Signs Preceding the End of the World begins with a gaping sinkhole, swooping to rush open, our protagonist Makina deftly moving away and on with her day. So we might consider the language of Yuri Herrera’s writing and Lisa Dillman’s translation into English: opening up before us, perhaps cataclysmic, rushing, yet simultaneously unruffled, pithy.
As Dillman notes, it is especially timely for this book to come to fruition. In this era of extreme fear-mongering, insisting on farcical walls being erected at illusory borders, this novel ventures into themes and questions of migration, immigration, transnationalism, transculturalism, language hybridity, and, of course, death and the end of the world—which these days seems to be looming ever-closer on our horizon.
We follow Makina as she journeys to track down her brother on the other side of the US-Mexican border. Makina is a character eluding cliché and expectation, with a sort of quiet, no-nonsense demeanor but also a brittle resilience that manages to subvert machismo and, furthermore, the eye-roll-worthy genres of feisty damsel or unrealistically sexualized waif. Makina is dexterous in her actions, observations, and expressions. Dillman writes her reflections with pointed beauty. For example, once Makina reaches US territory:
They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rabid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms up to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.
It’s arguably easy for a novel with such themes to be rendered in a typecast manner when translated for an Anglo audience. With a variety of shady men in The Little Town in Mexico, terse confrontations with coyotes and patrollers on the US-Mexico border, and the scenario of a young Mexican woman in the strange territory of the United States, one could easily envision a translation rife with offensively predictable discourses and pseudo-immigrant-Spanglish. Again, of course, this isn’t a book only worth appreciating relative to the lamentable standards of Latin American literature’s life in the States; in itself, it is a forceful and sustaining piece of literature. The language is wholly one-of-a-kind, not drawing attention to itself yet outstanding in its liveliness and dynamism. Words left in Spanish are done so conscientiously, speaking fluidly rather than stereotypically. The mix of high and low registers, lyricism and orality is striking. Dillman’s craftwork in this case is exceptionally masterful. It interrogates the notion of “world literature” and pushes into the strange interstices of familiarity, foreignness, and ambiguity.
Take, for instance, her solution for the most noteworthy example of Herrera’s neologisms: “jarchar”, translated by Dillman as “verse.” The word gets used extremely often in the book. The first few times I came across it I noted its verve, how it subtly propelled me from one scene or action to the next; by the third or so chapter I grew wary of it, puzzled at its persistence; soon thereafter, I was subsumed by Makina and the language of her story that it was merely a vibrant thread in the fabric of the world she walked (and talked) through. As Dillman explains in her inspiring translator’s note:
Written in the vernacular, these lyric compositions served as a sort of bridge between cultures and languages […]. And on one level Signs is just that: a book about bridging cultures and languages. Jarchar, too, is a noun-turned verb. […] Makina, the protagonist, is the character who most often ‘verses,’ as well as the woman who serves as a bridge between cultures, languages and worlds. Would readers realize any of this had it not just been explained? I doubt it. But that’s ok; the same is true of the Spanish.
The profundity of Dillman’s comprehension of Herrera’s writing and the narrative of Makina effectively becomes another facet of the novel itself. She cites an impressively broad list of books read for inspiration before embarking on the project, from Aztec mythology to Alice in Wonderland to, most prominently, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Though not explicit on the page, these influences on the expansiveness of her writing-translating are evident. It is non-standard English, geographically non-explicit, and as we adjust to the cadences and capacities of this hybrid language we are able to become oriented in a world (and underworld) that is as barbed with feeling (and non-feeling) as with the scathe of the senses and the bewildered urgency of adrenaline.
While much of Herrera’s and Dillman’s sentences are succinct, the rhythm swift, the novel is laced with an occasional protracted passage. The final sentence of the novel, for example, is outstanding: a behemoth final sentence-paragraph with which I had to pause, consider, and re-read many times, as one slowly chews and tastes a fine dish, or greedily saunters around in a new pair of shoes. Using unexpected and tactful punctuation and a somehow sharp ambiguity, the language oscillates from intrigued to rapt. Perhaps this is also evidence of Dillman’s expertise in turning that often-irksome, long Spanish sentence into a smooth and captivating sentence in English.
Of course, in this review, we could append all the usual adornments to this novel: harrowing, enthralling, daring, bold, complex; it is all of those things. But Dillman’s recreation of Herrera’s Signs in English is deserving of its own neologistic praise. It’s a work that’s not easy to pin down, yet it also is somehow intuitively graspable. In itself, Signs is jarchando from the confines of standardized language and the structures and limitations of its borders. No matter where we end up, we aren’t the same as when we versed.
Read the original review here.
*****
Rebecca Hanssens-Reed is a writer and translator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Square Review, M-Dash, The Saint Ann’s Review, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her translation of Margarita Mateo Palmer’s novel, Desde los blancos manicomios, is forthcoming from Cubanabooks Press. She is currently an MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.
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