In Mammoth, our Book Club selection for August, Eva Baltasar masterfully builds a sensually invigorating, intensely lucid character study of a woman that follows desire to its most extreme ends, drawing on the author’s cultivated themes of rebellion and self-liberation to lay wreckage to social norms, sexual standards, and the pretense of civility. Translated with finesse and lyric precision by her long-time English voice, Julia Sanches, the novel is by turns thrilling and disturbing, meticulously structured in its lines and its narrative; in line with Baltasar’s work as a poet, every word serves a purpose. Here, Sanches speaks to Hilary Ilkay about working with such fine prose, the necessary care taken on both linguistic and musical levels, and moving between strangeness and sense.
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Hilary Ilkay (HI): Mammoth is the last of Eva Baltasar’s trio of novels that reflect uniquely on motherhood and maternity—and you’ve been the translator of all three. I’m wondering how you see Mammoth fitting in with the other two, Boulder and Permafrost?
Julia Sanches (JS): I’m still working through my views on that. Eva has said in the past that Mammoth crystallizes her work in the triptych, and the more I’ve thought about the book, the more I’ve realized that their defining tension is between the societal expectations of motherhood and its instinctual, more primal side. If I’d read Boulder and not known Eva had children, I’d have found it impossible to believe that this woman—who’d written a character so allergic to motherhood—could be a mother, too. But from her position as a mother, Eva is always questioning the push and pull of norms and expectations, asking: what is motherhood for human beings as animals? And what is motherhood for human beings as part of a social fabric? I think this is what the triptych is exploring.
HI: In Baltasar’s work, I find the blurring between animal and human to be so striking—and that tone is set right from the beginning, so you see both the loss of self and the finding of oneself in that slippage. That tension, exactly as you describe it, is so alive in her novels. Did Mammoth in particular pose any unique challenges as a translator that the other two didn’t?
JS: Mammoth was slightly easier to translate because it’s the third book I’ve worked on by Eva, so I’ve become used to her style. She’s very, very controlled. The three sections of Mammoth are practically the same length, and her sentences are nearly all constructed in the same way. I had to play a little bit with the structure, because in Romance languages you can start a sentence with a verb, so the repetition of “I” doesn’t grate as much; that’s not the case in English, and I had to find a workaround.
I also struggled with some of the more agricultural terminology. Eva, who is an endlessly fascinating person, worked as a shepherd for at least one year (possibly as many as three) in the Pyrenees, and so in the novels, she uses some of the offhand language of a shepherd who knows the ins and outs of lambing, as opposed to the technical terms. The British editor and I discussed these sections in detail. For example, at some points, she refers to the sack that the lamb is birthed in as the placenta, but I thought English lay readers like myself might get confused because we have a very specific idea of what a placenta is.
While Permafrost has these intricate, paragraph-long metaphors that are difficult to unwind and render in English, Mammoth is a lot more pared down. So it was a matter of dialing things back and making sure the language remained very clear. I wanted no spare words whatsoever, and I don’t know if I succeeded in being as ascetic as I intended. It was a challenge. I am not terse by nature, so I had to go against the grain of my usual writing.
HI: You achieved it beautifully! And it’s interesting that you were grappling with this new terminology, because the protagonist herself is encountering these new experiences, like she’s never had to lamb before. That’s a sort of parallel journey—you’re wrestling with how to make that experience translatable to an audience, and she’s trying to do that for herself. In a past interview, you spoke about what you were reading when you were translating Boulder: Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, Carson McCullers, some really great poets. Did you undertake a similar process of reading certain things to aid or inspire you in your translation of Mammoth?
JS: I think for Mammoth I may not have read all that much, because I was at a residency in Switzerland, which ended up being another unexpected translation aid. I was in the countryside, and there were cows everywhere. The smell of manure was constant. We were near a forest, a pine forest, and I may not have seen mirages like the protagonist of Mammoth does, but I certainly saw a lot of slugs chomping on leaves.
Actually, I think I may have been reading Jean Rhys—one of her earlier novels, which ends with an abortion, so the motherhood theme, or the pregnancy theme, was present. I find that Eva’s protagonists feel things very intensely, even when they’re a little bit withdrawn and cool, or sarcastic and funny, they have these moments of heightened emotion. And there is no greater queen of intense emotion than Jean Rhys. The work in question is Voyage in the Dark, which isn’t generally the book that comes to mind when we speak about Jean Rhys, right? It’s about a woman who is born in Dominica, where Rhys herself was born; she suffers a loss in her family and ends up having to move to England, where she tries to figure out how she fits in as a white woman who grew up among people of color in the Caribbean. Eva’s protagonists also have this sense of not belonging, of trying to find their place in the world. Another thing I think is important to highlight—something Eva has mentioned a lot in interviews—is that the protagonists of Permafrost and Boulder are faced with this same condition of discomfort but do nothing, while the main character in Mammoth is the only one who actively tries to address her malaise.
