Just Before the End (Justo antes del final), Emiliano Monge’s sixth novel, is a story both in time and about it.  In eighty microchapters, each devoted to a year of his mother’s life, Emiliano Monge—or a nameless narrator who suspiciously resembles one Emiliano Monge—inculcates a three-part structure: a conversation with the mother, a corresponding interview with a family member, and an investigation of world events contemporaneous with the year in question.  The book, with echoes of Fuentes’ Aura, is told in the second-person future tense, locating the narrator and the reader on the same plane.  Are we witnessing a narrator in dialogue with himself, immersed in an asymptotic search for his origins as he reconstructs his mother’s story, or is the reader, cast in the second person, the story’s fictionalized recipient, a coparticipant traversing the thin membrane of the page?

The net effect is a spiraling, recursive format performed upon linear chronology, an implicit, reiterative rhythm coextensive with the unwavering march of the years. While the decisive events of the latter half of the twentieth century interpenetrate with the particular history of a single family, the mother—in whose archetypal resonance there’s no forfeiture of verisimilitude—becomes the story’s central figure.  The novel could likewise be envisioned as the 4D representation of its multifaceted protagonist, as the portrait of a woman at once tangible and elusive, intimate and remote.  Whereas in What Goes Unsaid (No contar todo)—Monge’s first production to mine the symmetries and the discrepancies between memory and imagination—the author traces the paternal over three generations, the overlapping biographies of grandfather, father, and son told, respectively, in third, second, and first person, here Monge introduces the other side of the family—with its guiding obsessions, its inherited fixations, and its private rationale.

The novel’s merit—its complex protagonist and innovative structure—is mobilized by its language. Monge’s formal accomplishment is the outgrowth of this technical excellence, the proof of ruthless attention at the level of the prose. Told in a voice equally searching and ironic that alternates spare brushstrokes with syntactic extension, invoking touches of humor and, at times, the plangent notes of a dirge, Just Before the End thrives in multiple registers and, in my admittedly biased view, delimits its own space, both in Monge’s oeuvre and in Latin American literature. I’m delighted to present the opening chapters. The English-language rights are available. Inquiries can be directed to Paula Canal at the Indent Literary Agency: paula@indentagency.com.

Josh Dunn

From Just Before the End

1947

No beginning is easy, your mother will say.

Did you know your grandma got sick the very day I was born?

She’d stomached her aches and pains for years, and when things went from bad to worse, she blamed me.

She never fed me, your mother will say, looking for herself in her voice.  She refused to pick me up. Her arms hurt, her joints ached, her bones were deforming one by one.

Excuses.

If I’d died, she would’ve found me forty-eight hours later, your mother will say, a pause coloring her words. So Ofelia fed me.

Obviously I don’t remember. Ofelia was your grandfather’s patient who ended up working for your grandmother, your mother will say, finding something in her voice. In her sewing shop, that hobby store that grew into a business.

The same shop where my mother worked for decades without complaining about her arms, her joints, or her supposedly bedeviled bones.

Your aunts, who’d told your mother the story of Ofelia, will tell you the wetnurse was unwell.

Something screwy in the head, they’ll add, each making a face. She muttered in foreign languages, wandered from one room to the next. But that’s not what you’ll want them to tell you.

No, your grandfather didn’t make it to your mother’s birth, they’ll say, going back to the beginning because you’ll believe such a thing is possible. The truth is he didn’t make it to her first months, as if he’d forgotten about his most recent daughter, born tiny and destined to be petite.

Their father, your aunts will explain, their voices, you’ll think, tediously woven into one, being the psychiatrist he was, testified in Goyo Cárdenas’s second trial. Before the La Castañeda fugitive spent the next 34 years behind bars.

That case—the mental wellbeing of the accused—kept your grandfather busy during his youngest daughter’s first months.

You’ve heard of the Tacuba Strangler, right?

You’ll read that that year, in France, Jean Genet debuted The Maids, the story of two domestic workers who, after an apparently miniscule inconvenience—they can’t finish ironing because of a burnt-out fuse—, murder the mistress, disfiguring the body of the woman with whom they’d lived in such apparent bonhomie and such intimate proximity that one of them could have been her daughters’ wetnurse; that, in the United States, Edwin Land presented before a jam-packed auditorium the Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant-exposure device in history; and that, in Mexico, the infamous serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández—alias Goyo Cárdenas—was sentenced to 34 years, even though your grandfather, the medical expert, declared the encephalitis he’d suffered during childhood had irreparably damaged his neurological structures and that he should, therefore, be considered not criminal but ill.

1948

Your mother will tell you that from her second year she doesn’t remember bim or bom.

Wait, she’ll say, stopping herself, her voice like a crystal dyed with the colors of the past. I remember the cold.

The curtains were always closed in that crypt of a house. And lowering her voice, she’ll add: they made up a room for Ofelia and me.

So they say. Since she doesn’t remember that space or anything else from her second year, your mother will tell you what her brothers and sisters told her: she never cried, never made a peep. She seemed to be allergic to hair and the cold gave her a rash. She was fragile, sick nineteen days out of twenty.

Her cheeks, she’ll say, repeating what your aunts and uncles told her, were coated with a sheen, a gloss of boogers and dried spit.

Hence, she’ll smile, the nickname: trout face.

Your uncles will confirm the neglected hygiene and the chronic iridescence of their kid sister.

And to justify that nobody thought, for example, to wet a Kleenex or to daub her cheeks, they’ll say that your grandmother had begun using the wheelchair from which she’d rarely—and only if she thought nobody was watching—get up.

Their father—who’d quit judicial work after an altercation in a trial—dedicated more and more time to private practice. He also became assistant director of the hospital where he’d worked for years.

All to say he spent little to no time at home. He was obsessed with mental illness. With diagnosing it. With dodging it. His mother, your great-grandmother, suffered from premature dementia, and his brother, your great-uncle, was schizophrenic.

He always, your uncles will conclude, had a soft spot for the crazies.

You’ll read that that year—a leap year, dooming your mother to an extra 24 hours’ cold—Bell Laboratories brought out the transistor radio whose warblings, your mother will say, defined her scant recollections of her first two years; that, in Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán convened the first silent march in history; that the World Health Organization—fated, among other contributions, to impede the understanding of mental wellbeing—was founded while in England the first ever one-piece hearing aid was unveiled and, in the recently established Israeli State, a sniper downed a first Palestinian boy; that, in France, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published and, in the United States, Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a book fated to enrapture your grandfather and to scar one of your uncles; and that, in Mexico, Mario de Ángeles Roque, accused of murdering and quartering his wife along with their three children, jumped from the witness stand in a foiled gambit to strangle the medical expert who would’ve diagnosed him—your grandfather who, little inclined to listen to the radio, almost didn’t have the time (or the breath) to read Alfred C.

1949

Your mother will untangle a first memory.

It shines like the photos in an album whenever I close my eyes, she’ll say in a firm, iridescent voice. Or like, you’ll think, the embryos of a Polaroid.

In those images, a sequence of superimposed exposures which your mother’s hypothalamus will illumine word by word, Ofelia gets kicked out of the house. Your mother couldn’t say if it happened during the morning or the afternoon. Imploded, she’ll say, a word you never imagined she would use.

Locks of your mother’s hair, the flickers of a half-made sentence, scissors flashing in Ofelia’s hand. The scissors again, Ofelia’s bruised arms, her hair—the dead cells of a woman who’d gone from batty to seamstress and from seamstress to wetnurse—strewn on the floor. The blood. You grandmother in her wheelchair, shouting; your aunts and your grandfather, running; the orderlies he’d called—if not him, who?—pinning Ofelia to the floor amidst her insults in three languages and her protests in four.

She never saw her surrogate mother again. The brutal precision, the untiring exactitude with which she describes Ofelia’s departure stems from, you’ll think, the pain or a feint of the imagination, maybe an amalgam of the two.  You grandpa’s lackies subdued her, you’ll hear. They gave her a shot in the arm or neck. They put her on a stretcher, crossed the living room, and carried her out.

Would you believe those goons dumped her on the street? They grabbed her arms and legs to haul her into the ambulance while one of my sisters ran her fingers through my hair and the other hugged me from behind.

That’s the last image on the reel.

Your aunts, who consoled your mother the day they took Ofelia and who will live only two blocks apart, will tell you your mother moved into their room.

Seeing as she arrived without a bed—the one she’d shared with Ofelia didn’t fit—, trout face, your mother, slept in a dresser drawer. The bottom one, they’ll explain, on the front step of one of their homes. A sweater for a blanket and a t-shirt for a pillow.

Then, seated in the living room, your aunts, the older and the younger, the plump and the peaked, the fabulous cook and the fabulously devout, two women always on the brink of the next laugh and whose words, like your uncles’, you won’t combine again, will tell you how they built your mother’s niche: shoe boxes.

Our grandfather, the miner who became our mother’s stepfather and visited whenever he could, was the only help we got. Great-grandpa spelunker, you’ll think, as industrious above ground as below.

You’ll read that that year, in Havana, a platoon of gringo soldiers desecrated the tomb of José Martí, one of your great-grandfather’s favorite poets, while, in Barcelona, four members of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia were executed by firing squad, the oldest of them not only your great-grandfather’s boyhood best friend but the individual responsible for his marrying your great-grandmother and becoming your grandma’s stepfather; that, in the United States, a movie based on Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman, a film destined to obsess your grandfather to such an extent that he could recite swaths of dialogue and would brag about having seen it some thirty times, was released while, in Quito, a version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, translated and rebroadcast, unleashed the same chaos that had run roughshod over London ten years back, only worse: in that Andean country whose name splits the world in two, a tricked, humiliated, and infuriated mob burned down the radio station and lynched the workers when they learned everything had been a hoax; that, in Vienna, Doctor Leo Kanner, synthesizing numerous theories from the turn of the century, coined the term refrigerator mother and laid the groundwork for the study of autism as a syndrome linked to a cold, aloof parenting style “ubiquitous among intellectuals”; and that, in Vatican City, Pope Pius XII excommunicated any and every Communist—past, present, or future—as if he were Methuselah incarnate while, in Madrid, the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health began and your grandfather’s keynote address, which extoled the merits of psychotropic drugs, heralded the case of Ofelia, a patient who succumbed to neurosis despite a battery of electroshocks and took scissors to her own skin.

1950

That year, your mother will tell you, she stopped sleeping through the night.

Closing her eyes, she’ll second guess herself, asking if it started that year or the next, but opening them, she’ll say she was right: in nineteen fifty, sleep started to elude her.

And not because I slept in a dresser drawer. I couldn’t sleep because of the shouts I heard—or thought I heard—in the boys’ room. Shouts that, despite being muffled by the distance and the doors, were shouts of terror, a plea.

One of those nights, rather than trying to fall back to sleep, I summoned what courage I could. I got up. It may have been less bravery and more imprudence or desperation, your mother will admit, her lips turning into an upside-down smile, saying, without words, that what she’s about to say will hurt.

The smallest, the youngest member of the family tiptoed in the half-dark, one hand covering her mouth and the other scratching at the space in front of her.  The door to your uncles’ room was open a crack.  So, for the first time in my life, your mother will say, her voice surfacing amidst the same capsized smile, their little sister turned into a ghost. I entered that masculine space, only to discover my second oldest brother was gone.

The surprise didn’t last as long as the confusion. I inched back and, in the hall, your mother will say, her fingers tracing the upholstery of the couch, I closed my eyes and concentrated. I made out the stifled screams, the thread of my missing brother’s voice—your uncle who, years later, would become the first Mexican to try out for a United States football team.

The noise came from my father’s office. I should’ve left. But rather than turning back, rather than lying down in my makeshift bed and pretending I heard nothing while I pretended to be asleep, I remembered I was invisible. I crouched down, crawled forward, and, with one eye, peered into the room.

My brother was on hands and knees. I couldn’t see what he and my father were doing, what your grandfather was doing to your uncle—your uncle who, decades later, would crisscross the city, driving you from one bookstore to the next.

But your mother will remember the muted suffering, the choked-out cries, and that your grandfather held something in both hands.

The middle brother of your mother’s older brothers, your grandma’s favorite, will tell you from behind the wheel of his taxi that he didn’t even like football.

He played because your grandfather, inspired by Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, made him. Because according to Doc Alfred, who never examined him and who knew nothing of the case, he needed to vent the pent-up energy he didn’t want to or simply couldn’t control.

And he’ll tell you—that same day and during that same commute, taking Calzada de Tlalpan while you look out the window, fixing your attention on a convoy of orange trailers to avoid the dampness eroding your uncle’s features and clouding the pewter of his eyes—about the most frightening moment of his life, the only time he was absolutely terrified.

At twelve, thirteen at most, he’d made the roster of the football team.  That night, your uncle will say, downshifting and accelerating the taxi, while I slept on the floor in my mother’s room, they came. Three or four of them, wearing Halloween masks.

With the blessing of your grandma and the maniacal enthusiasm of my old man, they stuffed my head into a cloth bag and tied my hands behind my back and threw me into the trunk of a sedan. Half an hour, an hour, or for all I knew a lifetime later, they dragged me down a flight of stairs, shouting, telling me I’d better say my prayers because my time was up. They tossed me into the void.

After a fall that seemed infinite, measured by the seconds during which I grappled at the air and tried to regain my breath, I landed in a mass of lukewarm water. They’d flung me off the ten-meter diving platform.

They pulled me out after twenty seconds, their way of saying welcome to the squad. A hazing—I understood years later—my father had concocted.

When I read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, I knew.

You’ll read that that year, the Soviet Union failed for the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth time to detonate a nuclear bomb, carving crater beside crater in Semipalatinsk; that, in Brazil, the Uruguayan national team defeated the Brazilians two to one to take the World Cup, unleashing a wave of euphoria that culminated in self-immolations: nosedives from the upper deck and the hysteria of ad-hoc acrobats who clambered to the roof, eager to jump from a greater height; that Celia Cruz, quite likely the only singer to transcend three generations of your family’s musical delights, debuted with Sonora Matancera, covering “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers” by José Vargas whose lyrics say: “A gardener sows a seed / in the soil of his love / another prunes its leaves / for whom does the flower bloom?” while, in Peru, an earthquake destroyed two thirds of Cusco, paving a trail with the dead and turning the living into ghosts, the wordless, faceless, spiritless survivors who wandered for days or even weeks amidst the rubble and the deceased in a psychological if not spiritual daze that garnered the attention of Doctor Raúl Watanabe, a forerunner of Latin American social psychiatry with whom your grandfather would trade innumerable letters: nearly all of the survivors had gathered in the environs of the stadium where Cienciano would play Sports Boys del Callao for the title; that, in Viena, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, responding to the theory of the refrigerator mother, shook what had been to date the pillars of the study of autism, redefining it as an emotional disturbance rooted in the psychological damage inflicted by the mother; and that, in the prefecture of Niigata and more specifically the city of Gosen, the Japanese drawer, illustrator, and animator Yoshifumi Kondō, famous for Princess Mononoke, Only Yesterday, and Whispers of the Heart, but not for his equally decisive Hear the Neurons Sing, a study commissioned by Kyoto University to trace the development of the fetal nervous system as no person or institute had before, was born.

1951

Your uncle’s screams, your mother will tell you, disappeared after he moved into your grandma’s room.

No, I couldn’t say when my parents stopped sharing a bedroom—assuming they ever did, your mother will reply, digressing from what she, apparently, wanted to say.

While my older brother slept blissfully through the night, even the silence woke me up. A silence pockmarked, she’ll add, staring, without realizing it, at the wall behind your chair, by whatever bugs and vermin were chatting in the wainscoting.

Other times, she’ll continue, separating her gaze from the wall and fixing it on the ceiling, her lips drawing a familiar downturned arc, I heard the moans my father never bothered to conceal.  So, not too unlike the year before, one night I struck out on my own. I crossed the house, strolled through the kitchen, and crawled the last meters to his office.

She was a distant relative or the domestic help, your grandmother’s friend, maybe a nurse. Could be a former patient, one of the many who, like Ofelia, became assistants in the hospital, the clinic, or my mother’s shop.

They never caught you? you’ll ask, filling a pause between her words. Not once, she’ll answer. They didn’t see me. Because they couldn’t see me. Because after I’d tried for so long to be invisible, invisibility had become my absolute.

I understood, she’ll explain, gathering her hair over one shoulder, that I already was invisible, that no one in that house paid me any attention.

Yes, her sisters and her youngest older brother, yes. But not at school, where she didn’t have friends, where the teachers forgot her name.

I really believed I was different.  That maybe, my body didn’t exist.

No, no way.

They would’ve nabbed her on the spot, your youngest uncle will contend. One night or another—your mother’s brother will snap his fingers—bango! my kid sister caught in the act.

Your grandpa stayed up preparing for his conferences. Be it in the clinic or the hospital, Pops worked like a horse. Those were the only hours he had left.

I can still hear the paper he gave at the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health, your uncle, the one who could see your mother, will say. It was his doctoral thesis and his research in La Castañeda mashed into one. My oldest brother along with yours truly formed a compulsory, two-seat audience while he rehearsed.

Your favorite uncle, a sensible and to appearances impartial man, a caring father and an exemplary spouse who will vigorously deny your grandfather tortured any child in any way at any time and will categorically reject the suggestion he bedded other women in the family home, will tell you that, thanks to his thesis, Mexican neuropsychiatry shook off Medievalism and began implementing drug therapy as an alternative to electroshocks.

But without realizing it and almost by mistake, your mother’s most brotherly brother, your uncle who countless times and on innumerable occasions will sub for your father and anchor your emotional universe, will wonder if maybe, after your grandpa polished his papers and dared to dabble in the drugs better left for patients, crossing—call it professional curiosity—into a room he hadn’t inhabited or even peered into before, if maybe then the cocaine, the heroin, or some other undiagnosed addiction turned him into someone else.

And although it sounded supremely unlikely—improbable but not implausible—, if his father slipped a former patient into his office during the dead hours of the night, who knew? To the extent that your uncle recalls or would presume to speak, there was only one: his sister-in-law, your grandma’s half-sister.

Your uncle, when you try to pursue the subject, will clearly prefer not to, not denying it but skirting it, precluding it, flitting over its surface. He’ll go on and on about your grandpa’s dissertation, as if a piece of antediluvian doctoral work were the keystone to your questions and the centerpiece of your doubts.

Your grandpa, your uncle will continue, was basically the godfather of Mexican psychopharmacology. He revolutionized the treatment of neuroses and epilepsy, he introduced and popularized chemical castration.

Aberrant sexual practice always fascinated him. And again, estranged from his own voice and aloof to the meaning of his words, he’ll admit that yes, maybe yes, he may have done something untoward to his second son.

But with an indispensable caveat: for his father, his brother wasn’t a case study but a source of inspiration.

You’ll read that that year, in New York, the UN created the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; that, in West Germany, Ilsa Koch, the witch of Buchenwald and the wife of the concentration camp commander, was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the torture, murder, and chemical castration of thousands of human beings, mostly Jewish, while the Mossad, the newly founded Israeli secret service, would disappear seven Palestinians, none of them to return; that, in Mexico, Televimex launched the Stars Channel, the first guests being Celia Cruz—performing “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers”—and Sansoncito, grandson of El Sansón, a Jota singer and native of Zuera, Aragón, who never recognized your great-grandmother, the half-sister of Sansoncito’s mother, a woman conceived during El Sanson’s tour through the heart of Mexico and fated to perish in an asylum: your great-grandmother who, years later, would remarry, this time to a miner of Spanish descent, as if to remedy her own beginnings; that, on the Enewetak Atoll and in accordance with Operation Greenhouse, the United States military successfully detonated their seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth atomic bombs while, in Mexico, the Association of Spanish Language Academies was created, deriving from the First Congress of Spanish Language Academies and, in England, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an unequivocal opponent of language academies and any suggestion of that ilk—“whatever remains encapsulated in the idea of language’s expressivity is necessarily incapable of being expressed in that language and is, consequently, in the most perfectly precise sense of the word, inexpressible”—, died; and that the Mexican pharmacist Luis E. Miramontes synthesized 19-noretisterona, the first oral contraceptive in history, a pill your mother would take—and subsequently stop taking—years later when, she’ll tell you, in the besotted clairvoyance after a night of drinks, she knew she wanted to be a mom.

Translated by Josh Dunn

Photo: Jonathan Tesmaye Salvador, Unsplash.

City of Asylum Pittsburgh is honored to have hosted Cuban writer and journalist Jorge Olivera Castillo as a writer-in-residence since November 2021. Jorge has published six books of poetry and two short story collections and is a well-known dissident, whose work has been banned in Cuba. It has been a great privilege to welcome Jorge to Pittsburgh as part of our residency program and to witness how he and his wife Nancy Alfaya Hernandez, a Cuban human rights and women’s right activist in her own right, have flourished here. Jorge’s newest collection of sonnets, En el filo del horizonte (On the Edge of the Horizon) was written during his time in residency in Pittsburgh and reflects themes of love, resilience, the despair of political turmoil, and his experience as an artist living in exile. Jorge’s work has been translated into several languages, including Czech, English, Italian, and Polish. 

Translator’s Note by Erin Goodman:

Hard Earth (Tierra dura) is a short story collection by Cuban writer Jorge Olivera Castillo made up of fictional accounts of a soldier in Angola based on Olivera Castillo’s own experiences. “It’s safe to say that this book is the fruit of a miracle,” says Olivera Castillo. “It’s not easy to emerge relatively unscathed from a civil war that took place in the jungle and that lasted for almost thirty years (1975–2002). The few truces that occurred in this period only heightened the conflict. I arrived at that forlorn place at the age of nineteen in the summer of 1981. For twenty-six months I survived in underground shelters, exposed to diseases that almost killed me, sporadic bombardments, insomnia, and hunger. The daytime heat was oppressive, nighttime was cold, and fearsome wild animals made the rounds in the dark early mornings. In short, everything one could imagine from a context where death was as natural as the remarkable duality of lush forests and dusty savannahs: the only landscapes I saw until the day of my much-anticipated return.”

By the time Cuba’s military engagement in Angola ceased in 1991, Cuban casualties numbered around 10,000 dead, wounded, or missing. In total, an estimated one million people were killed and millions more displaced as a result of the conflict. 2025 marks fifty years of independence in Angola, and fifty years since the start of the conflict that would last twenty-seven years. At the same time, the world has been returning to Cold War-era polarization, such that shedding light on another proxy war in Africa could be timely. These stories are told from a personal point of view, with very simplistic language and a matter-of-fact style that focuses on the implications of war on the psyche of young soldiers, rather than pushing any political agenda.

Erin Goodman

“The Feast,” from Hard Earth

The skinless, gutless monkey burned on the bonfire.

It was small, but that didn’t matter much. It would satisfy our hunger and that was enough. We were on the verge of a sunset characterized by thick reddish clouds that took on various shapes molded by the breeze..

“That one looks like a horse,” Arturo pointed his index finger toward the sky through the thin veil of smoke covering his face.

“I don’t think it looks like an animal. Hunger has stimulated your imagination,” replied René, crouching and turning the body of the headless primate on the wooden spit held up by stilts on each end of the campfire.

“It wasn’t an illusion. The cloud was in the shape of a horse. Look! Now it’s a crocodile,” he enthused with his arm extended in the direction of another discovery.

 “Compadre, stop looking up there. Come back to earth, where our problems are. I don’t even have the strength to lift my head,” said Bernardo.

“I agree. An empty stomach is why you’re seeing a whole zoo in the sky,” said René.

“Nah. It’s just a distraction from the hunger pangs.”

“We’ll be eating in twenty minutes,” René added.

The announcement stimulated the salivary glands of two of the three soldiers.

It would be their first bite in the two days they had been in the jungle. They supposed they were the only survivors who had managed to escape the devastating attack from the enemy troops.

Since their successful fugue, they had been wandering aimlessly through the dense vegetation that camouflaged hundreds of animals, some less evasive than the monkey on their spit. 

Arturo had led the hunt. He hit the target on the third shot. There was just one bullet left in the only magazine. René and Bernardo only had their sharp Russian Kizlyar knives. Their firearms were long gone: both weapons rested at the bottom of the Bomkula River, relegated to a memory of how they had overcome that obstacle in a frantic chase that had begun amid a hail of bullets and explosions of mortar shells.

“I need a break,” said René, pausing from spinning the animal’s rapidly diminishing flesh.

“From what I can see, there’ll be almost nothing left!” exclaimed Bernardo, getting up to take over the cooking duties.

“That’s normal, the volume decreases as it loses body fat. The point is to eat something, even if we’re not satiated,” said René. “So, is this the first time you’ll be eating monkey?” 

“It’s my third time,” Bernardo interjected.

Before answering, Arturo made a face and sighed.

“Honestly, the first time I could hardly eat it,” he said. “That was about six months ago in Benguela. We hunted four monkeys slightly larger than this one. I only had one bite and I swallowed it practically without chewing. My world was turned upside down. Although I wasn’t as hungry then as I am right now…”

“Maybe this time you’ll wish you had more. Look how toasty it’s getting. It couldn’t be better. And who knows what’s ahead in the coming days. We need to replenish our energy. Nobody knows how long we’ll have to hold out. We’re in limbo. It seems like there’s no way out of this jungle, it’s like we’re trapped.”

“René, you’re right that when hunger strikes, there’s no room for scruples. How long until dinner?” Arturo joked.

Bernardo assessed the hunk of smoking meat without interrupting his circular arm movement. The monkey would soon be taken off the rod and divided up equally.

“The feast begins in ten minutes,” he announced, raising his voice slightly as if it were a special event. He had assumed the stance of a professional announcer with the palm of one hand cocked to the corner of his mouth to broadcast the news.

The darkness crept in stealthily, breaking the near picture-perfect twilight. The gentle, varied colors yielded to twilight’s menacing shadows.

The three men were minutes away from a fleeting but vital moment of glory. They would face their second nighttime foray, now with only one bullet left and a pair of knives. At least their hunger would be somewhat sated by the bland flesh of the monkey.

They would wholeheartedly celebrate the chance to break their fast and the fact that they were alive.

The sun showed its last flashes. Arturo, leaning against the trunk of an imposing tree, discovered the shape of another animal in one of the clouds blown by the wind.

It’s an elephant, he thought, without voicing the idea.

“I think we can divvy it up now. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little raw inside,” René suggested.

Bernardo agreed, grasping the wooden stick by both ends and bringing it next to the fire near the tree where Arturo sat.

The chunk of meat was about eight inches long and barely four inches wide.

“Any more time and we would have had to settle for sucking on the bones,” René commented.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” said Bernardo. With a couple of deft movements he extracted the spit from inside the ape and unsheathed his knife from the right side of his leather belt.

Arturo accepted his portion unenthusiastically. Bernardo had carved the meat like a professional butcher.

The soldiers began to quench their voracious appetites. They were aware of its limits. Their emergency dinner was rationed and bland.

René bit frantically,  hardly chewing. Arturo took his time between bites. He didn’t feel as voracious as his companions who were determined to gnaw it down to the marrow.

Night thickened over the jungle. The curved sliver-moon was dulled by the fog, giving it a melancholy hue.

“It was delicious, wasn’t it?” Bernardo exclaimed, before taking a sip of water from his canteen.

“I have to admit that it wasn’t bad,” responded Arturo, gnashing at the last piece of meat. “I didn’t savor it like you did, but it was worth it. Now we can hold out until we can hunt something else or find our way out of this labyrinth.” 

“Don’t throw away the bone,” said René, holding out his hand.

“I expect your solidarity, mate,” said Bernardo with a wink to reinforce his message.

René looked at him sideways without answering, concentrating on breaking the bone.

“Here you go,” he said dryly.

“Are you upset?”

“No, not at all. Everything’s fine.”

Arturo was the first to lean back against the tree.

In just over a minute, the flames of the bonfire reignited. René had rekindled it with remarkable skill.

Each soldier took his place around the base of the tree. The bark of the trunk showed thick, perfectly outlined striations, shadowy in the gloomy night yet tinged with fine embers from the fire flickering over the mound of dry branches.

The evening was intense. Darkness weighed on their exhausted bodies, as they lay blissfully oblivious to the harsh intermittent jungle noises.

At dawn, the three lay in almost the same positions. The hyena’s first bite was to René’s abdomen. Not one had tried to defend himself. The herd feasted on their corpses.

Translated by Erin Goodman

Three Sonnets from On the Edge of the Horizon

I

At the edge of the landscape
goes life with its brightness and
solid shadows, stuck in old cloths
that claim to mask the wound,

that wind along the vast obverse
of the soul in its intermittent breath;
expatriated in an exilic flash
that ceases suddenly in its reversal.

The days, the seasons go by,
in the pupils of the crowd, lost
in the customary cycles 

of speculating on the conditions
—abstracted, sitting, or squatting—
of a trip to who knows what village.

V

Like a spark of light that goes out,
in the slow passage of hours
that mark the beat of each dawn,
obsession is bred by certain virtue.

It seemed the radiance of a diamond—
sprinkled like holy water
over a sole parishioner who meditates
prostrate before an extravagant altar.

In reality, a confused gesture,
embrace rehearsed a thousand times,
the promise of future growth

uncovering the extent of abuse,
motivated by reasons unknown,
betrayal ever present, addictive.

VIII

The moor, the rope, the precipice
complete the dowry of vileness;
they offer us the crude certainty of
the universality of torture.

Greedy promises notoriously made
to serve us up on silver platters,
omens the prophet unleashes
with gestures revealing

a euphoria whose aim is the expedited
mutation of a spacious, rosy orchard
in a garden of bitter truths—

impunity without mitigation,
the insignificance of forgiving, and
the insufferable burdens the human back bears.

Translated by Jonathan Bennett Bonilla

Photo: Pedro Domingos, Unsplash.

Erin Goodman is a literary translator residing in Boston. She selected and translated a collection of poetry by Juana Rosa Pita (b. 1939, Havana) entitled The Miracle Unfolds (Song Bridge Press, 2021), and the memoir by former Chilean minister Sergio Bitar, Prisoner of Pinochet (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Her short fiction and poetry translations have appeared in Poetry International Rotterdam, spoKe, Northwest Review, Presence, New England Review, and Los Angeles Review, among other publications.

Jonathan Bennett Bonilla (they/them) is a writer, translator, editor, and educator who grew up between languages, moving around the United States, Costa Rica, and Spain. Bennett Bonilla is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts and also teaches literature and creative writing in the Humanities Department. Their area of specialization and interest is in History, Theory and Practice of Social Movements. Bennett Bonilla is an advocate for social justice and is committed to disrupting white supremacy and cis-hetero-patriarchy in all of its institutional forms.

The following selections come from A Garden Razed to Ashes, an English translation of the 2014 book-length fragmentary poem, Un jardín arrasado de cenizas by Víctor Cabrera. This work by Cabrera draws inspiration from the instrumental “Japanese Folk Song” as performed by Thelonious Monk (and his quartet) on the album Straight, No Chaser (1967). The instrumental by Monk is, itself, a bebop adaptation of the piece of Japanese traditional music, “Kojo no Tsuki” [The Moon over the Ruined Castle], composed by Rentaro Taki in 1901. In these fragments, we can observe the transmission of ideas across time and space as different musicians and authors reimagine the same melody, orchestrating and improvising different approaches to the same melody, carrying the same premise from Tokyo to New York City to Mexico City and beyond. In addition to containing echoes of Monk and Taki’s musical work, Cabrera’s work is also highly self-referential, and the poem comments on the writing process which produced it. Reading this collection, we can see behind the curtain to observe how being transfixed by this haunting and enigmatic work of music can lead to the generation of boundless creativity.        

Layers of meaning permeate every aspect of these fragments. Throughout A Garden Razed to Ashes, induvial words simultaneously carry connotations in multiple fields such as music theory and architecture or dance and astronomy. Recurring evocative images in the poem also come to embody strata of significance. A solitary island with a cherry tree growing on it, a contemplative bird, and the faint, distant echo of an ancient garden’s ruins, as well as other motifs, go beyond merely explaining the different versions of the music that inspired them; rather, they create a new world out of the tones and textures of the tune. In addition to Cabrera’s words and images, the formal composition of these poems also reflects the disparate cultural influences that lead to the creation of the music that inspired this book. Jazz music lends its essence to aspects of the poem in the use of rhythm, repetition, and improvisation. The influence of Japanese culture can be felt in formal features such as the haiku structure, and in images such as cherry blossoms.

Cabrera is a highly prolific author and editor whose writings include collections of poetry and short stories. A Garden Razed to Ashes is representative of his style, as his works often enter into dialogue with other works of art including popular music, television, and film. 

Interested publishers should contact the translator at jlrich30@louisville.edu. 

James Richie
Louisville, Kentucky 

From A Garden Razed to Ashes

A suite within a suite. Tokonoma. A mental shelter. An isolated nucleus.
In the ether vision house, there exists an opportune point for detachment. A minor hideaway for
transcendence.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
Returning is the beginning for a new point of departure. Nothing is the same after being itself. Nobody is devoured twice by the same flame – the flame changes. Nobody is anything.
…………Revision. Perversion. Diversion.
…………Edition. Redemption. Innovation.
…………Introspection. Introversion. Introvision.
Treason and Tradition.
…………Variance and dissonance.
…………Version. Intervention. Repetition.
…………Repetition. Reedition. Repetition.
…………Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
A space contained within another space. A fractal song. An infinite melody.
                                                                                                                                           The foggiest idea.

*

I hear footsteps in the neighboring room. Not words. Slight sounds. Dubious murmurs in a spherical language. Airy syllables before a broken mirror. Encrusted cortex splinters. An archetypal orbit whirls beyond this emptiness. The drifting island’s silhouette. 

Someone besieges me from the other side of these walls. Breathing like a blazing shadow comet. Someone else hears my footsteps there. Those murmurs. My coughing. Someone who, without knowing me, is already leaving an impression on me. 

With eyes closed, I behold the softly-lit dimension. 

*

Suspended moment
The bird contemplates the sea
From the garden pond. 

*

What is the opposite of polishing?
I’m talking about stickiness. Superimposition. Purification-opposed ploys.
Instead of resolving tensions, focusing on their razor-sharp edges. Giving tribute to the scraps.
I’m talking about murky mixtures. Altered states. The corruption of sacred metaphors.
Distant domestic static murmurs are present. The universal frequency of Pandora’s beat box. Can anyone here hear my thoughts?
If I say I’m blanking out, it’s because I’m calling upon a garden razed to ashes. 

*

There is a latent flourishing on my borders. A secret spring sustained by its auguries’ tension. Flowing through stalled mental mechanisms: palpable internal storms upon typing certain phrases. Sudden attacks on the island’s borders. Synthetic discharges.
If I woke up now – if this very moment I interrupted these visions’ outflow – in the suite’s yellow space, I could perceive the light swing of the cherry blossoms. 

Translated by James Richie

Photo: Josh Wilburne, Unsplash.

Antonio Díaz Oliva: Dear Lisa, greetings from Chicago, “that somber city” where I have been living since the pandemic. Allow me to start our dialogue by asking about your location: Decatur. What can you tell me about Decatur? And what brought you to the state of Georgia? The word Decatur has an interesting sound, a je ne sais quoi…

Lisa Dillman: Greetings, Antonio. I can tell this conversation is going to be fun. It’s funny that you mention the “sound” of Decatur: You can easily spot newcomers and telemarketers because they say: “DEK-uh-tour” rather than “Dee-KAY-durh,” which just has a better ring to it. Decatur is a lovely, literary part of town, with several indie bookstores (shoutout to Charis, Brave and Kind, Little Shop of Stories, Eagle Eye…). Pre-pandemic, the Decatur Book Festival was, I believe, the fourth or fifth largest independent book fair in the country. I am a fan. And what brought me here was Emory, where I’ve been teaching for over twenty years now. You’re teaching as well, aren’t you?

A.D.O.: Actually, I’m not! For the first time in my life since my early twenties, I’m not doing any teaching! It’s been a year plus since I started to work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA) as an editor and translator. I can’t complain since, around the time when I started to feel academic fatigue, I published Campus, my latest novel, where, to put it mildly, I painted a not-so-nice (yet tragicomical and picaresque) fresco of your standard Spanish and Cultural Studies department in a US university….

Anyway, Decatur sounds lovely! Here I must disclose my ignorance when it comes to certain parts of this country (which to me feels more like several different countries glued together). That said, here and there I encounter cities with names like Decatur or Truth or Consequences (in New Mexico!) or a city that feels like a doppelgänger of a city that sounds familiar to me, like Valparaiso… in Indiana?

Apropos of doppelgängers, which can be considered like a translation of something or someone, I wanted to tell you about the first time I read “your words.” I’m talking about that beautiful volume that includes three novels by a friend we have in common, Yuri Herrera. First, tell me how you ended up translating Yuri’s novellas. And second, I just said “your words” to talk about your translations… and those are your words, aren’t they?  

L.D.: Editor and translator at MCA, that sounds incredibly cool. And I just laughed out loud about Campus, which I must read. I love academic satire and have never seen it applied to Spanish departments. I’m cringing already. But to answer your question, I lucked into translating Yuri. Many years ago, the wonderful Henry Reese at Sampsonia Way, the Pittsburgh City of Asylum magazine, wanted to publish an excerpt of Kingdom Cons. Yuri had been selected by Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was a writer-in-residence there at the time, as an example of an up-and-coming writer who people should know about. My friend Katie didn’t have time to translate the sample, which led to one of the happiest translatorial coincidences imaginable. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to keep translating his books. And yes, you did read my words (and since you know Yuri, you know how generous and open and vocal and down-to-earth he is with regard to both his writing and the role of translation), and also the words—or at the very least some of the suggestions—of editors and of the people I accost to ask about one quandary or another. So it’s not something I feel proprietorial about. My translations are an iteration, to use Karen Emmerich’s term, of an earlier text. Translation is far more collaborative than people often think. 

Anyway, let me ask you a couple of questions. You’ve written novels and short stories, satire and horror, and undoubtedly other things I’d love to hear about should you care to elaborate. Do you think of yourself as a certain kind of writer? And how did you get started?

A.D.O.: Before I answer, I want to tell you that last night’s event was a complete success! The book launch for the anthology (Through the Night Like a Snake) with our story was at Pilsen Community Books, a bookstore I love. It was me, translator Megan McDowell, and writer and translator Alejandra Oliva, who has a very interesting book about translation and migration: Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration.

L.D.: Oh, excellent. I’m so happy to hear that, and to learn about this book—we’re doing a unit on “interpretation” in one of my classes right now. Maybe I can incorporate it in the future.

A.D.O.: Anyway, thinking about myself as a specific kind of writer is, most of the time, a slippery subject. These days, because of “Rabbits,” and also because of “Little Animals” (another short story that’s coming out soon, translated by the wonderful Charlotte Coombe), I have to think of myself as a “horror writer”! I will take it (for now), in part because last night confirmed to me that horror fans are, let’s say, sometimes “more emotionally invested” than others. One reader came up and told me that my story reminded her of escaping an intense rural/religious community (she used the word “cult”) somewhere in Pennsylvania, but also that these days she works in a company that uses… rabbits as therapy pets. I was of course happily horrified to hear all of this! 

L.D.: Ha!

A.D.O.: And to answer your other question, I try not to think too much about myself as a writer. When I’m writing, I’m a writer. When I’m not, I’m an editor and a translator and a parent… and certainly a procrastinator. I suspect this is my way of dealing with the “figura del escritor,” which was one of the collateral damages of the Boom: a time when Latin American writers projected a serious intellectual persona who provided serious intellectual opinions on all possible topics.

L.D.: It’s funny, this image—the “figura,” the posturing—is something I associate with being an “author” but not a “writer.” Maybe because of authority, authoritarian.

A.D.O.: I mentioned this last night, at the event, when Alejandra asked me about our story, “Rabbits,” which I wrote like ten years ago, in Spanish, although the idea was in my head way before that…

Speaking of this story, I would like to ask you something that neither myself, nor my editors, nor my therapist (lol), have helped me to come to terms with: Why rabbits? Why did I choose that specific animal? Who knows! Maybe you can tell me about your experience from the other side of the glass: What was it like seeing these rabbits as a reader and then translating them into English?

 L.D.: One of the things I love about translation is being subsumed by a text, that period when you think about it all the time and it sort of haunts you—pun intended. And, for me, rabbits actually became creepy through and because of your writing. I started thinking of their beady little eyes. And the quick, jerking thumps of those legs. Unpredictable! What will they do next? The constant nervous twitching. Of course, it’s hard not to apply them to the “formative experience” that’s at the core of “Rabbits.” How many things might it allude to, how polysemous is it? To me, “fucking like rabbits” was a formative part of what Raquel and the protagonist did in their time on the outside, right? I think there’s something central to good horror—and I’m just reflecting on this now—that involves taking something that’s not inherently horrifying and making it so. Which means that taking the cute little bunny-wunnies and making them terrifying is a testament to your writing.

