After nine years and a criminal complaint. Affidavits, expert witness reports, trips back and forth to police stations, district attorneys, national courts. A five-hundred page case record. Two lawyers. One prosecutor. A justice commission. Fifteen years of therapy. Half my life! My entire family split in two. A whole town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published. Finally. Finally. . . Now I can say out loud all the names I once could not.
Argentine writer Belén López Peiró eventually wrote these words last year, following nearly a decade of denouncing her abuser.
Belén’s first novel, Por qué volvías cada verano (Why Did You Come Back Every Summer), published five years prior to the sentencing, is an account of the abuse Belén suffered as a child and the breakdown of her family after she spoke out. It covers a number of years between the apartments and lawyers’ offices of Buenos Aires and the small town in this province where Belén spent summers with her cousins, her aunt, and her abuser—her aunt’s husband. Using mixed media, the book gossips and growls in a cacophony of voices, legal and colloquial, who question, opine, pity, doubt, support, and blame her.
This April, Charco Press published the English translation of Belén’s novel by Maureen Shaughnessy. I caught up with the translator, who’s based in Southern Argentina, over Zoom to discuss the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rebecca Wilson (RW): What were your first impressions of the book and how did you feel when Charco Press asked you to translate it?
Maureen Shaughnessy (MS): In Argentina it had its moment of hype, which is how I came across it in the first place, even though it was published with a small press. It came out here during a time when the #NiUnaMenos movement was really taking off, in that context of purple and green marches with women filling the streets.
When I started reading it, it was too intense for me. Right away, in the second or third entry, she tells this really intense story, the most abusive moment in the book, the most raw. Plus there’s all these dense legal documents—there are these two extremes together.
I had read it and found it too intense to think about pitching it to editors. It was too much for me to even consider, so it was a hard place to go to, to work for so long on the book.
RW: Any translation is a huge responsibility. But given this novel is so personal, and a true account, what did you feel was your relationship to the text?
MS: During the last few drafts, I got to a point where it was already typeset and we were supposed to go to print and I read it again. I had to say, ‘No, wait, not yet. Sorry, we have to keep editing it’, because I did feel responsible for trying to translate all those voices that were swimming around in her head, all those demons she brought out onto the page.
I can’t relate at all to what Belen had to live through, but being the person who has to try to go back in there multiple times, bringing all that up—it was not a very enjoyable translation experience. It was really uncomfortable a lot of the time.
RW: And what was the thing that you thought was still missing or needed more fine-tuning before the book went to print?
MS: I wanted the voices to sound real. I would read it out loud to myself, over and over again, and there were these little moments when it still sounded stunted on the page. Belén has such a knack for orality. You don’t even necessarily know who all the voices are. You think: ‘Maybe that’s an aunt or a cousin or a neighbour.’ Maybe you can’t quite see what the person looks like yet or how old they are, but their voice sounds real. That was what I kept reading out loud for, thinking, ‘How would that sound in English? What would someone really say if they said that out loud?’
RW: And there’s so much implied in each character’s speech, isn’t there? Although they are talking to or about the protagonist, it’s really them thinking about their own life and their own struggle. . .
MS: Exactly, sometimes there is so much emotion in just a few lines, whether someone’s feeling angry, or betrayed. . . I had taken notes about who I thought all the voices were. I asked Belén about some of them and she said, ‘There’s a reason I didn’t put names in the book!’ Many of the voices were parts of her. She’d say, ‘Well that’s me talking to a part of me, that’s this other wounded part of me or this vision of me that came from therapy or came from a conversation or came from somewhere deep inside.’ And even those voices are conflicting sometimes, because they seem like different people.
RW: So how would you describe Belén’s approach to telling her story through all these different voices? Why do you think she told her story this way?
MS: Belén developed the beginnings of this book in a fiction writing workshop with Gabriela Cabezón Camara. From what I gathered by talking to her, it just came out. There was a convocatoria (a call from the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo organisation for young people to write about identity) that Gabriela brought to their workshop. At first Belén wasn’t sure if she had anything to say, because in Argentina the subject of ‘identity’ is more often associated with the dictatorship and the desaparecidos, but she started to ask herself ‘who am I?’ based on what she had lived through. She read a text about how identity is composed of our own voices as well as the voices of others, and that’s when she started to write the abuse scene from the beginning of the book, which was the last instance and was the most vivid in her memory. From there, the polyphony of voices, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Gabriela first invited her to read the piece at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, even though she hadn’t finished writing the whole book yet. A radio producer was in the audience and invited her to read it on the air and it went viral—everyone in her hometown heard it and the indie publisher Madreselva offered to publish the book. She had already tried pitching it to other publishing houses, but they’d all turned her down because the book was about sexual abuse.
The way she structured the voices works really well. Often the legal statements for a certain character are placed right before or after you hear that person’s voice, maybe her brother or her mum. You get an on-the-record and off-the-record version of the different characters or voices: what they said to the police and then how they sound when they address her.
There’s a lot of guilt, too. A lot of people throwing things at her: ‘Why’d you do this? Why’d you do that? Why couldn’t you have done it differently? Why’d you wait so long?’
I think she found a really positive way, therapeutically, to deal with it. She’s got all these voices going on in her head, and by spitting them out on the page she created a space for them all to talk to each other.
