v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Prospect of Suicide

From The LA Book Review:

Pizarnik herself might well have chosen a metaphor from surgery or unrequited love, something to capture what were for her the very high stakes of composition. She was known for working long and obsessively on a little chalkboard, typically on a single poem at a time, exhausting its possibilities before moving on, erasing a word one day, replacing it the next, rearranging the lines (about a dozen at most, presumably all that would fit on the slate) of her small, lapidary poems with an obsessive care that has been obscured by their obvious debts to surrealism and automatic writing. The influence of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Henri Michaux, and Yves Bonnefoy, whose work Pizarnik translated into Spanish, can be seen everywhere in her work, but her attention to prosody and her precision set her apart from these men with whom she is often lumped.

EN UN LUGAR PARA HUIRSE

Espacio. Gran espera.
Nadie viene. Esta sombra.

Darle lo que todos:
significaciones sombrías,
No asombradas.

Espacio. Silencio ardiente.
¿Qué se dan entre sí las sombras?

IN A PLACE FOR ESCAPING THE SELF

Space. A long wait.
No one comes. This shadow.

Give it what everyone gives:
meanings that are somber,
not full of wonder.

Space. Blazing silence.
What is it that shadows give each other?

Even if you don’t understand Spanish, try reading it aloud. Likewise, vibrate along with the lines of “La verdad de esta vieja pared” (“The Truth About this Old Wall”), from the same period as “En un lugar para huirse,” with its puns and confusions of meaning and sound oscillating like a plucked string between two points of understanding, the note itself invisible somewhere in between.

LA VERDAD DE ESTA VIEJA PARED

que es frío es verde que también se mueve
llama jadea granza es halo es hielo
hilos vibran tiemblan
hilos

es verde estoy muriendo
es muro es mero muro es mudo mira muere

THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS OLD WALL

that it is cold it is green that also it moves
it calls out it pants it croaks it is halo it is hail
strings are vibrating, trembling
strings

it is green I am dying
it is a wall a walled will with a why with an eye it will die

At her best, Pizarnik reveals an ecstasy in the instability of language and draws from it a mercurial, pathetic truth.

It is tempting to refer to the poems collected in Extracting the Stone of Madness as Pizarnik’s “mature” work, her finest poems written in the last decade of her life. But that judgment would do a disservice to her peculiar aesthetic. An ineradicable element of childishness persists in her later works and even those that are obsessed with death and dying, and not just in surreal, imagistic playfulness. Her constrained repertoire of images and themes are the dreamworld of a child and bristle with the urgency of adolescence: dolls and mothers, young girls and flowers, the failed dialogue of a screeching wind, mirrors, the magical strangeness of ordinary words, leaking walls, faces and names, the striking sensation of self-recognition, as if for the first time.

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A Random Fable

From Electric Lit, Jonathan Basile writes:

In the Babel imagined by Borges, the confusion of tongues takes place inside the tower, the library. The unified architecture does not create a unified linguistic community: “…the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible.” More perniciously, it is possible for language to remain completely intelligible, and yet to house an infinity of differences that make the dual interpretations of Babel seem trivial: “An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are you sure of understanding my language?” The narrator seems to take this proliferation of languages as a sign of the comprehensiveness of the library, though Borges treats this notion with irony. The possibilities of a single phrase, word, or letter, can never be exhausted. As our narrator explained, a word can differ from itself, can contain multitudes of interpretations, without differing by a single letter or mark. We can translate these inner differences, but only among source or target languages that are themselves without unity or self-identity.