A.D.O.: I do have to confess that I have a lot of fun (in an evil way?) trying to take things that are cute or twee and turn them into weird and/or eerie little monsters. So, thank you for your words. They made me giggle (also in a very evil way!). I love your reflection on horror as a genre, which tackles what I did in other stories from the same short story collection. Because isn’t horror (el terror, as we say in Spanish) in its most interesting vein when something we think is familiar suddenly becomes a reminder that everything in this life can become eerie? 

At least for me, this thing we call reality has always been a strange and uncanny affair… I guess good horror is like an alarm telling us that.

Now I want to ask you something that’s less horrific (I hope). I’m curious about some of the challenges that the translation offers to you. I remember we exchanged a few emails about some very specific things. And what to leave in Spanish or not. As a Chilean (that is, as someone who is not sure if what he speaks is actually Spanish or just mumblecore, lol), I’m always curious about how Chilenidad is perceived through writing.

L.D.: You know, it’s interesting. I remember my interview for grad school in the UK, where I did an MA in Translation under Peter Bush. I told him I wanted to specialize in Spanish Civil War fiction. Can you imagine? The naivete. This was the late nineties, I’d just done an MA in the US on Carmen Martín Gaite’s fiction and there was so much Spanish Civil War fiction that I loved. And Peter said, basically, “Ummmmm. That’s not how it works.” At the time I clearly had little concept of how much of translation is research. Each and every project. And not just subject matter, i.e., researching the backstories of what you translate, learning about the epoch and events and so on, but also the linguistic variation. And I remember checking some terms with you when I was unsure of whether they had a different meaning in Chile (e.g. guagua being not a bus but a baby!). But the most memorable Chilenism, I think, was guacho. What to do about guacho. I had never heard it used to mean “alone,” and in Chile it seems to be used in a number of other ways, too. But the fun of the translation quandary with guacho was that Raquel remembered a song: “Toda la gente guacha.” And in the story, when this first happens, it’s just a song lyric. And perhaps because guacho is quite polysemous in Chilean, it could suggest several things. But in English, anyone hearing “All the lonely people,” immediately thinks of “Eleanor Rigby,” which of course is the song Raquel is remembering, but we don’t know it yet at the time. So in the translation, I changed it to “Where do they all come from?”—the following line in the song, which is less of a giveaway. That way we get to hold on to the mystery until it’s later revealed that this memory referred to a cover version of the Beatles song. Another clear marker of Chilenidad is the main character using Pinocchio instead of Pinochet. I really wanted to keep that casual barb; it’s got so much flavor. 

A.D.O.: Yes, back in the early nineties we had so many nicknames for Pinochet. Pinocchio, as you say, or Pinocho. The Pinochetistas, those not-so-closeted-fascists that still exist to this day, used to call him “el tata” (grandpa or pop), or “mi general” (my general). Pinocho made a lot of sense to me because he was a puppet and the CIA was, well, Geppetto. We nineties kids, in the process of being brainwashed by US pop culture and slang, made up another nickname for him: Pino-shit!

L.D.: That’s fantastic. You’ve got to love a single-word, code-switching, expletive nickname insult. 

A.D.O.: I love the first part of your reply. Your answer to Peter Bush was somehow naif, as you say, but also brimming with enthusiasm and stamina! I don’t know how you feel about this, but when I translate, I do some research and I also need to remain ignorant, precisely to keep my stamina alive. I want to be surprised, especially in the first pass. I’m glad you touched on these topics related to translating, and the start of your career, since I wanted to ask you this. Have you noticed that translator’s notes have become like a genre in itself these days? I personally love this—it’s like the translator, who used to be invisible, now is willing to open the door to his/her/their house and welcome you with something like: “Let me tell you the story of how I translated this other story.” I know of someone who recently translated the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit and at the same time published a whole book (!) about translating Diamela Eltit. It’s like a Borgesian tale: the translator’s note becomes the real and only possible book. What do you think? Are translators’ confessions becoming a literary genre? Besides your words accompanying Yuri Herrera’s trilogy, have you ever penned a translator’s note?

L.D.: Ah, you’re referring to Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire, yes! It’s an amazing book—and clearly spoke to a whole community of people who are hankering for this kind of writing. And are now very excited about Jennifer Croft’s new novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, which two of my book clubs have chosen for their July reads! But I digress. Danny and I have co-translated a couple of books together, and though none of them have translator’s notes, we did do a Lit Hub piece on co-translation and how it works. And yes, I do think translators’ notes are becoming more common, whether as paratext or published in another venue (on the publisher’s website, or an online journal, for instance). As far as my personal forays, in addition to writing about Yuri’s trilogy, I did a note for Ten Planets, his most recent book to appear in English, which is a sci-fi (for lack of a better word) story collection. And I wrote a translator’s note for Such Small Hands, the first Andrés Barba novel I translated (working on the seventh this summer!). In general, I really do think people want to know more about what goes on behind the scenes, about hitherto invisible or invisibilized processes and people and manipulations and the subjectivity therein. And that goes for translators talking about their own work, but also for books like Corine Tachtiris’ Translation and Race and Karen Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals and Kate Briggs’ This Little Art and the fact that Emily Wilson has been interviewed so extensively. And I assume and hope that the role of editing will be the next iteration of this deep dive into the multilayered process of publication. Speaking of which, ADO, are you writing at the moment? You mentioned earlier that you are now thinking of yourself as a “horror writer.” So, in between being papá and the museum, what are you working on? 

A.D.O.: As always, I’m in between several (and, most of the time, contradictory) projects at the same time. They are like my children, asking for my attention. But lately I have spent more and more time on two projects. 1) A non-fiction compilation of some of my journalism, which includes forty interviews with US writers (from Don DeLillo to Junot Diaz), from when I worked at a magazine in Chile, and 2) a horror-translation-nouvelle which takes place in a museum. It features a character, the translator, who kind of isolates himself from the world by translating contemporary art… until one day he becomes his own translation—or doppelgänger. I must confess that I’m writing this nouvelle in English, although with the promise that I will self-translate into Spanish and first get the book out there in that language. Just like Manuel Puig in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. In fact, the work-in-progress title of the project is “Eternal Curse on the Translator of These Pages.”

L.D.: Wow, what a brilliant title. I love it! And since you’re going to self-translate, I guess cursing yourself is acceptable, because you’ll have the perfect “spell” to remove the curse as well. I’ll look forward to both books in the future.

A.D.O.: I hope this conversation will be the beginning of a friendship, or the continuation of the friendship we have already established with “Rabbits” and this exchange. I would love to visit Decatur in the next few years, and of course you can always come visit me in Chicago.

L.D.: Deal! And I feel the same way. Thanks, ADO, this conversation has been a real pleasure, and the start, rather than the end, of something. 

Read a preview of “La experiencia formativa” from ADO’s book Las Experiencias,
available in the US via SED, here.

Read a preview of “Rabbits,” Lisa’s translation of ADO’s short story included in the anthology
Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories,
available in the US via Two Lines Press, here. 

Photo: Kim Menikh,  Unsplash

What is translation? 

How is it that I read a sentence in English and my brain chooses and orders words in Spanish? Sometimes I try to freeze the mechanism at a given moment to observe it, and I feel like I’m losing my mind. 

***

And in the periods when I’m not translating, toward what do I employ this incredibly specific mechanism of transference? Toward mental processes that don’t call for it, slowing them down? 

***

I lived in New York for a year thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. Every morning, I settled into the eighth floor of the university’s library. I translated the poems that Charles Tomlinson had written in New York, decades ago, thanks to a Fulbright grant. And like him, like every foreigner, I wrote (why would I have escaped the cliché if neither Calvino, nor Lihn, nor Simone de Beauvoir, nor García Lorca had) a long poem about New York (which was really about me). 

So through the books, the parks, the subway trains, the streets, I trailed my translation unintentionally: We walk up Madison. It is the end / Of a winter afternoon. And I walked up Madison on my way home, and it was the end of a winter afternoon, and I chose […] the street / That seems like a home returned to, grown / Suddenly festive as we enter it / With the odour of chestnuts on the corner braziers. 

***

To translate is to think about oneself. 

***

&: an untranslatable authorial gesture?

A conversation with Shira about the ampersand in relation to a poem she’s translated and that we’re editing: it’s a subtle gesture, she tells me. Let’s make another subtle gesture, I say. Leaving the ampersand isn’t so subtle: it means introducing a symbol from another language. And what about using a “+”? But + also exists in English. It suggests an abbreviative intention, says Shira. A notation, I add. But colloquial. Yes, a gesture of speed: it saves two out of the three characters in “and.” And is there anything briefer than “y” in Spanish?

Sometimes to translate a poem, we try to get far deeper inside the author’s head than they themselves did. 

Really, who do we think we are. 

***

The preposition: that restless artefact that keeps us awake. 

***

Everything that must work well, dynamically speaking, for one to be able to sit down and translate: the eyes (sometimes they go blurry), the breath (sometimes it falls out of step), the hands (sometimes they hurt), the wrist that controls the mouse (it’s permanently inflamed), the neck, with its entire long, problematic continuation that it is the spine. 

***

If the translation gets jammed up, you have to step away. 

Go to the bathroom, get water, look for nail polish. 

If the translation gets jammed up, you have to unjam the body. 

***

It’s possible to keep translating while crying. 

***

Half the searches related to a translation lead us to a place we weren’t looking for but that is very close to us. Suspiciously close. 

***

When you’re translating, it’s important to read lots of other things that are completely unrelated to the translated text because, by some miracle, the answers to all your questions will appear. 

Or watch movies with subtitles. 

Or watch movies. 

Or read signs on the street.

The problematic word comes to us from the depths of chance. 

It’s the magic of translation. 

***

I can’t translate a book gradually, one day on and three off, mixing in other tasks: a book is a mass you must throw yourself into, give into—I might even say with which you must become one.

Many hours a day. 

Every day. 

***

Yesterday, in the translation workshop, we were working on a poem by Ted Hughes and we jumped unexpectedly to Miguel Hernández. How? There was a rhythm, a syntactical disposition, and a diffuse semantic sentiment. 

I have the sense that the task of translation always leads everything to merge with everything. An hour of concentration and discussion about a text and we’re swimming in the general ocean of form and content.  

***

In the translation videocall sessions with Shira, I always jot down individual words around the poem we’re working on. They’re usually clues or ideas or names that the tangential conversation has led us to: the place we’ve arrived after drifting further and further from the specific problems of the translation (but isn’t this the most specific problem in translation? Returning you to the world, in the broadest sense possible?). I make these notes to remind myself to read some author we’ve mentioned, or—most often, I think—to develop in my own writing some germ of an idea that’s come up in our chat. Curiously, that intention, impassioned in the moment, rarely comes to fruition. Once we’ve said goodbye, I move onto some other task, returning the page we’ve been working on to the file labeled “Shira” (one of those accordion folders), where it remains until the following week. I’m always fantasizing about going through those pages and writing something based on those notes. Or at least trying. It’s a lot of honest material, the fruit of collaboration, I think. And it’s sitting there, abandoned. But it’s not abandoned: it’s inside the translated poem. The passage from English to Spanish included all of it. The new version contains in its mortar all those notes from the illuminated rush. 

Some notes whose meanings I barely remember: 

From “Comice” by Stroud:
-empathy
-Mervin: Ancient/Asian figures
-Rabassa, Goldstein, Bly
-Sweet Adeline (Berkeley) 

From “Dissolving” by Stroud:
-Fragile things [this one ended up being the genesis and title of a poem I wrote]
-Alexis

From “This Waiting” by Stroud:
-“all morning” poems
-Eugene, Oregon
-Sufi poetry – trans. Daniel Ledinsky

From “In Sepia” by Stroud:
-Salinger: happiness is a solid 

From “After the Opera” by Stroud:
-Workshop: a single sentence – rhythm 

***

After reading her version of a poem by Tomlinson in the translation workshop, Laura tells us: “This time I followed my instincts, and I was a lot happier.” “It shows in the poem,” we tell her. 

***

Translating is guessing. 

***

Over and over, I make that naïve mistake of thinking, “It’s a very straightforward translation.” It never is. Translation is always the knot of a problem. The simplest decision can have ramifications for crucial ones, for details that have yet to be solidified (always the note of the note of the note, that provisional state of the word); the most superficial step from one language into another tends to take on indefinite depth. 

(Today I confirm this yet again while translating a very short story by Bruno Munari.)

César Aira: Now That I Don’t Translate 

A translator is constantly considering the big little problems of writing’s microscopy. I stopped translating ten years ago, and it was a relief, but over time I began to feel I had lost something. And I still do. What I miss aren’t the easy parts of the trade but its difficulties, those specific perplexities that would awaken my generally drowsy thinking. Now that I don’t translate, I have to make up new ones. 

***

Did I already know this? Today, translating Stroud with Shira, I found out that “escalera caracol” in English is “escalera espiral,” and she found out that “spiral staircase” in Spanish is “snail straircase,” and we both laughed.  

***

Each time I encounter one of those upper-case letters that English uses to name languages, movements, historical periods, etc., I feel a certain inexplicable pleasure when changing them to lowercase in Spanish. 

As if I were boasting about how my language doesn’t bother with that nonsense nor bow down to concepts with pompous hierarchies.  

My nature is made up of these arbitrary and impulsive feelings, too. 

