In Ten Planets, our February Book Club selection, the acclaimed Yuri Herrera made his short fiction debut in the Anglophone, featuring a myriad of worlds and inventions as seen through the author’s signature wit, playfulness, and fierce intelligence. Through the inspired language of his longtime translator, Lisa Dillman, Herrera elucidates the workings of humanity through a series of sci-fi miniatures, engaging with the philosophical queries of contemporary existence as only the writer can—through imagination. In this following interview, Georgina Fooks speaks with Dillman about the narrative-political, how she navigated Herrera’s neologisms and idiosyncratic style, and how such writing continues to push limits.
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Georgina Fooks (GF): Could you tell us about your relationship with the Spanish language and what brought you to translating it?
Lisa Dillman (LD): I’m sort of the poster child for study abroad programs. I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego when I went to Barcelona for a year and fell in love with Spanish, and also with Catalan—with the creativity and the ludic qualities I found in these languages. I don’t want to essentialize and say that Spanish is a particularly ludic language, but I found the possibilities for play really enticing.
Honestly, I think my entrance into translation was just the result of returning from studying abroad and having very stereotypical experiences of talking to friends who had not gone—telling a joke or something, and them not finding it funny. And that was frustrating: why is this funny in Spanish and you don’t think it’s funny in English? That kind of challenge was something I found infuriating to begin with, and then fruitful afterwards to try to deal with.
I then ended up going to the UK to study translation at Middlesex, under Peter Bush. I had been in a Spanish literature doctoral program, but the US is really bad with translation programs and courses. There are more now, but none that I knew of at the time. In the UK and most other countries, translation is a proper field which you can study—so that’s what I did. I moved to the UK, I did my masters there, then spent subsequent years, you know, translating a short story, sending it to a journal by snail mail, waiting for five or six months to get a rejection letter, sending it out again, and eventually, finally I got somewhere.
GF: When did you first encounter Herrera’s work? And what motivated you to translate him? As you’ve translated all of his novels into English so far.
LD: I have. And I’m actually working right now on the one that came after Ten Planets. I had a friend who was asked to translate an excerpt for Symposia Way, which is the literary magazine of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. The City of Asylum has writers in residence who are in exile from their home countries, and they were doing a series in which they asked the writers and residents to select one writer they thought deserved attention. Horacio Castellanos Moya selected Herrera.
At the time, it was just a short excerpt of Kingdom Cons, which they published in their magazine, and I was thrilled to do it because it was immediately apparent that Yuri’s style is just so rich and nuanced and does so many different things at the same time. It struck me as incredibly poignant and beautiful, and very different from anything I had read.
That was probably over ten years ago now, and to get from there to an actual book took a number of years. People were saying that this work was untranslatable, that it didn’t make sense—and it certainly was not easily classifiable. It was only when And Other Stories finally decided to take a chance on him, and they then proved that there is a readership out there with appetites for complex, difficult-to-categorizable fiction, which is really satisfying.
I always feel like it’s a sort of chicken and egg situation. Now, there are many small Indie presses doing fantastic work with literature in translation from all over the world, and also from Latin America in particular. But fifteen or twenty years ago, there were not as many presses by a long shot. Do people not read in translation because translations are not being published, or is it translation not published because people won’t read it? I think the past five or so years have proven that people want to read in translation.
GF: It can be a somewhat vicious self-perpetrating cycle, this question of what is publishable, and how that influences what is read. As you mentioned with Yuri’s work, what I really enjoyed from Ten Planets is that you might think that it’s science fiction, but the book is very difficult to categorize. In the translator’s note, you wrote: “His writing is nothing if not experimental, and everything he writes is something of a departure.” For you as his translator, how did you feel approaching something that even nominally looks like science fiction?
LD: Well, I will say that, very naively, I first thought: “Oh, my gosh, science fiction. This is going to be so much easier to translate than Yuri’s other work.” That did not turn out, of course, to be the case. But I think science fiction or speculative fiction is the starting point. Yuri sets himself a new challenge with every book he writes, selecting lexical as well as conceptual and stylistic modes in which to play, and in which to constantly push boundaries. And it is that boundary-pushing which distinguishes Ten Planets from straight up sci-fi or speculative fiction. I found it really enjoyable to translate, and there was something satisfying about working on very, very short stories. You can feel that you’re accomplishing something—“Yes, I did a whole story today.”