There is translation not only within each library, but between the possible instantiations of the universal library as well. The structural limits necessary to any project of permutation shape how its texts signify. Borges used twenty-two lower-case letters, space, comma, and period, in books of 410 pages with forty lines and some 80 characters per page. To translate his project for the web, libraryofbabel.info kept as close as it could to the dimensions of Borges’ books, but of course creates them digitally, as a series of hyperlinked “pages.” This transubstantiation is not without its effects on how users approach the text; whereas Borges’ librarians were most satisfied by their discoveries of accidental poetry, visitors to libraryofbabel.info are just as likely to look up memes and ASCII art. Borges signals the impossibility of any library’s “universality” by including in his short story many of the characters (capital letters, digits, a diacritical mark) that were unknown to his librarians. While the narrator celebrates the completeness of his library, Borges gently ironizes this claim by showing that such a character set is insufficient even for his brief fiction.

The change of media was a biblical theme as well. Genesis tells us, with regards to the builders of the Tower of Babel, “they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.”

If the possible significance of a single phrase can never be exhausted, no library can ever be total in the sense imagined by an entire tradition from the Ancient Greek atomists to Borges’ narrator. Only the elements, the atoms of a system can be permuted, which in the case of language are the letters, the marks of punctuation, and a nonfinite series of other contextualizing aspects, from the typeface to the grain of the voice. But language is not atomic; these elements split, divide, and ceaselessly differ from themselves, allowing the unthinkable to emerge from the most familiar texts. The website then is neither a realization of Borges’ fiction, nor a translation in the classical sense of perfect adequation. It translates with a repetition dependent on difference, a discovery indistinguishable from invention, which continues to illumine hidden facets of Borges’ inexhaustible story.

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The Truth about the Second Ammendment

From The LA Review of Books, Mike Davis writes:

FIVE WEEKS BEFORE the final ratification of the Bill of Rights in December 1791, the regular Army of the United States of America, under the command of Revolutionary War hero Arthur St. Clair, was utterly destroyed at the Battle of the Wabash by an alliance of Western Indians led by the great war chiefs Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. It was a worse disaster than the Little Big Horn. Only 45 members of St. Clair’s 1300-person expedition which included regulars, militia, and camp followers survived the ambush unscathed.

This is the real historical context in which the meaning of the Second Amendment must be interpreted: the national army had been annihilated, the First Nations had reclaimed the Ohio Valley, and the British were emboldened to retain the Western forts (Michilmakinac and Detroit) that they had agreed to surrender in the treaty of 1787. A “well-regulated militia” of armed people was the only thing standing between George Washington and the return of King George III. Or, between white people and successful rebellions of slaves and Native Americans.

Odd, to say the least, that the left-liberal media has so neglected this background, particularly since it speaks to “original intent,” that fetish of Scalia and much of his party. More importantly, why haven’t we taken advantage of the GOP’s Salafist interpretation of the Constitution to revive the classical (Charles) Beardsian critique of this slaveowners’ relic? The alternative tradition in American history, embraced by Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson, has always asserted the priority of the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s foundational document and natural law.

Bird Brains

 

From ARS Technica:

Birds are smart. They use tools, engage in social learning, plan for the future, and do a variety of other things that were once thought to be exclusively the stuff of primates. But hundreds of millions of years of evolution separate mammals and birds, and structurally, their brains look very distinct. Plus there's the whole size thing. If you look at a bird's head, it's clear that there's not a whole lot of space for mental hardware in it. So how do the birds manage with smaller brains?

While other studies have tackled a lot of the structural differences, a new one released this week in PNAS shows that, to some extent, size doesn't matter. Its authors show that birds pack neurons into their brains at densities well above densities in mammals' brains, putting some relatively compact bird brains into the same realm as those of primates when it comes to total cell counts.

And the funny thing is, we probably should have known this was the case.

If you look at a typical avian brain without knowing much about brains, you'll mostly be impressed by the size (or lack of it). Some of the heaviest brains in birds are found in the macaws, and those weigh in at under 25 grams. The raven, a large bird with a well-deserved reputation for intelligence, has a brain that is typically around 15g. That's in the same neighborhood as a rabbit.

If you know your way around some neuroanatomy, however, other things will stand out. Many of the structures we associate with higher cognition in mammals (and especially in primates) either aren't clearly there or look rather different in birds, which suggests that bird cognition has to be radically different from the cognition in mammals.

