As Charlie Ng writes in her essay, ‘Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech’, the poetic ‘Song of the Whale-road’ embodies the “primordial unity” of humans and nature in the timeless, ahistorical figure of the whale. Published in Asymptote‘s Spring 2023 issue, ‘Song of the Whale-road’ is a series of experimental excerpts from the novel Oceánica by Yolanda González, arranged and translated by Robin Munby. It navigates the ocean not only as a landscape but as a powerful “symbol of the collective unconscious”, juxtaposing the false narrative of human godhood we tell ourselves against the whales’ magnitude in our shared planetary experience of nature and time. In this interview, I spoke with Robin Munby about his role in shaping the gravity and pull of this text, as well as about his piece ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’, also published in Asymptote‘s latest issue, in which a serpentine glossary helps guide a critic’s review of translations.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Robin, you almost seem to have gone beyond the remit of a translator with ‘Song of a Whale-road’. Building on González’s approach to Oceánica, you’ve brought ‘Song of a Whale-road’ into your own experimental realm of language, structure and presentation by compiling the text yourself. What was the creative process behind the piece’s cohesive form?
Robin Munby (RM): The way the piece came about is quite straightforward. I’d read and enjoyed Oceánica and planned to do something with it down the line, but it was the call for the Asymptote animal-themed special feature that gave me the prod I needed. Because I was translating the piece with that goal in mind, it made sense to focus on the intercalated sections running through the novel told from the perspective of a pod of whales, as opposed to working on sections from the novel’s various other strands.
In the context of the novel, the sections which became ‘Song of the Whale-road’ function a little like the Greek chorus. For that reason, I wasn’t sure until I’d compiled them and really until after I’d had a go at translating them, whether they would work as a standalone piece; there’s something a little absurd about presenting the chorus without the play. But I felt there was an internal logic to them and a music that would hopefully come through even outside of their original context. Though translation always involves re-forming and re-contextualizing to varying extents, I’m sure I’d have made different decisions had these pieces been translated alongside the rest of the novel. In particular, the translation of the wider novel would likely have influenced my approach to these sections, and I’d have had to focus slightly less on their internal coherence and more on the points at which they resonate with and speak to the novel’s other strands. I’ll come back with a fuller answer if/when I translate the rest of the novel!
MCS: You wrote, in your translator’s note, that the critic Constantino Bértolo compared Oceánica to an epic poem in air and tone. How does this assessment resonate with you? I do love the ambiguous universality of the text’s personal pronouns.
RM: In terms of its epic scale (and the whales…) Oceánica invites obvious comparisons with Moby Dick. It’s interesting, in that sense, that both novels use ‘intercalary chapters’, or something like them, though in very different ways. Where Melville interrupts his narrative with chapters on the history and minutiae of the whaling industry, Yolanda González uses a similar technique but to a very different end, to undercut the human-centered perspectives of the wider novel.
In terms of epic poetry more specifically, I have the translator Jeffrey Zuckerman to thank for pointing me to the term hronrāde, ‘whale-road’, in Beowulf. Not only did that particular word turn out to be a perfect fit for the title of the piece, but it also got me thinking about broader links between the texts, such as the role of violence and vengeance, and was a way into thinking of the piece as poetry. I also found that right-aligning the text, as well as giving it a wave-like form that mirrors its physical setting, helped me key into its particular rhythms.
I love that you mention the ambiguous use of pronouns, which I feel are an important part of the disruptive quality of these passages, leaving the reader (and the translator!) always a little disorientated, always teetering on the edge of understanding. There’s a lot said about the trust authors put in their translators (traduttore, traditore), but less is said about the role of trust going in the other direction. When working on a text as challenging as ‘Song of the Whale-road’, it matters a lot as a translator that you trust in the author, and the writing, and allow yourself to go with it. If you’ll allow me to go slightly off topic, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the British author Ann Quin lately. A lot of her writing operates at this ‘edge of understanding’, but it’s so compelling that as readers we are (or at least I am) all too happy to follow her into ambiguity and chaos, rather than giving up or getting frustrated. The same was true when translating ‘Song of the Whale-road’: because I loved the novel and had complete trust in Yolanda González’s writing, I was able to follow her into that space without panicking, or trying to second-guess or smooth out, as can happen when you’re working on a text in which you don’t have the same faith (as most translators inevitably do at one point or another).
MCS: As for ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’, a piece of original work, has The Book of Serpents helped you operate at this ‘edge of understanding’, or inspired you as it does the reviewer in the story? Does the story constitute your own record of “the translator’s reproductive strategy”?
RM: In a very literal way, it has. The genesis of this piece was some friends of mine giving me a copy of The Book of Snakes by Mark O’Shea (University of Chicago Press, 2018) for my birthday. I’ve been a bit obsessed with snakes since I was a child, and they’d seen this first-hand when we were on a trip together in Extremadura and I’d completely lost my mind on spotting a viperine water snake (Natrix maura) in the reservoir we’d just been swimming in. It was whilst leafing through that book that I came up with the idea of repurposing descriptions of snakes to describe translations. Above all, I did it for fun, but as a translator and occasional reviewer of translations, I also hoped it might help to inject some of the serpentine world’s color and variety into my own writing. The idea of scaling it up (sorry) into a story came later, and the all-pervading word ‘smooth’ seemed like a good bridge between the two worlds (not to mention their long association with betrayal and duplicity). As for translators and their reproductive strategies, I prefer to leave that to the imagination…
MCS: While writing the lexicon the translator in the piece uses for her reviews, did any particular works spring to mind?
