Annie McDermott is a London-based literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English, bringing to readers the works of acclaimed Spanish-language authors like Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, and Selva Almada. She now adds into her exceptional oeuvre Brenda Lozano’s Loop, a fragmented novel that takes the form of its protagonist’s personal notebook, kept while her boyfriend Jonás is away in Spain. A wonderfully wandering text that traces the myriad pathways of the mind, Loop is the English debut of one of Spanish-language literature’s rising stars and an immersive, innovative introduction to Lozano—who is already a widely influential writer in her native Mexico. I recently had the pleasure to correspond with McDermott over email, and quickly took to her; she is as excellent an epistler as she is a translator, her prose suffused with wit and poise. During our exchange, McDermott graciously shared with me her approach to dialectical difference, her fragmented method of translation, and her love of phrasal verbs.
Sophia Stewart (SS): You translate fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. How did you come to pursue both of these languages? What’s your literary-translation origin story? Do you find you enter a different “zone” depending on which language you’re translating?
Annie McDermott (AM): I learnt Spanish by mistake and Portuguese on purpose—or maybe “by chance” is more accurate than “by mistake.” I moved to Mexico after finishing university, on a bit of a whim, and ended up staying for a year, teaching English and learning Spanish and living the sort of bilingual life that I’d always found both completely fascinating and completely distant from my monolingual upbringing in the south of England. I realised I loved spending time in the space between languages, and that was what led me to think about translation. I then moved to Brazil, to São Paulo, with the specific aim of learning Portuguese so I could translate Brazilian literature as well.
As for the zones: I think mostly the zone depends on the text rather than the language, but the zone does change from language to language as well. I learnt both Spanish and Portuguese as an adult, and when you learn languages as an adult you often vividly remember the circumstances in which you first encountered particular words, meaning that your existence within that language is strewn with all these different memories of people, places and situations. So in a sense, switching between languages means switching between different sets of memories.
SS: Allow me to geek out for a second, because I studied Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in undergrad. With so many regional differences in Spanish, how do you approach issues of dialect in your work? Translating, for instance, a Mexican author and an Argentine author would be totally different, from the conjugations to the slang. Did you learn a specific dialect of Spanish first, and then expand out to others from there? Do you feel most comfortable with a particular dialect?
AM: What a great thing to study! I’m jealous. Yes, there are so many regional varieties, and it’s one of the things that makes Spanish such a fascinating language. One of my favourite things is looking something up on the WordReference forum and finding an extensive thread full of people weighing in from different countries, and even different regions of different countries, each with a completely different idea of what the word means.
I learnt Spanish living in Mexico, and it’s definitely Mexican slang, rhythms, and speech patterns that I feel most comfortable with. When it comes to translating other varieties of Spanish, I think the important thing is remembering how little you know—it’s so easy to be tripped up. This is another reason why I’m in awe of people who translated before the internet; nowadays, you can watch films and videos, and read news articles, social media posts, etc. etc., from whichever region you happen to be working on, and get a feel for it that way as well.
SS: What was your relationship and collaboration with Brenda Lozano like while you were translating Loop? (She seems extremely cool—I for one am obsessed with this photo of her where she’s flanked by icons Julieta Venegas and Valeria Luiselli.)
AM: You’re quite correct—she is indeed extremely cool. We emailed back and forth a bit as I was working on the translation, and she generously and very patiently answered all my questions. There’s a lot of wordplay in the novel, and sometimes to retain it I had to depart a bit from the original text, and I ran those things by her as well. For example, there’s a point in the Spanish that reads: “Y mira esto: ‘El éxito reproductivo está relacionado con la longitud de la cola del macho.’ A mí me gusta cuando Jonás toca el piano de cola en casa de su familia.” (“And look at this: ‘Reproductive success is related to the length of the male bird’s tail.’ I like it when Jonás plays the grand piano [literally, ‘the tail piano’ (!)] in his family home.”) In English, since we couldn’t have both, I thought it was more important to keep the bird’s tail than the grand piano, so with Brenda’s permission I made the second part: “And I’m telling a long tail for you now, Jonás.” In those emails we also discussed our mutual love of reggaeton, though I’m not sure how we got onto that.
SS: Loop was published in the original Spanish as Cuaderno ideal, or Ideal Notebook. How much influence did you have over the selection of its new English-language title, and can you talk a bit about the significance of this new title?
AM: Ideal is a Mexican notebook brand, which means that the title in Spanish has that double meaning. We weren’t convinced that Ideal Notebook would work as a title in English—retaining the loftier sense of a perfect, platonic notebook without the reference to an everyday brand seemed to change the tone of it quite a lot. It was Carolina Orloff, one of the Charco Press directors, who came up with the title Loop, and right away it seemed perfect; it takes in the loops of the narrator’s handwriting in her notebook, the songs she listens to on repeat, the weaving of Penelope at her loom, Jonás’ round trip, and the circular structure of the book itself—all in one pleasingly monosyllabic word.
