In February 2024, Arthur spoke with Bruna via Zoom about this award-winning translation and other aspects of her practice. The full video of their conversation will soon be available in English on the new LALT blog.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: Today I’m excited to talk to a wonderful translator and writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato. She translated The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. It’s great to have the opportunity to talk to Bruna about this book. 

First, how did this project come to be? How did you first hear about Stênio and how did this project end up in your hands?

Bruna Dantas Lobato: People kept telling me about this book because of my interest in Northeastern literature. I grew up in the Northeast of Brazil, which is an area of the country that is marginalized, that isn’t as represented either in Brazil or abroad. And we speak in a certain way, we have a certain accent, there’s a dialect, and many cultural influences that are unique to that region. The population is made of more people of color than in other parts of the country that had different waves of European migration. We have a bigger Indigenous presence, a bigger Black community, etc. I’m very fond of the Northeast. I love everything about it. My Portuguese is accented in that way. Any Brazilianist or anyone from Brazil would say, “You talk like one of the underdogs.” It is what it is, I was born into it. 

So I’ve been trying to push more literature from that part of the country. Not always very successfully, because I hear, “It’s niche” or, “It didn’t get big recognition in Brazil,” but it wouldn’t get big recognition in Brazil, you know? It’s not like it’s a cosmopolitan white man being a flaneur in São Paulo, that’s not the kind of literature that is being made, and it shouldn’t be.

But this book did well in Brazil. I kept hearing about it, and I got a PDF from the agency that represents Stênio, and I wrote some reader’s reports for publishers. I ended up also reading some samples by other translators, and they were interesting, but they mostly erased the fact that the book was spoken in a certain way. There is a spoken quality to the prose, and it is very much written in the Portuguese I grew up speaking. It’s not the dominant, national-TV Portuguese. 

So I wanted to highlight that, and I ended up getting an email from Michael Wise, the editor at New Vessel Press, saying that he was interested in buying the rights to the book. He wanted to know if I had a take on this kind of dialect, what would I do differently, or how could I capture this dialect in English? I did a little sample for him and wrote quite the long treatise explaining my ideas and what I thought was important to privilege, and that’s how the book came to me.

A.M.D.: What were some of the things you chose to privilege? How did you emphasize elements of a very specific place while changing the language? 

B.D.L.: Well, not a single word has remained, but all the words remain. First, I didn’t want to write the dialect in a way that was foreign just for foreignness’s sake. To me, what is interesting about the Northeastern way of speaking is not that it sounds different from dominant Brazilian Portuguese, but that it’s witty and self-deprecating and poetic and full of imagery and sometimes full of exaggeration: everything is huge and aphoristic. That’s what I wanted to highlight. And there’s an oral quality to it. Everything needed to sound very literary, very written—because it is a very literary book—but it also needed to sound spoken, like this could be somebody waxing poetic at home or on the phone telling their life story. That was my goal. 

A couple of different kinds of imagery were really important to me. One was the river. There are all these floods and rivers and drownings and these different images there, in a place that is marked by droughts, so it’s quite the counterpoint to how the region has been portrayed before. I saw the crossing of the river—and there is a cross that marks the river as well, a physical cross—I saw that as representing the book itself. It needs to cascade and flow and follow its course in its own way. That’s not something I ascribed to the book, it’s already built into the prose. You saw the punctuation, the unusual stream of consciousness: that is how the book was written. That was important to me.

It was also important that a character like Suzzanný, who’s hyperbolic and noisy, could be noisy in her own way. She has two labels that are pretty heavy on her shoulders: one is that she’s travesti and the other is that she’s from the Northeast, and a person of color and all of that, so she needed to be loud in a way that was not just going to be Black or just travesti or just Northeastern: it needed to be all her own. This is pretty much what I did with all the characters. I didn’t want to think, “Oh, they’re supposed to be a certain way, this is signalling Northeast, so I’m going to go in that direction.” That might have meant making them sound folksy, as if they were from the American South or something like that. Instead, I wanted them to seem invested in language. 

A.M.D.: I’d like to hear more about your own novel and other writing projects. To what extent do you differentiate between the practices of translation and writing? Do you feel you’re doing something similar when you do these two things, or do you see them as completely separate disciplines?

B.D.L.: I do think I’m doing something similar, though when I’m translating I’m writing on style alone, which is every writer’s dream, to just be surfing on words. And, of course, in my own writing, I have to take care of the content. For example, there are structural concerns: it needs to rush a certain way and escalate a certain way and land with this particular emotional effect. Those are the same concerns I have when translating, it’s just that I’m using slightly different material. In my own writing I think, “Okay, maybe I need a more dramatic outburst from this character,” while as a translator I think, “Maybe here I need to switch out this sentence or I didn’t do a good enough job with this character’s words because I’m not getting enough of the outburst that Stênio put in.” They go hand-in-hand.

My own novel is also short. I guess that’s in line with what’s in vogue in Latin America. I like a short novel. Mine is about a young Brazilian woman’s first year at an American college and the relationship she forges with her mother over video calls. Long before the Zoom era, so many of us were already celebrating the holidays over the computer. I wanted to use a space like this one, the split-screen, as a sort of stage. It’s all the characters can see of each other, and what can we do with that? I really loved it, I thought it was an experimental, form-oriented approach, and it was an interesting way for me to explore loneliness, financial precarity, foreignness, all of that. And I’m very dialogue-driven, so all of that is in there. But it doesn’t have the kind of plot that Stênio’s book has. They have completely different intentions. It’s not meant to be that expansive, to show a character’s entire life from youth to old age. It has completely different ambitions. As much as we share a style, or at least an interest in style and poetics, and we have a solid sense of aesthetics for our writing, we are using completely different tools. That’s fun. 

But translation is a part of my process. There’s one short story by Caio Fernando Abreu that takes place entirely over the phone, and I adore that story. It taught me a lot about how to sustain a narrative with only two characters, and with limited physicality—one person can hear the other one coughing, or clearing her throat, or making a sound, and they think, “I wonder if she’s playing with the cord.” Many other stories I’ve translated have taught me a great deal. Stênio has certainly taught me a great deal as well, though I translated his book after I was done with my novel. But maybe my next novel will use some of his influence too.

A.M.D.: Speaking of Caio Fernando Abreu, we featured an excerpt from your translation of Moldy Strawberries, which is now out from Archipelago Books, in a previous issue of LALT. Caio Fernando Abreu was a key writer of queer literature from Brazil, and The Words That Remain is a standard-bearer of that literature. Do you see that as an important part of your practice? Why should these voices be brought from Brazil to English-speaking readers?

B.D.L.: I didn’t set out to translate only queer literature, but I think my interests are clear. In a way, it chose me. I’m drawn to that kind of perspective. I’m drawn to books that show a side of Brazil I don’t see often, mostly because I see the translator as a curator. I have a lot of responsibility in choosing the very limited facets of Brazil to which we have access in English, and I usually go for the books I haven’t had the chance to see in English yet. Queer books are a big part of that. Translating a book from the eighties that’s known for being cosmopolitan and going through the AIDS crisis and all of that felt like an important dialogue for American literature to have with Latin American literature. I can’t believe Caio hadn’t been translated widely before—it still shocks me. But I think a lot of it has to do with homophobia. Not just on the translator’s part, but the general market not being welcoming or prepared for it. Translators like Gregory Rabassa touched on all the authors around Caio and never touched him. So there was some kind of barrier there, I think.

I’ve since worked on other queer books. I just finished one, I’m still working on a title in English: E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira. It’s a trans sex worker’s memoir. In many ways I’ve ended up writing and researching and doing a lot of translating around queerness or around identity in general. I also translated The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, a book about race in the south of Brazil—the whitest part, really. It’s about a Black man in this very white place and police brutality and all of that. All these books around identity show Brazil in a way that might not be the easiest to market or reconcile—those are the books I tend to be drawn to. And I’m very happy and privileged to be working on books around queerness.

A.M.D.: Speaking of unfair biases, for many years we’ve been told people should translate into their “native language.” But now a lot of people are realizing that’s not the case: people can translate in all different directions. What’s the importance of recognizing the work of translators like yourself, who are translating books and languages from their own place of origin?

B.D.L.: I love talking about this. There are many entry points we can have into a text. For example, I’m not a queer person and I translate queer texts. My entry point for that, a lot of the time, is being an immigrant. I understand how this character feels lonely or excluded. I may have different experiences I’m drawing from, the way an actor might draw from personal experiences of grief to render grief they have not experienced. Of course, it’s perfectly fine for anybody to translate books from the Northeast, but maybe I will bring something they wouldn’t. In the same way, Toni Morrison writes in Beloved about the African-American experience in ways I can imagine, but I can’t feel. I can empathize, but I can’t know. I think there is great value in that too. 

As for my relationship with the English language, I think I am a better translator for being a foreigner. I think my English is thoughtful in different ways. I think when it’s just me and the page, when I’m writing and there isn’t an audience in front of me, my relationship with the language has to do with hearing it, feeling it, it’s sensual, it’s textured, it’s artistic. Honestly, it was being a foreigner that made me so self-aware of language, of syntax, of shifting connotations and the weight of a different word if I shift the order around. All of that. 

The Words That Remain is available now from New Vessel Press. Watch out for these other titles in translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato:

• The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório (Charco Press)

• Tokio Suite by Giovana Madalosso (Europa Editions)

• E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira (Feminist Press, English title TBA)

• No Point In Dying by Francisco Maciel (New Vessel Press)

And don’t miss Bruna’s own novel, Blue Light Hours, coming this October from Grove Atlantic!

Photo: Brazilian writer and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, by Ashley Pieper.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. In 2023, she was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. She was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: What inspired the two of you, as translator and writer respectively, to dedicate yourselves to books for young adults? What makes writing and translating for young people special and distinct from writing and translating for other audiences?

Federico Ivanier: I always found it curious that people wonder about writing for young people. It doesn’t happen the other way around: no one finds it curious that someone simply writes for adults. For me, writing for young people is natural. They seem to me to be incredible interlocutors. They are in transit, so to speak, and they have agile minds. A young reader connects very well with our need to tell things because that helps us to be who we are. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, the life story of each author is reflected in their work. I am no exception. My adolescence—when I was twelve to sixteen years of age, to put a number on it—determined who I am, in many ways. It marked me as a reader, it made me understand the power of literature. For me, it’s inevitable, when I write, to connect with that.

Claire Storey: I came quite late to translation and during my MA in Translation Studies, we looked at a children’s picture book. I loved it! I realised then that this was a field I could actually work in. I became involved in World Kid Lit, an online platform highlighting the importance of translated books for young people, where I was co-editor for four years, and my interest really grew from there. Over time, my own translation practice has drifted towards the older end of the spectrum, where I can really get my teeth into a longer prose text.

Books for young people can be instrumental in understanding themselves and their surroundings, to see protagonists their own age in various different situations that they may identify with. In turn, translated books are so important for young people to learn about the world as they are growing up and developing opinions and identities, to see other cultures or traditions as well as seeing themselves reflected in those texts.

A.M.D.: Claire, what can you tell us about your “Young Adult Literature from Latin America” project, which received funding from Arts Council England? How did you go about presenting the project and why is it so necessary in today’s publishing world?

C.S.:  The idea for the project came about in part through my involvement with World Kid Lit. We publish an annual  list of titles for young people in translation, and it became clear that there were fewer books for older readers and barely any coming through from the Spanish-speaking Americas. In the UK, where I’m based, there had been no direct acquisitions for several years. I was also at a point in my career where I was ready to take the next step and hopefully gain more work. This then formed the basis of the project: to present books from the region to UK-based publishers in the hopes that someone would acquire the rights to publish the books and then hire me as the translator.

In choosing the books, I was influenced by an interview I did with Uruguayan writer and publisher Manuel Soriano for World Kid Lit, in which he expressed his frustrations around English-language publishers expecting a certain type of book from South America. I aimed to showcase a mix of genres and styles that challenged this idea—I wanted great books that happened to originate in Latin America. 

I created a document including details for each title together with translation samples and circulated it to UK publishers by email. The funding covered trips to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy and the London Book Fair in the UK, so I arranged to meet with some of the publishers who were interested. I was absolutely thrilled—and somewhat stunned—when Rosemarie Hudson at HopeRoad said she wanted to acquire not one but three of the titles. The second book from the project is The Darkness of Colours by Argentine writer Martín Blasco, and the third The Wild Ones by Mexican writer Antonio Ramos Revillas.

The joy of having a funded project was allowing myself freedom to choose titles that I knew might be more challenging for UK publishers because they’re beyond what might be expected. Dr. Emily Corbett, lecturer in children’s and young adult literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, reviewed Never Tell Anyone Your Name for #IntlYALitMonth and commented that “Ivanier’s novel… pushes the boundaries of the horror genre as we know it in the English-speaking world.” I’m thrilled by this recognition, as one of the aims of the project was to broaden the English-language publishing landscape.

A.M.D.: What do you think about the categorization of certain books as “Young Adult Literature”? From your perspectives, what characteristics set these books apart as a distinct type of literature? What, if any, are the limits of YA Literature?

F.I.: I feel that, when we talk about literature for any specific group, we’re not really thinking much about the text itself, but about the “ideal” reader—that is, a reader who, in theory, is the best for one specific text. This needs further discussion, but let’s just accept it as valid for argument’s sake. So, following that reasoning, thinking about “Young Adult Literature” isn’t so much about considering the characteristics of the books, or their limits, but about this supposed ideal reader. This is quite a topic because categorizations also respond to the market: a specific audience is constructed, and in this way, the consumers are too. In my opinion, outside of this “reader,” there isn’t much that makes literature for young people different. I understand that I have an ideal reader, but I am also writing for anybody who wants to read. It’s still literature. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

C.S.: Following on from Federico’s point, it’s interesting that a recent article in the Guardian newspaper here in the UK suggested that “74% of YA readers were adults, and 28% were over the age of 28,” which begs the question, who is this imagined ideal reader?

I’m not always convinced that the labels we put on literature are all that helpful. In the English-speaking world, the idea of YA can be open to interpretation and means different things for different people, even within the same market. What is the difference, for example, between “Young Adult” and “Teen”? There’s also now an emerging category of “New Adult”. I see books for these age groups tackling big, complex topics, but one thing that perhaps sets YA apart from New Adult or adult literature is that it often includes fewer and less graphic scenes of sexual or violent content and less swearing.