*** 

In the new translation workshop, there were eight people on the first day. One of them is Pabla—we’ve been friends since middle school. Together, we lived many important moments. Together, we remade language and accumulated vocabulary and stories. We translated from Latin; I have a gorgeous photo of her sitting at the table in my apartment on Acevedo, giving a smile of true joy and holding up high, one in each hand, our respective Vox Latin-Spanish/Spanish-Latin dictionaries. We rarely see each other anymore. Of the eight people in the workshop, she was the only one who came up with the same solution as me for the first line of Stroud’s “Cathedral.” I was excited, sure that it spoke to our friendship, our history. 

***

Anne Carson: Saying Things Less Well

I like the space between languages because it’s a place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you would like, or not being able to say them at all. And that’s useful I think for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived. And translation continually does that dislodging, so I respect the situation—although I don’t think I like it. It’s a useful edge to put yourself against.

Fabio Morábito: The Words More or Less Coincide

When you start translating, you come up against a problem that, to me, is irresolvable, and it’s that, in a sense, translation is impossible. Not even the translation of poetry but rather the straightforward kind, such as, “I like a dog.” It would seem such a simple sentence wouldn’t cause any issues, but it does because translation happens at a cultural level. We translate not just a language but a culture. At first, you confront the fact of the words more or less coinciding, but then you feel that the meaning isn’t the same, and that’s paralyzing. […] There’s something there, a metaphysical problem. 

I read and nod my head. 

Translating is beautiful. 

Translating is horrible. 

Translating is exasperating. 

Marcelo Cohen: Perhaps I Don’t Have So Much Faith

I should stop hiding from myself that I may not have so much faith in the efficacy or feasibility of translation anymore. I do it because it comes relatively easy to me, because it suits me more than journalism or teaching, because I didn’t have the patience to study biochemistry, or because I’m stubborn. 

I’m quite surprised to notice how that faith in the feasibility of translation decreases with time and experience. There are days when I outright exclaim, frustrated, alone in front of the monitor: “Translation is impossible!”

***

Nevertheless, beginnings are sexy: early in the morning, there’s that exhilarating moment in which every word, in both English and Spanish, vibrates with sound, meaning, and associations—they all seem to be telling me so much! The two languages size each other up and merge, and for a few minutes we all frolic (the words and I) in a morning etymological orgy. 

***

It’s midnight on a holiday, and suddenly, as if in the ocean, I feel the wave lift me up and move me forward: the desire to translate. It’s been a while since I’ve felt it so strongly. The specific desire to translate poems by Marie Howe, rapidly. 

***

A poet’s body, face, way of walking, way of speaking: I watch Frank O’Hara read “Having a Coke with You” a thousand times. It’s so helpful when making decisions for the translation: the cigarette pinched between his fingers, the confidence in his own voice, the speed at which the words of those long lines leave his mouth. 

This poem is fast. It was intended to be read fast. The translation shouldn’t slow it down. 

By contrast: Jimmy Schuyler reading “Salute.” A slow, sad drawl. Drugged.  

*** 

Translating is guessing. Guessing at the other.

***

Hello, I’m your translator. I’m remodeling you. Sh! Let it happen. 

***

Talking about everything at once, casually, no time limit, no preconceptions: the best way to co-translate. 

It’s difficult to find a translation partner, but when we do, it ignites us. 

***

Suggestion for lifting the spirits: shut off the internet or shut off the electricity, sit down at the dining room table to translate—poetry, by hand, without a dictionary.  

***

The desire to translate seizes you in the most unexpected or impossible—uncomfortable— moments. Like sexual desire. Later, when you have to translate, when it’s the time and place to do it, sometimes it goes quiet. 

Translated by Will Howard

The verticality of lists is important. It quickly gives us a sense of quantity that horizontality, at first glance, does not permit. The first thing we notice about a list is the distance to the bottom. Then comes the reading of the list, and then we start wondering why these elements came together to make up a list. Lastly, we must also pay attention to what the list may conceal: that which cannot be seen at first glance but is indeed there. 

Let’s try this exercise with the list above;

1. It occupies a significant percentage of the blank page.
2. It deals with countries.
3. Countries whose editors participated in the TyPA Editors’ Week, the first program of its kind in Argentina with the goal of familiarizing international professionals with its national literature, to see it and feel it on their own land, held each April in Buenos Aires.
4. But a list also hides things, and this is what makes it dizzying, in the words of Umberto Eco. Hidden, for example, are other sublists: the 150 editors who participated in the program or the more than fifty Argentine works that were translated over the years. And it also obscures things that cannot, perhaps, be listed. 

For example, let us focus on Switzerland. The name Ricco Bilger, editor of the beautiful Bilgerverlag press, immediately comes to mind. He participated in the program in 2011. He applied to a call that set out two basic requirements: that the participants understood some Spanish (most of the event was carried out in this language) and that they already had some authors translated from Spanish in their catalogue.

Ricco did not meet either of these two conditions. But there was something in his application that caught our eye: maybe it was something as simple as mere intuition. So we told ourselves: it’s fine, we will be able to manage with just English. Ricco didn’t speak much English either. 

The Editors’ Week was hectic. We had put together an ambitious program for authors, editors, and journalists, and there were many business meetings, lunches, and dinners where someone was always taking out pen and paper to jot down names of people and books: participants’ future private lists. 

But let us come back to Ricco. We took pains to ensure he did not get lost in the conversations; we took notes for him with the names of books and authors recommended by editors and journalists, ensuring that he had all of the information so that, once he got home, he could navigate the impossible, boundless map of our country that contemporary literature can assemble. If we take a look at the program from that year, we see that Ricco, much like the other participants, had some twenty business meetings with editors, visited four publishing houses and the cultural section of a newspaper, attended lectures, and went to a party: it was the only time one couldn’t take out pen and paper; hands were busy with beer bottles, feet with dancing. 

At the party, there were many people who had met with editors during the week, as well as many authors. Among them was Hernán Ronsino, who by then had already published his novels La descomposición and Glaxo. We introduced them via hand gestures. Ricco’s English was trying hard to incorporate a few words in Spanish. The volume of the music, the excessive heat, the colliding bodies, all compromised verbal communication. Especially verbal communication that lacked a common language. Also at the party was Irene Barki, a French literary agent based in Buenos Aires for several years who at the time represented Hernán. She joined the chat to officiate as translator. It did not work either. But she did manage to tell Ricco that she had a copy of the French translation of Glaxo on her. Coincidentally, Ricco read in French. It was a quick and elegant way to end the brief torture that is trying to converse at a party with someone for the first time, in a language you don’t speak.

Some time after the program finished, we sent out a short survey to see if there had been any copyright purchases. The only one that responded immediately, because he had already secured the translation rights (into German) was Ricco Bilger—he had acquired Glaxo. It was the fastest result ever at the Editors’ Week (we all know how long these processes of buying and selling rights can take). Time passed and Ronsino established himself as an author in Argentina, he was creating an oeuvre. After Glaxo came the German translation of Lumbre, then La descomposición, then Cameron. In 2018 his German translations brought him to a residence in Switzerland for six months, invited by the Literaturhaus Zürich and the PWG Foundation. In 2020, he won the Anna Seghers award for his “Trilogy of the Prairie” (La descomposición, Glaxo, and Lumbre), an award that is given to a German-speaking author and a Latin American author translated into German. In a few months, Una música, his latest novel, will also come out in this language. All thanks to the same translator: Luis Ruby.

This anecdote is one of many from various editions of the Editors’ Week throughout the years, and we share it now because it illustrates the complex and often random process by which the process of publishing a book in another language, and in other countries, is set in motion. Of course, business strategies exist: pages of costs calculated by hand, including marketing budgets and previous agreements with influencers and distribution channels. But these make sense only when it comes to well-established authors with proven sales or, at least, celebrity status. And according to the latest surveys, this applies only to a negligible amount of just fifty authors in the entire world. The rest must make ends meet by taking another path, one in which networks of mutual understanding, like the ones we have shared, occupy a central place. 

We might call it the romantic path: that of the book as a unique and symbolically relevant artistic creation, which takes its stride because it falls into the hands of an educated reader, because it traverses a path in which elective affinities are awakened. After twenty years of working by, for, and with translation, in all its facets, we are convinced that this is just the case. But, also, that it isn’t enough. Affinities are not activated on their own, especially when distant cultures are at play: you have to seek them out, invite them in, and accompany them. Alongside romanticism, you must assume, as well, that which many may consider to be its opposite: a professional attitude. Borrowing Brian Larkin’s concept, it is a question of creating and sustaining infrastructures—that is, material networks that allow for the traffic of goods and people, and that can also shape the exchange of ideas and cultural products. In the case of literary translation, it becomes essential to know all of the agents involved in this exchange—editors, literary agents, translators, and critics, among others—to participate in international circuits, to strive to communicate in a different manner according to each interlocutor, to learn the economic and legal regulations at play, to know how to negotiate, to come up against official bureaucracy in each country, to construct a trustworthy route, to persevere.

It’s no small thing. And if, additionally, the journey of a book starts in the South, the work is presented with much more demanding challenges than when it starts in the North. The complicity and inequality of the global system of literary exchange has been studied by many, so we will not get into it in detail here (although we refer to the seminal texts by Pascale Casanova and Johan Heilbron, or to the always invaluable reflections by Esther Allen, to name a few examples). It’s true that in the last few decades there have been efforts made to reverse the situation—all driven forward by translators—and that there are minor changes we have seen here and there; yet, for now, the relationship is still as uneven as always. 

Okay, then. What to do? We think perhaps the best option would be to unify, to the extent possible, romanticism with professionalization. To encourage thought-out and sustained actions that generate friendly spaces for this union, to favor the possibility for the spark to ignite and the exchange to occur. There are many good examples in the world: France has excellent subsidized programs for the translation of French authors that have been in place for more than a century, which continue to have great results and to serve as an example for many programs in other countries. So-called “minor” languages, like Dutch or Catalan, are highlighted through activities of cultural promotion that make their authors visible in many corners of the world. Nations with other literary traditions, like Korea, have put impeccable information centers in place in order to spread the word about their editorial production. There are many, many awards, grants, trips, publications, and networks that have proven successful and are almost always sustained by public organizations, though sometimes private as well. It also takes reliable and updated data and the commitment of local editors who, together with agents and translators, are a fundamental knot in the network. 

From our various positions, we’ve contributed what we could to this process, and we intend to continue to do so, because we are convinced that the wider the variety of texts in the world, the more open the minds of the readers will be, and the broader the possibilities for a more tolerant and caring coexistence. In this day and age, this is an urgent priority. At the TyPA Foundation, in the meantime, we continue our research work: together with other organizations, we are working to disseminate and further education; and we anxiously hope the Argentine government continues supporting the invaluable efforts made by the translation enterprise Programa Sur. 

To finish, one last anecdote: during the first edition of the TyPA Editors’ Week, back in 2003, after an event full of activities and information about dozens of authors, the departure day ultimately arrived. At the airport, while waiting to board the plane that would take her back home, one of the participants ran into a title that caught her eye. She read a couple of pages, got excited, and decided to contact the author at once. That is how esteemed German editor Michi Straussfeld, of the prestigious publisher Suhrkamp, discovered Sergio Olguín in the Buenos Aires airport; and soon enough, El equipo de los sueños became Die Traummanschaft, by translator Mathias Strobel.

We might never manage to decipher the exact formula for a book’s arrival into another language. But can we laboriously build up the infrastructure? Yes. And believe in the magic of books? That too. 

Translated by Elena Schafer

Photos: Editors at work at the TyPA Editors’ Week.

At Alfaguara we pubished a book by Rey Rosa.
They had translated it from Guatemalan into Spanish.
Rey Rosa hated me. With time, the publishing house changed.

Statement by Juan Cruz at the 2019 Edita Barcelona Forum

Are translations done from one variety of Spanish into another in the Spanish-speaking publishing industry? This may seem like a condemned practice when dealing with literary texts, as can be seen in the statement made by Juan Cruz, a former editor at Alfaguara, but what happens when we are dealing with translations?

In this essay, two dichotomies present in the doxa of the Spanish language publishing market are discussed: the first is the opposition between the language of literature and the language of translation; the second, in the realm of language of translation, is about the varieties of Spanish used to translate, contrasting translations published in Spain with those published in Latin America.

The Language of Writing and the Language of Translation: Two Antagonistic Representations

The opposition between the language of literary writing and the language of translation is usually defined by editors. One thing is the Spanish employed to create literature and another is the Spanish required for literary translation. The editors at Anagrama, founded in Barcelona in 1969, are experts at dealing with the issue of linguistic variety, since they have earned a good deal of their publishing prestige by “discovering” Latin American authors whom, once they are published in their “Narrativas hispánicas” collection, return with greater prestige to their national spheres. Bolaño is a case in point: he functioned for years as the publishing house’s “brand.” In this sense, Teresa Ariño, the legendary head of Anagrama’s translations, is clear: “In the original, what the author wants to say must remain; the translation is the translation.”

While the Europeanization of Latin American writers is condemned nowadays, the same is not the case with translators. In those cases, the language of the translator is adjusted to the European standard. Marc García, a head editor at Anagrama, explains, “In an original, the author uses his own variety. In the translation, the original author uses his variety, and you have to choose which varieties you adapt it to. We adapt it to the European variety because we are based here [in Barcelona].” Thus, the Spanish of the writer is respected, while the translation is adapted to the language of the publisher in question. In this case, Anagrama’s editorial decisions are made in Barcelona for their Spanish reading public, even though the publisher buys rights for and distributes throughout the entire Spanish-speaking market.

