I had wished to interview Robin Myers for a while now, particularly after reading her bilingual book Tener/Having and finding out that she had translated into English some of my favorite contemporary writers, including Isabel Zapata, Andrés Neuman, and Ave Barrera. My interest in meeting her only grew stronger when I discovered that she lived in Mexico City, where I grew up. Though we live in quite distant parts of the city, I feel like sharing the experience of living in this chaotic yet exceptionally effervescent place immediately made us neighbors, peers, and even accomplices.
The interview took place in a bright and slightly too warm day in Coyoacán. We sat down at a lovely café that is also home to the most important feminist independent bookstore in Mexico. The original interview is almost three times longer than what I present here. But even though this is an abridged version, readers can get a full sense of Myers’s thoughtfulness, creativity, and generosity. I hope they enjoy listening to her as much as I did.
Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): What were your earliest experiences with translation?
Robin Myers (RM): I loved reading as a child, and as a teenager I became especially interested in poetry. In retrospect, I realize I did have experiences of reading poetry in translation, but I didn’t really think about what that meant. As a high school student, somebody had given me a book by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who I loved, and there were a few poems that made a strong impression on me, but I don’t remember actually stopping to think about who had made that happen in English.
I would say that my path into translation happened in two, for a long time parallel, ways that didn’t actually touch. One was a love of poetry—both reading and writing it—and the other was an interest in Spanish, specifically because I was really curious about Mexico. I have some family history in Mexico, and I wanted to spend time here, and I understood as a kid that that meant I had to learn Spanish as well as I could. So I studied it in school and began reading in Spanish to the extent that we were given literature to read in class. Once I had learned enough Spanish to be able both to read and to speak more comfortably, I had the experience, living in Oaxaca, of coming across a poem in English that I loved and wanting to be able to share it with a Spanish-speaking friend. So my first experience as a translator was translating a poem into Spanish, which I’ve never done ever again.
AM: I read about this poem in one article, and from what I understood you haven’t published it, right? And you are not planning on doing so.
RM: Nope. Somebody else can do a much better job.
AM: But that’s a good question that I often find myself asking. What do you think about translating to a language that isn’t your mother tongue? Because I feel like sometimes people who study or engage with translation fetishize the mother language. Do you know what I mean?
RM: Yes, absolutely. To be honest, I think that’s something I did for a long time. I had this sense of the first language as the “dominant” language, and it’s been through talking with and reading other translators that I’ve come to realize what a problematic way of thinking that is—about language and about the multiplicity of languages in our lives and how multilingual so many people are, and how many different kinds of intimacy there are with different languages. I think it’s been a continual process of moving away from that mindset. In my case, I don’t personally feel very comfortable translating into my second language, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think other people can and should. Or that it isn’t crucial that they do. You know?
AM: Right, I’m thinking of, for example, the work of Mónica de la Torre. She translates into English, which is technically her second language.
RM: Yes, or I think about a translator I really admire, Julia Sanches, who grew up speaking Spanish, Portuguese, and English. She has this beautiful essay about her first languages—three of them!—as eggs with multiple yolks in them.
AM: Oh, that’s an interesting way of putting it, because when you think of that metaphor, I think of an anomaly, right? If an egg has multiple yolks it’s, like, not normal, but at the same time, it simply happened, no?
RM: It simply happened, and maybe they grow.
AM: Right, right, I like that way of seeing it. So, zooming into your own approach to translation a bit more, my next question is how do you choose what to translate? How do you think of an author and say “I want to translate them”?
RM: It happens in different ways for me. It’s often just reading someone’s work and feeling this sense of “how do they do that?” This sense of wonder or surprise that, for me, usually happens on the level of language rather than plot or theme. I feel captivated by how they used language to make something happen and want as a translator to be inside that process, figure it out, and get to participate in it. That can happen to me with many different styles of writing. And living in Mexico City, a number of the writers that I started translating were people I already knew, and there was this feeling of being youngish writers together, getting our start at the same time. There was this sense of companionship, of solidarity, of asking them permission to translate something, and also this experience of “let’s try to figure out this other process together.”