When it comes to considering YA books in translation, this can be tricky because the categories we impose don’t neatly crossover. Some topics or language in one culture may be considered too old or too young, or taboo in another. Even the expected length of a book can be a consideration. I try to keep an open mind rather than being constrained by our own narrow ideas of what is or is not considered YA. 

A.M.D.: How did the two of you come to work together? How did Claire become aware of Federico’s work and vice versa? What’s the story of how the English-language version of Never Tell Anyone Your Name came to be?

C.S.: Following my interview with Manuel Soriano, I asked him for recommendations of writers for older readers. He put me in touch with Julia Ortiz at Criatura Editora. We had a lovely Zoom call and she suggested I look at Federico’s books and put us in contact.

F.I.: I would say that all of this is Claire’s doing. She was the one who contacted me and started everything. All I have done is try to support her work.

A.M.D.: To what extent did the two of you collaborate on the translation of Never Tell Anyone Your Name? Did Federico intervene at all in the translation? Claire, do you prefer to work closely with the authors you’re translating, or to keep your distance while translating?

F.I.: My intervention was close to nothing. I fully trust Claire and her work. I also believe that a translation is a type of rewriting and that the translator should always have reasonable freedom.

C.S.: We were lucky enough to meet in person at the Young Adult Literature Convention in London in November 2023, where Federico was speaking on a panel. As we met, he had not yet read my translation! 

F.I.: I wanted to wait to have the finished copy in my hands! 

C.S.: I admit that was a bit nerve-racking. Federico is the first author I’ve really had direct contact with. He has been so supportive of the translation process, and given me the freedom to explore my process and create the English version of the text. 

We are also currently collaborating on the translation of Federico’s first ever publication—The Sword of Fire (originally titled Martina Valiente in Spanish)—for Puffin Books, which is due out in April 2025. It has been quite a lengthy selection process and we have had to work closely to collate and prepare information to support our submission. I’m excited to see Martina come to life in English.

A.M.D.: What is the significance of Never Tell Anyone Your Name (and the other books Claire has translated through the “Young Adult Literature from Latin America” project) being specifically Latin American? Why is it important that Latin American literature—for young adults and other audiences—should be published in translation by UK presses?

C.S.: The aim of this project was to increase the representation of YA books from the region in the UK. Latin America is such a vast region and, from here, relatively far away, but it’s vitally important to hear different voices and stories, and as Spanish is so widely taught in schools over here in the UK, important also to recognise Spanish as a world language, not only European. 

F.I.: Latin America has a unique but peculiar history; it’s a great blend of cultures and human journeys that we don’t find elsewhere. It would be odd not to consider that interesting. However, it shouldn’t be understood that the stories we tell in Latin America are more important than those told in other places around the planet. It’s just that the stories we tell in Latin America are unique to Latin America. 

A.M.D.: What were the biggest challenges of writing and translating Never Tell Anyone Your Name? What were the funnest or most interesting parts of the work?

F.I.: For me, although it’s a short novel, it was a very long process. It took around fifteen years from when I began writing until the book was published. I wrote, rewrote, and abandoned the novel several times. I had two major breakthrough moments, the first one when I understood exactly who my central character was (when I understood his identity) and the second when I decided to use the second-person narrative. That mix allowed me to find the atmosphere and rhythm I was looking for in the text.

C.S.: This unusual second-person present-tense narrative was another reason why I chose this book—it was a challenge for me! It took me a while to find the narrator’s voice. I remember feeling frustrated at one point that the text didn’t seem to be flowing, so I set the text aside for a few weeks and concentrated on something else. When I came back to it, I was pleasantly surprised that the draft wasn’t as awful as I thought!

A.M.D.: Never Tell Anyone Your Name is, in part, a book about international travel and interacting with people who speak differently from oneself. How did you deal with the book’s geographical specificity and use of different accents in dialogue, both in the original and in the translation?

F.I.: When writing, I tried to use my own experience living in Spain for a year, but without resorting to slang. At least not too much. I believe slang distracts and tires the reader if taken to the extreme. Sometimes, it’s just the author showing off. The author is always present—this is quite obvious—but, I believe, in many cases, it’s not necessary to constantly remind the reader that you’re there. At times, even in entire texts and even if it sounds contradictory, the author should remain silent, and let the characters and actions take charge.

C.S.: The interplay between Uruguayan Spanish and European Spanish was really fun. The differences are so inherent in the Spanish verb conjugation, and as a Spanish speaker, you instantly recognise the geographical differences. This was much harder to ripple through the text in English where we don’t have those markers.

One approach I considered to this challenge was trying to play with UK and US English. I had an enjoyable conversation with my World Kid Lit colleague Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, who lives in the US, where we discussed our different speech patterns and turns of phrase. Ultimately, this approach didn’t really work, but it was great to have the space to discover that for myself. I decided in the end to add more pointers about the differences rather than including the differences themselves. 

A.M.D.: The internet has had a massive influence on youth culture for decades. As a result, do you have the sense that international young adult readers have more in common now than they used to? Might we talk about a “global young adult culture” when it comes to books and reading? If so, what effects might this shared culture have on both writing and translating for young people?

F.I.: I don’t think the internet “creates” a new kind of teenager. In reality, with or without the internet, teenagers today face the same challenges as always: understanding who they are, what they desire, how to achieve it, how to coexist, how to transition into adulthood, what love consists of, or how to be yourself, and this is not an exhaustive list. None of this is answered by Instagram or TikTok. On the contrary, they bring more confusion. Besides, adolescence, like adulthood or childhood, is not the same for everyone. I don’t believe in generalizations. Sometimes, as adults, we need them because, deep down, we’re afraid of these young people who will inevitably take our place. Personally, I’m happy for them to take it, and I try to focus not on a person’s age but on other characteristics.

Also, with globalization emerge local responses. I wouldn’t like to think we are moving towards a global culture—that is to say, one that is uniform—because that would be like thinking that, in the sea, all fish are turning into the same fish. I want dolphins, sharks, whales, anchovies, the whole lot. Our cultural biodiversity is fundamental. And I believe it will always exist. Personally, as an author, I don’t want to write like anyone else or fit into a global concept. 

Photo: Uruguayan writer Federico Ivanier and British translator Claire Storey at the UK’s Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC), London, November 2023.

Lawrence and I spoke via email about his unique artistic practice, the joys and peculiarities of translating children’s literature, and the troubling rise in anti-LGBT censorship of writing for young readers. 

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: First, a question wrapped in a compliment: you’re incredibly prolific! I—like many translators, I suspect—am consistently blown away by how many excellent translations you’re able to produce over short periods of time (in two directions), all while writing your own books and traveling internationally to talk about your work. Can you share any tips or trade secrets about productivity?

Lawrence Schimel: This comes up a lot, especially from Americans, and especially those who ask how I can afford to translate so much poetry, with as badly as poetry translations are usually paid. Probably the biggest secret or tip is living in a country with socialized medicine, and hence not needing to have a different day job (distracting me from making books) in order to have health insurance, as is the case in the US where health insurance is available/affordable only via employment.

I’ve also tried to channel my time and energy into creative work, so these days rather than get embroiled in online flamewars or something like that, I’d rather translate some poems and be doing something positive in the world instead.

In general, I find that translation satisfies the creative itch in a way, but without draining the well of creativity in a way that my own writing tends to. 

Deadlines also help. Having someone who wants to publish something (which is frankly easier with a translation, usually, than one’s own writing) is a very strong motivator for me. Not just getting paid for the work, and hence keeping a roof over my head and allowing me to buy books to read, but also for the work to reach a readership.

AMD: Besides translating children’s literature, you’re also a widely-published writer of children’s literature, and your books are often translated into a variety of languages. What can you tell us about seeing your work spread across lines of language? To what extent do you take part in the process of translating your work into languages you don’t speak or write yourself?

LS: I’m always delighted to talk to translators as they’re figuring out ways to recreate my own work in other languages, and since I both write in multiple languages and translate primarily from and into two, I fully understand and appreciate how flexible one needs to be sometimes—or how many liberties a translator may need to take—in order to be faithful to the spirit of the work (and also its commercial aspect, since, unlike many other kinds of translation, children’s books have the potential to sell quite well and over a long period of time, as the market essentially renews itself every four to five years). 

My most-translated books are two rhyming children’s stories with same-sex families that I created with the Latvian illustrator Elīna Brasliņa. They are now published (or at least under contract) for over fifty editions in forty languages. And I’ve regularly talked with a lot of the translators, and helped supply them with some of the various existing versions, in case those might help aid or inspire solutions for their languages. I tell the translators to take whatever liberties they need to recreate the books, which should be fun, rhyming adventures. Since they can’t change or contradict the art, they can be as free as they need to with the plot, if doing so helps them be more faithful to the text, if that makes sense.

I originally wrote the books in Spanish, and provided a line-by-line English gloss for editors and/or translators who might need them. I later did my own rhyming English translations (there are lots of tweaks and edits to the different English-language editions published in  Canada, Wales, New Zealand, and South Africa, even though they’re all my self-translations: sometimes it says “stuffie” or “teddy” or just “bear”; sometimes it’s “my two moms,” “my two mums,” or “mum and mam”). So far the book has been published in three different French-language editions: two in Europe (in Switzerland and a bilingual French/Flemish edition in Belgium) which are translated directly from the Spanish, and one in Canada which was translated from my own English self-translation (also published by the same Canadian publisher).

For a long while the biggest objection to the books was the margarine; I hadn’t thought twice about rhyming “margarina” with “cocina” in Spanish, especially as both my husband and I are dairy-free. But some of the editors had moral objections (for instance, in Switzerland, where it was a matter of national pride for it to be butter instead of margarine) and some translators asked if they could change it to butter because margarine is so polysyllabic and didn’t fit the meter or the rhyme well. In Israel, to avoid issues of kosher dietary laws (and because margarine in Israel comes in bars, not round containers), we changed it to hummus and actually named the cat Hummus, too, which worked out quite nicely. 

But to give an example as a translator working with a language I don’t speak myself: a few years ago, I translated two picture books by an author friend of mine, Clare Azzopardi, from Maltese into Spanish. I had been in a multilingual European children’s writing/translating workshop with Clare many years before, during which we had worked on the first drafts of one of the two books, so I’d been a witness to (and a commentator on) it from its genesis.

I worked partially from an English bridge translation by Albert Gatt, but, for instance, I noticed that in one of the stories, all the cats had rhyming sets of names, whereas in the English version the names were translated accurately but didn’t rhyme. So I consulted with Clare and was given permission to make up new sets of cat names that rhymed in Spanish, like Canela and Franela. Likewise, there were moments where the English proved awkward or confusing to translate into Spanish, and I asked Clare what the Italian would be, and from Italian I was able to come up with a Spanish version that had much better flow and syntax. 

Rather than focusing on that cliché of what is “lost in translation,” I prefer to focus on the greater loss of not translating (anything) from an entire nation/language’s literary output.

AMD: How does translating children’s literature differ from translating literature written for grown-ups, if it does? Do your concerns or priorities as a translator change depending on the age of your target audience? 

LS: A lot will depend on the kind of book it is (not to mention the kind of publisher): whether the translation preserves all the cultural details or instead whether the translation localizes the book.  

I think each project has its own priorities and concerns. For instance, I recently translated a Latin American picture book for a publisher in the UK in which I advocated for keeping the word “pueblo” in Spanish because a “village” in the UK means something very different from the communities founded by escaped African slaves in the remote Colombian mountains where the book was set.

But I also translated another Latin American picture book, this time for an American publisher, in which I would normally have once more advocated for leaving “abuela” and “pueblo” in the original, except that this project, while written and illustrated by an Argentine creator, Isol, was commissioned by the Palestinian Museum as part of their “Palestinian Art History as Told by Everyday Objects” project. Isol had previously given a workshop for the Tamer Institute, and had been given a shawl, which she used as the basis for her book, scanning it and using the embroidery as the background for the art and the story.

So in this case, consulting with my editor, we decided “abuela” and “pueblo” should in fact be translated, even if in another book by an Argentine creator we would have left them in the original.

The biggest determining factor is probably the illustration, though, in that the translation cannot contradict what is depicted, and that will condition what solutions you can come up with for the translation. (I’m thinking, for instance, of languages that are inflected, so nouns have genders; in Spanish, Death is feminine: La Muerte, or Mexico’s La Calatrina, although in English Death is usually depicted as the Grim Reaper, who is commonly male.)

The question of inclusivity and gendered stereotypes and gendered language is also one that needs to be grappled with, and which can be trickier for certain ages.

I translated into Spanish a lovely children’s book by indigenous creators Richard van Camp and Julie Flett. Little You shows various indigenous families in different compositions, but never genders the babies being addressed. The Spanish translation of this interview will have to figure out how to say this, but luckily, since this interview is for an adult readership, the translator will be able to resort to direct non-binary language in a way that I couldn’t in my translation of the book itself, aimed at young readers. It was important for me to respect the authors’ care in creating a fun, rhyming, and gender-neutral book, and so I struggled to avoid using the masculine as neutral in my translation. This led to my taking, perhaps, some liberties to recreate a fun, rhyming, gender-neutral version in Spanish, but by doing so I was more faithful to the spirit of the book, even if not the line-by-line or spread-by-spread text. Some solutions were easier: I could change the line “you are perfect” to “you are perfection” to avoid winding up with the gendered “perfecto/perfecta.” From the very title things were complicated because all diminutives in Spanish are inflected masculine/feminine. In the end, I delivered both a literal version in Spanish and my rhyming gender-neutral version, which is the one that was, in the end, published, under the title Tú eres tú.

AMD: I imagine creating illustrated children’s books must be an intensely collaborative process between writer (and possibly translator) and illustrator(s). Am I right in thinking this, or does the process work differently? What’s it like in cases, such as those of your books ¿Lees un libro conmigo? and Igual que ellos, when the same book is illustrated by different artists in different editions?

LS: Unquestionably the case, and I think one of the important things for writers to be aware of is to leave room for the illustrator to create their own visual narrative in parallel with (or sometimes in contrast to) the story being told in the text. Very often, after the illustrations are done, I’ll go through the text again and see if there are things that need to be cut or changed, so the combination of text and illustration works hand-in-hand.