In opposition to this demarcation between language of literature and language of translation, the Mexican translator Arturo Vázquez Barrón, co-founder of the Ibero-American Alliance for the Promotion of Literary Translation, explains what happens in Mexico when one reads translations done in Spain: “The reader is often shocked by Spanish translations because they are full of tíos and gilipollas and the like, but no one demands that a Spanish novel be adapted to Mexican Spanish. If that is not demanded of the originals, why must it be demanded of translations?” (in Santoveña 2010: 245-246).

Despite the fact that, since the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, translation has been described as creative writing, the explanation for this double standard in judging its language—be it the original work or the translation—is due to the fact that the latter has less legitimacy than the former, and therefore is subject to the standardizing restrictions imposed by the publishing industry. Suffice it to say that this lack of legitimacy is not something inherent to the object, but corresponds rather to a social construct. According to the analysis of American critic Lawrence Venuti (1995), the hegemonic representation of translation is governed by the “paradigm of invisibility”: translation is usually considered an invisible practice, or, better said, is rendered invisible by the publishing market and the cultural industry. This invisibility, based on the “strategy of fluency,” is what allows for the maintenance of the “individualistic illusion of authorial presence” for whoever wishes to access the foreign author without mediation.

Applied to the territory of our language, how is this strategy of fluency manifested? Here I am interested in discussing the situation of the different varieties of Spanish vis-à-vis so-called “neutral Spanish” in order to problematize the strategy of the “neutral translation.” Does the neutral variety represent the paradigm of invisibility? Or, on the contrary, does it reject fluency by presenting itself as a construct that is not common to any Spanish speaker? 

The (Dis)Repute of Neutral Spanish

Upon reading publishers’ style guides or speaking with editors and translators, “neutral language” appears as a recurring topic referring to a “common,” “international,” or “general” variety of Spanish that might transcend national borders. The adjective “neutral,” loaded with meaning during times of war, seeks to avoid linguistic competition, but in pretending to erase its polemos does nothing but make it more evident. Varieties of language are in competition because some are prioritized and others are undervalued in the publishing industry.

So-called “neutral Spanish,” created for the audiovisual industry, quickly spread to the globalized publishing industry in Spanish. According to the Argentine researcher Gabriela Villalba, neutral Spanish is an “imposition, on the part of the publishing market, for a literary koiné that meets the needs for exportation” (2017: 382). Although supposedly deterritorialized, this koiné must be close to the Madrilenian standard, filtered through the Pan-Hispanic sieve. Its most salient characteristics are: “the use of tú/ustedes and their verbal forms for the second person, aspectual variations in the use of the preterites, with the Rioplatense variety only using the simple form, the use of lexical variations from standard Spanish following the Madrilenian standard, represented by the DRAE [Diccionario de la Real Academia Española], and the neutralization of references to regional varieties” (Villalba 2007: 3).

Depending on where it is expressed, this translation koiné will take on different functions. It is true that, in Spain and in Latin America, publishers aim for a wide circulation of content on both sides of the Atlantic, but the translation strategy for guaranteeing this circulation is not the same. For some, the recourse to the neutral is a way of guaranteeing that circulation, while for others, it is no more than an unviable strategy.

Among Argentine publishers, there are those who defend neutral language as a positive, consensual Utopia, and others who see it as a negative horizon that cuts off discourse. However, everyone mentions it when it comes to tying the causality of the circulation of books to avoiding local traits in the translated text. Leonora Djament, of the Eterna Cadencia publishing house, acknowledges a certain tension with respect to this: “We believe neutral Spanish doesn’t exist, but at the same time, we know we are translating for the entire region, and we have to bear in mind readers in all Spanish-speaking countries when we translate.” Maxilimiano Papandrea, of the Sigilo publishing house, makes the same point. He doesn’t believe his translators write in neutral Spanish, but he does believe they avoid locally branding their texts with Rioplatense Spanish, since this would sound very dialectical. “If I distribute in Spain, this strategy would be suicide,” he concludes. Salvador Cristóbal, of the Fiordo publishing house, has the same opinion. He envisions a regional translation for Latin America free of Argentinisms. In this sense, neutral Spanish would be, for him, a “pretty Utopia. A pure one doesn’t exist, but you can try to create it.”

The circulation of translated books in Latin America requires a strategy that renders invisible local varieties and brings them close to the Madrilenian standard under its “neutral” guise…

Oftentimes, publishers buy the translation rights for the entire Spanish-speaking world, and given that they distribute in the entire area, their translation strategy ends up corresponding to their economic concerns. However, this strategy is also defended by small publishers that acquire translation rights solely for national distribution. In these cases, as Villalba (2017) points out, translation into neutral Spanish continues to operate as a “practice of prestige,” allowing us to continue believing that books, in an eventual promising future, will surpass boundaries and reach more readers. This trait of supposed incoherence with these publishers’ real conditions of circulation demonstrates, on the contrary, that symbolic capital cannot be reduced to economic reasoning: neutral Spanish is a translation strategy that provides legitimacy in the Argentine and Latin American cultural field.

The opposite representation is at play with Spanish publishers, as is the case with Anagrama, which translates from Barcelona for the Spanish-speaking world, given that this press buys the translation rights for the entire language area and is very much present in the region, distributing or printing directly in Latin American countries. Conscious of the unease that their translations trigger in Latin America, Teresa Ariño justifies the publisher’s procedure: “Yes, there are lots of complaints, but what are we going to do? They are books that cannot be ironed out. For us, doing something standard is ironing out the book.” The standard (“a general Spanish from here”) is the variety they use—that is, a Spanish closer to the Spanish of Madrid. At the same time, the localization of products to Latin American varieties is unthinkable: “We cannot produce editions for other countries, it’s an economic question, of the market,” Ariño concludes. Again, economic reasoning is used to justify a translation policy. The neutralization of the text in these cases would not endow their books with prestige, but quite the contrary. At the same time, the variety that is permitted in translated literature is their own.

The unequal relationship among varieties, when they leave their national territory—be it Iberian Spanish circulating in Latin America or Latin American SPanish circulating in Spain—is confirmed by Ana Mata, a Spanish translator and instructor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, who in her professional trajectory with Spanish publishers has had to adapt translations coming from Latin America to the European variety, as well as prepare books in Barcelona that will circulate throughout the Americas: “For example, one of the books I am currently coordinating is going to be released in Colombia before it’s released here. I asked ‘So, when the translation arrives, do I have to treat this book in some fashion?’ The answer: ‘No, we’re doing it from here.’ The translation was done here, but the book is going to be released in Colombia first. I say this because the opposite isn’t done. When it happens in the other direction, and a book that has been put out there by international imprints and is re-released here, it will indeed be corrected for release in Spain.”

These statements encourage us to think about the importance of understanding the social conditions in the production of “neutral Spanish” in order to leave behind the cliché according to which the common language is that which is not marked by local singularities. If literary language cannot be conceived of outside the authors’ traits in the “here and now,” then literary translation, understood as a creative practice, cannot erase those material conditions either.

In this way, be it prestige-granting neutralization in the case of Latin America or adaptation to local traits in the case of Spain, in both cases, we see that editors appeal to an economic argument in order to justify opposing translation strategies. The circulation of translated books in Latin America requires a strategy that renders invisible local varieties and brings them close to the Madrilenian standard under its “neutral” guise; while in Spain, the Madrilenian standard is deemed the one that can circulate freely throughout the Spanish-speaking world. From the Iberian perspective, the strategy of neutralization would rob translations of literary value; they can be labeled “European” without no shame. In this way, we can see clearly the unequal distribution of not only economic but also symbolic capital in the globalized publishing world of the Spanish language, the varieties of which are in conflict when it comes to choosing the language with which translated literature is produced.

Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio

References:
Santoveña, M. et al. 2010. De oficio, traductor: Panorama de la traducción literaria en México. Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas.
Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London/New York: Routledge.
Villalba, G. 2007. “La tensión entre el español neutro y el rioplatense en las pautas de traducción.” Actas de las I Jornadas Hispanoamericanas de Traducción Literaria, Centro Virtual del Instituto Cervantes.
Villalba, G. 2017. “Representaciones sobre el español en la traducción editorial argentina: metodología de una investigación.” El taco en la brea 1(5): 380-407. 

Notes:
This article is a rewording of part of the chapter “¿Una lengua común que nos separa? La intraducción en el territorio actual del castellano” (forth., 2024), written as part of the research projects “Social Networks of the Past”, ERC St. Grant (No. 803860) and “The Novel as Global Form: Poetic Challenges and Cross-Border Literary Circulation” (PID2020-118610GA-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033).
The statements of the editors M. García, T. Ariño, L. Djament, M. Papandrea, and S. Cristóbal and the translator A. Mata were excerpted from interviews carried out by L. Fólica between December 2018 and May 2019.

Photo: Bookstore, El Retiro, Madrid, by Juan Gomez, Unsplash.

I never hid, as time declassified my past, that my rocky beginnings as a translator were more on the side of the shadows than on that of the light. First, because as a lad I destroyed a Lacan Seminar in the dreary kitchen of the office of the psychoanalyst who’d hired me, for a few bucks, for the task, and then because I was a shadow translator for my great friend Marcelo Cohen (in fact, and as if putting the finishing touch on our pedagogical relationship, I did it again recently, but I won’t say how or for whom or where), who committed the recent misdeed of leaving us alone with his absence. From the massacre of the Seminar (I don’t even remember which one it was!) I gained that kind of experience often considered intangible: a certain boldness, the suspicion that sometimes the mask translates more than you, and a vague worker’s consciousness. From shadow translating for Marcelo I extracted, or rather, I received the tools of the noble trade.

But that’s easy to say. How was I given those tools? Because shadow work among translators, which is more frequent and more common than anyone admits, is usually very instrumental and not very dialectic. Moreover, there are two types, of which my first stage as a shadow writer and that most recent episode I mentioned could—except for a not-so minor detail to which I will return later—be illustrative: either the shadow translator is a novice who agrees to enjoy a certain work space in exchange for an equity slice stripped of moral rights, or he is a mature colleague who has no qualms about helping a friend in trouble and accepts, just like the novice but absent his need, the same conditions: a fair payment without the corresponding symbolic achievement. What would these rewards be? Basically, that of being recognized as the authors of that work—derivative, but a work nonetheless. In the case of the mature colleague, to renounce them is almost a gesture of nobility. In the case of the novice, it’s a collateral loss, in that not signing the work is the same as being invisible to the contracting publishers (or to the reading public or reviewers, although the name of the translator is usually less important to them than the jacket cover).

So, did Marcelo take advantage of my inexperience? I’ve often asked myself this question. Before answering it, I’d like to clarify that, throughout my career, I’ve also availed myself, albeit little and reluctantly, of both sides of shadow work. Little and reluctantly, not out of ethical concerns but because it was never clear to me whether it was more of a problem than a solution, that is, in monetary terms, more work for less pay. Hence, part of the answer to the above question is spurred on by this fact: did I really get Marcelo out of a tight spot (I am referring above all to my first shadow translation, because in the second case I’m certain I did) by putting my sweat at the service of his pen? I’m tempted to say no. I’m tempted to say, although he didn’t plan it that way, that he was doing me more of a favor than himself. A relative favor, of course, because helping someone to become a translator isn’t exactly fixing their life. Who can live, let alone feed a family, from translation alone in Argentina or Spain? Eppur si traduce.

My feeling, which is now almost a certainty, is that Marcelo considered me a peer. I’m not saying that I was or wasn’t, I’m saying that he saw me that way. We met personally, as is now public and well known, in Barcelona, at the legendary tapped telephone in Plaça Universitat, back in January or February of 1977. Marcelo was the guy who managed the phone’s sign-up list from a table in the Estudiantil, a bar that still exists. We became friends soon after, thanks to soccer in particular, in addition to teaching English at the same academy. Marcelo had acquired a certain literary fame and was beginning to publish articles in cultural magazines as well as his first important translations; by then I’d begun to translate technical, erotic, commercial, and medical texts. We had no training other than that of reading, a hard chair, and a portable typewriter. It was in that context that Marcelo pushed me into the stormy waters of editorial translation: it’s easy, he told me, you’re more than halfway there, I’ll give you things to do, and when you’re ready I’ll introduce you at the publishing house. So I jumped into the waves; I knew how to swim, more or less, but I couldn’t get my footing anywhere. From there it was either sink or swim.

Sometime later, much later, I discovered that Marcelo had practiced an intensely drastic method of practical initiation with me. I discovered it because I remembered what I myself had done one afternoon at the beach with a female friend whom, with the recklessness of summer, I encouraged to follow me beyond the surf, where, in spite of the rough sea, you can swim more freely. I shouldn’t have done it. She was perhaps a little less skilled and much less daring than me, and although we weren’t far from shore, where people were splashing around oblivious and happy, we soon realized that it was really hard to return and my friend, understandably, first hesitated and then panicked. The ocean was choppy, the underwater current was strong and a crosswind was blowing. On top of that, as if in an act of symbolic expressionism, the sky turned cloudy. My perception of the water changed: it was now cold. All that in how long? A matter of minutes. We were both floating, yes, but she was starting to get tired, and I wasn’t Mark Spitz; there were no lifeguards or bathers or attendants (what an inopportune time to shuffle synonyms!) in sigh and shouting for someone seemed totally unfeasible. So I did what Marcelo had done to me without my knowledge (and probably without his either).