But as we have identified the proteins that act as key regulators of mammalian brain development, we have discovered that the same proteins are all there in birds, too. Tracking their expression as the brain develops has allowed us to determine that some of the brain structures that look physically different in birds and mammals actually have the same developmental history and express the same suite of genes when mature. Finally, manipulating the activity of these genes affects bird and mammalian brains in similar ways.

So, all the same basic pieces seem to be there in both birds and mammals, which leaves the issue of raw horsepower. Mammalian brains are simply so much bigger that it seems inevitable that they could get more done.

But size isn't everything. Neural capabilities seem to be based on the number of neurons present, as well as the number of connections they can establish. Could birds simply cram more neurons into the same amount of physical space and thus get more done with a smaller brain?

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An Antipolitical Sentiment

 

From The Atlantic:

We reformed the nominating process. The use of primary elections instead of conventions, caucuses, and other insider-dominated processes dates to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, but primary elections and party influence coexisted through the 1960s; especially in congressional and state races, party leaders had many ways to influence nominations and vet candidates. According to Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H. W. Bush, here is how Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, got started in politics: “Samuel F. Pryor, a top Pan Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. ‘If you would,’ Pryor said, ‘I think we can assure you that you’ll be the nominee.’ ” Today, party insiders can still jawbone a little bit, but, as the 2016 presidential race has made all too clear, there is startlingly little they can do to influence the nominating process.

Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016, only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who hew to ideological orthodoxy.” By contrast, party hacks tend to shop for candidates who exert broad appeal in a general election and who will sustain and build the party’s brand, so they generally lean toward relative moderates and team players.

Moreover, recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge incumbents. “In congressional districts across the country, party leaders were able to carefully select candidates who would contribute to the collective good of the ticket,” Carson and Roberts write in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time. “This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries, in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and thereby made general elections less competitive. “A series of reforms that were intended to create more open and less ‘insider’ dominated elections actually produced more entrenched politicians,” Carson and Roberts write. The paradoxical result is that members of Congress today are simultaneously less responsive to mainstream interests and harder to dislodge.

Was the switch to direct public nomination a net benefit or drawback? The answer to that question is subjective. But one effect is not in doubt: Institutionalists have less power than ever before to protect loyalists who play well with other politicians, or who take a tough congressional vote for the team, or who dare to cross single-issue voters and interests; and they have little capacity to fend off insurgents who owe nothing to anybody. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts, incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader who, in a shocking upset, lost to an unknown Tea Partier in his 2014 primary. Legislators are scared of voting for anything that might increase the odds of a primary challenge, which is one reason it is so hard to raise the debt limit or pass a budget.

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A Sadness Reigns

From The Washington post, Sebastian Mallaby writes:

Even once a new leader is chosen, that leader will either be a Brexiteer, in which case he or she will be at odds with a majority of Parliament — and therefore vulnerable to a vote of no confidence, which could trigger an early election. Alternatively, the new leader will be a Remainer, in which case he or she will be at odds with the outcome of a referendum in which fully 72 percent voted. Nor is the situation going to be stabilized by other political developments. There is talk that the Labour Party may seize this moment to defenestrate its leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The Scottish National Party has already predicted a second referendum on independence from the United Kingdom.

There will be consequences for financial markets, both in Britain and abroad. Already, the British pound and the London stock market have been hammered, anticipating the recession that is likely to come. So-called “safe haven” currencies are rising: the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, the U.S. dollar. For all these economies, stronger currencies mean weaker exports and lower inflation. Do not expect the Fed to tighten soon. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempt to rescue his country from terminal stagnation has just suffered a mortal blow.