That, of course, is for picture books; working with middle grade or adult fiction, which are often pure text, can be different. Oftentimes, intended age ranges can vary between languages, with a book scaling up or down in terms of audience.

One recent book I translated, Different: A Story of the Spanish Civil War, written by Venezuelan author Mónica Montañés and illustrated by Eva Sánchez Gómez, was originally a very text-heavy picture book when published by Ediciones Ekaré. I suggested to Eerdmans, who published the book in English, for us to use the same text and the same art, but to change the trim size and format to let it be a middle grade novel, with more pages, which better suited the ages of the characters in the story and the length of the text in the English language market. The book just won a Batcheldeer Honor from the American Library Association, so it seems like our instincts and the adaptations we made were solid. And Ekaré is even thinking of doing the same thing now, when they sell through the current Spanish-language print run of the picture book! 

You mention ¿Lees un libro conmigo?, which has gone through various editions. Most recently, it was published in a bilingual English/Filipino edition by Kahel Press in the Philippines, with new art by Pepot Atienza. The art by Thiago Lopes which was used in most of the editions and translations of the book didn’t have enough space for the bilingual text, and also in order to fit the series where the book was published, it needed to be a square rather than a rectangular shape.

Perhaps most importantly, there were some major cultural differences in how blind people are portrayed, and so there were visual cultural clues that wouldn’t necessarily have “read” for young readers in the Philippines. 

AMD: You’ve translated several books for young readers—such as Niños, written by María José Ferrada and illustrated by María Elena Valdez, and Different, which you mentioned earlier—that deal with heavy, difficult historical subjects (in the case of these two books, the disappearance of children under the Pinochet regime and the experiences of children during the Spanish Civil War, respectively). How do you approach this sort of project? What do you hope young readers will gain from the experience of reading these books?

LS: I think it is important for all of us to remember that children live in the world with us, and hence anything that happens in the world is an appropriate subject for children as well, so long as it is written appropriately for their frame of reference. 

In the case of a book like Niños, the poems themselves are not heavy in any way. Rather, what’s heavy is the architecture or construction of the book, the contextualization, which crystalizes everything: Ferrada imagines the missing childhoods of the children who were disappeared or killed during the Pinochet dictatorship with one poem named for each of those children.

For Different, the English translation also has a lot of original backmatter that contextualizes the Spanish Civil War for young readers who might not yet know anything about it, as well as a glossary of terms we agreed to leave in the original, and whose definition provides additional cultural or historical context. 

At the same time, the story of a family fleeing for political freedom is one that, sadly, is so very timely, in so many parts of the world.

(I did also think it was vitally important for American kids in particular to read this story in which Venezuela, not the US, was the fabled country of freedom to which they flee, to counteract recent years in which certain politicians and the media only call Venezuela a “shithole country.”)

AMD: In 2021, we read in the news that Hungarian bookshop Líra Könyv had been fined for selling the Hungarian translations of your books Early In the Morning and It’s Not Playtime! due to the fact that these books depict queer families, with same-sex parents interacting with their children in everyday settings. In the United States and other countries, we continue to see efforts to ban or censor books depicting queer characters, based on the reactionary notion that such books will somehow harm or corrupt children. What are your hopes or concerns for children’s literature affirming queer identities in the current publishing scene?

LS: I was completely unprepared for those books to have provoked the backlash they did, especially since Elina and I set out to write books that focused on queer joy, not just books about being different or overcoming homophobia. So the books, we thought, were completely innocent, until we had it proved by various government backlashes how dangerous so many people found our queer happiness to be. Aside from the Hungarian government’s intent to suppress the sale of the books, the NGO in Russia who published them was shut down by the state.

I don’t read Hungarian or Russian, so I was spared the majority of the backlash and vitriol. I learned to Google myself in Cyrillic, and when I was feeling strong enough to stomach it, I would search for what was being said about the books or myself—ranging from posts suggesting that I, the illustrator, and the translator should all be shot to the Vice Chair of the Communist Party denouncing me on TV for committing “fifth column attacks” against Russia. But I wasn’t able to keep it all at arm’s length, only when I went looking for it; I was also subject to daily online attacks, threats, etc. on multiple social media platforms. 

It was hard to live through, but it only confirmed for me how important it is to continue to create these kinds of stories, and to find ways of getting them into children’s hands, despite not just the haters but also the publishing industry and how it makes room only for a certain kind of story, or only in one slot (to be on Pride displays for June), ignoring us the rest of the year.

And while the backlash against these two books of mine usually gets most of the attention, there was also a lot of solidarity and collaboration. Not just campaigns like the one run by 100% Mensch in Stuttgart, together with the NGO Equality Factory in their sister-city of Łódź, in which for every copy bought in German they donated a Polish-language edition of the books to the LGBT-free zones in Poland. Or how NGOs like Stonewall Cymru donated a set of the books in Welsh to all eight hundred primary schools in Wales. Or how, in Portugal, the books were published by the government itself, in particular the Comissão para a Cidadania e a Igualdade de Género, and given free to schools across the country. 

There were also all the publishers (big or small) and NGOs and queer bookshops and other entities who came together to co-print the books in different languages, and to help bring the per unit costs down enough to make it possible for all those who took part.

Not to mention how bookstores like Líra Könyv reacted to the government: instead of putting a warning label on the book, as many other bookshops did, they put up signs at the entrance to every bookstore saying: “In this bookstore we sell books with different content than traditional ones.”

AMD: Finally, a question on a topic other than children’s lit: through your translations of Agnès Agboton (Voice of the Two Shores, published by flipped eye in 2023) and your collaboration with Layla Benítez-James on the work of Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio (Hija del camino, which was supported by a 2022 NEA Translation Fellowship and will soon be seen on screen via Netflix), you’ve done a lot to lend visibility to Black writers working from Spain, and to Afropean identity. How do you perceive your role in breaking down ethnocentric ideas about what “Spanish literature” should look like?

LS: I have a personal commitment to make sure I am translating at least one racialized writer each year, in either direction. These are, unfortunately, not usually projects I am asked by publishers to translate, so instead I feel it is important to use what privilege I have—and the luxury of time to be able to devote to creating a sample on spec—and what industry contacts I’ve amassed over the years to try and open what doors I can for these voices the publishing industry is otherwise actively and passively suppressing.

This can be work from a writer like Agnès Agboton, from Benin, who writes in her mother tongue, Gun, and then self-translates into Spanish, publishing in bilingual editions in Spain, where she’s lived for over thirty years now. I started working with her when she represented Benin for the Poetry Parnassus celebration held in conjunction with the London Olympics; I translated from the Spanish and then she recited the Gun originals so I could hear the music, and I read her the English so she could hear the music, and we tweaked as necessary.

Or a children’s book by Afro-Guatemalan writer Julio Serrano Echeverría, forthcoming from The Emma Press in the UK (which won a PEN Translates Award from English PEN, as did the Agboton project for flipped eye).

Or into Spanish, translating writers like South African poet Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (with Arrate Hidalgo), or non-binary African-American poet Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead.

But I also think it is important to help create space and opportunities for racialized writers as well, and one way I figured I could do so would be to share a contract with a younger translator as a kind of private mentorship. That was how the collaboration with Layla came about, and it’s been fascinating and wonderful because the learning happens in both directions. As an autodidact, there is so much I only know on an instinctual level, and thus having to try and articulate it has helped me a lot in terms of understanding my own ideas and understandings about translation. And she has also helped push me out of my comfort zones or my complacencies; she makes me challenge or change some long-held ideas or habits that don’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny.

Obviously, I don’t pretend to be the only one doing this work, but until we burn down the systems in place that result in the suppression of so many voices, it’s work that all of us need to be doing, and I hold myself accountable to continue to (actively) do what I can.

Photo: Lawrence Schimel, by Nieves Guerra.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: I’m very happy to be in conversation with Darrel Alejandro Holnes, author of Stepmotherland, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. I was struck by this collection’s title because I recently worked on a translation from Spanish that involved the concept of stepfamilies—madrastras, padrastros, hijastros, etc.—and I’m fascinated by the difficulty of translating these terms from Spanish to English. Can you tell us how you arrived at this title? Why Stepmotherland?

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Absolutely. The title of this collection was originally Tierra madrastra. “Tierra madre” means “motherland,” and “madrastra” is the word for “stepmother” in Spanish. I had a conversation with a friend of mine about whether I wanted a Spanish-language title for a book of poems that are primarily in English, where English has such a strong presence. I started playing around with this word, this concept, and I couldn’t find a word in English that really fit the concept, so I made up a word of my own. Stepmotherland is my attempt to fit this concept that I found in Spanish into the English language. I found that this process, in so many ways, paralleled my own journey into this country, trying to take this Black Panamanian version of a human being and fitting it into a US context that doesn’t always have room for someone like me. I’m into building chairs and making sure I’ve got my own seat at the table, and I think there’s something magical about this title. I think it does that work: it builds that chair and it demands a seat at the table. I see the concept of Stepmotherland as something that speaks to the pan-American reality; many people on this continent might not originally be from here. Their lineage connects to countries from all over the world. I think the project of not just the United States but also a lot of Latin American countries is to try to make something new out of all these pieces of cultures that have been left behind, in a way. Even the whole concept of the postcolonial is that these former colonies have been left behind, and they now make up this “third world.” It’s not really about ranking; it’s about an “old world” and a “new world”—the new world being the world of the colonies—and then this “third world” comes out of that. That’s where the term originally comes from. And I think Stepmotherland as an idea really speaks to the way we struggle on this continent with inheritance, we struggle with legacy, we struggle with a history of theft, a history of slavery, a history of genocide, and a history of colonization that is rooted in violence and rooted in erasure, but that also gave birth to everything we are. That struggle and that tension is something I wanted to really highlight with this title, and that tension is something that runs throughout the book. 

AMD: I think it’s an extremely apt title. I’d like to talk more about the way language works in the book, which is really fascinating. Reading the collection as a translator made me think about how fantastically difficult it would be to translate a lot of these poems because play with language is already so deeply built into them. I’ll put the question this way: do you see yourself as an English-language poet, or do you even think you can define your practice in linguistic terms?

DAH: When you look at the etymological history of the English language, you find that it’s a language of empire and a language of trade. It has within it words of German origin, of French origin, of Arabic origin that have made their way into the English language. I think of the language I speak as very much a language of the new century. It is a product of a very global education and of all the geopolitics that have impacted me as a subject of capitalistic democracy and “free trade.” I think of my language as the language of my experience—so much of that is in Spanish, so much of that is on the Internet, so much of that is rooted in pidgin slang. Most of the slang I grew up with in Panama is actually a pidgin language; we import words from French, for example, and adapt them to our own spellings and pronunciations. I’ve always been really fascinated by that, because it felt like a secret code—one I understood because I had the context for it, but a code that also makes me feel more foreign when I engage sometimes in English in the United States because if I have the impulse to use any kind of slang that has its origins outside of this country, I will eventually lose somebody in the audience. I’ve instead found that, through poetry, it’s not a loss but a gain, because when the audience stays with you through the poem then they’ll also learn something: they’ll learn a new language, they’ll learn a new word, they’ll learn the code. I discovered that poetry was also a way to teach this code. So my knowledge of the code doesn’t make me foreign, it makes me special.

AMD: Something I loved throughout the book is how you use slang, and how you don’t succumb to the commonly accepted binaries between English and Spanish, or even between different types of Spanish. You’re willing to erase those lines. 

DAH: Absolutely. More is possible than people are telling you. That’s the truth. And everywhere you see a boundary is a missed opportunity to connect. So don’t lose that opportunity.

AMD: Speaking of going deep into words and focusing on specific bits of language, some of the poems I enjoy the most from your collection are the definition poems, like “ba•by.” You mentioned that you don’t read it aloud often—why is that, and what is it that attracts you to the definition format?

DAH: At the time when I was writing the definition poems, I was reading A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, and I was also reading Bird Eating Bird by Kristin Naca, which are two collections that are very, very concerned with language. M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A centers on the first African-American student to ever win the National Spelling Bee—I believe it was in the forties or fifties—and her win was stolen from her because they refused to give her the prize. That collection is very concerned with spelling, the ways we learn language, and the power of language. And Kristen Naca’s Bird Eating Bird is about learning Spanish. I learned from those collections how you can use the study of language to tell a story. I had these stories that I wanted to share, but I felt that they necessitated a particular vocabulary, and if I was able to find that vocabulary I would be able to tell those stories. So I made a list of key words, kind of like magic words that would unlock my ability to tell the story, and “baby” was one of them. 

AMD: We hear so often of poetry as a question of giving names to certain things, or of defining. That’s what drew me to these poems in which the definition itself is the poem. Something else that stood out to me throughout the collection were the ekphrastic poems. What drew you to ekphrastic writing, and particularly to the religious imagery that comes through in some of your ekphrastic poems?

DAH: I think of all my friends who are lapsed Catholics or former Catholics or recovering Catholics—the whole variety. A lot of us continue to be haunted by the iconography. It becomes burned into you in a way, even if you are someone who doesn’t believe or you get to a point where you renounce your faith. If you grew up in that culture, I think there’s something really powerful about it and really moving, and for me it’s something really global. I was in Bulgaria, seeing Orthodox churches everywhere, and I recognized a lot of the iconography. I was in Kenya and I had the same experience, and of course I have that same experience in Panama too. So it was a way of speaking a very global language, because I’m working with these icons that are pervasive throughout multiple cultures but that are also unique. As a Black person I’ve always been really fascinated by the culture of the Black Madonna, and also there are these paintings in which, over time, the skin color of the figures has turned black. They are sometimes venerated or worshiped by the local community. That’s so interesting to me in a country like Bulgaria where the Black population is so small, and consequently there’s also a lot of racism. I experienced microaggressions in a small Bulgarian village where they also venerated this Black Madonna. That’s fascinating to me. I think about what we worship and why, and so much of this book is about worship as well—the ways we worship family, the ways we worship the nation-state, the ways we worship sex, the ways we worship each other. I think so much of being in love is about devotion, and so much of Renaissance painting and sculpture is about devotion. That devotion includes those who worship at the church of art and art history. I felt so moved when I saw Michelangelo’s Pietà because you can also see your own stories in it. When I looked at the Pietà I was also able to see my own experiences and the experiences of people in my community in the narrative that’s represented by that iconography. It’s a place of investigation, another way of asking these questions through artistic engagement. 