RM: I’m not sure particular texts came to mind as I was writing the lexicon, but since the piece was published, a couple of people have said they’d love to read some of the imagined translations. It got me thinking that maybe I should cloister myself away and dedicate the rest of my life to the Borgesian project of writing them all into existence… But mostly I’m just made up that so many people have read and enjoyed this fairly bizarre window into the depths of my psyche. I have a friend from Liverpool who works as a molecular biologist specializing in insecticide-resistant mosquitoes; thanks to her I know more than I ever thought I would about the diversity and, yes, reproductive strategies of the humble mosquito, so perhaps there could be a sequel in the making…
MCS: In addition to Spanish, the original language of ‘Song of a Whale-road’, you also translate from Russian and Asturian. How did you arrive at this combination of languages, and how do you balance your translation pursuits between them?
RM: I arrived at my three source languages in very different ways. I began learning Spanish quite young, with the encouragement of my mum who speaks Spanish herself, and I studied it through school and university. As for Russian, my grandmother was from St Petersburg, though she lived in Liverpool for most of her life, and we were very close. As a child I’d hear her speaking it fairly often, but she always spoke to me in English and never taught me much beyond the alphabet (I used to write her ‘secret messages’ in Cyrillic). She died when I was twelve but was a big part of why I decided to study Russian alongside Spanish at university. I came to Asturian much more recently. Though Spanish is very much the hegemonic language of Madrid, the city where I live, Spain is home to a great multiplicity of languages, and I’d always wanted to learn another of them. During the pandemic, I finally had the time to do it; it was a strange time, so I find it hard to remember exactly what drew me to Asturian in the first place, but I haven’t looked back since. I’m still a relative newcomer to the language and literature, but I’ve already had the chance to meet and translate some wonderful writers, and I’m very excited to see what the future holds.
As for how I balance these languages, that’s a subject for a whole essay. It’s not easy, and for the most part it’s less a conscious decision and more a product of my particular circumstances at a given time. Almost all the income I earn from literary translation comes from translating samples for Spanish publishers — it’s the language that puts the bread on the table, so it naturally takes up a big share of my time. Beyond that, in the last year especially I’ve been devoting a lot of time to Asturian, which means Russian has been on the back burner, at least as regards literary translation. There’s also the impact of the invasion of Ukraine, which has rightly prompted some soul-searching in those of us who work with Russian (and especially those of us with Russian family ties). That’s too big a topic to do justice to here, but I’d point people to Ukrainian-born translator Boris Dralyuk’s writing on the Russian language and the war, as well as pieces on the subject by Russian poet Maria Stepanova and Russophone Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov, whose novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv came out earlier this year in Reuben Woolley’s International Booker Prize-longlisted translation.
MCS: What new publications or authors should one keep an eye out for in Asturian and/or other lesser-translated languages of Spain?
RM: This is a great question! If you’ll allow me to shoehorn in a couple of shameless plugs at this point, as part of the launch of the Spanish Riveter magazine at the London Book Fair last month, I participated in the event ‘Changing the Translation Landscape from Multilingual Spain’ at the London Cervantes Institute, alongside translators working out of Basque (Aritz Branton), Catalan (Mara Faye Lethem) and Galician (Jacob Rogers). The event is available on YouTube and is a great place to go for recs and readings from all those languages, as is the Riveter magazine itself and the episode of the Three Percent podcast we recorded as part of the same event. Jacob’s translation of The Dear Ones, by Galician writer Berta Dávila, is definitely one to look out for. It comes out next month with Three Times Rebel, a publisher based in Scotland focusing specifically on women writing in minority languages. Fum d’Estampa are another UK publisher with a focus on lesser-translated languages, and their backlist is a goldmine of Catalan literature in particular. As for Asturian, I’m hoping we might start seeing some publications in the pipeline over the next year or so, which may include Xaime Martínez’s wonderfully leftfield novel La fuercia, along with the deeply moving poetry collection El llibru póstumu de Sherezade by Raquel Menéndez. There’s also work afoot on a poetry anthology. In the meantime, I recommend checking out Will Howard’s playful, dare I say colubrine translation of Pablo Texón’s poem ‘Word chain’ in the Riveter magazine. I hope we’ll see more of their collaborations soon!
Robin Munby is a literary translator from Liverpool and based in Madrid. His translations have appeared in publications including Wasafiri Magazine, World Literature Today, Subtropics, Cambridge Literary Review, and Asymptote. He works primarily from Spanish, Russian and Asturian into English.
Michelle Chan Schmidt is an assistant editor of fiction for Asymptote, raised in Hong Kong and based in Dublin, Ireland. She studies at Trinity College Dublin and is fascinated by representations of history in Hong Kong literature.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: