Our first-ever live Q&A could have hardly gone better: award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney chatted with Blog Editor Josefina Massot for a solid hour, covering everything from voice, rhythm, and expletives in our exquisite October selection to her “unfixed migrant identity” and its effects on her craft. Read on for a taste of this riveting conversation, which Book Club members can request in full—hearty laughs, pensive pauses, and all!
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Josefina Massot (JM): Ramifications is largely character-driven, and there are so many elements to the protagonist’s psyche and voice. I was wondering about your experience inhabiting that complexity: were there aspects of it that particularly resonated with you, or that you found especially challenging to tap into?
Christina MacSweeney (CM): One of the things that played into my experience is that I read the first fifty pages of the novel when they were still in the process of inception (Daniel will often send me work at early stages). As I read more—as he progressed and made subsequent changes—the character grew with me, with the reading. And he’s very complex, but what most came through to me was this sense of paralyzed masculinity, a sense of frustration that very much stayed with me. He’s somebody I want to root for in some way, for him to break through all the issues that are holding him back.
I often talk about translation as getting into a character’s shoes and walking around in them, feeling that I can wear them. Daniel’s writing is so beautiful and precise that it helps you get into it. When you’re translating, it’s usually months and months, and the characters’ voices are there with you all along: you wake up with them in the morning, you go to sleep with them at night, they talk to you while you’re washing the dishes. So I think it’s hard to judge characters as a translator; you can’t feel judgmental about them, because you’re living with them. They’re part of your life.
JM: You’ve lived with several of Daniel’s characters, too, since you’ve also translated his first novel, Among Strange Victims. There seem to be some commonalities between both books: the protagonist in Ramifications is in many ways passive, and at the same time, he’s trying to piece together clues about his mother’s disappearance; in Among Strange Victims, Rodrigo could be described as indolent, and Marcelo tries to retrace someone’s footsteps (not his mother’s this time, but an enigmatic boxer-poet’s). Could you point to other continuities? And might there be, in some sense, a “signature” Saldaña París book? I realize two novels are hardly enough to make such generalizations, and they’re also very different in tone, but perhaps you could point to certain tendencies.
CM: If we think about the two books, but also Daniel’s poetry and the non-fiction pieces that he writes, he is exploring masculinity. But in fact, in Among Strange Victims, the main character is Beatriz, the woman who is in Mexico with the boxer-poet at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rodrigo’s mother is also a very strong figure in his life. In that respect, the books are very different, because Among Strange Victims has a much clearer female presence. In Ramifications, you still have the mother figure (the absence of the mother) and the narrator’s sister, who is also an influence in his life. But they’re ultimately quite different. I don’t think Daniel is ever going to be the kind of writer of whom you can say, “This is a Saldaña París book,” because his writing is constantly changing—his point of focus changes, the angles from which he views things change.
JM: That’s the best kind of author, one that keeps evolving—branching out or “ramifying,” if I may! On that note, I wanted to move on to the title of the book. The original is El nervio principal, which refers to the midrib of a plant’s leaf, from which the veins branch out or ramify. You decided to go not with Midrib (thank god!) but with Ramifications, which still alludes to that botanical element but adds on a layer of meaning: that of the consequences of Teresa’s disappearance. It’s a brilliant example of how creative translators can get. How did you come about finding that title, and did you make other changes of this kind?
CM: Like you, I found the thought of calling the book Midrib disheartening: nobody’s ever going to buy such a book, I thought, nobody’s ever going to read it. I was also determined not to have anything that could even vaguely be connected to drugs in the title of a book coming from Mexico, so I put aside any options involving veins. I had to start thinking laterally, basically, and as soon as I did that, one of the first ideas that came to me was that of the veins ramifying out from the center. I sent Daniel a list of options to see if there were any that he liked, and luckily he always manages to pick the one I like as well—even if I hide it within the list! We often think along the same lines. In terms of other changes, there were just a few: the Spanish doesn’t mention ramifying at any point, so there were maybe three or four places where I did actually try to put that in. Like “midrib” and “petiole,” “ramify” seemed to be the kind of word the narrator might have learned at school and liked to use, so it worked on that level as well.
JM: You say Daniel and you are often of one mind. Have you had experiences (you don’t have to name names!) where editors or writers were a little less open to your creative suggestions? There are those who tend towards so-called “fidelity” a little too much . . .
CM: I’ve never really felt that my creative impulses have been stifled. I’m sure many translators will tell you that sometimes editors feel they have to rewrite your text in terms of grammar, vocabulary, etc., and it can be frustrating if that happens. Maybe I’m lucky, because I’ve had editors who understand what I’m doing and see their job as trying to improve it. It’s lovely to get somebody with so much experience who’s on your side and working with you. I think people don’t talk enough about the skill of editors in publishing houses; their names are rarely mentioned, but they often do a wonderful job.
JM: That’s great to know! Going back to the novel, another element I was struck by—both in the original and in translation—is how seamlessly the narrator straddles high-brow and low-brow terms. I was wondering how you went about tackling that combination of erudite or lyrical words with, say, very specific Mexicanisms.
CM: A lot of the time, that shift takes place when the narrator goes back to his childhood. This ten-year-old child likes to feel that he’s somewhat scholarly, so he likes to boast about these nice, smart words, but he’s still a ten-year-old child. To me that shift didn’t seem strange, because children do that kind of thing: they can come up with the most amazing words, and then the next minute, they go back to childish language. In terms of the Mexicanisms, I’ve translated quite a lot of Mexican literature, so I’ve gotten mostly used to those. They do vary from one part of the country to the next, though: in northern Mexico, for example, the slang vocabulary is quite different to the chilango of Mexico City. One of the things that I find a little sad about translating into English is that we have such a limited range of expletives. There’s such inventiveness in Mexico on that front, and it sometimes creates a problem with editors if you try to bring in a different word. The very Mexican pinche, say, would work well as “bloody” in British English, but not in American English . . . of course, then editors might ask for “fucking” or “damn,” and I’ll already have used those a dozen times! It can be tricky.