AMD: Through ekphrastic poems like yours, canonical art—and it doesn’t get much more canonical than Michelangelo—can become manipulable, almost customizable. In your poem on the Pietà, you paint it with different colors, not as a pure, empty whiteness but as something else. It reminded me too of misconception of Greek classical sculpture being purely white when in fact it was not. You really explore the power dynamic between canonical art and noncanonical art—if such a division exists—in these poems.

DAH: In doing so, I’m also elevating these other stories. What really fascinates me about most of the Bible is the fact that the majority of the people in the Bible are not kings and queens—so, what does it mean to tell their stories in a way that is supposed to be exemplary, putting them on a pedestal? How do you venerate them? I’m also interested in the veneration of the mother figure, which makes its way into Christianity and specifically Catholicism from cults dedicated to the veneration of the mother in the Mediterranean, as well as Western Europe and the land now known as Italy. Growing up in Panama, Mother’s Day is actually the biggest sales day of the year for stores. It’s bigger than Christmas, it’s bigger than any other holiday because this is a country where women are sometimes venerated and where motherhood in particular is really venerated. I feel that my relationship with my mother is also deeply cultural, so if I’m writing about her then I’m writing about my culture, and if I’m writing about my culture then I’m writing about my mother. I’m excited by the opportunity that comes from these ekphrastic poems.

AMD: One final question about where the inspirations behind this collection come from. I sense that they’re quite diverse and wide-ranging; there are some poems that are very historical, some that are clearly derived from personal experience, some that are inspired by other pieces of art. To what extent do you see yourself as a researcher, or as a person deliberately seeking out questions or themes to write on, and to what extent does it just come organically through what you happen to observe?

DAH: I think it’s both. My research is very organic because I research outside of any particular project, typically. I research because I’m curious and I want to know. I think of myself as a lifelong learner—I’m always a student of the world and a student of experience. That’s why I love to travel and try new things. So many of the poems in the book come from questions; the questions lead to experiences and the experiences inspire the poems. If I didn’t nurture my curiosity, if I dismissed it, and if I was absolute about my relationship with knowledge, then I would have no creative soul. That curiosity that every child has is at the heart of any artist’s creative spirit. So don’t grow up too fast. Don’t grow up at all, really. I’ve been able to perfect my skills as a researcher because I’ve worked with ethnographers and anthropologists who have trained me to conduct oral histories and historical and literary reviews that led to ethnographic plays and research-based plays. Once you learn to ride a bike, you can’t unlearn it. Once you learn to find the answers to the questions you have, you’ll never stop seeking out more information. I’m constantly trying to learn more about the world, about myself, about community, about culture, about history. That investigation created this book. And I hope to continue investigating. I think the poems will come.

Photo: Darrel Alejandro Holnes, by Beowulf Sheehan.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: First, congratulations on all the good work you’ve been up to. You’ve been translating prolifically, besides writing your own poetry and cultivating literary community with endeavors like your blog The Guest and your Poem Per Diem newsletter, all of which is very impressive!

I was inspired to get in touch when I recently read The Science of Departures, your translation of poems by Adalber Salas Hernández, published last year by Kenning Editions. As I was reading, I noticed one poem, called “A Day in the Life,” seemed very familiar—then I remembered I had translated the same poem a few years back for a feature on young Venezuelan poets in LALT! I like your version a lot better, I must say. 

What memories come to mind when you think back to working on The Science of Departures? There’s a lot of rather esoteric language in the book (medical terminology, etc) and also a lot of historical and literary references—one poem paraphrases the opening lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance. How did you manage this referential language in your translation?

Robin Myers: First of all, I’m tickled to learn that you translated “A Day in the Life,” too! Adalber is a big believer in multiple translations and so am I; I love the idea of our different versions all hanging out together. 

Working on The Science of Departures was a continual lesson in how palimpsestic translation can be—and how many rabbit holes it can beckon you down! My first drafts tend to be very loose and rough; I focus on getting an almost gestural feel for the poems, surrendering to the way they move, trying to move along with them. Adalber’s poems flow and fork and send out syntactic tendrils in a way I found especially pleasurable to drift with. In (many) subsequent revisions, I focused more intently on peeling back the different layers of historical and literary references you’ve alluded to. As I delved deeper into those references, and into the “original” language they’re made of (Adalber’s work often draws from his own readings and translations from English, French, and Portuguese, in such a way that the question of the “original” soon blurs into the palimpsest), I often tried to incorporate them directly. For the poem that paraphrases the opening lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, I quoted from Gregory Rabassa’s translation. For the poems dense with medical terminology, I asked a friend who’s a nurse to help me revise for technical accuracy. 

At the same time, I’m sure there are underlying references I missed, which meant I ended up translating them on their own terms, as part of a poem on its own terms, without necessarily tracking where they came from—and I think, when it comes to poems that don’t declare their intertextuality as an objective per se, that that’s okay, too. Take the title, for example: I’d translated the whole book before Adalber told me that “la ciencia de las despedidas” is in itself a Spanish translation (one of many!) of a line by Mandelstam. Rather than turtles, it’s translations, translations, translations all the way down.

AMD: Another poetry book you translated that I really enjoyed is Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, which came out from Cardboard House in 2018. As the title suggests, the book is a sort of tongue-in-cheek obituary for lyric poetry, its preoccupations and form, but at the same time it’s a very formal book, I think—one that repurposes and plays with poetic traditions. I loved your metrical renditions of the poems, which likewise adhere to form in a playful, ironic way. How did you go about capturing this unique take on meter and form in your English versions? And what are your thoughts on translating metrical poetry in general?

RM: I love translating metrical poetry, and it was Ezequiel himself who got me hooked on it; I took a poetry translation workshop with him as a college student in Buenos Aires, where our friendship and collaboration began. He insisted we learn the nuts and bolts of meter as a way to approach translation with a deeper sense of poetic tradition, a more extensive formal toolbox, and a keener ear. I was very resistant at first, but I changed my tune when I started to experience translating in meter as a more concrete form of contact with what I find challenging and exciting about translation in general: you’re searching for freedom within constraints, trying to create something new within the armature of something that already exists, paying obsessive attention to the relationship between the parts and the whole. Meter won’t let you forget either one (parts, whole).    

In translating Lyric Poetry Is Dead, I used mostly iambic lines of different lengths, veering pretty freely in and out of them, to evoke Ezequiel’s own multifarious use of meter (which in Spanish is defined in terms of syllables, not stresses, as in the English tradition). I wanted my own use of meter to feel rigorous but also playful, free—which is the tone and the drive of the book itself, as you’ve pointed out so thoughtfully in your question. The idea of tradition as something to be engaged with, reappropriated, reinvented, teased.

AMD: I was happy to hear that you’re currently translating Andrés Neuman’s novel Bariloche, which will be published by Open Letter. I’m a big Neuman fan and I’m looking forward to reading your translation! He has been translated into English before by a number of translators, most notably Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, who have done three of his novels and a book of short stories to date. What’s it like to work on writing by a contemporary author who has been translated before by other translators? Have you looked back at existing translations of his work, or do you find that distracts from your own translation? 

RM: I’m a huge admirer of Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia’s work, which I first encountered when I read Neuman’s Traveler of the Century some years back. They’re incredible, and I admire them so much that of course I find it daunting to work on an author they’ve translated so extensively! At the same time, I like to think of translators and authors, and our overlapping relationships with each other, as inhabitants of shared ecosystems—keeping each other company in some way, working alongside each other, contributing together to the environment we’re all part of. While I’ve worked more often with previously untranslated authors, that has started to change. For example, I translated Cristina Rivera Garza’s book The Restless Dead when she’d already been translated and has continued to be translated by other people, and I think the multiplicity and simultaneity of those author-translator relationships is a healthy and wonderful thing. In one case, it’s even led to a collaboration: Sarah Booker (who is the translator of The Iliac Crest and Grieving, among other works, as well as an exceptionally kind and generous person) and I have been co-translating another of Rivera Garza’s novels.

To answer your second question, I usually don’t look back at extant translations with the explicit purpose of informing my own, at least not at the time. In the specific case of Bariloche, there’s also the factor that it’s very different stylistically from Neuman’s later work (it’s his first novel, written when he was 22 years old!). In general, though, once I’ve gone through my own process (which sometimes means I’m “finished” and sometimes just that I’ve wrangled with my translation enough to feel that I know where I stand with it), then I’ll go back and read existing translations out of curiosity and eagerness about how the different versions might be conversing with each other, or how they might continue to. I’m excited to return to Caistor and Garcia’s past translations and to read their upcoming work.

AMD: I’m also very much looking forward to reading your co-translation with Ellen Jones of Ave Barrera’s The Forgery from Charco Press. I’ve never done a co-translation before and I’m interested to know more about the process. How are you and Ellen divvying up the work? Do each of you do different things or work on different sections? And how does it work in practical terms? Do the two of you meet up in person and literally “work together” or is it more about sending your respective translations back and forth and swapping notes?

RM: Ellen and I split up the book by chapters, then worked independently on a first draft of our respective halves. As we finished our initial versions of the chapters, we swapped, and each of us revised and commented in detail on the other’s work. (Truly, what would we do without Track Changes?!). Then we swapped again, so that the “first” translator could have another pass at the chapter she started with, and so on. Once we had a cleaner draft, we switched to Google Docs for our subsequent revisions, and once we had the copyedits back from Charco (thanks to the wonderful Fionn Petch), we went through everything in person. We also kept ongoing lists of doubts and tricky bits to resolve later, names and terms to standardize throughout the book, discrepancies in expressions used in the UK vs. the US (Ellen’s from the former, I’m from the latter), etc. And we WhatsApped each other lots of long and ruminative voice notes! I loved the continual conversation that this project became, and I think our system worked well in allowing us both real creative independence while also keeping us involved in—and part of, and accountable to—all the stylistic decisions that ultimately shaped our collaborative whole. I learned so much from Ellen along the way. And I found it both comforting and freeing to share the experience of continual thinking-out-loud that translation usually requires in solitude.

AMD: How does personal closeness to the author manifest itself in your translations? I understand you’re good friends with many of the authors you translate, and I’ve heard you say you work quite collaboratively with some of them. What impact does a close, collaborative relationship have on the finished translation (if a translation is ever really finished)? And what about when the opposite is true? If and when you translate entirely without the author’s input, how does that feel in comparison?

RM: Personal closeness to the author means, for one thing, that I feel comfortable asking as many questions as I need to while translating. Because there are always, always questions (with this word, did you mean more x or y? can you help me unpack this image? how crude or how formal is the register of this exclamation I’m not familiar with? etc.). I treasure the chance to have an ongoing conversation not just with the author’s work by translating it—which is the nature of translation itself—but with the author as a real live person with whom I already share a sense of camaraderie. I also get a thrill out of accompanying the author as they revisit their work through the questions that arise during the translation process. Of course, all of this can happen with an author I have no prior relationship with. But to start from a place of lightness and trust—my trust in the author’s intent and stylistic decisions and how those decisions both assert and open themselves to interpretation; the author’s trust in my creative independence as a vehicle of respect for their work—is both gratifying and uniquely fun. It makes for a more playful collaboration, I think. 

When I don’t have much contact with the author, the process is, unsurprisingly, more solitary, which makes the process of combing through my doubts and making my Final Decisions more solitary, too. The conversation remains an essentially inner monologue, though supported and enriched by the research I do, the contextual questions I ask other people, the fellow translators I may consult on one thing or another. Which means it’s never really a monologue in the end, not ever.    

AMD: I understand from previous interviews that Spanish is your second language—although you do have family roots in Mexico—and that you’ve been living and working for some time now in Mexico City. As a first-language English speaker living in Mexico, how does everyday immersion in your source language affect your practice as a translator (if it does)? What do you like and/or dislike most about working as a translator into English in Mexico City? Do you think your translations would come out differently if you were completing them elsewhere?

RM: In The Restless Dead, Cristina Rivera Garza writes that the responsibility of The Second Language “is questioning everything (what is original and primal and natural) by the sheer fact of its existence… If the mother tongue achieves an effect of intimacy through familiarity, The Second Language produces intimacy by way of hypervigilance” (my translation). I love the hypervigilant intimacy of living in my second language, and I love the concentric circles of my contact with it. To put it one way, my second language isn’t simply Spanish, but Mexican Spanish; not simply Mexican Spanish, but Mexico City Spanish, with its particular accents and slangs, its obscenities and nostalgias and social stratifications, which I know something about by virtue of living where I live and which I’ll always, always need to keep learning about (and asking about, and listening for, and stumbling into). As a translator, this means I’m most comfortable translating literature from Mexico—not because living anywhere makes you an expert in anything, but because it’s what most comprehensively orients your ear. And also because it’s where I have the broadest web of friends and books and resources I can call on when I need more information or input on what I’m translating. I certainly translate work from other places, too; it just requires a different kind of legwork from the get-go. 

I guess the only thing I’ve sometimes disliked about translating into English while living in Mexico City is that, for a long time, the distance (less geographical than contextual) made the English-language publishing industry feel even more daunting and inscrutable than it already is. I was translating for several years before I got my act together to pitch any book-length work, and it took several years after that for any projects to land. I just didn’t feel like I knew how anything worked. And although I started getting to know a warm and vibrant community of Spanish-language writers soon after I moved here, it took me much longer to meet other translators into English, both in Mexico and in the US. Having more translator-solidarity and mentorship in my life has been a great gift in every way.

AMD: I’ve been thinking recently about the trickiness of writing an “artist statement” as a translator—of coming up with a specific proposal, or a specific set of ethics, let’s say, that guides what one does as a translator. Would you say you have a specific goal or a particular ethical prerogative in mind when you translate? Is there something you’re always “going for” when you translate, or does that change depending on the author or the text at hand? 

RM: It certainly changes depending on the author or text. But there are a few things I always think about and try to bring to every translation. I’ll quote the translator Sophie Hughes for the first one: “I approach a text that is already complete, mature, sure of itself, and it’s my responsibility to look after it, to respect it for what it is (its nature or essence), whilst protecting it from linguistic butchery…” Of course, there’s something subjective and interpretive about defining “what it is”; same with “linguistic butchery”! But I mention this remark of Sophie’s because I love her invocation of respect and care: how the translator assesses what the text intends to do, and how the author carries out that intent, and then works to honor both (intent, execution).  