But the largest consequences will be for Europe — both for the reality and the idea. Britain’s vote will encourage populists elsewhere: Already, Euroskeptics in Sweden, France and the Netherlands have demanded a copycat referendum. Spain’s neo-Marxist far left is expected to win a quarter of the vote in Sunday’s election. Polls suggest that French voters are more skeptical of the E.U. even than British ones, a sentiment that will assist the far-right populist, Marine Le Pen, in next year’s presidential contest. Populist governments are already in power in Greece, Hungary and Poland. The fear that Europe’s cohesion is weakening could reignite economic turmoil in the euro zone. Government bonds in Spain and Italy look riskier now that the continent’s cohesion is in doubt.

In an ideal world, the Brexit shock would galvanize Europe into a muscular response. To borrow an analogy from the 2008 financial crisis, if Thursday’s vote was something of a “Lehman moment,” then we should all wish for the next steps to resemble the fast rescue of AIG and the passing of the TARP bailout plan — in other words, a determined commitment that no more dominoes should fall. But Europe’s problems are too deep, and its leadership too fragmented, for this vigorous response to appear probable.

The project of European integration can be thought of as three experiments in the management of globalization. The first is a triumph: The single market for trade in goods and services spurs competition and efficiencies in a bloc of more than 500 million people. The second experiment is a mixed story: The commitment to free movement for students, workers and retirees across 28 countries has expanded individual freedom and prosperity but is politically unpopular. Meanwhile Europe’s third experiment is a disaster. The creation of the euro, the shared currency now used by 19 E.U. countries, was quite simply a bridge too far.

But what is the way back? Once a country has given up its currency and denominated every contract in euros, the prospect of exit is too awful to contemplate. Greece has gone up to the brink on more than one occasion; each time it has decided not to jump. Yet if the euro’s dissolution would be prohibitively traumatic, the further integration required to sustain a common currency is equally daunting. Nations in the euro zone need to coordinate their taxing and spending. They must be prepared to transfer large chunks of federal revenue from rich regions to poorer ones — as happens within the United States. Given the Euroskepticism revealed by the Brexit vote, none of this is in the cards.

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Mala in Peru

Interview with Mala at BoilerRoom on his new project in Peru:

I’m going to send you some more stuff about the subject, but let’s talk Peru. First and foremost, congratulations on completing the project as I’m sure these cultural explorations must take a lot of time. Why Peru though?
A number of reasons really. One was that when Gilles and Brownswood asked me whether I’d be interested in doing a record for them, some of the suggestions felt too obvious. There was mention of going to Africa to record, but where do you start in Africa? It’s so huge. Depending on what region you are in, the experience will change dramatically due to the history and their own vibrations. It felt like too big a situation to get involved in at that time.

I say this to everyone but I think I was Peruvian in a different life. My wife has always spoken fondly of her experiences in Peru and a lot of her friends are Peruvian. At the time, a lot of them were moving back because they were beginning to have families. When we first went to Peru my son was three and my daughter was about 16 months old.

A lot of people don’t understand the sacrifice a mum needs to make to constantly be there for the kids. Unfortunately I think a lot of kids get put into care too young, either because of economic or financial situations. I really wanted to be there for her and help bring up our children because of the sacrifices she had to make to bring them up — her own loves and her own passions.

t felt like the perfect opportunity to have that dream holiday; taking her and the kids to Peru so she could go and see some of the friends that she hadn’t seen for years. It was also a chance to really embark on a new journey. When I thought about Peru I realised I didn’t really know anybody that knows much about the country. I certainly wasn’t told anything about Peru in school. You’d probably only know about the Incas and Machu Pichu or the pan flutist playing a really bad Bryan Adams cover on Croydon High Street.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to explore a new world of music, educate myself and open up a new palette of sound to my audience.

For some reason, I imagined that you’d mention your partner as a real influence for this project alongside your own personal discovery. Listening to the album, I certainly found parts of it very romantic. Would you say that Mirrors doubles up as an ode to your other half?
The fact that we have a life together. The fact that we have kids together means that my daily existence is for her and them anyway. I don’t mean that in a cliche way. It’s just that when you have a family of your own you live massively for them. You try and fill your home with love and general well-being of mind, body and spirit. If anything, me going to Peru was inspired by her experience of Peru and her longing to go. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen Peru had it not been for our relationship. So yeah, I definitely think there’s an aspect of that in the record.  