RW: This book is written with urgency but it takes place over many years. How did you try to conserve that pacing?
MS: That was easy because of the way that Belén wrote the book. Each page, each voice, is so contained. As a translator, I feel like I could have taken any one of the entries out of order and still understood each specific voice. Who knows, maybe you could pick them up like a deck of cards, shuffle them and put them in a different order, and it would tell a little bit of a different story, but, because they’re each so strong, it would still all be there. Each page is so specific. I love that. It’s really short and edited down. But so much comes across in each little piece.
In terms of the story, Belén published another book after this one where she narrates the rest of the legal battle, Donde no hago pie (Nowhere to Stand). It’s not written in the same way; it doesn’t include all these different voices, and it follows a much more traditional narrative. Reading that helped me understand the background—what happened afterwards, what happened legally, where she had to go from there.
The second book begins after she had changed lawyers and together they went through the legal battle. It’s more like a diary in that way. She’s definitely the protagonist in that book, as opposed to in this book where she’s at the centre receiving all these voices, which is why this book stands out so much. The way that she chooses to tell this story is unique.
RW: What was the biggest challenge for you in translating the book?
MS: Trying over and over again to get all the little details, in terms of the voices. There are a few really raw moments, violent moments of abuse where I had to try to find the right words to use, to get all that rawness and violence across without it being tacky or downplaying it—making sure it gives you that same sense of discomfort as it did in the original. I think that, as a translator, is the hardest part. We read a book, and a book makes us feel a certain way. And then as a translator, we want the reader to have those same feelings in another language. So whether it’s humour or discomfort or horror or fear or joy or beauty, whatever feeling the different moments in a book can invoke in us, we want it to come across to readers in other languages.
Other books might have some funny little word play or humour or something really culturally specific. This book didn’t have those things; it was more about the realness and rawness and the orality of the different voices and how uncomfortable the book makes one feel.
It’s as if the protagonist is in the middle of a circle surrounded by all these voices and Belén is inviting us in to feel how she felt. So much of the book is written in the second person: ‘You did this, you did that.’ So, as a reader, you’re on the receiving end of all these voices. And as a translator you have to recreate that feeling.
RW: Can you tell us about any specific linguistic dilemmas that stuck with you for a long time until you could get it right?
MS: I remember this line, it’s Juan, the lawyer. He’s talking to her and downplaying her trauma. He says:
Your mum told me that you were thirteen, but we’re better off saying you were eleven. That’s how things go with the law. See, you have to exaggerate a little. To all effects, it’s the same, right? What difference does it make? One year more, one year less? He raped you either way. Ah, no. That’s right, he didn’t rape you. Then, why are you here? What was your name? Oh, right. It was almost rape. Close, but no cigar. Bloody hell. We would have been better off. This way, our case is screwed. Judges are more sympathetic to rape victims, the younger the better.
That line, ‘close, but no cigar’, I remember not being sure what to put there for a long time. He’s being ironic and sarcastic and mean-spirited about this terrible thing that happened to her. You’re trying to put all of this guy’s personality and the way he’s treating her into just a few words and make it sound natural. Belén did so much work with it, to nail these voices down.
RW: The title immediately exposes you to this. Were there any suggestions for alternative titles, or was it always going to be ‘Why Did You Come Back Every Summer’, as it works in English?
MS: It’s one of the first lines of the book. We initially played around a bit with the wording but then decided to keep the original title, which I think the book needed. It’s a question and it puts her at fault; it’s accusatory right away to her, to the victim.
RW: To close, what do you think this book demonstrates about using writing and books to tell these kinds of stories, as opposed to other mediums?
MS: Well, Belén is a writer, so that was the best way for her to process and share the story. We all have our art form or creative outlet or the way we process things, and obviously she has the gift of writing. Who knows, maybe she has always been writing about this. She had so much courage to decide to make it all public and say ‘this really happened’.
She was in the thick of it. The case was only settled last year and she started writing this book eight years ago. It’s so unfair not to be taken seriously for so long. I feel like it’s a gift that she opened herself up and shared such a raw part of herself with us. The book is really powerful in that way.
As a reader, I felt things that I didn’t feel before I read this book. I haven’t experienced abuse like that. There’s a part of what happened to her that I was able to tap into that helps me now as a human to be more empathetic. She has given us the gift of being able to go there with her.
Maureen Shaughnessy is a writer and translator from Spanish to English. Her translation of Belen’s novel was recently awarded an English PEN translation grant. Her published translations include works by Sara Gallardo, Hebe Uhart, and Nurit Kasztelan. Her work has been featured in The Paris Review, Brick, World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, AGNI, WWB and Asymptote Journal. Her forthcoming translations include a novel by Lucía Lijtmaer and microfictions by Leila Sucari. Raised in Oregon, she now lives in Bariloche, Argentina.
Rebecca Wilson is an editor, occasional writer and a translator from Spanish to English based near Bogotá, Colombia. She works with the Latin America Bureau amplifying grassroots struggles for social and environmental justice in Latin America, as well as writing about music, film, and books for Sounds and Colours and subtitling short films. Her work has been published by NACLA, The Line of Best Fit, Sounds and Colours, and the Latin America Bureau.
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