I also find myself thinking of something the translator Conor Bracken once wrote to me as part of an interview for The Guest, a monthly column I wrote for Palette Poetry: while translating poetry (surreal poetry, in this case), he said wanted to focus on sound “as another plane on which important arguments are being made.” I love this idea of sound as argument, an idea I think is essential to any sort of relationship with poetry (not just translating it but also writing and especially reading it).

Finally, I’ll say that I approach translation as a cover artist: as a musician who studies and performs an existing text with devoted attention to the original score and, simultaneously, with curiosity and excitement about how the music will change—because it must change—by the sheer fact of being reinterpreted.

Photo of Robin Myers by Nuria Lagarde.

_________
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator of both poetry and prose. Her latest translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), and Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books). 

This claim might seem far-fetched at first. Oklahoma sits at the heart of so-called “flyover country”: the part of the United States you fly over to get to the parts where things actually happen, or where the things that happen actually matter. Oklahoma is, at least at present, overwhelmingly politically conservative, which doesn’t seem conducive to the sort of cosmopolitanism that would make for a literary translation hotspot. And, with four million people spread out over seventy thousand square miles, Oklahoma doesn’t seem as likely as New York or Los Angeles to generate the sorts of spaces and encounters propitious to a thriving translation community. 

Luckily, these are all misconceptions. Like Latin America, Oklahoma might be deemed less-than relevant from an elitist U.S. perspective, but I was born and raised here (in Ardmore, to be precise), and my twenty-nine years have taught me that a very great deal happens in this place, much of it important. Like those of Latin America, Oklahoma’s political woes might seem to preclude creativity, but in fact they spur it on. And, like Latin America, Oklahoma might be dubbed peripheral, but peripheries are often where it’s easiest to breathe and where you have most room to grow. In short, there are many reasons one might think Oklahoma is not a natural habitat for Latin American literature in translation, but none of those reasons stop it from being so, and, indeed, it is.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Whether it makes sense or not, Oklahoma—and my adopted hometown of Tulsa in particular—has produced and played host to a great many remarkable translators, of Latin American literature and otherwise. It still does so today, thanks in no small measure to the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, an arts residency under the auspices of the George Kaiser Family Foundation that currently supports me and every other translator included in this dossier. Please note that the five of us are by no means the only translators in Oklahoma; in fact, we are not even the only translators supported by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, which also boasts Kaveh Bassiri, who translates from the Persian, and Jae Kim, who translates from the Korean and the Japanese. My friends Daniel Simon, Grady Wray, David Shook, Boris Dralyuk, and Beverly Pérez Rego all deserve mention as well among the pantheon of Oklahoma translators. The brilliant translators included in this dossier—Jennifer Croft, George Henson, Steve Bellin-Oka, and Rhett McNeil—are in good company.

Reading their contributions, I am confident you will agree with me that this is a special place for translation. First up, Jennifer Croft, born and raised in Tulsa, presents an exclusive preview, appropriately titled “Translation,” from her translation of Dislocations by Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy, coming this October from Charco Press. This brief text is a reminder of the permanence of translation in human communication, and I can think of no better bearer of this reminder than Jenny, an eminently and deservedly award-winning translator and writer with one International Booker Prize already under her belt (for Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights) who, in the few short months I’ve known her, has not only been shortlisted for another International Booker Prize (this time for Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob) but also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her own novel-in-progress, Amadou. I won’t attempt to tell Jenny’s life story here (for that, read her acclaimed memoir Homesick, which she originally wrote in Spanish)—suffice it to say that she clearly got a hefty dose of whatever’s in the water around these parts to have become the world-renowned translator, author, and champion of translators’ recognition she is today.

My dear friend and longtime collaborator George Henson likewise swigged more than his fair share of Oklahoma’s translation-laden waters. He was born just down the road in a town called Sapulpa, and his family has been here since the 1880s, living for a time in what is now recognized as the oldest house standing in Tulsa. His contribution to the dossier is another exclusive preview from a forthcoming publication, this time from A Long Day in Venice by Argentine author Abel Posse, coming soon from Betimes Books. This translation marks a change of styles and settings for George, as he describes in his generous translator’s note; he has been translating Mexico’s modern classic Sergio Pitol for longer than I have known him (which, by now, is saying a lot). George was LALT’s first translation editor and continues to collaborate with the journal as translation editor-at-large, giving his talented students at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies the opportunity to publish what are often their first translations in a literary journal. Esteemed Mexicanist Ignacio Sánchez Prado was right to call George “one of the most important literary translators at work in the United States today” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I am lucky to call him a colleague and—as I never tire of saying—a fellow Fellow.

Next up in the dossier is a moving short story from Mexican writer Andrea Candia’s An Abundance of Innocence, beautifully translated by poet and translator Steve Bellin-Oka. Steve was the first Tulsa Artist Fellow I saw “in action,” so to speak, reading some of his own remarkable poems at a basement jazz bar in Tulsa, before the pandemic and before I had any inkling I’d someday join the Fellowship’s ranks. Steve is a transplant to Tulsa, but don’t let his Baltimore origins fool you: he is a fixture of Tulsa’s literary community, all the more so through Tulsa Glitterary, an LGBQT+ writers’ organization he founded and directs with the Fellowship’s support, hosting a yearly conference and a monthly queer reading series. We had the pleasure of publishing Steve’s translations of poems from Invisible Border by Mexican writer Rodrigo Figueroa—a friend of the journal with his own Oklahoma connections, as it happens—in our sixteenth issue, putting Steve among the first Tulsa Artist Fellows to publish in LALT. I am delighted that the journal has served as a showcase for his work, and now for that of many other Tulsa translators besides. Steve’s poetic vocation shines through in his translations (even when he is working with prose, as in this sample), and Tulsa is lucky to have him on the team. 

Speaking of teams, the fourth and final translator included in this feature is a team player beyond the inherent teamwork of translation. My friend Rhett McNeil is a multifaceted literary artist and critic, translating from Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, as in the case of the striking excerpt from acclaimed Brazilian novelist João Almino’s Man Made of Paper presented here. I first experienced his work reading his translation from the Spanish of Escape Attempt by Miguel Ángel Hernández—a book I still remembered fondly when, years later, I happily noticed his name on the Tulsa Artist Fellowship roster. Rhett is from Texas, Oklahoma’s neighboring state and archrival, but he has family connections in Tulsa and can therefore be forgiven. Like Steve, he is not only an artist in his own right, but also a cultivator of artistic community. He is the founder and director of Left Field Books, an independent Tulsa-based publishing house dedicated to avant-garde international literature in translation that will soon be releasing its first titles, and he also founded and leads the Tulsa Sandlot Society, a social baseball club combining sport and public pageantry. Rhett embodies the freewheeling creativity I love about the Tulsa art scene, and his presence here only adds to Oklahoma’s translational pull.

On behalf of everyone at LALT, I’d like to extend heartfelt thanks to Jenny, George, Steve, and Rhett for sharing their work, and to Tulsa Artist Fellowship for betting on translators and cementing Tulsa’s status as a global hub for literature in translation. We also thank our friends and colleagues at our parent publication, World Literature Today, for the essential role they have played in making Oklahoma a home for literary translation, over the course of ninety-five years and four hundred issues. We are proud to follow in their footsteps. With entities like TAF and WLT at the helm, the future of translation in Oklahoma is in good hands.

We translators are always on the lookout for cognates—words from different languages, according to Merriam-Webster, that are “related by derivation, borrowing, or descent.” I cannot shake the feeling that, through shared roots, shared troubles, and shared unrecognized brilliance, Oklahoma and Latin America are somehow cognate places: cognate territories, if you will, that grow closer together with each word that crosses over from one tongue to another. I hope, reading the Oklahoma translators whose work we share in this issue, you will let yourself come to the same cosmic and commiserative conclusion.

Photo: Crossing the street in Tulsa, by Drew Harbour, Unsplash.

With a career spanning decades and various genres, Giovanna Rivero has established herself as one of the definitive voices of contemporary Bolivian narrative. Reading her latest short story collection, Tierra fresca de su tumba, I was struck by both the unpredictable twists and turns of her prose and the uniqueness of her haunted, out-of-place characters. Giovanna and I talked via email about the collection, its rural settings and reflections on illness, and the late-coming recognition of Latin America’s longstanding Gothic tradition. Tierra fresca de su tumba will be published in English translation by Charco Press in 2023.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: You’ve worked in several genres. We read the review of your novel 98 segundos sin sombra in LALT No. 19 with great interest, and I was moved by the short stories of Tierra fresca de su tumba, published last year by Editorial Candaya. Do you feel more comfortable working in one genre or the other? In your opinion, what are the benefits and challenges of the short story, a genre that’s often undervalued in the book market?

Giovanna Rivero: The short story is, to me, a demanding genre in every sense of the word. The tension, the narrative arc, and the characters’ depth all have to play out within a relatively limited space. Even though I tend to write long stories, almost nouvelles, I think the short story has what we might call an “obsessive” quality to it, in the way it tries to gnaw down to the character’s bone, pushing their conflict and circumstance to the ultimate consequences. This radicality is what always entices me about the genre. But I am also fascinated by the challenges and opportunities offered by the novel; for me, it’s like an invitation to explore unknown places, where a lion could jump out in front of me just as easily as a white rabbit or a venomous spider from some endangered species. This rhizomatic possibility of the novel, the way it can take you from a nuclear conflict to some other conflict that perhaps you didn’t have in mind, strikes me as a real provocation. On the other hand, the boundaries between the genres are growing ever more blurred, and the fog in-between is another territory that feeds into the desire to keep writing.

A.M.D.: I was happy to hear Tierra fresca de su tumba will be translated to English and published by Charco Press. How does it feel to know you’ll soon be having your English-language debut? Do you know who’s going to translate the book? What are your hopes for the translation?

G.R.: I’ve been writing for many, many years, and being translated into English and other languages has always been a hope of mine—one I could only glimpse on a far-off horizon before, since I’m not a high-profile writer. Now, however, Carolina Orloff, the director of Charco Press, is backing my work with a passion that moves me. I trust her to make the best possible decisions when choosing a translator. What I hope for from this journey into English is the same thing that happened with the translation into Portuguese by Laura Del Rey, published by Editora Incompleta and Editora Jandaíra. She connected deeply with the book’s literary language, but also with each character’s cultural roots. She and I talked about it as a double translation, semantic on the one hand and dialectical on the other, since Tierra fresca de su tumba is full of characters who, while speaking Spanish, don’t speak the language so straightforwardly. Rather, their speech is “stained” with localisms, with life experiences, with social class. I hope the English-language translation also takes that into account.

A.M.D.: You participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. At LALT, we are interested in seeing how creative writing programs influence writers’ evolution across linguistic and geographical barriers. How was your experience in Iowa? What impact did it (or does it) have on your literary career?

G.R.: Writing residencies are tremendously necessary for writers, especially those of us who come from countries where state support for art, and literature in particular, is minimal. Besides the tangible support, a writing residency like the one offered at the University of Iowa allows you to experience—if only for a few months—the emotions of deterritorialization. The landscape, time, the air, everything comes through with a different texture; and when I say “texture” I can’t help but think of its link with the textualization of life. Perhaps we need that “room of someone else’s” in a different, provisional home in order to project our imaginations from uncomfortable or unique places.

A.M.D.: There is a critique of certain hypocrisies and injustices of the contemporary academy in your story “Hermano ciervo.” How do you see the relationship between literature and academia at the moment?

G.R.: I think the academy in general still casts a suspicious eye on those who, besides being academics, are also writers. Or, I should say, those who are the other way around. I’ve often wondered why this is the case, when the subject matter of the literary academy—and of much of the humanities—is supposedly literary discourse. One of the answers I’ve come to is that there is a fear of the imagination being aimed at the creation of alternate worlds, and so this imagination is separated from all other intellectual production and is even scorned, perhaps considered a handicap to theoretical abstraction, to the formulation of ideas that aspire to a certain rigor. Of course, within the academy there are also wonderfully sensitive people with the courage to make space in their writings for pursuits and proposals that are not always canonical. This pact is not so common, but it does exist, and I am thankful to know that kind of thinkers and professors.

A.M.D.: You were born in the city of Montero, and you grew up in the department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia. Landscapes and characters from Santa Cruz often play important roles in your fiction. How does your place of origin influence your practice as a writer, and your fiction itself?

G.R.: I’ll never stop being from the provinces, even if I move to Saturn. That belonging, beyond its telluric strength, is an ontological aspect of my self that has deeply marked my writing. Also, ever since I was little, I’ve noticed that visual representations of Bolivia prioritize mountainous landscapes. This preeminence of Andean beauty leaves out other landscapes, which is to say, other framings of reality and the subject’s relation to that reality. I’ve been very aware of this exclusion, and it’s something I take on when I write.

A.M.D.: While many of the characters of Tierra fresca de su tumba are anchored in Santa Cruz, they often also lead cross-border lives: they are members of migrant communities, Bolivians who have migrated to other countries, and other beings displaced in one way or another. Why do you feel drawn to such characters, whose lives cross borders?

G.R.: I think I survived the suffocation of provincial life thanks to reading comics. Heroines and heroes like Gilgamesh and the Priestess of Light, who could cross the borders of historical eras and inhabit unknown spaces, affirmed for me that the imagination is the true vessel in which to travel. Constant movement between my small town and the capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, made me a migrant ever since my infancy. I didn’t know it, of course. That back-and-forth, of just fifty kilometers, articulated the notion of landscape and horizon. Out the window of the bus that would take us to the city to take care of important business, like going to the doctor or handling legal matters, I would see the huge green expanses and the identical evening suns. It all left the stamp of a great melancholy on my spirit. My characters serve to metabolize that old feeling. They leave their places of origin to prove the horizon is always distant, even as they travel kilometer after kilometer in pursuit of an ideal place.

A.M.D.: Another motif that frequently crops up in Tierra fresca de su tumba is rurality. Several of its stories take place in the midst of the enormity of fields or forests, and rural space itself sometimes takes a leading role in your stories. Why—and how—do you write the rural world?

