What kind of journey begins without the possibility or intention of return? And what kind of person sets out, all the while knowing this to be the case?
Tales of the epic quest often take such questions as starting points. But the latest novel from contemporary Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, titled Signs Preceding the End of the World, rejects each of these questions from the outset.
Recently translated into English by Lisa Dillman for And Other Stories, Signs Preceding the End of the World focuses on Makina, a young Mexican woman, as she travels from her rural village across alien towns, ice-green rivers and black mountain passes searching for her brother north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Equipped with the determination to return home after a short trek across the border, she leaves with few provisions, which include, among other things, “one white blouse and one with colorful embroidery, in case she came across any parties.”
As Makina meets up with the “top dogs” in her town who arrange for her trip, Herrera offers a glimpse of the men that loom behind Mexican organised crime: Mr. Double-U, “a joyful sight to see,” the hustling Mr. Aitch, who hangs with his gang of misfits at the literarily-named drinking establishment Pulquería Raskolnikova, and the tight-lipped Mr. Q, who “never resorted to violence—at least there was nobody who’d say he did.” Besides adding a touch of Tarantino-esque flair to these shady characters, Herrera essentially establishes a novel of personalities. Biggest among them is Makina herself.
Makina is street-savvy and spirited. She is acutely aware of her sexuality, frankly describing encounters with the boys she’s “shucked,” or the constant pressures of the wandering male gaze. She is a gifted communicator who works the telephone switchboard in her hometown in the native tongue, ‘anglo’, and a third language that is “more than a midpoint between homegrown and anglo […] a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born.” But above all else, Makina is a heroine, in the truest sense of the term. On her journey from Mexico to the United States, she asserts herself emotionally and defends herself physically in the face of male authority, displays both maternal compassion and a sharp sense of justice for those who have been wronged, while her thoughts and memories reveal a profound empathy for the conditions of those around her.
Aided by Herrera’s ingenious application of metaphor and colloquialism—controlled artfully in Dillman’s hands—a carcass putrefying beneath the Mexican sun takes the shape of a pregnant woman giving birth, rucksacks that scatter the pathway to the border are loaded not with objects but “crammed with time,” and a baseball stadium, with its rows and rows of black, plastic seats, instead assumes the form of “an obsidian mound barbed with flint, sharp and glimmering.” Finally, the Iraq war transforms a domestic U.S. military base into “the place where people’s hearts are eaten.” Upon the discovery of her brother’s status as an illegally-enlisted American soldier, Makina’s life breaks apart, like two planets colliding at the end of the world.
In her translator’s note, Dillman states that Signs Preceding the End of the World deals with major contemporary issues of “migration, immigration (and two of its stomach-churning corollaries, so-called nativism and profiling), transnationalism, transculturalism, and language hybridity—not to mention, of course, the end of the world.”
Though the novel’s finale is at once dauntingly cynical and dizzyingly enigmatic, Herrera nevertheless possesses a penetrating faculty about these issues, which he captures with masterful clarity in content as well as form. After discovering the truth of her brother’s whereabouts, Makina and a group of “homegrowns” are stopped by a patrolling police officer, who finds one detainee clutching a book of poetry. The cop forces him to write a poem on the spot, but the immigrant is unable to do so. Makina instead grabs for a pencil and, “without stopping to think which word was better than which other or how the message was turning out,” erupts across the page in a rapid-fire burst of verse:
“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”
The spoken-word quality of Herrera’s prose suggests his own stories might be written with the same unbounded rapidity as Makina’s text, offering readers the kind of direct ferocity that is only rarely, if ever, matched by the author’s peers. More than anything else, this passage reflects Herrera’s ability to navigate complex issues and cultural tensions from a variety of perspectives: Makina simultaneously speaks of the negative imports (dirt, violence, dope) delivered to American communities, though this “destruction” is fuelled by American desires (for food, dope, and unquestioning loyalty), and mediated by persistent stereotypes (“we who didn’t come by boat […] we who came to take your jobs”). Where Makina once embraced the identification of the Mexican immigrant as social outsider, she now accepts (“what else could we do?”) the perceived role as barbarous invader, bearing an apocalyptic end to the American Dream.
Packed into a tidy hundred and seven pages, some will view Signs Preceding the End of the World as a forthright comment on the imagination of national boundaries, the shared fate of all to be experienced at the end of the world, or the eternal separation between “us” and “them.” But all will be sure to regard this novel as an enduring document of world literature.
English-language readers will find apt comparisons between Signs Preceding the End of the World and Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road. Indeed, Dillman makes explicit her translational debt to McCarthy for broaching themes of borderlands and eschatology, alongside other works such as Dante’s Inferno and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Herrera’s is the topic of the cultural transplant, especially to inhospitable environments filled with misunderstood, or misunderstanding, peoples. The contending foreign presence is an America where the immigrant is made to feel unwanted, “homegrowns” working north of the border and forced into a life that mutes any expression of the culture they left behind, and eventually even Makina herself.
Because Herrera traces these issues with such fine attention to nuance and idiom, the difficulty of translation is heightened to an incredible degree. Dillman explains her approach to the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World as one of “marking” language as “non-standard in ways that are not geographically recognizable,” and the selective preservation of Spanish words and phrases, all supported by readings of other “non-standard” works of fiction.
Special consideration is also paid to Herrera’s use of the Spanish neologism jarchar (“to leave”)—deriving from the Mozarabic language of Muslim Iberia—which is rendered in Dillman’s translation as “to verse.” The decision to remain stalwart to the integrity of the Spanish-language version may at first come off as disorienting. But this feeling is merely fleeting. Like a foreigner in a country where he does not know the language, the reader learns quickly to adapt to the use of such choice phrases. And the reader can begin to understand the motivations behind the choices of the translator. The greater, longer-lasting effect is to envision oneself a traveller in Makina’s place, pointing to a notion of translation as a kind of boundless borderland to be traversed though the act is impossible. The journey must be undertaken, and somehow, through language, a way must be found across.
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Ethan Alexander Perets studies Japanese art history at the Courtauld Institute in London.