Did having your family around change the way you approached recording? For instance, if your family were out on the beach and your kids were paddling around in the sea, would you usher that into the record?
Me and my son went for an afternoon walk near some of the rivers near Urubamba, otherwise known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas. It’s about 90mins outside of Cusco and we stayed there for just under two weeks. We were just walking around and he was throwing stones in the streams, finding massive bugs and caterpillars that you don’t see where we’re from.

I thought the sound of the stream was beautiful and this being water that runs in a sacred valley, I thought there must be something special about it. I remember him looking up into the mountains and saying “papa, thunder is coming”. If you listen to “Sound Of The River”, you hear my son go “thunder coming” at the start. It’s just little things like that. Trying to incorporate the actual reality of my experience of Peru into the record.

Did you have any profound experiences? Did you meet any people out there that really changed the way that you recorded?
I found some very interesting instruments. Part of the country is Afro-Peruvian so obviously it’s rich in African roots. They play a number of strange instruments that I’ve never heard of; the only well-known one is the cajon — a wooden box which gives out a low bass frequency as well as a high pitch patter.

The quijada is the jaw of a deceased donkey. You hold the top end of the jaw and using the hand and a bone, you scrape the teeth. With the base of your fist, you bash the thick bottom part of the jaw. It actually sounds really nice when layered on top of a snare. Then there’s the cajita: a donation box used at churches. The combination of opening and closing this wooden box and bashing a wooden stick on the outside creates the sound.

It’s always the percussion that always attracts my ear…
Mine too. Again, probably because it’s African-influenced. How deep does that Africanness spread throughout the world? It’s deep man. That’s why I couldn’t take on that Africa situation just now. It is an ancient thing in all of us — that basic rhythm. A lot of the rhythms in Peru are also 6/8 too.

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Borges and Income

 

From Longreads-Borges and $:

V.S. Naipaul called it a time of “great crisis” for Borges: “his late thirties and early forties, when—the family money lost—he was doing all kinds of journalism.” For a literary author like Borges, journalism was soulless commercial work, but now, in his time of need, Borges was forced to take jobs for how well they paid regardless of their crassness or meaninglessness—book reviews, movie reviews, brief articles for a woman’s magazine. “I needed the money,” he said of a translation job.

During this financial instability, Borges befriended a young writer with a wealthy family who he went on to mentor in the literary arts. Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Ocampo’s brother-in-law, was only 17, but his family wanted him to be a great writer. Curiously—somehow part of his first act of tutelage—Borges and Bioy-Casares locked themselves in a room for weeks, writing a promotional pamphlet for yogurt. According to one advertising firm, the pamphlet, distributed at Martona dairies, displayed a charming brand of storytelling and was successful as an ad.

Bioy-Casares’ uncle, the owner of Martona yogurt, was paying Georgie and Adolfo to write straightforward advertising copy, but instead the two burgeoning literary geniuses treated the pamphlet as a distinct “literary event,” filling it with absurd jokes. They amused themselves with their facetious claims about “the elixir of long life,” which prevented poisoning and putrefaction. In hindsight, the yogurt pamphlet would indeed become the subject of serious literary scholarship—an essay by Cristina Parodi, which I’ve translated to English—but even this critical analysis notes the work’s true origins: “It was a well paid job,” and Borges was experiencing “economic needs.” For all the so-called writing Borges lowered himself to do, it still wasn’t enough. With his father growing sicker, Borges needed a steadier income.

“Along about 1937,” he wrote, at the ripe age of 38, “I took my first regular full-time job. I had previously worked at small editing tasks. . . . These had all been small-paying jobs, and I was long past the age when I should have begun contributing to our household upkeep.” It was a very minor position, he wrote, a municipal job. Borges’ solemn task was to re-catalogue library books into a brand new system—that no one used.