G.R.: As I was saying, my place of origin, my provincial condition, the distance/tension between me and the capital, all told, made me well aware of non-hegemonic spaces from an early age. I remember the syllabi of my school’s language and literature classes were made up mostly of novels whose characters lived on the high plateau. Everything important or meaningful took place against a horizon that to me, as a little girl, seemed too far away. The message seemed to be that nothing of historical value or cultural transcendence could happen in eastern or Amazonian spaces. The status of narrative space, therefore, did not apply to my known world. In Tierra fresca de su tumba and in my other books, the rural universe, the woods, the tropics and the heat permeate the characters’ subjectivity to define an ontology and even a set of rules for life. In the end, the cutting of reality that is the landscape configures the temperature and colors of the world. It’s a matter of intuiting the cosmos in that which is closest to us, be it a tree, a parrot, or the baroque fertility of a patio.

A.M.D.: The theme of illness—physical, mental, or both at once—also touches many of the stories in Tierra fresca de su tumba, in which we see bodies deformed and minds disturbed by various ailments, often as spiritual as they are bodily. I think the theme of illness has concerned us with greater gravity than ever in the past couple of years, on a global level, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. How do you handle this theme, which is so universal and so personal all at once, in your literature?

G.R.: It seems to me that illness, whether mental or physical, is a reminder of death and irrefutable proof of our imperfection. Illness imposes a painful limit. The ways in which we have responded to this limit has given rise to the most hair-raising of literature. I feel compassion for my sick characters, but this compassion, this empathy is precisely what leads me to tear them apart. Perhaps I dramatize my own weaknesses, over and over, when I push my characters to experience their own deaths, to look at their own wounds, their scars, to tear up the self-centric unity—now so fragile, incidentally—of the personality. They suffer because I have suffered and seen people close to me suffer, struggle against the body, against the psyche. I saw my younger brother suffer endlessly due to bipolar disorder. I think writing about sick characters is a somewhat strange way I have of loving literature and accepting existence. On the other hand, narrating illness opens up a different epistemic space; something is learned and something is uttered from that experience, which is non-transferable but common nonetheless.

A.M.D.: We read quite a lot today about “the Latin American gothic,” or regional variants like “the Andean gothic”: terms used by critics to describe the turn toward darkness in Latin American literature, a turn along which some critics have placed you. What do you make of this categorization? Do these terms seem useful to you? Do you think they represent something new, or rather a recognition of something that has existed for a long time in Latin American letters?

G.R.: I think what’s new is the interest in this old darkness. I agree that we are experiencing a sort of coincidence of writings, above all by women, that manifest a specific sensibility: reality that is stained, that yields before the energy of the ghostly and the extraordinary. Calling this phenomenon “the new gothic” is one way to understand it, as is regionalizing it such that even the landscape forms part of this renewed expressionism. Nevertheless, I think “buying” this category without putting much thought into it, looking only at the most superficial and cosmetic traits of the gothic, impoverishes our ways of reading and imagining. It’s always better to read and write without pigeonholes, without some checklist of current market expectations. In any event, I heartily concur with something Flannery O’Connor put forth as one trait of the southern gothic. She claimed the writings of the south were resistant to the cultural hegemony of the north, whose fiction was granted prestige thanks to its non-negotiable worship of realism as a means to interpret historical events. The cultural field of the north tended to look over its shoulder at the writers settled in the lands of the United States’ big plantations, where slavery was so hard to erradicate. For O’Connor, the southern gothic focused on the “freaks”; she didn’t call them monsters or ghosts, and she was not obsessed with absolute mimesis, if such a thing is possible. The freak, for O’Connor, was always at the margins: the anomalies of their spirit and body, their theological contradictions demanded that they flee any center. That’s exactly what I try to do in my writing.

A.M.D.: Lastly, which writers would you recommend to a reader who enjoys your books?

G.R.: I would tell them to read instinctively. If my books remind them of other writings, even very tangentially, they should follow the path of their reader’s heart. That’s the kind of reader I am: I like to discover other worlds at the margins, not from the echo that sounds from the center of a particular moment. If the reader wants to read some sisters of mine, I recommend Daniela Alcívar, Solange Rodríguez, Claudia Aboaf, Fernanda Trías, Betina González, Ana Llurba, Magela Baudoin, Liliana Colanzi, Gabriela Ponce, Ariadna Castellarnau, Fernanda García Lao, Natalia García Freire, Ana Paula Maia, and María José Navia. And, of course, not only writing by women. There’s so much to explore! And they should read poetry, please. And the literature of other eras too. Taking some distance from the immediate, the contemporary, provides another kind of oxygen.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Giovanna Rivero (Bolivia) is a writer. She earned her doctorate in Hispano-American Literature at the University of Florida. She is the author of the short story collections Para comerte mejor (2015, 2018 Dante Alighieri Prize and finalist for the 2021 Celsius and 2021 Guillermo de Baskerville Prizes), Ricomporre amorevoli Scheletri (2020), and Tierra fresca de su tumba (2020, BancoSol Prize for Best Book Published in Bolivia, 2021), among others. Her novel 98 segundos sin sombra (2014, Audiobook Narration Prize) was adapted for film by Bolivian director Juan Pablo Richter. In 2004 she participated in the Iowa International Writing Program and in 2007 she received a Fulbright grant. In 2005 she received the Franz Tamayo National Short Story Prize. In 2011 she was selected by the Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of “The 25 Best-Kept Literary Secrets of Latin America” and in 2015 she was awarded the “Cosecha Eñe” International Short Story Prize. Rivero has published several research articles on Latin American science fiction, and she coordinates online creative writing workshops. Along with Magela Baudoin and Mariana Ríos, she directs Editorial Mantis, which publishes the work of Hispano-American women writers. https://giovannarivero.com/

Photo: Street scene, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Michael Krahn, Unsplash.

Over the course of our first five years, I am proud to say that LALT has published a prodigious quantity of content. With a small but passionate editorial team, we have published the work of more than 500 writers and 300 translators, spanning continents, genres, and over a dozen languages.

For this special edition of LALT, which marks the close of our fifth year of publication, our editors have cast a glance back and recalled some of the pieces they feel best represent our editorial line. This selection of five texts is stylistically, geographically, and thematically diverse—like the journal itself—and speaks to both our central commitments and our goals for the years to come.

“The Craft of Suspicion: The Essay in the Social Sciences” by Ricardo Forster, translated by Brendan Riley (LALT No. 16, November 2020)

Marcelo Rioseco, our Editor-in-Chief, selected a text that illustrates LALT’s interest in prioritizing the literary essay: a “craft of suspicion,” in Forster’s words, that has “claimed inquietude and suspicion for its own by trying to place its inquiry outside the established canons and beyond current grammars in use.” As the Argentine philosopher observes, the essay, for all its historical and aesthetic value, tends to be excluded from the “productivist logic” dominant in contemporary scholarship. LALT seeks to reverse this trend by providing a space for the “expression of a bottomless, open form of writing” that the essay represents.

Marcelo commented on his selection: “Ricardo Forster is one of those philosophers who call writers’ attention as soon as they start thinking. And his essay we published in LALT No. 16 is about precisely that: thinking more poetically, starting from correspondences and analogies, exploring, feeling things out; seeing the essay as an exercise of freedom, not as a prefabricated format upon which to build an academic track. Forster presents the essay as a form of intellectual responsibility in the face of barbarity and the irrational—an answer that never ceases to amaze us in its tremendous capacity to illuminate the complexities of our contemporary life.”

Four Poems by Elena Garro, translated by Adele Lonas, Olatz Pascariu, Silvia Soler Gallego, and Francisco Leal (LALT No. 8, November 2018)

Associate Editor Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza chose a set of texts that reflects another key component of LALT’s editorial line: recognizing indispensable Latin American authors who, despite their undeniable talent and literary merit, run the risk of falling into obscurity. Elena Garro is one such author—an essential poet and prosist of her generation of Mexican writers who has been unjustly underread outside Mexico and in languages other than English. The combined effort of translators Adele Lonas, Olatz Pascariu, Silvia Soler Gallego, and Francisco Leal, under the direction of Professor Patricia Rosas Lopátegui of the University of New Mexico, seeks to remedy this omission, presenting four poems from Garro’s Cristales de Tiempo that “highlight the conflicted relationships that Garro had with writers of her time.”

“Re-Enchanting the World with Indigenous Literature” by Aline Ngrenhtabare Lopes Kayapó and Edson Bepkro Kayapó, translated into Spanish by Christian Elguera and into English by Arthur Malcolm Dixon (LALT No. 18, May 2021)

My own choice for a representative text from our first five years is one that serves as a manifesto for one the fundamental pillars of LALT: our permanent section dedicated to Indigenous literature, where we have published the work of more than forty Indigenous writers working in more than a dozen languages. LALT is committed to affirming the linguistic and cultural diversity of Latin America, always including space for the peoples and literatures that have existed in these lands long before it was either “Latin” or “America.” We are also committed to presenting contemporary Indigenous literature as the dynamic, innovative field it really is, avoiding the historicization and romanticization often imposed upon Indigenous creativity, which, as this essay says, have “distorted our historical memories and transformed our peoples into passive subjects to the violence of colonization.”

I appreciate Aline and Edson’s essay—as well as their generously giving me the chance to translate it, working from Christian Elguera’s excellent translation from Portuguese to Spanish—because of its reflection on both the immemorial permanence and the pressing relevance of Indigenous letters. As they tell us: “We are living at a moment of speech. Before, we had to stay discreet and keep quiet in order to live. Today, in order to move forward with our ancestrality, we must make known our social projects, for the soul cries out and echoes. Indigenous literature has been the sounding board along this path, and what we write is a reflection of our collective memories.”

“Of the Samovar and the Teapot” by Esther Cross, translated by Frances Riddle (LALT No. 11, August 2019)

Denise Kripper, LALT’s Translation Editor, selected a text that captures another of our core concerns: the recognition of translators as major players in the game of literature, and the need to reflect on translation just as we reflect on writing. Esther Cross’s essay—itself beautifully translated by Frances Riddle—encourages readers to consider the complexities, frustrations, and pleasures of literary translation, which, as Cross tells us, is “much more than an issue of metric equivalence… Translators often state that in order to translate what the words and sentences are trying to say, they have to capture the spirit of the original text’s language. And what is the spirit of a language?”

Denise situates this text—the first she solicited for the journal after starting as Translation Editor in 2019—in the wider context of LALT’s mission to put a spotlight on translation: “LALT exists thanks to translation—it is in translation. That’s why I’m interested in texts, like Esther’s, that delve into the translation process, which, as we know, doesn’t happen by magic. Her essay reviews readings, confesses to conflicts, and shares strategies. She generously gives us a glimpse behind the scenes, revealing the artifice of the practice of translation while still thinking about it and representing it as something intriguing and mysterious, as the art it truly is.”

An Extract from Lluvia by Victoria de Stefano, translated by Christina MacSweeney (LALT No. 5, February 2018)

Last but by no means least, Book Reviews Editor Néstor Mendoza selected a prose sample that serves to illustrate another central point of LALT’s editorial line: our practice of publishing in-depth dossiers dedicated to individual authors, as we did in the case of acclaimed Venezuelan writer Victoria de Stefano in our fifth issue. This excerpt from the novel Lluvia forms just one part of the full feature, along with an introductory text by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, two separate interviews with the author, and an essay on her work by Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec. Through such dossiers, LALT hopes to give unfamiliar readers thorough introductions to essential Latin American writers—whether in their original language or in translation to English—and to help those who already know these authors delve deeper into their bodies of work.

Néstor said the following about Victoria de Stefano’s writing: “The prose of the great Victoria de Stefano is a return to language, and to the everyday expressed with beauty and rhythm. Reading her implies coming face to face with her characters and with the narrative texture of her novels—it is Lluvia in this case, but it could just as well be any of her other publications. She never writes a gratuitous sentence. We can always pick out some passage, some paragraph that becomes definitive to us.”

These five texts represent just a tiny fraction of the broad-ranging, multifaceted literary production LALT has published over the past five years. We encourage our readers to return to these writings—and their corresponding translations—and to consider with us the tenets we hold dear as a journal: intellectual responsibility, redeeming undervalued creators, holding space for linguistic diversity, centering translation, and diving deep into noteworthy bodies of work.

And, with gratitude, we invite you to stay with us in 2022 and beyond as we continue our mission of bringing Latin American literature to the world.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Managing Editor, LALT
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Cover image: Reader follows proper COVID safety protocols, which we love to see! Photo: Clay Banks, Unsplash.

“Creo que no creo. Tan solo escribo sin copia del original.”
—Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza

This essay’s epigraph comes from the final section of the poetry collection Cuidados intensivos (2014) by Venezuelan poet Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza¹, and serves as an observation on the work of its author as well as a hypothesis on all literary production. Perhaps not by chance, the aphorism is based on intertextuality, creating a link with the poem “Creo en la vida” by Eugenio Montejo. Montejo writes, “creo que no creo,” conjugating the verb “creer” twice to defend a unique conception of atheism confronted by the wonders of human existence. Gutiérrez writes exactly the same sentence, but his words mean something completely different: he juxtaposes the verb “creer” in the first case with the verb “crear” in the second, indicating through the words of another poet that he does not believe in originality as an element of the artistic process (Gutiérrez 123, Montejo 64). This assertion reveals an important notion that applies to Cuidados intensivos itself, and perhaps to literature in general.

In After Babel, the fundamental text of contemporary translation studies, George Steiner affirms that “there will be in every complete speech-act a more or less prominent element of translation” (207). Cuidados intensivos serves to prove this affirmation. From January to October of 2015, I had the opportunity to examine Gutiérrez Plaza’s book in detail as I translated its poems from Spanish to English.² The observations and thoughts recorded here are one product of those months’ efforts. The experience of translating Cuidados intensivos allowed me to perceive the aspects of the “original” book, as it were, that can be identified as the “elements of translation” mentioned by Steiner.

