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#ALTA40: My First ALTA Conference

This weekend I was in Minneapolis for the 40th annual American Literary Translators Association conference. It was a blast; I met dozens of brilliant editors and translators, reunited with friends made this May at the Biennial Graduate Student Translation Conference held at UT Dallas, and absorbed so many interesting perspectives on what it is to be a translator and an editor who works with translations.

Reading my translations of Nadia Escalante Andrade at ALTA40.

Aside from hearing a lot of great work in translation and having many thoughts provoked by the weekend’s fantastic panelists, I got to volunteer a few hours at the conference bookfair, and—most exciting—I was honored to read my translations of Nadia Escalante Andrade at Saturday’s Exchanges contributor reading. I read four poems, two of which were published by Exchanges in their spring 2017 issue. As I walked out of the reading, I checked my phone to see a heartwarming Facebook post from Nadia, which I’ll translate here:

¿Saben qué es más bonito que leer los poemas propios en lecturas públicas? Que otrxs lean tus poemas con otra voz y en otro idioma ante seres que no te miran pero sí te ven, y no te escuchan, pero sí reconocen tu voz.

[You know what’s more beautiful than reading your own poems at a public reading? Having someone else read your poems in another voice and another language, before beings who do not look at you but do see you, and that don’t hear you but do recognize your voice.]

This is such a lovely description of what translation does for literature, and I’m happy to have spent a weekend with the people who dedicate themselves to recognizing the voices of the world.

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What I’m Reading: “Colin Kaepernick Has a Job”

Once the semester started I lost all hope of reading books outside of my studies, but I still manage to get in a few good essays/pieces of literary journalism every week. One I’d like to recommend is this profile on Colin Kaepernick and his activism, written by Rembert Browne for Bleacher Report.

Rembert Browne is an amazing writer—I’ve been a fan of him for a couple years now after one fated evening-into-night session of reading everything he ever wrote for Grantland.

Nearly every paragraph of this profile packs a punch, but here’s a taste:

“When you are a minority and refute the notion that you were charitably allowed into a club—that you were being done a favor, not that you earned it—you will be punished, until it has been determined that you have learned your lesson. This has long been sport for white America, long before football. Slavery was for sport. Laws laced in hatred and hypocrisy were for sport. The invisible ceilings and roadblocks and hurdles—sport. The real tradition of this country is a testing of the limits of people of color, to see how far we can be pushed until we either give up (and give in) or fight back (and die).

The remaining option—to persist—is the one that has always been inconvenient for white America. Colin Kaepernick is inconvenient. To persist is to show strength, but also to be unpredictable, hard to define, impossible to control. And to grow stronger with every lash is to become dangerous—a threat not only to power, but to inspire others to follow suit. Leaders of color in this country have long been mythologized by white America when they teach their own to thrive within the confines of current rules, not when they demand that every rule be called into question.”

Read the full essay here.

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What I’m Reading: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

Love in the Time of Cholera

I’m nearly finished with Love in the Time of Cholera, written by Gabriel García Márquez and translated (wonderfully) to English by Edith Grossman. I’ve been ten pages from finishing for a couple weeks now—gotta love that start-of-semester madness! (But I plan to finish the book tonight.)

What is there to say about this book?

Like all other García Márquez books, its engagement with language is absolutely masterful. (And major props to Edith Grossman for bringing that state of wonder into English.) García Márquez could have written engrossing toaster oven manuals if he’d tried. While the story is interesting in its own right, I’m really sticking around for the words—for the ways he surprises me, makes me smile with a turn of phrase, knocks my breath away with a simple description.

Enough of me, though. For a taste of what I’m talking about, here’s the master himself. This is just a short little excerpt to exemplify how downright pleasant this reading experience can be. (And again, let’s stress that this is in translation! Love to all the world’s translators.)

” . . . Then she urged him to say what he meant to say, because she knew that he, or any other man, would not have awakened her at three o’clock in the morning after so many years after not seeing her just to drink port and eat country bread with pickles. She said: ‘You do that only when you are looking for someone to cry with.'”

And here’s one more fun little moment:

“Once he tasted some chamomile tea and sent it back, saying only: ‘This stuff tastes of window.’ Both she and the servants were surprised because they had never heard of anyone who had drunk boiled window, but when they tried the tea in an effort to understand, they understood: it did taste of window.”