SS: What was your translating process like for Loop, compared to the other novels you’ve translated? Did its structure—written in little fragments—affect your approach at all?
AM: I don’t think it did, but then I think that’s because my translation process is quite fragmentary anyway. As well as going through the text a lot of times from start to finish, I like to jump around and work on different passages at random; it’s a way of coming at them fresh and seeing what stands out. More generally, I think the main thing that felt different about translating Loop is the fact that it was the first—and sadly still the only—Mexican novel I’ve worked on. Mexico is where I learnt Spanish, and where I lived for a while, and it felt like such a luxury for so many references to feel familiar, to be able to visualise the streets the narrator walks down in Mexico City, or the tongs the dwarf uses to select his cakes in the bakery.
SS: The novel is composed as the narrator’s personal notebook, in which she documents her activities, meditates on life, and even communicates with the dead. Do you keep a notebook? If so, would you recommend other literary translators keep one?
AM: I’ve kept different kinds of notebooks at different points in my life, including for the purpose of communicating with the dead, but when it comes to translation, the main thing I use notebooks for is writing down words I come across or turns of phrase I overhear which seem like something a character in a book I’m working on might say. And although it feels quite grand to be making recommendations, I would recommend doing that—translations deserve to include the full spectrum of all the strange and amazing things people say, so when translating it’s handy to have a store of them at your disposal.
SS: There’s this wonderful section where the narrator muses about verbs, and specifically Spanish verbs. I’ll just excerpt it here because it’s so great:
What is the problem with this place? There’s no one verb that can sum it up. There are so many. Several of those verbs are all over the press every day. Even though Spanish syntax shouldn’t let them, they insist, the verbs, in jostling to the front of the headlines. They even contort, the verbs, as if in a circus, on a tightrope, to be the most important words in the newspaper headlines. Isn’t the role of verbs interesting? The verbs that denote action, what’s happening here and now. They’re like the little hands on a clock, they tell you the exact time in sentences. Whereas waiting, like the clock in the dentist’s surgery, could have the minute hand stopped or the second hand skipping. Waiting renders verbs useless. Sentences without verbs, like cutting a puppet’s strings. Nothing moves.
As a translator, do you feel similarly about verbs, and specifically Spanish verbs? Got any verb-related hot takes?
AM: My verb-related hot take is that people should demand verb-related hot takes of each other far more often. I agree that the passage you quote is really wonderful, especially the idea of Spanish verbs as circus contortionists—they definitely feel a lot like that when you’re translating them into English and suddenly encounter all kinds of restrictions. Verbs can contain more information in Spanish; “hablas,” for example, tells you who’s speaking, whereas “speak” in English could be referring to anyone. In English, verbs always need to be accompanied by subjects, which can lead to a lot of repetition or extra words that aren’t there in the Spanish. In the passage you quote, the narrator talks about “[s]entences without verbs, like cutting a puppet’s strings,” which makes me think how in Spanish it’s also much easier to have a sentence that’s made up only of verbs, and how freeing that can be—the opposite of a stringless puppet.
However, it’s not all bad news for English; my other verb-related hot take is that phrasal verbs are kind of amazing. It’s wild that, say, “take out,” “take on,” “take in,” “take up,” “take down,” and “take over” all mean completely different things, and you can have a lot of fun with that when translating.
SS: Loop feels very much like a novel about writing and therefore for writers, and there are lots of gems in it for fans of Spanish-language literature. The narrator gives shout-outs to some of my favorite Spanish-language writers—Borges, Juan Rulfo, Josefina Vicens, my queen Sor Juana. Which Spanish-language writers are your favorites, or have influenced you most personally?
AM: Juan Rulfo is the author of what was I think the first sentence in Spanish I ever fell in love with, from Pedro Páramo: “Miraba caer las gotas iluminadas por los relámpagos, y cada que respiraba, suspiraba, y cada vez que pensaba, pensaba en ti, Susana.” (Not-very-poetic translation: “I watched the falling raindrops lit up by the lightning, and every time I breathed, I sighed, and every time I thought, I thought about you, Susana.”) I’ve had two editions of Pedro Páramo in my time, because one got lost, and they both ended up falling open at that page.
SS: And finally, because the narrator talks at length about the Proust Questionnaire, I can’t help but ask a couple questions from it. Who are your favorite writers?
AM: Having favourites is so hard! I always forget someone. But the two I never forget are Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf.
SS: And which words or phrases do you most overuse?
AM: I seem to say things are “enraging” quite a lot at the moment, but that’s probably just life under a Conservative government.
Annie McDermott’s translations from the Spanish and Portuguese include Dead Girls and Brickmakers by Selva Almada, Empty Words and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar). She has edited books for And Other Stories and Charco Press, and writes reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.
Sophia Stewart’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.