In Borges’ first experience with work-a-day living, we can imagine a reliving of his childhood fears, when his meek, bespectacled sympathies were mercilessly bullied at school. He may have been a local literary celebrity, but inside the library, it didn’t matter. He was nothing like the manly hombres with whom he was trying to coexist:

I stuck out the library for about nine years. They were nine years of solid unhappiness. At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. Once, a woman, one of the readers was raped on her way to the ladies’ room. Everybody said such things were bound to happen, since the men’s and ladies’ rooms were adjoining.

After work, he said, “as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.”

Though emotionally taxing, this job was physically undemanding. The other workers made it a point to never exceed an hour’s work daily—and forced him to do the same. So, after an hour, Borges would steal away to the basement to read and write for his remaining five hours at the library. As far as literary day jobs go, this could have been ideal, if Borges were not such a sensitive soul—if he, essentially, were not Borges. He did not earn very much (more than 200 pesos a month), but it was a regular and necessary paycheck. With his patrons no longer capable of patronage, he needed this “menial and dismal experience,” as he called it, to pay the rent.

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A National Holiday

From Jacobin:

One hundred fifty-one years ago today, a warship landed in the harbor of Galveston, Texas. Union general Gordon Granger was on board, along with about two thousand Union soldiers.

Later that day, Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa — Galveston’s most luxurious mansion and a onetime Confederate military headquarters, built by slaves just five years earlier. He announced the dawn of a new era, reading from General Order 3, a document declaring the end of the Civil War and reasserting the power of the Federal government over the soon-to-be reconstructed South.

But Granger’s most important message was directed not to Galveston’s cotton planters or shipping magnates, but to their slaves:

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…

The crowd was jubilant. Many of the assembled spectators were black Texans who had been deceived about the war’s progress by planters hoping to maintain control over their captive workforce for one last cotton harvest.

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had finally come to an end in Texas. That day — June 19, 1865 — would come to be celebrated by black Americans all over the country, who remember Juneteenth as the anniversary of their historic triumph over the planter class.

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Spanish in English

 

Interview with translator Christina Macsweeney at Words without Borders:

What do you think is the current state of the literary translation of Latin American literature in this country?

There’s definitely been a resurgence in the publication of translated literature from Latin America in recent years. For a while, it seemed like the publishing industry both in the US and UK had gotten stuck in some stereotypical vision of that literature (and many reviewers still manage to sneak the word “magical” into their comments on anything from Latin America). But it’s very heartening to see so many new voices being published now (Yuri Herrera, Alejandro Zambra, Álvaro Enrigue, etc.), and writers whose work was sidelined in the past, such as Sergio Pitol, are also being reevaluated. There’s still a lot of work to be done: for one thing, I think it continues to be more difficult to get writing by women from Latin America into translation. Yes, there are some wonderful exceptions like Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel, Laia Jufresa . . . but they are exceptions. And the essay, which is a major genre of Latin American writing, is largely absent too.

Why might it be so difficult to get women’s work translated, and what do you think it is about the particular writers whom you mentioned that make them the exception?

Yeah, that’s definitely a big question. But I don’t think writing by women is only sidelined in terms of translation. Part of the problem might be that their work is also seen as having less authority in the original culture, which means it get reviewed less frequently, and/or is taken less seriously. In terms of the writers I mentioned, what makes them stand out for me is that they have very individual styles, very strong voices. And they seem to approach writing in ways that are surprising, sometimes even unsettling.

Do you have any advice for aspiring translators? What about those of us who may not be able to translate but who are interested in translations?

For aspiring translators, my first piece of advice would be: don’t give up. It can be disheartening to send off report after report, one sample translation after another, and to feel you’re getting nowhere. But you have to hold on to your passion for the works you feel should be available to readers. It’s also important to feel part of a community: I’ve never been great at networking, but those opportunities to exchange ideas with other translators, and members of the publishing industry, can be amazingly enriching.