But in linguistic terms, Yuri does have some constants, and pushing the limits of language is one of them. His style proved to me that, in fact, it was not going to be easier to translate this book than his previous books.
GF: What I found very enjoyable was that Ten Planets is a very literary text still, and, as you say, the lexicon is playful and very fun. There’s a lot of thematic attention to language as well: the question of how language shapes the way we see the world or don’t see the world. Do you think that kind of metatextual concern made Ten Planets more difficult to translate?
LD: That’s a good question. The one consistent challenge with Yuri’s writing—and in fact, I think with all translation—is: what he does in order to push boundaries in Spanish doesn’t exist in English. One thing that I have always found in every text Yuri writes is a really deeply infused sense of affection and respect for both language and his characters, as well as the situations that they come from, and that can be brought across syntactically or morphemically—for example, with a very creative usage of suffixes.
I’ll give one very silly example: Yuri always writes the word for bones—“huesos”—as “güesos”. That is not something I’ve ever seen elsewhere, but it connotes this sort of affection, right? It’s often not prudent to look for a sort of one-to-one equivalent. I briefly toyed with the idea of something like “bonez”, but that would have a very different effect in the English. I don’t think that would feel particularly natural. It would, to me at least, feel forced, and it doesn’t necessarily feel affectionate.
And so, to meander my way back to your question, one of the great difficulties there, and one of the great joys and challenges, is to try to be inventive myself, and come up with what I deem as analogous strategies.
GF: There are lots of funny moments in the text that partly come from playing with language. For example, in the translator’s note, you talked about the “miniminder”. I was wondering if you would talk us through the brainstorming approach for your solutions to such wordplay. What do you do when you have a particularly difficult translation problem to work with?
LD: Well, with the “miniminder”, this is in one of the two “Objects” stories. (In the collection, there are two stories with identical titles.) In this story, a woman is panicking because her partner and daughter are gone, she doesn’t know where they are, and she is inhabiting a world of objects. There are stupid objects, and there are smart objects, and we’re not necessarily sure what all of these objects are. But there is certainly an element of something ominous with these objects, that are perhaps surveilling her. Clearly, surveillance has lots of resonance in today’s society.
The woman pulls out an object which in Spanish is called a Tenmeaquí, which would be ten me aquí—literally “keep me here”—and it’s all one word. Both Yuri and the Internet verified for me that this is essentially a made-up term that gets used in Mexico when parents want to fool their children into behaving. A mother might say to a child, “Go next door to the neighbors and ask for a little bit of Tenmeaquí.” The idea is essentially “get out of my hair for a little while“, right?
I spent a very long time being more literal, trying to maintain this idea of “here” or “there”. I toyed for a little while with “keep me there” rather than “keep me here”. In the end, I thought more about the object itself, which is very apparently quite similar to a cell phone. The woman tracks her partner and her daughter on the phone and can see dots of where they might be moving. I spoke to Yuri about it, and to lots of people I know also, and came up with this idea that essentially, we are relegating brain space and responsibility and child care and all sorts of things to these smart objects. So that began to have a bit more resonance for me, with the idea and the story of there being smart objects and stupid objects. So a smart object, a smartphone, is allowing us to track. That was how I came around to the idea of minding.
I was still debating back and forth until the very last minute between “minimind” and “miniminder”. I like them both. With the “minimind”, it was the idea that I have relegated my brain to this object, so this has become my mind. But in the end, I preferred the idea of the minder being used in a more British sense. We don’t use minding that way in the US, to mean “taking care of”. But I was thinking, childminder, babysitter, right? That was the long road to miniminder.
I think I only was able to really feel satisfied when I let go of the idea of the English attempting to do the same thing in the same way, and instead thought: “Okay, it’s not doing the same thing in the same way. It’s doing an analogous thing in an analogous way.” Karen Emmerich has a book called Translation: The Making of Originals, and I really like her use of the word “iterations”. She talks of translation as iteration.
GF: Ten Planets feels like very a political book—commenting on contemporary society, but also on bigger, broader political questions. How did you feel about translating the politics of the book? Did it feel political to you?