My first pragmatic intuition/proof was to make sure that the surface pull of the waves was strong enough to take advantage of it and not fight against the undertow, which was or seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. By swimming as horizontally as possible we’d be able to gain more distance than we lost after the wave passed, and so I tried to explain this to my friend, but she was in no position to accept theoretical speculations or any solution other than clinging to me and praying that I would save her. At that point, the situation was as follows: she was begging me, already quite exhausted, to come closer to save her, and I was a couple of meters closer to the shore, aware that if I approached her we would both sink. Then, with the little bit of spark I had left, it occurred to me to tell her that yes, I would pull her out, but if she came towards me, I’d get close enough, more or less at arm’s length, and when she grabbed me, I’d take advantage of the wave’s inertia and move a bit towards the shore. So, little by little, and dancing to the rhythm of the waves, we moved out of the danger zone to where the undertow wasn’t as strong. And suddenly we were standing up, surrounded by grandmothers and children with duck or dinosaur floaties. All in the same sequence shot. When we returned to our little square of towels and looked, panting, at the aquatic inferno that almost swallowed us, there lay ahead of us a totally innocent and neutral strip of ocean, the same ocean as always, the ocean of all beaches.

And so, thanks to Marcelo and his reckless insistence, I believe I learned to translate and take responsibility for the authorship of my translations. And just like at the beginning, it’s still hard as hell for me to get out of the water.

The Apostil

Once I’d cut my teeth in aquatic combat, my friend suggested that I get a new pair of swimming trunks (swimsuit, bathing suit, Speedo?), a pair of swimming goggles (glasses, specs, whatever) and some sandals (flip-flops, who knows what else) and introduce myself to a couple of editors whom he’d already arranged to accept me as a quasi-senior translator. In fact, two successive assignments fell in my lap, perhaps because at that time there weren’t a lot of us swimmers who could avoid sinking in mid-course, and the industry was beginning to realize that professionalizing the translator didn’t imply a loss, as many publishers feared, rather a gain, especially in terms of time but also money. I’m talking about a time in Spain when there was not the slightest hint of a translation contract, something that was resolved by almost ornamental touches on the invoice; the invariable response, which was also ornamental, if anyone demanded something a little more in keeping with the law, which was also ornament: “Well, you see, it’s not house policy.”

Of those two, then three, then more publishers who trusted in my rhythmic stroke, one was the great Paco Porrúa, who’d carried Editorial Minotauro on his shoulders to Barcelona and continued to open the way here (where I was then and am now) to science fiction of the highest quality. Almost all of his books were translations, and Paco had a very clear, unwavering, and singular vade mecum as far as the Spanish model of translation was concerned: since he published mainly in and for Spain, he allowed the second person plural [vosotros] to be conjugated as it was in Spain, although he recommended avoiding the eventuality and looking for ways and shortcuts so as not to abuse it, but as for the naturalization of the colloquial he was unsparing and strictly prohibited, for example, the use of the verb coger (in the Spanish sense of “to seize”) where the verb agarrar [to grab], tomar [to take] or any other paraphrase could be used without a problem (to avoid the uncomfortable Latin American reading of coger as “to fuck”). In Minotauro’s books, no one ever got caught [or fucked]. Not even when making love. Paco disliked vulgarity; he was most interested, above all else, in caring for his transatlantic readers, who remained faithful to his editions from afar. His symbolic market was clearly to speakers of the Rioplatense, that is from Argentina and Uruguay. 

I must say that disposing of the verb coger wasn’t a big deal for me; on the one hand, I’d already cut my teeth on translating soft porn stories for magazines like Penthouse or Playboy, a venture that was splendidly managed by another great cultural boilermaker, the Uruguayan Homero Alsina Thevenet, who, while able, generously distributed (he paid well and fast) these translations among South American swimmers. I believe it was also Marcelo who connected me with him, although at that time the pool of odd jobs was extremely socialized. Homero Alsina didn’t like us using coger for tomar or agarrar either, although he was less prescriptive than Paco and, besides, he didn’t handle such, shall we say, delicate material. But those clear idiosyncratic traits, perhaps generational, resonated naturally in our incipient swimming poetics. The schizoid question having been resolved for obvious chrematistic reasons—already contemplated during the Argentine childhood of several school generations—along with the coexistence of the specter of vosotros, most of us were left with the flag of whether to coger [to catch] or not (the bus, the subway, the umbrella). No doubt it will sound philologically daring (among other reasons, because that’s not my field) but perhaps, thanks to a survey that is still needed, we can read the decision to use or not use the verb coger as one of the political axes of the Rioplatense translations done in or for Spain; to understand us/ourselves (or confuse us even more), it would be our waterline.

I say this having scant idea of how my colleagues chose to coger (to seize, not to fuck) this phenomenological bull. Not only have I not completed a study, I’ve scarcely dared to ask them about it. Marcelo, for example, I suppose had adopted the warnings of Paco and Homero to the letter, and perhaps also of Muchnik, for whom he translated quite a bit (I only participated in a dictionary resolved in unison), but I can’t be sure that in other cases, with peninsular editors, coger was a no-no. I can, however, speak for myself with some authority. I know that I never fucked around with my translations (uhm, rather, I mean I never used the verb coger) except on a single occasion; allow me to clarify or punctuate: I never wrote coger, but I’m not totally sure that a proofreader (forced or not by the editor) never fucked (that is, used coger) with my translations behind my back because, let’s be honest, nobody checked all the galleys or proofs of their work life—assuming they were even sent—and damn the fun I’d have now retracing (or should I say re-swimming?) that waterfront. Nor am I an absolute guarantor against possible distractions. But we’re not talking about precise casuistry, rather phenomenology, and what matters here is the intention behind the phenomenon, its political willingness, which is none other than to avoid having to coger while swimming. In all cases except, as I said, in one.

When I undertook translating all of Shakespeare’s poetry (another of the oceans Cohen got me into) except for one poem (the relatively short “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” which Andreu Jaume, the brilliant editor of tutto chéspir for Penguin, kept for himself), I discovered a few things I’d never noticed before. One, that Shakespeare matters much less to people than they claim; another, that one can swim so many nautical miles of rhymed hendecasyllables in a few days and not succumb or drown in the attempt; and yet another, that William was, I won’t say a feminist avant la lettre, but indeed a very fine critical observer of the power dynamic between the different sexes, genders, and libidos of the Elizabethan era, which is not so alien to us, really. I discovered this, above all, in “The Rape of Lucrece.” I’m not going to give a spoiler and recount here the story and the poet’s approach (and I say spoiler with absolute right: who of you has read that tremendous poem from beginning to end, huh?) but the title itself already does: yes, there is a Lucretia and someone rapes her. The Chespirian [that uniquely Spanish way of pronouncing Shakespeare] work of psychological introspection is brutal; the proximity to all the elements of an act as execrable as it is universal is such that one wonders if William himself had not suffered or made someone to suffer something like this at some point in his life. The emotional to-and-fro and the naturalness of the details never verge on the commonplace, and there’s not an ounce of histrionics or moral justification. “The Rape of Lucrece” should be read, perhaps, before some of his plays. Especially today, now! Shakespeare wanted to be a poet, not a playwright. That was the passport to fame he believed he’d bought. And it is in poetry that he revisits time and again the question of power in erotic relationships. It is true that in those long pseudo-love poems William put his hopes for commercial success when the theaters had to close due to the plague, but it is no less true that the deep problems of one genre and the other differed, just as his treatment of the universals differed. In short, it is not my intention to make an apologia of the Bard as a bard rather than as an employee and impresario of the theater; nevertheless, I recommend a slow, attentive, unprejudiced, even irreverent reading of “Chespirian” poetry, which after all is not that much.

The point is that my revenge as a distance swimmer for having to navigate waters full of linguistic jellyfish was to use (in both senses!), for the only time in my career, the verb in question in verse 677 of Lucrece, just when the rapist commits the act: 

This said, he sets his foot upon the light,
For light and lust are deadly enemies:
Shame folded up in blind concealing night,
When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize.
The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries;
Till with her own white fleece her voice controll’d
Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold

Shakespeare uses “seize,” which is both to catch or trap or clutch, and a euphemism for “take” in the sexual sense; I use coger, which is both things but on different shores. So what now? Do I force myself not to use the verb again for the sake of symmetry? Or has my revenge swum its final lap? In any case, the line between coger and no coger in South American translations in Spain has already been drawn, and not by me, heaven, or earth, forbid. To prove my point, I offer: not long ago, an Argentine publisher wanted to release to the Hispanic market a trans text of high erotic voltage, for which the translation was revised and, with a certain criterion, all the occurrences of coger were replaced by follar, the Spanish verb for “to fuck.” The result was that every five minutes, the characters refucked here and there, overfucked, infucked, exfucked, and I don’t know how many other things. In other words, as I said: the study must be done once and for all.

Translated by George Henson

1 Translator’s Note: Throughout the text, the author plays with the polysemy of the Spanish verb coger [to take, to grab, to seize], which can also mean “to fuck” in Latin America. With this in mind, I’ve decided to leave the verb in Spanish, and italicized, in every case.

Photo: Li Yang, Unsplash.

When the world entered the final phase of the Cold War in the mid-1970s, Latin America endured the rise of neoliberal policies anchored in the implementation of the National Security Doctrine. One of the repressive practices employed by the Southern Cone dictatorships to eliminate all forms of dissent was political exile, a mechanism for the forced exclusion of citizens. Due to linguistic and cultural proximity, Spain was one of the preferred European destinations for exiled individuals. As such, in the final years of the Franco regime, Madrid and Barcelona became host cities to Latin American political migrants and were a site of professional development for exiled intellectuals, writers, and journalists, some of whom were attracted by the cities’ existing publishing industries. The presence of Latin American exiles and émigrés coincided with a period of political and cultural upheaval, remembered as a time of high collective hopes. Barcelona was reclaiming its international relevance in the Ibero-American publishing industry, and significant transformations were beginning to take place in the publishing sector.

In the book world, giving or receiving work was often seen as a gesture of solidarity, or even as the frank repayment of a debt owed to Latin America for taking in exiled Republicans. The networks of labor solidarity between Spanish publishers and Argentine exiles also benefited from the pivotal actions of émigré Latin American writers who belonged to an earlier generation, and who, strictly speaking, were neither displaced for political reasons nor persecuted by the Southern Cone dictatorships, such as the writers of the Boom generation living in Barcelona. This solidarity, mobilized by networks of literary émigrés and political exiles, was certainly effective, particularly when new arrivals had the basic training required for the publishing tasks available to them: a command of foreign languages—English, French, Italian, and German—allowed them to work as translators; previous experience in journalism and publishing opened doors to other aspects of publishing work. With or without previous experience, Latin American exiles wrote dictionary entries, encyclopedia articles, and serials, and even books of technical or investigative journalism. Some were collection editors, editorial advisors, manuscript readers, illustrators, and cover designers. A significant number of exiles participated in the work surrounding book translations, from supervising collections and editing manuscripts to proofreading and linguistic adaptation, also called “desargentinización” [de-Argentinization] or “galleguización” [Spanification]. Other avenues for work included writing popular novels, typically under a foreign pseudonym, and adapting classics for children’s literature editions.

The names of Latin American translators show up time and again at the publishing houses founded during the latter years of the Franco regime, between 1968 and 1975, such as Lumen, Tusquets Editores, Anagrama, and Edicions 62.

At the end of the twentieth century, the prominent literary publishing houses in Spain boasted catalogs filled with Latin American translations, and more than a few had hired exiled workers, as revealed by translator payrolls. A brief overview corroborates this: between 1974 and 1983, imprints located in Barcelona published countless translations by Latin American émigrés, mostly from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The names of Latin American translators show up time and again at the publishing houses founded during the latter years of the Franco regime, between 1968 and 1975, such as Lumen, Tusquets Editores, Anagrama, and Edicions 62. With a largely modernizing editorial approach and a focus on selecting high-quality works and revamping the themes, styles, and genres of both the local and imported literature present in catalogs, these publishing ventures were considered politically progressive and culturally avant-garde. This meant that political and cultural ties could be established with Argentine intellectuals, writers, and journalists. The imprint Anagrama published translations by Ricardo Pochtar (renowned for his translation of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, published by Lumen), Mario Merlino, Roberto Bein, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Marcelo Cohen. In fact, Cohen was the first to translate the Catalan writer Quim Monzó into Spanish, and Anagrama was the first publisher of a Monzó translation in 1981. Argentines Marcelo Covián and Federico Gorbea, the writers and romantic partners Susana Constante and Alberto Cousté (who co-translated Apollinaire’s Zone), and Marcelo Cohen all translated for Tusquets Editores, as did the Uruguayans Homero Alsina Thevenet and Carlos M. Rama, with Rama leading the editing and translation of Guerra de clases en España, 1936-1939 by Camillo Berneri for the Los Libertarios series. At Lumen, Esther Tusquets’ publishing house, translations were done by the Uruguayans Cristina Peri Rossi, Homero Alsina Thevenet, and Beatriz Podestá Galimberti, and by Argentines, including the poet Mario Trejo, the screenwriter Carlos Sampayo, and Ricardo Pochtar. Additionally, in the mid-eighties, Ana María Becciú translated Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack from Paris. Marcelo Cohen worked as a collection editor at Montesinos Editores, where the Argentine and Uruguayan Álvaro Abós, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Homero Alsina Thevenet translated, as did the Chilean writer Mauricio Wacquez.

Moreover, the work of Latin American exiles and émigrés was felt across the entirety of the publishing industry at the time. Agents connected to the Argentine publishing houses Sudamericana and Minotauro via Edhasa’s publications in Spain contributed not only to the presence of Argentine translators in Spanish companies, but also to the reprinting and circulation of translations done in Argentina. Minotauro has a unique story in this regard: not only did its editor and primary translator, Francisco Porrúa, migrate, bringing with him his pseudonyms Luis Domènech, Ricardo Gosseyn, and Francisco Abelenda, but the imprint’s primary translators—Carlos Peralta, Matilde Horne, and Marcial Souto—did as well, both before, during, and even after the period of exile. The Minotauro publishing project left its mark on the memory of Argentine emigration in Barcelona, and its prestigious director is often cited as an example of a great editor. Their work on translations, in particular, is held up as a model of care and respect for a text.