Specifically, the “translated” nature of Cuidados intensivos can be perceived through the intertextuality that marks the book. Many words, phrases, ideas, and poetic constructions are transferred in from other texts. By highlighting the intertextualities that feed into this collection’s poems, one can read it not only as an original book—the product of a single author, generated through his own creativity—but as a translation in itself that rests upon other levels of artistic and cultural production. Few studies have been dedicated to the link between intertextuality and translation, but in theoretical terms there is an important relationship between the two concepts. Translation implies an interaction between texts, and intertextuality implies the reinterpretation of the ideas of one text within another, which forms an important part of the task of the translator. Through an analysis of certain poems from Cuidados intensivos in the context of the complete works of Gutiérrez Plaza, along with existing theory on intertextuality and translation, I propose to explain how intertextuality gives rise to an “original” work by a single author that is also a translation, even if not translated from one language to another.

The works of Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, and Cuidados intensivos in particular, serve to demonstrate the nature of the original text as translation. The usefulness of Gutiérrez Plaza’s poetry for this purpose comes not only from the quantity of intertextualities and external references that fill his texts, but also from the programmatic role of his work. All of Gutiérrez Plaza’s poetic production thus far has had something to do with the need to “construir un concepción de la poesía” (Gutiérrez, Pasado en limpio, Isava 5). As a writer and an academic, Gutiérrez Plaza has demonstrated an almost obsessive interest in the use of poems as tools in the project of explaining—to others and to himself—what poetry is, asking this question of any reader who chooses to confront it.

The very title of Cuidados intensivos implies its purpose and its reader’s task. It evokes medical vocabulary—a reference to the hospitalisation of the poet’s mother before her death. During the process of preparing the collection, these two words—“intensive care” in English—were unaware of their nature as an “intuición premonitoria” (Gutiérrez 145). In a literary context, the title points to the need, especially pressing in the contemporary world, for the reader of poetry to focus on the “cuidado” of the poem as the final redoubt of the word (146). The collection has few limits in thematic terms, and its poems address notions of nationality, eroticism, politics, and death with equal depth. Nonetheless, the current that links all of these parts is a preoccupation with the identity and the survival of the poem itself. Even more than other works by Gutiérrez Plaza, Cuidados intensivos represents a deliberate attempt to diagnose the contemporary condition of poetry and to consider how readers can care for it more effectively.

Long before he composed Cuidados intensivos, Gutiérrez Plaza fulfilled, perhaps unconsciously, the simultaneous roles of poet and translator, although he never translated between distinct languages. He has always recognised the presence of other levels of literary production underneath his own, provided by other authors and translated by himself to form new levels of meaning. Gutiérrez Plaza has admitted that intertextuality plays an indispensable role in his work, and this intertextuality is what creates the inherently translated nature of his texts. One of the epigraphs of his first poetry collection, Al margen de las hojas (1991), which also appears as a section of the longer collection Pasado en limpio (2006), is a quote by Jorge Luis Borges: “El concepto del texto definitivo no corresponde sino a la religión o al cansancio” (Gutiérrez, Pasado en limpio 9). Even in his first published book, Gutiérrez Plaza expresses his lack of belief in artistic originality in favour of recognising influence, reference, and intertextuality as essential elements of writing. He recognises the translated text—that is, the text composed of materials previous to and separate from the author’s own creation—as the true manifestation of the literary process, in place of the fictitious “texto definitivo.”

Interpretations of intertextuality and translation are informed by an extensive theoretical legacy. Intertextuality in itself, as a recognised element of literary study, emerges from the work of Russian philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky paved the way for the recognition of the possibility of “la auténtica polifonía de voces” within a single literary work: the possible presence of characters and happenings alien to the pure creation of the author (15). Bakhtin concentrates his study of polyphony on examples of prose, but the precepts he establishes for the multiple identity of the literary work and for its production as an act of communication between voices and creators apply perfectly to the case of poetry.

Other theoretical foundations of an intertextual analysis of Cuidados intensivos come from the schools of structuralism and deconstruction. The French structuralist analyst Michael Riffaterre identifies intertextuality—which he perceives as the limitation of possible interpretations of a text through connections with others—as an essential element of all literature (108-113). As he expresses in his Sémiotique de la poésie (a translation to French of the English original, Semiotics of Poetry), “percevoir le texte comme le transformé d’un intertexte, c’est le percevoir comme le summun des jeux de langage, c’est-a-dire comme un text littéraire” (61). The tools of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida are also useful in the task of analysing Cuidados intensivos; Derrida’s distillation of the word to a phonic symbol appropriated by meaning allows for the examination of the significative interchange between texts, just as it nourishes the process of translation (81). Finally, one must recognise the profound influence of Umberto Eco on the study of intertextuality. His recognition of the “open” nature of any work of art reaffirms the need for an intertextual reading of Cuidados intensivos and validates the interpretation of the book as a translation (4).

Various translators and theorists of translation also provide useful perspectives for an analysis of Cuidados intensivos, especially when their works are read in conjunction with theories of intertextuality. George Steiner’s central affirmation—that “all acts of communication are translations”—is closely linked to the concept of intertextuality, as it recognises the re-interpretative essence not only of poetry or literature but of any human attempt at communication (Potter 17). More than a decade before Steiner proposed this hypothesis, Roman Jakobson argued that “the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign,” establishing an early basis for a universal theory of communication as translation (232). To analyse a work of contemporary poetry, one must extend this suggestion to the more concrete context of the practical role of the translator and the nature of the translator’s work.

In his famous essay on the task of the translator, Walter Benjamin states, “[j]ust as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of much importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife” (254). This assertion establishes the link—which is intertextual in the clearest sense—between one text and another at the moment of translation. Translators occupy an intermediate space between two texts and write their own reading or re-reading of the “original” to create the translation. Essentially, the act of incorporating read or re-read elements of a cultural text into another is as much an act of translation as an act of writing itself, and this act can be perceived most clearly through intertextuality.

Contemporary translators work under a certain degree of pressure to create something new—a pressure much less tangible for translators of older texts who dedicate themselves to the direct recreation of the words they translate in their own language (Bassnett 124). Translators of contemporary literature tend to use “original” texts as sources of inspiration instead of canonical codes that precisely direct the task of translation. Translators work with the connections between texts; they serve an inevitably intertextual purpose. The poems of Cuidados intensivos demonstrate how Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza serves this same purpose as a poet, and the process of translating them to English adds another level of intertextual growth to the structure within which they already exist.

The most basic level of intertextuality evident in Cuidados intensivos—and, by extension, the level of translation least distinct from simple reference to other texts—is present in the texts whose intertextualities are established by means of paratexts. Gérard Genette, the inventor of this term, defines paratexts as the elements added to the essential text that “ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption” (1). This definition includes titles, epigraphs, and dedications. By means of these tools, the poet, the translator, and the editor of a text can specify the nature of its interaction with other texts, in the sense of intertextuality as well as in that of translation.

For example, the titular poem of Cuidados intensivos includes a dedication to the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who is also the author of one of the book’s epigraphs. The poem pays tribute to Szymborska not only through the paratext of the dedication; the poem itself is “construido” as a re-reading and recreation of a poem by Szymborska called “Alabanza a mi hermana.” Szymborska’s poem begins with an expression of anxiety over the fact that none of her relatives writes poems; Gutiérrez Plaza’s begins with an expression of anxiety over the fact that none of his relatives reads them (Gutiérrez 96, Szymborska).

The presence of Szymborska’s words in Gutiérrez Plaza’s poem (and in my translation) is made possible thanks to the process of linguistic translation from Polish to Spanish and from Spanish to English, but beyond linguistic translation, the intertextuality between Szymborska and Gutiérrez Plaza implies another level of translation. Szymborska expresses an emotion in her poem, and Gutiérrez Plaza re-reads this emotion in his own context, transferring it to his own experience. This artistic act, common in Cuidados intensivos, is the same project undertaken  by the translator at the moment of translation.

Another case of this variety of intertextuality is noticeable in one of the poems devoted to social criticism included in Cuidados intensivos: “En una estación del metro no visto por Pound (En Caracas, no en París).” The epigraph of this text is the poem “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound, which appears in its entirety in English: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” (61). Gutiérrez Plaza’s poem is not simply an observation of the crowd that fills the metro; it focuses specifically on an “hombre de escaso muñón” who advances toward a metro car, lamenting his illnesses and begging other passengers for money (61).

Through intertextuality with Pound’s short, ambiguous poem, Gutiérrez Plaza translates it to a distinct geographical context and to a more concrete language. Pound’s “original” poem describes the same situation described by Gutiérrez Plaza, but the Venezuelan poet decides to add specificity—a common option for the translator—such that it fits better within his personal experience. This paratextual intertextuality with Pound represents another example of Gutiérrez Plaza’s simultaneous roles as poet and translator. My translation of the poem to English, which also includes Pound’s poem, is a curious example of a backwards step in linguistic terms. It attempts to reflect Pound’s inspiration as well as the distinction injected by Gutiérrez Plaza as the poem’s original translator.

Beyond the examples of Szymborska and Pound, which are made obvious through paratexts, other poems from Cuidados intensivos include dimensions of intertextuality that require a deeper analysis. I will address four such poems in more detail.

“Al modo de Oliverio Girondo (si hubiese sido mexicano)”

This brief, humorous poem is the most difficult to read—and, perhaps inevitably, the most difficult to translate—in Cuidados intensivos, and yet it offers one of the clearest examples of the process of translation carried out by Gutiérrez Plaza through intertextuality. The poem is constructed based on a direct reference to the Argentine avant-garde poet Oliverio Girondo, and more specifically to his poem “12,” which is composed almost entirely of reflexive verbs placed in sequence to describe a romantic, erotic relationship. Gutiérrez Plaza adopts this innovative construction in his own poem, clearly reflecting (almost as much as in the paratext of the poem’s title) the deliberate influence of Girondo.

Gutiérrez Plaza also forms his poem primarily out of reflexive verbs, but he does not employ verbs related to the standard vocabulary of love and sex. The Mexican theme mentioned in the title is reflected by the fact that Gutiérrez Plaza completely avoids conventional verbs in favour of invented verbs based on nouns belonging to the vocabulary of Mexican cuisine. These verb-nouns, which lack any fixed meaning, provide the poem’s sense of absurd humor, especially as the poem maintains the erotic interchanges developed by Girondo. While the poetic characters of the Argentine poet “se miran, se presienten, se desean,” Gutiérrez Plaza’s “se tortillean, se enchilan, se emposolean,” etc. (Girondo, Gutiérrez 83).

Obviously, this poem represents a great challenge for the translator, as it requires one to work with words that lack definitions even in their own language. The most notable trait of “Al modo de Oliverio Girondo” is its incomprehensibility, and this incomprehensibility forms the main message of the poem. Gutiérrez Plaza wrote it during a months-long stay in Mexico City as an expression of the difficulty that a foreigner experiences when faced with the linguistic incomprehensibility of another country—even a country whose people speak the foreigner’s language. For Gutiérrez Plaza, the vocabulary of Mexican cuisine took on the form of an indecipherable code, as mysterious as the erotic code suggested by the colors, smells, tastes, and textures of Mexico’s gastronomy.

This intertextuality, not only with Girondo but also with the distinctive language of Mexican cuisine, is so profound as to sacrifice any actual meaning. It manifests the affirmation of Roland Barthes that “the writerly text is ourselves writing”—the true creator of the poem’s meaning is neither Girondo nor Gutiérrez Plaza, but rather the reader (5). If translation implies an effort to capture the significance of one text and transfer it to another, Gutiérrez Plaza has done a bad translation on purpose, deforming the meaning of Girondo’s poem and of Mexican culinary vocabulary to create a new text that is inherently impossible to understand. Of course, a Mexican reader or anyone with adequate experience of the huaraches, guacamole, and molletes that Gutiérrez Plaza evokes would be able to read the poem with greater understanding of the linguistic units that form it, but such a reader would nonetheless be unable to establish precise semantic relationships between the words and their apparent meanings.

In this sense, the poem represents not only a complicated translation by the author but also a complicated translation by all of its readers, who are unable to know if they have interpreted its words “correctly.” The reader’s obligation to create an incomplete or incorrect  mental translation is made clear in my English translation (Appendix). The lack of meaningful words and the specificity of the cultural references force the translator to translate the poem almost without changing its words in linguistic terms; the translation to English is as difficult as the original translation of incomprehensible words to Spanish, which was undertaken by the poet himself.

The poem itself is a translation of intertextual words and contexts across geographical and linguistic boundaries, and its translation to English represents another step in its creative existence. In the case of “Al modo de Oliverio Girondo,” the original poet deserves as much credit as a translator as does the translator himself.

“Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma”

Another poem on a Mexican theme from Cuidados intensivos, “Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma” demonstrates an act of translation through a very different level of intertextuality. It is perhaps the poem that best represents the mixture of wonder and cynicism that characterises Gutiérrez Plaza’s perspective as a traveller discovering Mexican reality. The poem is constructed by means of a juxtaposition of two planes: the bustling modernity of Mexico City and the historical, indigenous, mythical legacy of the city of Tenochtitlán. This central juxtaposition is nourished by the poem’s intertextualities, which themselves imply a process of translation even in the “original” poem.

The definitive characteristic of the poem is the translation of the past into terms of the present, or vice versa. Like the narrator of Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba,” the voice of Gutiérrez Plaza’s poem perceives the modern Mexican reality it observes while the sun rises over Paseo de la Reforma through its links to an almost mythological past, defined by the presence of gods, “guerreros águilas,” “pochtecas,” and other elements of the indigenous heritage that lies literally beneath the present-day city (Cortázar, Gutiérrez 53). These elements exist alongside “los Starbucks” and the “Instituto de Salubridad e Higiene” of contemporary Mexico (53).

The presence of these two historical levels—two cultural texts in and of themselves—implies an act of temporal translation by Gutiérrez Plaza, who translates entities of the past to a modern context and, at the same time, translates omnipresent entities of the modern world, like Starbucks, to the antiquated language of a lost past. By establishing relations between cultural texts and vocabularies, Gutiérrez Plaza translates historical periods to new contexts, just as a translator transfers words from one language to another.

Another example of translation as a component of the “original” text in “Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma” results from the inclusion of lines from a translated text as integral parts of the poem. The metaphorical “guerreros águilas” of Gutiérrez Plaza’s Mexico City proclaim:  “Aquí nadie teme la muerte en la guerra / esta es nuestra gloria / este tu mandato / ¡Oh, dador de la vida!” (54). These words come from a Nahuatl text included by Miguel León Portilla in his book De Teotihuacán a los aztecas: antología de fuentes e interpretaciones históricas. This text, entitled “Otro cantar, afirmación de la gloria y del poderío de los aztecas” by Portilla, is a patriotic song of praise for the city of “México-Tenochtitlán” and its martial power (Portilla 162).

