. Ramsey’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Fernanda’s characters moved as much as they shocked me—I felt tenderly towards her monsters. Maybe subliminally I understood these as signs that I had the right sensibility for the job, so at that point I said to my husband: I’ll translate a sample and be honest with myself about whether I have the skill to pull this off. And I could hear Temporada de huracanes in that sample. I knew I could do it. One day I hope someone retranslates it so that I can read it afresh. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from Mexico, Argentina, and China!

With much of the world now weeks into lockdown, our writers bring you news of its continued impact upon both the publishing and bookselling industries, as well as on writers’ own responses. In Mexico, authors such as Olivia Teroba and Jazmina Barrera have continued to engage with audiences; in Argentina, bookshops have been embracing solidarity to overcome the current challenges; and in China, the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan has brought fresh poetry broadcasts and publications along with it. Read on to find out more! 

Andrew Adair, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Here in Mexico City, the lockdown has been largely optional, with much frustration over President López Obrador’s casual, relaxed approach before a global pandemic. Until a few weeks ago, there was no lockdown whatsoever, which left people to follow their own moral code when it came to deciding what to stop doing and when. Now, restrictions are in place and movement in the city has calmed down, though with such lackadaisical direction, many still continue to gather. Of course, many more have no choice but to work, as Mexico is the second-most impoverished country in Latin America (Brazil being the first) and many live, not week-to-week, but day-to-day.

And so, with that, we’ve moved online with the rest of the world, shifting many literary conversations to all manner of digital platforms: Zoom, Instagram, YouTube Live—surely you know the drill by now.

One particularly busy author is Olivia Teroba, a newcomer whose first publication of feminist-edged essays, Un lugar seguro (A Safe Place) arrived last year from Paraíso Perdido. Teroba has given workshops and talks through various institutions and bookstores, most notably her Zoom videoconference “New Genealogies” with Casa Tomada, an independent cultural space which has done an impressive job of moving online.

On April 24, la UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) celebrated International Book Day with a series of rousing talks from a wide range of authors as part of their new program #CulturaUNAMenCasa. Topics included, appropriately, “Reading poetry in digital environments,” “Books that save our lives,” and “Feminine Verse in Latin America”—a talk between Claudia Masin and Mexico City-based poet/translator Robin Myers. READ MORE…