AM: Right.
RM: And that has also started to change over time, but it’s still part of the approach that I’ve really enjoyed and learned from.
AM: How do you think it has changed? What are the differences between the translations you did then and those you do now?
RM: More recently, I’ve started to translate writers who have already been translated by other people, and then I work occasionally on commission. Those projects aren’t necessarily books I have found my way into on my own, but something an editor already has in their sights. And even if those collaborations don’t start with the initial response of “yeah, I feel this affinity with this piece of work,” that can be kind of a thrilling experience in its own way—trying to delve into someone’s work when there isn’t the immediacy of that first attachment. I really enjoy that too.
AM: Yes, one might think that not knowing the author beforehand makes the process more detached, but at the same time, not being fully acquainted with someone’s work might give you a more objective perspective, to the extent that we can talk about objectivity.
RM: Yes, I see them as similar processes in different directions. Sometimes if I’m feeling a strong pull toward a piece of work, then I have to learn to detach a bit more while translating, and sometimes if I start from a place of more detachment, then I find myself drawing closer to the text over time.
AM: And speaking about your relationship with texts, I would like to ask you more about your translation process. What happens when you sit down and start translating something?
RM: I tend to be very loose, or a weird combination of loose and mechanical, about my first drafts. I tend to work on a number of different projects at the same time, so I usually have a page count for myself. I tell myself, “I can do this number of pages of pages per day of this project and then this number of that project,” and that’s exactly, most of the time, what I end up doing. So I try to be very permissive with myself in that first draft, just letting myself respond to the text, not being very finicky about much, just making sure I get something on the page. That’s how, I feel, the experience of an author’s register starts to come through to me, getting a sense of how they use a sentence or how their dialogue works, these gestures of an author’s style. Once I have a first draft, I get extremely obsessive and begin zooming in more and more with each subsequent draft. So it becomes more slow-going in the revisions, and there are many of them. With each stage, revision gets more specific.
AM: And more technical, I would imagine, as well.
RM: Absolutely, and once I’m a few drafts in, I’ll read the whole thing out loud to myself. There’s also when I find things that stick out to my ear that haven’t to my eye.
AM: Have you found similarities in the sounds between Spanish and English or, maybe, irreconcilable differences?
RM: Spanish is a more multisyllabic language and English has a lot of shorter, curter words. So there’s a textural difference there. Spanish also has more rhyming words, which demands a different kind of attention to sound-correspondences, whether you want them or not. It makes me think of something the translator Sophie Hughes said about translating Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, about how she had to find lots of Englishes to translate it. And I think a multiplicity of sounds makes for a multiplicity of languages as well, which means I’m always trying to think about what sounds harsh, or sweet, or fluid, or abrupt—about the consequences of sound.
AM: And also about cultural perception around sound, right? I remember I took a class where we read the Aeneid and one of the critiques that the professor made was that the translation was too singsongy. And that was because the writer decided to use, I think, iambic pentameter, and the professor didn’t like it. So, there’s this perception of something being too much of this or too much of that, too singsongy, too assonant.
RM: Yes, the attitudes about alliteration also. Some people cannot stand alliteration.
AM: Yeah! I love alliteration!
RM: Me too!
AM: I love puns as well, and there’s this generalized rejection of puns.
RM: I know! Yeah, no, I’m on your side about both of those things.
AM: How do you deal with this possible antipathy towards unpopular forms of using language? What do you consider in order to say, “Well, even though some might not like an alliteration here or a rhyme there, I still want to include them in my translation”?
RM: Certainly, in the first draft I’m not thinking much about audience at all.
AM: For sure.
RM: And I think all of these issues involve an interplay between intuition and personal style as a translator—plus a certain amount of acceptance that someone can always dislike a decision you’ve made instead of another one you didn’t make. Like you said, someone can write off a translation just because they don’t like iambic pentameter. That’s an example that feels close to my heart. I translate a lot of poetry in meter without, you know, announcing it, like stealth meter. I can imagine some people thinking that’s kind of bizarre! But I think there are choices we make as translators that we just have to accept as the choices we made.
