This fall, my first book-length translation was published: When You Get To The Other Side, a novel originally written in Spanish by Mariana Osorio Gumá. It’s a story of familial love, perseverance, and generational wisdom that’s lush with detail and care. I’m particularly pleased that it was published by the Cinco Puntos imprint of Lee & Low Books—and that, while the project started before Cinco Puntos made its move from El Paso to NYC, its editor Stephanie Frescas Macias was able to stand beside it the whole time.
To learn a bit about how the book came to be—in its original version and in its English translation—you can read this conversation between me and the author Mariana Osorio Gumá. You can get also get taste of the book—again, in Spanish and in English—by watching and/or listening to this virtual bilingual reading we did:
Get your copy of When You Get To The Other Side from your local bookstore or library today! If they don’t have it yet, ask if they can get it for you! If they can’t, get it from Lee & Low or Bookshop.org. And thanks for reading.
I’ve been listening to this album on repeat for a few weeks! It’s got some great scream/sing-along-in-the-car tracks on it, particularly “Jícama” and “I Don’t Believe In Death.” Here’s “Jícama,” but I encourage you to give the whole album a listen on Spotify.
“Es verdad. Si se para uno a considerarlo bien, hay muchos libros. Se tropieza uno con ellos a cada paso. Acechan a la vuelta de los más ocultos recovecos; acompañan en el viaje, aunque no se más que el modestísimo del tranvía; entretienen el aburrimiento o la angustia de las salas de espera; templan la melancolía de las convalecencias y de las tardes de lluvia; usurpan, a veces, las funciones del amado ausente; montan guardia en las mesas de noche, al alcance de la mano del insomne; se esconden bajo las almohadas como el secreto más peligroso de la adolescencia; presiden ciertos actos solemnes y risibles; resplandecen de venalidad en los escaparates de lujo; amarillean en los puesto callejeros; se mustian bajo las axilas de los estudiantes; se abren, de par en par, en las cátedras; duermen en las bodegas de los ricos; arden en las hogueras de los fanáticos.
As ever, my ability to keep this blog “up-to-date” is . . . lacking . . . BUT! I wanted to share a couple videos of things I’ve been doing, virtually, during this pandemic autumn.
In October, I read my translation to English of one of Rosario Castellanos’s essays, “El zipper: La hora de la verdad” (“The Zipper: The Moment of Truth”), at the lovely Us & Them reading series’s fall event. Us & Them is usually held in Brooklyn but has adapted for these Zoomy times, so we’ve been fortunate enough to keep seeing this reading series put translators and writers (and writers and translators) into conversation and community even now, which might be when we need it more than ever. Here’s the video of the event, time-stamped to the start of my contribution (16:57; but, if you have the time, I encourage you to listen to the rest of the readings—they’re fabulous!). And check out the Us & Them website to see their reading archive and keep up on future events.
Then, at the end of October, I got to give a virtual talk (in Spanish) as part of a roundtable series on identity construction, culture, and power (Construyendo identidades: Cultura y poder, Ciclo de mesas redondas) hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)’s Centro de Investigaciones de América Latina y el Caribe in partnership with UNAM-Chicago, UNAM-Boston, and Loyola University. My talk, one in a panel moderated by Benjamín Juárez Echenique, is about Castellanos’s construction—and questioning—of a Mexican feminist identity in her newspaper essays. I’ll share the video below, time-stamped to the start of my presentation (and again, I encourage you to watch the other presentations if you have the interest and time!).
I feel like this is so obvious to me that it’s strange to say it, but I know I should: I felt (feel) really grateful and honored to get to participate in virtual events like this, for so many reasons. Because I’m well and privileged enough to carry on (maybe at a different pace, in different rhythms, but still, carry on) with my translating and scholarship during this incredibly unstable time; because I got to share a virtual stage with some really brilliant creators and thinkers; because I won’t ever take these communities and connections for granted, especially now; and because I get to share work I really care about, about a writer whose ideas/writing, I believe, deserves more (and deeper) attention, in multiple languages. So: to those of you who invite, read, write, share and listen: thank you!
It’s May 2020, and for more than two months now, to keep each other—loved ones and strangers alike—safe and healthy, we’re all staying inside and avoiding contact as much as possible. I’m in my hometown of El Paso, my one-week trip from early March now in its third month. I feel lucky to have sunshine and family within my reach, but of course it’s bittersweet—what I’ve left behind, and what will no longer be, linger in my mind.
I don’t know when I’ll see my partner, sheltering at home on the East Coast, next. In a different world, we’d planned to take off for Mexico City at the end of this month, for our second long-ish stay there together; he was going to work on his dissertation and I was going to translate, translate, translate all summer, popping out for a street taco at mealtimes, or warming up one of a dozen tamales we’d have stocked in the rental apartment’s fridge. That’s how we’d imagined the summer, anyway. It’ll have to stay imagined for a while, as we’ve (of course) cancelled the trip.
So, a fitting tune for all of that: the amazing Chilean singer Mon Laferte’s “Chilango Blues.”
In the world of home-enclosure, a couple funny, eerie lines from the song: “Se acabó la democracia en casa / Ahora vive un monstruo en la terraza.” A straightforward translation: “Democracy has ended at home / Now a monster lives on the terrace.” Now imagine it rhyming and Mon Laferte’s voice crooning it. So good.
Anyway, I hope that your terraces remain monster-free and that we can keep democracy alive, at home and outside it. Take care.
“One, two. I count the women I pass on Avenida Insurgentes as I walk to the roundabout. I also pay attention to the men, but that count is different, more rushed. There are lots of them, and to keep up, I have to skip over some numbers, counting in twos or threes. One–three–six–eight. Since I turned off Milán Street to here, I’ve seen so many (it’s impossible to keep the mental count) men who are alone; the women, on the other hand, are in pairs or in groups. Grandmother, mother, daughter. Two friends. Very few walk alone: three, if I include myself.