Something I would like to see in the reception of translated literature is a more nuanced discourse. Like many translators, I’ve gathered a nice little collection of adverbs and adjectives (some even superlative) from reviews of my work, but mostly that’s as far as it goes. So I’d like to encourage readers and reviewers to start addressing what it is about a particular translation that makes it work.

You said in another interview that you and Valeria Luiselli didn’t only collaborate through text, but that music and video clips and even a ballet production played a part in the translation process of Faces in the Crowd. How was it that these other art forms informed your collaborative creative process?

Yes, music and dance were very important in the translation process of Faces in the Crowd. I think it started with Valeria sending me links to videos of the Mexican dancer José Limón’s choreography of The Moor’s Pavane: watching the movements, and feeling the rhythm as I translated and redrafted fed into two important scenes in the novel. And I played Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz”—Valeria had also been listening to it when writing certain scenes dealing with Lorca—over and over to keep that waltz rhythm in my mind. Valeria also told me about the books she was reading as part of her research, so E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Collyer brothers was very helpful in finding that 1920s New York voice. I think that sharing those things also helped to make our relationship as author-translator closer, and it’s something we’ve continued ever since: for example, with The Story of My Teeth, Valeria made sure that I was able to hear the conversations of the reading group, and also watch a video of a tour around the exhibition on which the original story was based.

That’s fascinating. As a writer I understand how other art forms can inspire one’s writing, but I never considered it in relation to the translation process—probably because I’m not a translator.

Well, there are a great many similarities between creative writing and translation.

Absolutely. And what about your collaborations with other writers? You have two upcoming translation releases: Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims and Eduardo Rabasa’s A Zero Sum Game. What drew you to these books? Can you discuss the differences (and/or similarities) in the translation process for each one?

I really appreciate being able to collaborate with the authors I’m working on, but it is a time-consuming process, and not all writers have that time to spare or feel confident to evaluate the English translation.

In relation to Daniel Saldaña París, Valeria mentioned his work to me, and I first read his poetry, which I loved. I then got hold of his novel, En medio de extrañas víctimas, and was hooked. So I translated a few chapters, started sending the sample to publishers, and eventually Coffee House Press decided to take it on. I also met Daniel briefly in New York around that time, and he was happy with the early chapters of Among Strange Victims. So I continued translating and Daniel read through and commented on the final draft, answering my queries and making suggestions. But the best part of the process was when we had the opportunity to share an author-translator residency organized by OMI International at Ledig House in New York State. We went through the proofs of the novel together, often reading sections aloud to each other. It meant a lot to both of us to hear the other’s voice speaking the novel.

Eduardo Rabasa, who is also Valeria and Daniel’s Spanish publisher, initially asked me to read La suma de los ceros with a view to making a sample translation, and, as I was very impressed, we took it from there. I sent him sections for review as I finished them. I also suggested a few small changes to the structure of certain sections, and getting his feedback on that was immensely useful.

So my experiences, while different with each author, have been very positive. As I live on a different continent than all three of these authors, the time I have been able to spend with them in person, both getting to know them and working on the texts, has, I think, contributed greatly to the success of the translations. Emails and Skype are fine, but nothing beats personal contact.

You described translating Valeria’s work as a  “double translation” because these texts were written in Spanish and translated into American English, but you are based in the UK? How does that change the more typical, or “single translation,” process?

When I first began translating Faces in the Crowd, it was for the UK publishing house Granta. Perhaps because the book is set between New York and Mexico City, using British English spelling and idiomatic expressions felt all wrong. Happily, Granta agreed to let me use American English. I now translate regularly for US publishers, but this does involve a certain amount of role switching, as if I have to step into another place where I can access a more American voice. With Among Strange Victims, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive “bloody” (my translation of pinche) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with “damn.” But the problem was, I’d already used “damn” in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on “frigging,” which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.

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