Nonetheless, I do take cultural audience and contextual audience very seriously, and they’re aspects I think about with increasing specificity as I edit. Just to give a small example, in translating both poetry and prose, I feel inclined to not italicize words in Spanish and to keep more and more words in Spanish as part of the translation. I feel strongly about keeping a word in the source language when it’s an intentionally, significantly local reference, whether we’re talking about names of food, names of plants, nicknames, terms of endearment. I feel more and more interested in letting the specificity of those terms shine forth with the understanding that not all English-language readers are going to pick up on references. Some will look them up, some won’t. There are going be blind spots for the reader and that’s okay. At the end of the day, literature in translation necessarily becomes part of now at least two cultures, maybe more. It’s still part of the culture it came from. It’s part of the culture that’s going to read it. And within both of those cultures there are countless others. I want to let multilingualism and multiplicity in general be part of the process.
AM: I love what you say about leaving some words untranslated because this is a hot debate among people who study and practice translation.
RM: Yes.
AM: There’s always the controversy whether you should always “domesticate” the text and bring it completely to the target language. But I prefer your approach of leaving words untranslated. Maybe some words can be translated but you would lose a lot by translating them. Now, coming back to this question about process, do you usually let writers participate in the translation of their work?
RM: In general, I would say yes, to different degrees. There are writers with whom the translation becomes very collaborative. Usually not with a first draft, but after a few drafts, I’ll always send the translation to them. Some writers do have specific requests, or comments, or concerns, and those become part of what I ultimately do with the final version.
AM: How do writers usually react to seeing their work translated?
RM: Almost everyone I’ve worked with has been incredibly gracious, supportive, and excited to have it be a collaborative process. I’ve also had the experience of translating writers who are translators themselves, which at first was daunting to me. I thought that maybe a writer who was also a translator would want to be more aggressively involved or more opinionated about certain things, and what would happen if we had strong disagreements? I’ve actually found the opposite, though. I think translators are so aware of the personal artistry involved in translation, and of all the personal commitments and decisions, that I’ve found most translators to be very engaged but not interested in micromanaging. I’ve also translated writers who don’t necessarily want to be that involved—maybe they appreciate having a chance to see the text, but they keep their distance, either because they don’t feel the need to participate more directly or because they don’t have enough contact with English-language writing to venture their own suggestions. I absolutely respect that position as well. Still, it’s always important to me as a gesture to share the text with them before it becomes an object.
AM: Before it goes out into the public, right. Speaking of sharing texts, how do you pitch a translation and what has been the contemporary reaction to translated literature in the United States or at least in the presses that you’ve published with?
RM: The pitching process is so unpredictable, and I’ve had pretty limited success in pitching projects completely cold. But what I usually do is write a cover letter that describes the text briefly and what I find remarkable about it, why it matters to me, what got me hooked on it—you know?—a plot and stylistic overview plus something quite personal. I also submit a sample of about twenty to twenty-five pages. Some publishers request a reader report, either from the translator or from somebody else. That’s a much more in-depth analysis of the book, the plot, the style, and the context of a work in translation. Sometimes an editor will ask for a longer sample later. There are lots of ways it can go. I’ve found it to be a very slow process, I have to say.
AM: Like most things in the literary world.
RM: Exactly.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator of both poetry and prose. Her latest translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), and The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing). She is currently working on a book of essays about translating poetry.
Alan Mendoza Sosa holds a BA degree in Comparative Literature in English and Spanish from Brown University, and an MPhil in Latin American Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature from The University of Cambridge. He is an incoming student at Yale University’s PhD in Spanish and Portuguese. He is interested in eighteenth century Hispanic Culture, the Latin American Avant-Gardes, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies, and Contemporary Hispanic Literature.
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