JM: Along those lines, I particularly liked how you struck a balance between domestication and foreignization by retaining localisms but also, in certain instances, making things just a tad more accessible to anglophone readers. Sometimes, when I read books based in Latin America and then read their translations, I feel that they’ve either gone too far to cater to foreign audiences—and therefore read a little blandly—or that they’ve gone the other route and are somewhat alienating. Getting that balance just right is tough, and you’ve nailed it!
CM: I think that’s maybe also because I lived in Venezuela for a long time, and I’ve traveled quite a lot, certainly across Mexico and Central America. I’ve spent quite a lot of time there, so I now have a feel for whether the language can blur in some ways, and what might be acceptable or inaccessible to people. You have a wider idea of the country’s literary culture, of where an author is coming from in terms of the way that she or he is writing and the influences at play, so you can bring those elements through to a certain extent in the translation. But you can also demand that readers interact a little bit more with the book and have to work a few things out, yielding a more active kind of reading.
JM: I actually wanted to ask about your experience living in Venezuela. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that translation also refers to the displacement of geometric figures on a plane, whereby such figures are perfectly preserved; by contrast, geographic translation—our own shift in coordinates as we travel around—inevitably transforms us. You yourself have spoken of an “unfixed migrant identity,” given your Irish background and subsequent move to Latin America. I wanted to know what led you to make that shift, and how you think geographic translation has affected your linguistic translation.
CM: That’s a really interesting question! I grew up in England but in a very Irish environment, and I spent a lot of time in Ireland. Whereas most of my more English friends tended to go East once they started traveling, my eyes were always set in the opposite direction. I’d been very interested in Latin American culture for a long time, and I’d been reading translated books that I could get in England, because it wasn’t easy to get Spanish-language titles at the time. When I went to Caracas, I was able to really delve into the culture behind Latin American literature; I got to know many more authors, particularly female authors that I’d never heard of. I asked myself, “Why have I not heard of these women?” It opened my mind to be able to have such wonderful access to so many new voices, and to read them in Spanish for the first time. That shift has definitely affected my translation.
JM: Back to that, then, I’d like to touch upon the question of music. Daniel is a poet, and that definitely shines through in the original. How did you go about capturing that musicality yourself, especially considering the vast differences between Spanish and English on that front? Spanish-speakers love their em-dashes and parentheses and subordinate clauses and half-page sentences, while English is often a little more to the point . . . each language’s natural rhythm is so radically different as a result. Was the process of hearing and transposing the original mostly intuitive, or was there some kind of method to it?
CM: I think it was mostly intuitive. I seem to have an ear for the music in a text; it’s very important to me. I’ll unconsciously speak the text aloud to tap into its rhythm—how quickly a sentence is going, how long it is, what the pace of a paragraph should be, how the music can change from one sentence to the next. This is all part of my reading experience, and I’m trying to replicate it in my writing. I’ll consider, for example, the order of words in a sentence, which affects the flow from one sentence to another. Maybe somebody might look at one of my sentences and think, as my editors sometimes do, “Well, I’d put that bit at the beginning rather than the end.” But it has to be at the end, because that affects the rhythm and flow of the whole paragraph. So yes, it’s a kind of intuitive process, and something that for me is part of not just writing as a translator, but of writing in general.
JM: I’ve read that you also work with visual art, and I was wondering if your love of image, in addition to sound, plays heavily into your translations.
CM: Another author I work with, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, is also a visual artist, and one of the things we’ve talked about is that trying to separate word and image is misguided: they’re both forms of communication, and there’s a point where they can overlap very productively. For my master’s, I did an intersemiotic translation. I was working on a text by Elena Poniatowska on Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo, and I decided to make collages to go with it. There were a lot of references in the text that I thought might be difficult for readers, so I made these collages that included elements of the work of both artists but also my own. In some way, I was using them to try to explicate the text a little bit, but also to follow the rhythms within the text, which are very strong in Poniatowska’s writing.
JM: Like Saldaña París, Gerber Bicecci and Poniatowska are Mexican writers. In fact, many of the writers you’ve translated so far hail from Mexico, and a lot of them are also quite young or writing their first few books. Is there something about the Mexican literary scene and these relatively fresh new voices that particularly appeals to you?
CM: Yes, I think Mexico is going through an absolutely brilliant moment; there’s such incredible talent, and when I’m there, I get a sense that different forms of culture are interacting with each other much more actively than seems to happen in anglophone countries; there’s an awful lot more conversation between the different arts, and it feeds into collective creativity. People are very much exploring artistic boundaries. I’m not focused only on Mexican literature, though; I’m very interested in all of Latin America. There are always so many authors you’re trying to get published, but for some reason or another it’s not happening. The kind of writing we end up doing as translators often depends on what we can get done. Our interests are wider than might appear!
Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth; her translation of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel Among Strange Victims was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American Literature and published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms. In 2018 she was a participant in the first Hay Festival, Dallas. Her most recent fiction translations include works by Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Jazmina Barerra. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd) was adapted for the stage at The Gate Theatre, London in 2020.
Josefina Massot was born and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied philosophy at Stanford University and worked for Cabinet Magazine and Lapham’s Quarterly in New York City, where she later served as a foreign correspondent for the Argentine newspapers La Nueva and Perfil. She is currently a freelance writer, editor, and translator, as well as a blog editor for Asymptote.
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