I know that when I arrive at the roundabout it’ll be different: there will be women, women smiling everywhere, an incredible and immense majority of women, and among them I’ll feel completely safe . . . but for now, I need to cover a few more streets.”
On August 16, women in Mexico City marched in protest of the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of violence against women, the complicity of the government and law enforcement, and the fear they feel daily due to all of this. A writer named Sandra Barba attended the march and wrote an excellent crónica of her experience for Letras Libres, explaining how and why the women are coming together in solidarity in the streets of the capital. I got to translate this essay for World Literature Today‘s blog, and I’m very glad to be able to bring Sandra’s words to more readers.
I translate literature because I believe in it—I believe in the power of language—I believe that we desperately want to communicate with each other through language, in spite of language, across and beyond language. And I know that as a translator I can do my small part to make that happen. But literary translation often doesn’t feel as immediately important as, say, the work that human rights activists and immigration lawyers and civil rights organizations are doing. That’s why this project felt special to me. Translating this essay felt immediate and powerful; it feels like, perhaps, I’m helping people understand something that’s happening now, helping people see the women who are fighting for good now. I’m grateful for the feeling, and for these women, and for anyone who reads Sandra’s essay—in English or in Spanish.
Lucked out by reading a really good book on a really good beach day in Tarragona, Spain.
You GUYS, this book! This book is so good! (It’s so good it made me come back to blogging. Whoops, re: the past however many months I’ve not updated this . . . ) Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a 365-page essay on translation and the relationships it forges and exposes—and it’s so well-written and thoughtful and engaging that I blasted through it in like three days, snatching moments to read whenever I was sitting still and had it within reach.
My copy is very dog-eared, but here are a couple select excerpts:
“I would argue that this is what reading offers us: occasions for inappropriate, improbable identification. For powerful reality-suspending identification with a character, a writer, an idea, an experience, a fantasy. Fantasies that apparently have nothing to do with me – isn’t this, in its way, the power of a fantasy? – that do not appear to directly concern or pertain to me. But that catch me up nonetheless. Like a complicated miracle. Like the everyday complicated miracle of reading books written by other people – especially, perhaps, books in translation, originally written in languages we will never speak, about places we will never visit and experiences we will never have. Books that, through the work of translators, address us nevertheless, include us in the remit of their address (not by expanding it, necessarily, to some broad and flattened out universal of shared experience but, as in the haiku, but narrowing it and sharpening it to the absolutely local, the absolutely particular).”
And:
“Perhaps you’ll hear me say that there are works in French I haven’t truly? or fully? or properly? read because I have only? read them in translation, but that’s surely premised on the chance, the plausibility, of one day reading the originals. Mann on the other hand? Tolstoy, Ferrante, Kang? All those books? Yes, I’ve read them. Or, let me maintain that I have read them. Let me believe that what I have read in English partakes, in all its difference, of what you have read in German, in Russian, in Italian, in Korean. This, after all, has been the form of my aesthetic experience, my own expansive and authentic aesthetic experience. I notice that the more remote the languages seem from my own capacity to learn them, the more assertive I feel. Why is this? I am more willing to register and be troubled by the close, familiar differences than the more distant ones, I realize, and perhaps this is complicatedly true of all of us: when we are presented with a version of something that we know we can’t know, or not without some great, unlikely effort on our part, we are more prepared to accept how it comes, and to grow attached to the only form in which we are able to receive it.”
There’s so much measured, generous insight in this book. Go to your local independent bookstore and get it!
Hi! This is my way of casually coming back to this blog after months of radio silence. Oops.
I’m currently living in Mexico City, working on my dissertation thanks to a fellowship from BU. I’ll write someblog posts about it soon, but for now, a song that always brings me some joy: Laura Mvula’s “Green Garden.”
And: please donate to Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign. Thanks! More to come . . .
I should call this blog post “What I Read” because, really, I read this book back in April. But!: At Harvard Review Online, I’ve just published my review of Empty Set, written by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated by Christina MacSweeney, and published by the always awesome Coffee House Press.
(Above, the scene: a tasty toast, a pen for note-taking, a delicious coffee, and an ARC of Empty Set. Good company on my conference trip to Spain a few months ago, where I stopped in a bookstore-cafe for breakfast and review writing.)
“There are—I’m certain of this—things that can’t be told in words,” explains the self-described “visual artist who writes” Verónica Gerber Bicecci in her novel Empty Set, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Empty Set makes no attempt to tell only with words. Its fragmentary written vignettes are interspersed with sketches and explanatory diagrams that illustrate and, in some cases, build the understandings of its twenty-two-year-old narrator, Verónica. Acutely observant and persistently curious, Verónica’s voice powers the novel, guiding readers to travel its winding route with the same patience and wonder as its protagonist.
“There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.”
-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Nominee for 2018 House Representative in NY-14
Political news has been pretty horrible lately, folks. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in her Democratic primary this week was a huge moment of hope, and we needed hope pretty badly. (Fun fact: she founded the college blog I wrote for and edited throughout my undergrad at BU! Not surprised at all to see her taking Howard Thurman’s message to the streets so powerfully.)
Other people giving me hope are the good, good people working hard to protect and support immigrants and refugees, adults and children, who arrive to our country hoping for better lives. Here are a few organizations where this work is being done, and to whom I’ve donated what I can—if you can donate some money too, will you join me?
I know these are not the only groups doing this important work, but it’s a start if you’re feeling you don’t know how you can help—just help those who have been helping all along.