LD: It definitely felt political to me, sometimes in quite concrete ways. It was important to me to make sure that I was at least consciously attempting to not impose my own political readings on the text. In “Zorg, Author of the Quixote”, there’s a point at which Zorg and his love interest Pirg are talking about dead people hanging in the trees. They’re talking about harvest time, and the image that I just kept thinking of was [Billie Holiday’s] “Strange Fruit”. I just kept thinking that there was something—not overtly but obliquely—racial going on. When I translate, I send Yuri lists and lists of queries that come up; when I asked about this passage, he essentially said, “No, I wasn’t thinking of that at all.” But I thought of it.
It’s inevitable that all translation is interpretation, and every reading is an active interpretation. I think it’s fallacious to attempt to claim that you are just channeling the original and your own biases are not in effect, but it is important to me to attempt the utmost awareness of how my position might be affecting my reading of something. When you say that this book is, in some ways, less overtly political, I assume you’re maybe thinking of Signs Preceding the End of the World, where there is quite clearly a border crossing experience and a young, Latino migrant body in the United States. We don’t have anything as explicit as that in Ten Planets. Yet, at the same time, that’s what science fiction does. It finds its own metaphors and its own language in which to speak about issues in other worlds that reflect our own.
GF: I’m glad you mentioned “Zorg”, because as someone who reads in Spanish as well as in English, it was very obvious that this was an homage to Borges. When these kinds of cultural references come up, how do you go about bringing them into English? Do you hope that your reader might recognize them as a kind of hidden treat, or do you give more infrastructure to explain those cultural references?
LD: This same sort of issue occurs in all translation: the familiarity of the source text readership with cultural references, versus how much knowledge the translated-language readership have. To what degree might they miss things? There are really explicit references, as you say, to Borges, Cortázar’s “House Taken Over”, those sorts of things. Luckily, the readership for a writer like Yuri is already quite cosmopolitan in a literary sense, and so I don’t necessarily feel any need to reinforce certain connections. At the same time, I think it would be very easy. Hypothetically, if someone didn’t know those works, to what degree does that constrain or curtail connections that they could make? I would like to say not very much. I do think each reader’s position manifests their own connections, and that’s something Yuri tends to believe as well. He really believes in his gut. I’ve always had the sense that he never wants his readers to feel like they missed something or didn’t get something.
Having just said all that, his sixth book, which I’m currently working on, has a number of difficulties along those lines. It’s historical fiction—in case there was some other brand-new genre that he had not yet toyed with—about Benito Juárez and the year he spent in New Orleans. There is some nuanced Mexican history there that requires me to do a lot of research in order to really understand all of the references and how things play out. I do think that even very cosmopolitan readers will likely not have that sort of cultural knowledge. So that’ll be one of the challenges for that book, but for Ten Planets I didn’t really feel distraught over the idea of there being any possible references that could be missed.
GF: Yuri’s stories feel very welcoming and warm and playful, but at the same time his work feels like a great addition to the canon of world literature. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what might make Herrera’s work world literature, why it appeals to a wide variety of audiences.
LD: I will say that I have not read much theory about “world literature” and the question of “does world literature exist”. But if I speak to this in terms of worldwide appeal, Yuri’s writing is representative in lots of symbolic ways. The things that happen or characters that exist in his works—we could easily read them as stand-ins for some sort of issue, or some sort of event, or some sort of injustice. And yet at the same, the interpersonal is always there. I really like that. You use the word “welcoming”, and that’s a great word to use for his writing. I’m going to steal it and start calling it that. And I think that’s what he and his readers would find to be true: his writing is for everyone on an individual level, regardless of education, regardless of language, regardless of national histories. Readers can all find resonance with the very human experiences of things like death, ageing, his deeply held respect for things like migrant experiences. His appeal is, on some levels, universal.
Lisa Dillman has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over Madrid, Such Small Hands, and The Right Intention by Andrés Barba, as well as Yuri Herrera’s three novels. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University of Atlanta, Georgia.
Georgina Fooks is a writer and translator based in England. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote, and her writing and translations have been published in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, and Viceversa Magazine. She is currently completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at Oxford, specialising in Argentine poetry.
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