The presence of exiles at Editorial Bruguera is also relevant and of interest to any history of Hispano-American translation focused on transatlantic cultural relations. The incorporation of Latin American exiles into Bruguera, and its practical and symbolic effects on the importation, translation, and publication of world literature in translation, can be traced in at least four of the imprint’s literary collections: Libro Amigo, and specifically the Novela Negra series, edited by the Argentine writer Juan Martini, and also Narradores de Hoy, CLUB Bruguera, and Clásicos de Erotismo, edited by Eduardo Goligorsky with translations by Ricardo Pochtar and Beatriz Podestá Galimberti. The work done by Argentines in Bruguera’s final years contributed to, as Nora Catelli points out, the revamping of the publishing house’s image through the creation or modernization of literary collections that combined the traditional publishing approach of popular literature—pocket editions at an affordable price—with an important pivot to high literature, achieved through the publication of Latin American authors and original and reprinted translations of foreign literature.

Not all the exiles who worked in publishing as translators or in jobs related to imported literature stayed in the profession. Only some developed, starting in the mid-eighties, translation careers that were at the same time both vocational and professionalized. Nonetheless, this case study sparks reflections on the various social functions of translation as a tool for the professionalization of writing.

Translated by Fiona Maloney-McCrystle

An elderly translator, Dorrey Malcolm, is being interviewed about her adoptive sister, Janet Marren, and Janet’s partner, famed photographer Marcey Jacobson. The narrator has difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction as she recounts falling in love with her adoptive sister as a young girl and their first sexual experiences in the Bronx apartment where they were raised. The lives of Dorrey and Janet collide with Marcey’s in the 1930s when they become involved with the Communist Party. These chapters explore themes of social unrest, political dissent, and sexuality, as these women who are artists, lesbians, and communists are forced to immigrate to Mexico during the height of McCarthyism. The narrator slips into memories of Ota Benga, the Mbuti Pygmy man who was kidnapped from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo and put on exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Her obsession with the details of Ota Benga’s life and suicide reflect a connection to the pain of relocation, assimilation, and the longing for one’s place of origin. 

Two Central American teenagers, Oliver and El Gavilán, begin their journey North to reach the “Other Side.” They must reconcile the brutal life they’ve known with the choices that lie before them as they struggle against their own conflicts of personality. Oliver is attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others and is disturbed by the ruthlessness exemplified by his traveling companion. Their relationship becomes increasingly strained as they cross Mexico by foot and train, and through a series of flashbacks in these chapters it is revealed that Oliver is gay and closeted. These chapters disrupt stereotypical depictions of young gang members, refugees, and teenage boys left with few options in the Northern Triangle region.

An academic returns home to southern Mexico to work on her dissertation after her professor’s suicide abruptly ends their affair. While there, she is destined to reconnect with her family and confront their complicated history, including the patriarchal abuse suffered by her grandmother, the history of a disabled cousin who is the son of the protagonist’s grandfather and an indigenous housemaid, and the class tension that surfaces between her family and the workers who harvest coffee beans on their ranch. These chapters address experiences of womanhood in a patriarchal society, class tensions, and the question of what we are ultimately willing to sacrifice for love and stability. 

Interspersed throughout the novel are several stand-alone chapters describing La Bestia, the freight train that Central American migrants and refugees ride in order to reach the United States. La Bestia becomes a character in itself and is a looming presence in the lives of these characters as their dramas unfold.

This excerpt, “Animal Memory,” comes from the first chapter of Now Way Bay. My translations of Claudia’s work have been published by The Offing, Lunch Ticket, and Mexico City Lit. In 2020, I was awarded the Banff BILTC Emerging Translator Fellowship to continue my translation of this novel (postponed). I have permission to translate this 150-page novel, which was originally published by Coneculta Chiapas (2017) and reissued electronically by Los Libros del Perro (2021). 

Allana Noyes

Animal Memory 

Animal memories don’t work the way ours do. Our minds are so forthcoming, so willing to invent, fill in the gaps. Our memory is forever reconstructing, censuring, cherry-picking. I’ve always admired animals for that reason, especially the large mammals of Africa, such powerful creatures with such objective memories.  

I was born in 1909 in New York City and lived near the Bronx Zoo. You don’t know how it was back then. The zoo was enclosed by only a short fence, and when I was a girl coming home from the synagogue, I’d hop over to see the animals, always snagging my dress on the top of the iron bars. There was almost no security in those days, and I wasn’t the only one who wandered around the zoo after hours. Ota Benga was there too, a Pygmy from the Congo who’d been brought to New York as a special exhibit, wandering around the darkened zoo.

He was a small man, the teeth in his mouth filed down sharp as a shark’s. The excited crowds would gather in front of his cage to watch him take up his bow and aim it toward the clouds. A filmmaker had fashioned his costume especially for the exhibition; just a mottled scrap of fabric made to look like jaguar fur. Ota seemed to genuinely enjoy the attention during visiting hours, but in his down time after the zoo closed its doors for the day he’d wander around in silence, wearing an old pair of boots and a jacket that hung down to his ankles, chain-smoking cigarettes. I saw him like that a few times and looking back I’d like to imagine he enjoyed strolling around the exhibits, taking a good look at the animals from the opposite side of the bars. “The African Pygmy, Ota Benga, twenty-three years of age, four-foot-tall, 105 lbs. Brought from the Kasai River of Congo, Central Africa, by Doctor Samuel P. Verner. On display every afternoon this September,” so read the little plaque outside his quarters.

I suppose he’d been unhappy though because I remember the day I learned of his suicide. It was the summer of 1916, the same day I saw Mrs. Marren sobbing in the kitchen. The war had been going on for two years at that point, and she’d just been notified that her brother, who’d been in France fighting for the Germans, had died. As this scene was unfolding in our kitchen, Ota Benga was lighting his own funeral pyre somewhere in Virginia. He grit his teeth and shot himself in the head with a stolen pistol. 

Mrs. Marren cared as much about my fascination with Ota Benga as my passion for animals, which is to say, very little. Although she was certainly a very polite and decorous woman, she was profoundly indifferent to anything that didn’t have to do with theatre or the suffragette movement, including her own daughter Janet, and me. 

They thought of me as a sort of wild child, but I wasn’t really. Truth be told, I was distant and melancholy. The reality is that I felt a kind of kinship with that wandering pygmy. 

Even though I didn’t know who my birth parents were, I knew from very early on that they were no longer among us. I’d always lived with the Marrens. They were old friends of my parents and had been impacted by my orphanhood almost as much as I had, though they weren’t affected by the orphanhood of my brother, who I never saw again after Christmas in 1915. I received a final letter from him some time after I’d moved to Mexico. 

It was in that letter I found out he’d fought in the second world war and survived, though it left him with a limp. He lived in Miami where he was married to a young Korean woman. I don’t remember exactly what the letter said, but I do remember he’d written, “War is beautiful, if it weren’t so terrible, we’d be smitten forever.” I imagined him penning this letter while reclining in a beach chair before a wide expanse of warm saltwater, his demure Korean spouse at his side. I imagined that as he wrote, he reminisced about the battlefield where he’d nearly lost his leg. Had our Jewish parents been on his mind? Had he filled in the gaps of this heroic narrative while on the frontline, desperately trying to instill some greater purpose into the senselessness of war? I often thought about visiting him but never seemed to make time, and then later I learned he died. Of course, I was unable to attend the funeral because something came up with Janet. Always something to do with Janet—or to do for her.                                

What else can I tell you that might be of use? There’s so much I want to tell you, but I don’t know how important any of it is for your project—if it’ll be useful for your research on the life of the photographer, Marcey Jacobson. Our lives were only connected by our mutual love for Janet and our ruthless competition for her affection. Perhaps if I tell you my life story then some things will make themselves clear. But would you mind sitting by the window over there? It’s hard for me to see your face without the light. 

As I was saying, my adoptive parents were liberal and Jewish; art lovers who rented a building in the Bronx where they held their theatre rehearsals. They belonged to a group of painters and writers who all lived together and took turns educating us roving neighbor kids. Every afternoon, artists and poets came to chat with the Marrens and thanks to that I was allowed to skip most of Hebrew school, getting my education at home, though it was often informal and vague as far as education goes. The Marrens depended on the goodwill of these volunteer teachers, and when no one was around to hold class, they’d turn me loose to wander around the old, ten-story building where many newly arrived immigrants lived. That’s how I learned Spanish, from a Cuban woman who spent her mornings sewing costumes for the theatre, as well as Portuguese, from an old, toothless sailor who always spit when he spoke.

Sometimes, friends of the Marrens, people who saw me running around and who had known my parents, would say with surprise, “She’s the spitting image of Liz.” For that reason, I always made sure to always play near the adults where I could eavesdrop and hear them say such things, and this became a seemingly innocent routine that was in fact an essential part of my childhood identity. The only thing I knew about my mother was that her name was Eva, but that she changed it to Liz when she made it to the US. Why I still don’t know. 

When I was a bit older, I started to investigate her and her friends and siblings and I found out she was born in Germany, though back then it was still ruled by the King of Prussia. She was raised in a kosher household governed by her father, Fred Gustav, a respected doctor in Cologne. She enjoyed a charmed life, growing up in a house in Koenigsplatz with a terrace that overlooked the woods. Her family was the first in the city to own a telephone and every Saturday they went for cake and coffee at the Monopol Hotel. 

But something about my mother must have radically shifted as the new century drew near, because one carnival season in Cologne she met Jacob Malcolm, a Jewish socialist and the disowned son of two merchants from Hamburg. Liz, Eva at the time, stopped covering her hair and fled to America with him in 1908, just before World War One began. 

After her arrival she found work, first in the grey cement factories of Chicago and then as a spirited union organizer for the first worker strikes. For many years part of me wished I were more like her. Now, as an old woman, and because I knew you were coming to talk to me about my life, I’m starting to think my mother couldn’t have been the idealized image of her I’d dreamed up while hiding under my bed from Mrs. Marren, terrified she would scold me for having snagged yet another one of my dresses on the zoo’s wrought-iron fence. 

The thing about getting old is that there’s no doubt in your mind that you’ve failed in some way. It doesn’t make a difference how you choose to spin it.  Whatever it was you did in life, none of it seems to justify the fact that you’ve become old. Nothing can justify the fact that you’re not dead yet—that I had the gall to outlive Janet and Marcey. It’s hard for me to tell how much of what I’m telling you is the truth, which memories I’m making up and which ones really happened. Since my sight started going the world has become a frothy, white cloud. I open my eyes and no matter how much I blink, I can’t focus. The only thing I’m sure of is that the love I had for Janet was a timeless thing, and that it’s still the most vivid sensation I’ve felt in my life. It’s clear and precise like some understated thing, like the monotonous, enduring love of two old people who wake up together in the same bed day after day after day. 

I knew I was in love with her from the beginning. We shared everything, a bedroom, shoes, classrooms, parents. I remember I’d begun to study ballet and she, painting. We must’ve been about thirteen, and our only worldly possession was life itself. We’d hide under the covers in bed to chew gum and look at the pictures Janet had pinched from the theatre teacher’s room. Black and white postcards of naked women with soft, full bosoms. 

We were curious about the ways our bodies had begun to change, and under the covers in our bedroom in that old Bronx building we would touch each other’s breasts. I remember her linen nightgown, the shape of her girlish body opening underneath. We kissed for a long time, getting to know one another in the darkness, and back then Janet was mine alone, but I was destined to lose her. She met John at a party on the East Side, but that’s not really when I lost her. The thing with John was just her way of distancing herself from me. It wasn’t until she met Marcey that I lost her for good.  

What else? I’ve been working on forgetting all this my whole life, my memory is like a sandcastle left in the spray, dissolving little by little. At first you can still see its outline raised in the mud, shaped like a fresh grave. Then the shore smooths out again, wide and pristine. Even your own footsteps get washed away. I’ve always felt that way, as if all the tracks I made in life were buried, diluted, covered up ever since I made the trip back to New York. “I’m drunk off my sorrow, I devour myself / and my sorrows I cry / vulture I am I rise / I wound and soothe with my singing / both vulture and arrogant Prometheus.” 

You know Martí? I translated him into English, it was my life’s work. Now that most of my eyesight is gone and I can’t read, I recite it from memory, though sometimes I don’t remember the exact lines, so I improvise. Instead of “singing” I say “sobbing.” Here it is again, “and I wound and soothe with my sobbing” sounds like a Mexican bolero, doesn’t it? I like to think about boleros sometimes. “We will triumph with the power of love, unite your voice with mine, and sing our victory,” isn’t that beautiful? That’s the bolero Marcey used to sing to Janet sitting out on the patio at their home in San Cristobal in the evening when the heat would finally break. Marcey would pick up her guitar and Janet would fold a quilt over her lap. I think I have a picture of that somewhere. I took a polaroid when I saw them out there on the patio once.  I’m sure I have it, you should take a look through my things. I just have the basics here, but you should go to my old apartment and look through the boxes I brought up from Mexico. Rose Malcolm, write that down, she’s the one who can help you. Rose is my cousin. She keeps my apartment in Brooklyn now. 

But anyway, as I was saying, I never was religious, though I did go to the synagogue as a girl. I liked the way the candlelight rippled along the golden altars and the chanting and songs have always instilled a comforting sort of drowsiness in me. As Janet and I walked home hand in hand we’d sing them together, Baruch atah, Adonai.

Translated by Allana Noyes

.

Photo: Roman Kraft, Unsplash.