Category: News & Events

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New translation! WHEN YOU GET TO THE OTHER SIDE by Mariana Osorio Gumá

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.

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Fall 2020: Some Rosario Castellanos-related virtual events

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!

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New translation! An essay by Sandra Barba

“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.

Read “We Will Not Let Each Other Go” here. You can read it in the original Spanish here.

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What I’m Reading (And Reviewing): EMPTY SET

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.

[Keep reading my review of Empty Set at Harvard Review Online…]

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New translation! A short story by Rodrigo Fresán

“Years ago the man got married and years ago the man became unhappy in his marriage. The man lives in Buenos Aires and he passes his time, or tries to make time pass, thinking about the Aztec Empire . . .”

I have a new translation out! A very short story by Rodrigo Fresán, in my English, is part of World Literature Today‘s May 2018 speculative fiction feature. The story is “Ancient History,” and it continues my short streak of translating stories about Mexico by non-Mexican writers! You can read the story online or in print; World Literature Today is sold at my local independent bookstore (as well as Barnes & Noble), so it’s probably sold at your nearest bookstore too. I hope you’ll read the full issue, whether in print or online, as it’s full of great works translated from many languages, and has a super-strong book review section, too.

I translated this story for no real reason last summer—I was reading Blanco Móvil on my laptop in a coffee shop, and stumbled across the original story, “Historia Antigua.” I liked it lots, and it was quite short, so I translated it on the spot just for fun. After that, I didn’t revisit it for several months, until I heard about WLT‘s upcoming speculative fiction special feature and realized I had something just right for it, hiding out in my computer files. A happy coincidence.

Rodrigo Fresán is an incredible and prolific Argentinean writer, who already has a few books out in English translation. Will Vanderhyden’s latest translation of Fresán, The Bottom of the Sky, will be published by Open Letter Books in just a couple weeks! So if you like this short story in World Literature Today, you should definitely get yourself a copy of the book as soon as it’s out.

Hope you enjoy reading Rodrigo Fresán, in English or in Spanish!

Read my translation of Rodrigo Fresán, “Ancient History,” in World Literature Today.

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¡Estoy en España! Talking Beckett, Translation, and Mexico

¡Hola! Writing this from my hotel room in Cáceres, in the Extremadura region of Spain. I’m here for the “Samuel Beckett International Conference: Literature and Translation” conference hosted at Universidad de Extremadura.

I came to Spain a couple days early to take a pre-conference mini-vacation in Madrid, where I: stumbled around museums, jetlagged but blissful; had a sangria at Las Cuevas del Sésamo and listened to a lone pianist play “Something” by the Beatles; had a café con leche and toast, finished my current read, and bought a couple books en español at La Central. It was nice to go back to Madrid. It’s been over five years since I did my study abroad semester there, but I was reminded quickly by the living memory of the city that Madrid was where I learned how to be alone. It’s a simple thing, but that lesson gave me the space and confidence to take on the challenges that made (and make) me my current self. So cheers to that.

Tomorrow I’m presenting my paper, “Beckett’s Mexican Translations: Resistances of Literary Diction and Conviction” in one of the afternoon sessions at the conference. Beckett is not my principal research subject—or my secondary one, or my tertiary one, etc., etc.—but I’m approaching this from my side of things, which is to say the side that tips toward Mexican literature and translation studies. It comes from a side research project that  my advisor, Christopher Ricks, guided me on this fall.

And I’m happy it got me to Cáceres, which is beautiful. Wish I had more time here to explore, but I’m taking the train back to Madrid right after I speak tomorrow, so that I can catch my my flight Saturday without any trouble. Wish me luck!

& ‘Ta luego—

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New translation! A short story by Pedro Novoa

I’m excited to share my latest translation with you all! For Latin American Literature Today‘s fourth issue, I translated the Peruvian writer Pedro Novoa’s short story “Carne de subasta,” or “Flesh for Auction.”

LALT is an awesome magazine, an offshoot of World Literature Today that publishes all its pieces in English and Spanish. Because of this, the story in its original Spanish is available to read in this issue. There’s also a fantastic interview with Pedro Novoa in which he talks about the story I translated:

Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz: In the short story “Carne de subasta”  … you incorporate Mexican slang in the words of the protagonist Jalisco Méndez. What is your relationship with Mexico? How did this story originate?

Pedro Novoa: I have relatives in Sonora, Mexico. Herbert Ávila, a cousin of mine, went in the 80s to cross the border to the US and live as an undocumented immigrant over there. He was a “wet back,” was able to enter American soil and to not get deported back to Peru, he took out his Mexican passport. He’d get expelled from the country closer to the border and would attempt to cross again. And that’s what he did three times until they almost killed him. Because of that he stayed in Sonora where he raised a family and has found that stability that he’d longed for in the US. He’s the one who used to say we were “auction meat,” something to be offered up to the highest bidder. It’s a terrible image depicting the condition of many Latinos, and I racked my brain to recall the Mexican slang that my cousin had already made his own. And because it also seemed to me to be an interesting metaphor for the current situation of the Latino man. Someone who is sold to the highest bidder in our neoliberal, commodified and inhumane world.

On the other hand, I’m constantly on the lookout for terms with popular origins, and it seems to me that Peruvians and Mexicans have a rather vast inventory of colorful, symbolic and rhythmic words. This lexicon of Mexicanness also came to me through film and music. Just to mention the most important examples, the film Amores perros and a few songs by Control Machete and Cypress Hill.

(Read the full interview here.)

Moving this from Spanish to English was fun, with its snappy pace and Mexican slang everywhere! Originally, I was a little nervous (and excited) for the challenge of translating Peruvian Spanish for the first time—and then I was given a Mexican narrator to work with! A funny coincidence. I guess that challenge will have to wait a little longer.

I hope you enjoy reading Pedro Novoa’s story, in English or in Spanish!

Read my translation of Pedro Novoa, “Flesh for Auction,” in Latin American Literature Today.

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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.