Within “Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma,” this text serves as a source of direct communication between the modernity observed by the narrator and the historicity of the atemporal city he imagines. Again, Gutiérrez Plaza adopts the role of the translator as he re-imagines a potential meaning of preexisting words, reinterpreting verses that have already been translated from Nahuatl to Spanish to give them yet another meaning in their new language. The translation of these lines to English implies yet another linguistic transition, and another need to create a temporal context for words that exist outside their era.

In “Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma,” Gutiérrez Plaza acts as a translator as he creates a new meaning for an existing text, appropriating it for his own purposes and offering other translators the opportunity to extend the process of translation in equally linguistic and literary terms. The original poet incorporates and translates other texts within his own work.

“Renuncien a defender las buenas costumbres”

A third poem that demonstrates the simultaneous identities of poet and translator adopted by Gutiérrez Plaza is “Renuncien a defender las buenas costumbres,” a work that addresses themes of social decadence through the perspective of a criminal who accepts such decay as an almost cosmic inevitability. As is indicated in a note at the end of the book, the poem is based on an interview with Marcos Camacho, also known as “Marcola,” which originally appeared in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo (Gutiérrez 130). Marcola was the leader of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, a criminal organization based in São Paulo that originated in prisons as a defence coalition for convicts. In his interview with O Globo, Marcola identifies his role not only as the leader of the PCC but also as “um sinal de novos tempos”—he perceives himself not only as a criminal, but also as a manifestation of justice for Brazilian subalterns and of the decadence of his country’s corrupt contemporary society (O Globo).

The use of Marcola’s words is a key example of Gutiérrez Plaza’s role as a translator. The first step in the process of incorporating the text is its translation from Portuguese to Spanish; in this sense, the entire poem already represents an example of inter-linguistic translation even before reaching its more literary phase. After the linguistic step, the translation of Marcola’s text transforms into another type of translation. The inclusion of the criminal’s words represents an intertextuality between his discourse and the book of poems itself; having displaced the interview from its original journalistic context, Gutiérrez Plaza gives it a new level of meaning by including it in a context defined by its literary identity. Including line breaks and variations in rhythm, Gutiérrez Plaza translates Marcola’s words to a distinctively poetic language; in short, he translates  journalism to poetry.

Gutiérrez Plaza ends the extended intertextuality of Marcola’s words with an “original” intertextuality created by the criminal himself. In his interview, Marcola references Dante’s Divine Comedy, pronouncing in Italian and then in Portuguese, “‘Lasciate ogna speranza voi cheentrate!’ Percam todas as esperanças. Estamos todos no inferno”  (O Globo). Gutiérrez Plaza’s poem converts his words to Spanish and divides them according to a poetic structure: “Como dijo el divino Dante: / ‘Pierdan las esperanzas, estamos en el infierno’” (130). My own translation takes a step further, adapting the words to English and to the poem’s new structure: “As the divine Dante said: ‘Abandon all hope, we are in hell’” (Appendix). These multiple levels of continuous intertextual translation demonstrate the identity of any poet, or any person who employs poetry as a form of communication, as a translator in their own right.

The works of Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, and Cuidados intensivos in particular, create  a chance to change interpretations of the role of the poet. As Gutiérrez Plaza’s translator, I have learned that the original poet—through reinterpreting texts, changing contexts, and developing new cultural products based on previous products—fulfills many of the same functions as the translator. The deliberately intertextual works in Cuidados intensivos can be read as translations even when they are read in the original Spanish: the interaction between texts directed by Gutiérrez Plaza gives rise not only to a book of intertextual poems, but also to a collection of original translations.

In theoretical terms, Cuidados intensivos and Gutiérrez Plaza’s work in general offer an important opportunity to recognize the inherent link between intertextuality and translation. Although these themes have their own prominent theorists and their own analytical jargons, they also share essential traits. An analysis of intertextuality requires recognition of the process of transferring meaning that is implied by translation. At the same time, an analysis of translation requires recognition of the interaction between distinct texts as an element of the translated text and the original text, implying intertextuality. Intertextuality and translation combine in Cuidados intensivos, forming a text that intertwines two ways to conceive of language, from conceptual, analytical, and academic perspectives, in an artistic sense.

Cuidados intensivos supports George Steiner’s affirmation that every act of communication includes an inevitable element of translation. The poems written by Gutiérrez Plaza as original acts of communication with his reader also represent levels in a more extensive process of translated communication, traversing languages, contexts, and interpretations. When he admits, “[t]an solo escribo sin copia del original,” Gutiérrez Plaza does not renounce the role of the creative poet; rather, he adopts the additional and necessary role of the translator.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Norman, Oklahoma

¹ Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza (Caracas, 1962) is a poet, essayist and university professor. He has published the books of poetry Al margen de las hojas (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1991), De espaldas al río (Caracas: El pez soluble, 1999), Principios de Contabilidad (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2000), Pasado en Limpio (Caracas: Equinoccio, bid&co, 2006), Cuidados intensivos (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2014), Cartas de renuncia (La Poeteca, 2020), El cangrejo ermitaño (Visor/FCU, 2020), and Intensive Care (Alliteration, 2020), as well as several books of essays, literary research, and anthologies. He is Associate Editor of Latin American Literature Today.

² My translation was published in bilingual edition as Intensive Care by Alliteratïon in 2020, and was reviewed by American poet Steve Bellin-Oka in World Literature Today.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problemas de la poética de Dostoievski. Trans. Tatiana Bubnova. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986. Print.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Print.

Bassnett, Susan. “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies”. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998. 123-140. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator”. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and  Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 253-263. Print.

Cortázar, Julio. “La noche boca arriba”. Digital collection of Ciudad Seva, www.ciudadseva.com. Web. 29 October 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Girondo, Oliverio. “12”. Digital poetry collection of  www.literaberinto.com. Web. 5 November 2015.

Gutiérrez Plaza, Arturo. Cuidados intensivos. Caracas: Lugar Común, 2014. Print.

—. Pasado en limpio. Caracas: bid&co, 2006. Print.

Isava, Luis Miguel. “Pasado en limpio.” Prólogo. Pasado en limpio. By Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza. Caracas: bid&co, 2006: 5-7. Print.

León Portilla, Miguel. De Teotihuacán a los aztecas: antología de fuentes e interpretaciones históricas. Mexico City: UNAM, 1983. Print.

Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”. On Translation. Ed. Reuben A. Brower. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. 232-239. Print.

Montejo, Eugenio. Alphabet of the World: Selected Works by Eugenio Montejo. Trans. Kirk Nesset. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Print.

O Globo. “Entrevista com o líder do PCC, ‘Marcola’”. Republished in www.miradouronoticias.com. Web. 31 October 1015.

Potter, Anthony. “Gender and Aesthetics?: Two Translations of La Respuesta”. Mester 27.1 (1998): 17-34. Print.

Riffaterre, Michael. Sémiotique de la poésie. Trans. Jean-Jacques Thomas. París: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. Print.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Szymborska, Wislawa. “Alabanza a mi hermana”. Digital poetry collection of www.poesia.us. Web. 17 October 2015.

Appendix: Poems and Translations from Cuidados intensivos / Intensive Care

En una estación del metro no vista por Pound (En Caracas no en París)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
—Ezra Pound

El hombre de escaso muñón
descendió a los infiernos,
serpenteó entre sombras inválidas
arrastrando sus muletas como un gimnasta.

De un brinco entre tantos
alcanzó la boca de un vagón.

Hablaba de sida y albúmina humana
a las soterradas multitudes.

Sus manos extendidas como reliquias
imploraban a un bosque de húmedos rostros,
pétalos purulentos sobre negras ramas.

In a Metro Station Not Seen by Pound (in Caracas, not Paris)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
—Ezra Pound

The man with a meager stump
descended into hell,
he slithered between invalid shadows
dragging his crutches like a gymnast.

In one hop out of many
he reached the mouth of a subway car.

He spoke of AIDS and human albumin
to the buried multitudes.

His hands, extended like relics,
begged in a forest of wet faces,
purulent petals on black boughs.

Al modo de Oliverio Girondo (si hubiese sido mexicano)

Veinte millones de almas, hechas cuerpos,
se antojan, se huarachean, se alambran,
se aflautan, chilaquilean, se arracheran,
se tortillean, se enchilan, se emposolean,
se enmolan, se mixotean, se gusanean,
se enguacamolan, se enmolletean,
se enquesadillan, se fajitean,
se escamolean, se nopalean,
se agringan y al fin campechanean.

In the style of Oliverio Girondo (if he had been Mexican)

Twenty million souls, made bodies,
fancy each other, huarache each other, alambre each other
flauta each other, chilaquil, arrachera each other,
tortilla each other, enchilada each other, pozole each other,
mole each other, mixote each other, gusano each other,
guacamole each other, mollete each other,
quesadilla each other, fajita each other,
escamol each other, nopal each other,
gringa each other and finally campechana.

Amanecer en el Paseo de la Reforma

Antes de que salga el sol
la vida está inquieta,
soñamos despertar pero no lo hacemos.

No es tiempo de cultivo.
Tláloc, ansioso de ofrendas, permanece.
Y a lo lejos oímos tambores
como si anunciaran la guerra florida.

Son las 6:30 en el Paseo de la Reforma:
los pochtecas salen con sus vasos humeantes
de los Starbucks de las vidriosas torres financieras;
los indigentes siguen durmiendo a los costados
de las vidriosas torres financieras;
hay tamales y transeúntes en las esquinas;
oficiales con chamarras fosforescentes
contradicen los semáforos;
hombres de negro, encapuchados,
con relucientes metralletas, resguardan la calma;
gente en indumentaria contra el colesterol
trota con chihuahuas atados a sus pasos;
obreros con rostros campesinos
emergen en masa de los subterráneos
mientras otros, mejor ataviados, ruedan
en dirección contraria en bicicletas de alquiler;
huelguistas de hambre salen de sus carpas, mugrientos,
frente al Instituto de Salubridad e Higiene.

Entretanto, los guerreros águilas ostentan
sus coloridos y emplumados escudos
y cantan en coro:

“Aquí nadie teme la muerte en la guerra
esta es nuestra gloria
este tu mandato
¡Oh, dador de la vida!”

Así, “orgullosa de sí misma”, en duermevela:
“se levanta la ciudad de México-Tenochtitlán”.

Dawn on Paseo de la Reforma

Before the sun comes up
life is restless,
we dream of waking but we don’t.

It’s not planting time.
Tlaloc, anxious for offerings, remains.
And in the distance we hear drums
as if declaring flower war.

It’s 6:30 on Paseo de la Reforma;
the pochtecas emerge with steaming cups
from the Starbucks of the glass financial towers;
the indigent carry on sleeping beside
the glass financial towers;
there are tamales and pedestrians on the corners;
police wearing fluorescent coats
contradict the traffic lights;
men in black, masked,
with shiny automatic guns, keep the peace;
runners rebelling against cholesterol
trot by with chihuahuas tied to their steps;
workers with campesino faces
emerge en masse from the underground
while others, better dressed, roll
the opposite direction on rented bikes;
hunger strikers come out of their tents, filthy,
in front of the Institute of Health and Hygiene.

Meanwhile, the eagle warriors show off
their colorful, plumed shields
and sing in chorus:

“No one here fears death in war
this is our glory
this your command
Oh, giver of life!”

And so, “proud of itself,” shaking off sleep:
“the city of México-Tenochtitlán arises.”

Renuncien a defender las buenas costumbres

Ustedes son los que tienen miedo de morir.
Nosotros no.
Somos hombres bombas.

Estamos en el centro de lo insoluble.

Ustedes, entre el bien y el mal,
se detienen en la única frontera.

Su muerte es un drama cristiano
en una cama, un cáncer, un ataque al corazón.
La nuestra, la comida diaria, la fosa común.

Somos una empresa moderna, rica.
Ustedes, el estado quebrado, una zafra de incompetentes.

Tenemos métodos ágiles de gestión.
Ustedes son lentos, burocráticos.

Luchamos en terreno propio.
Ustedes, en tierra extraña
muriendo de miedo, cada hora.

Estamos bien armados, al ataque.
A ustedes los persigue la manía del humanismo.
Somos crueles, no conversamos con la piedad.

Ustedes nos han transformado en “super stars” del crimen.
Los tenemos de payasos.

Nos llaman “los barones del polvo”,
y por miedo o por amor nos ayudan en el barrio.
A ustedes los odian.

Nuestras armas y mercancías vienen de afuera,
somos “globales”.
Ustedes, nuestros clientes.

¿Solución? No hay solución, hermano.

Somos el inicio de algo tardío.

Somos hormigas devoradoras,
escondidas en los rincones.

Renuncien a defender las buenas costumbres.

Estamos todos en el centro de lo insoluble.

Como dijo el divino Dante:
“Pierdan las esperanzas, estamos en el infierno”.

Refuse to Defend Good Manners

You’re the ones who are afraid of dying.
Not us.
We are human bombs.

We’re at the center of the insoluble.

You, between good and bad,
wait around at the only border.

Your death is a Christian drama
in a bed, a cancer, a heart attack.
Ours is the daily meal, the mass grave.

We are a modern, wealthy business.
You all, the failed state, a crop of incompetents.

We have agile management methods.
You are slow, bureaucratic.

We fight on home ground.
You, on foreign soil
dying of fear by the minute.

We are well armed to attack.
You’re hounded by the mania of humanism.
We are cruel, we don’t converse with pity.

You have transformed us into “superstars” of crime.
We see you as clowns,

They call us “the powder barons”
and out of fear or love they help us in the barrio.
They hate you.

Our wares and weapons come from the outside,
we are “global.”
You are our clients.

Solution? There is no solution, brother.

We’re the start of something that came late.

We are ravenous ants,
hiding in the corners.

Refuse to defend good manners.

We are all at the center of the insoluble.

As the divine Dante said:
“Abandon hope, we are in hell.”

Poems translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon and published in Intensive Care (Alliteratïon, 2020).

This essay was originally published in POESIA, Ed. 46 (October 2021).

Photo: Marcelo Leal, Unsplash.