HI: You’ve talked about this before, but in addition to the haunting and difficult moments, there’s a lot of humor in Eva’s writing. There’s a scene in Mammoth when she’s trying to arouse a German hiker, and she says, “Guten Morgen” while in bed—a moment of comedy in this otherwise bizarre scene in which she’s driven by a primal impulse. How do you encounter the humor as a translator? Is it challenging to render it into English, or does it lend itself naturally?
JS: Humor is incredibly challenging to translate. That particular moment didn’t need much from me: it’s perfect, already multilingual, and carried across seamlessly. Some of the other sex scenes in Mammoth are hilarious. She isn’t really attracted to any of those men, but she needs them for the purpose of becoming pregnant. In the first scene, with the guy she meets at the party—the swimmer with the broad shoulders, there’s some nautical language, flagpoles and hoisting, and I had to figure out 1. how to make it funny, and 2. how to help people actually visualize what was going on physically. I really enjoy Eva’s humor; it’s less slapstick—though there are some slapstick moments—than it is ironic. I’m glad you bring humor up because reviewers tend to forget how funny she is.
HI: I found the voice of the protagonist to be one of the most distinct first-person voices I’ve ever read. It’s just so vibrant on the page. How did you navigate capturing it? Because it does shift over the course of the novel, too.
JS: The voice does seem very well-developed to me in the original. There must be some decisions I make subconsciously, in response to what I see on the page, that I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint right now, but there’s also the delicate balance of poetry, humor, and a very modern perspective. And there’s the progression of her voice, as you said. In the first section, I feel she’s a little more cynical and frustrated. In the second, she’s swept up in the labor of survival; she has to do things to keep herself alive. In the third section, she’s desperate. She’s achieved what she thought she wanted, which was to get pregnant, and yet the physicality of being pregnant takes her by surprise, messing with her to the point that she feels dissociated, alienated from her own body. Maybe it’s less her voice than her emotional state that I was translating.
HI: I’m interested in the structure of the novel. This is the third in a triptych, but there is a kind of mini triptych within the novel itself, with the three sections. Can you speak a bit more about that?
JS: I was recently looking back at the book and, as I said, I noticed how the three sections that make up the novel are practically identical in length. I know from experience that I need to be extremely careful with Eva’s word choices, but it wasn’t until a year or so after delivering the book that I noticed how clean the entire structure is as well; it’s almost as if it’s split into three trimesters. Sometimes, as a translator, you get sucked into the granular, and it can be difficult to see the whole picture. Permafrost, the first in the triptych, was a little more scattered. Each short chapter threw you from the present into the past and back again, and from one character to another. It’s a bit more of a collage experience. Boulder is extremely tidy, and there are also distinct parts, like in Mammoth. Eva’s next novella, which I have not begun translating yet, is almost two different books in one. It’s the same first-person narrative, and the first section resembles the first part of Mammoth—a young woman trying to find her feet in Barcelona—while the second takes a sudden, Gothic turn. I was very surprised to read that from Eva, which is nice, really. It’s like being in a relationship with someone; even a decade into the relationship, it’s comforting to see the unexpected facets of your romantic partner. I think Eva is still trying the novel form on for size, figuring out what suits her.
HI: That’s a beautiful way of framing it. I love the phrase you’ve previously used to describe Eva’s writing as embodying “the freedom to write prose very poetically.” Can you say more about how her poetic sensibility informs her prose?
JS: When I was reading around for Mammoth and Boulder, I tried some poets’ novels written in English and found that none of them really do what Eva does. American fiction seems to be defined at the moment by a striving for clarity; every word has to be almost translucent, so you can see right through it to the intention of the author, to the meaning they are trying to deliver. Clarity is paramount. Even poets writing novels aren’t into elaborate, weird metaphors, unlike Eva. There’s one line in Mammoth about the sunrise, where she writes: “There’s something sacrilegious about Barcelona at daybreak. The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps.” Bizarre, right?
One of the struggles of translating Eva is figuring out what the image is doing, what it conveys, and also why she’s written it the way she has; is it pure image or is the image forged by the way the words sound together? I wrote about this in my afterward to Permafrost, remarking on this one image of a kitchen curtain (“I felt smaller and smaller by the day, next to her nothing but a frilly kitchen curtain”) that appears in the prose. My editor was confused by it, and I realized, in rereading, that there are these end rhymes and head rhymes in the original that propel the phrase forward (“Jo em sentia cada dia més empetitida, reduïda a una cortineta de cuina al seu costat”). So it’s about striking a balance between those two things—the semantics and the phonology.
I think if it were poetry instead of prose, I might be able to be a bit freer with my word choice. But prose is active, it’s doing something, moving things forward, telling you a story. Remove one element and you might find that you’ve skipped over an important plot point or characteristic feature that is imperative to the narrative.
HI: I was struck by the metaphors and images that Eva uses. They felt quite original to me, especially in prose writing. Have you found this to be the case?
JS: I think so. One of the things that has always drawn me to poetry is the way a poet can take something I’ve seen every day of my life and cast it in a completely different light. Eva does this, but in her prose. At one point in Mammoth, the protagonist is looking out at these trees, and she says the leaves have been replaced by “armies of small shields.” What is going on here? What have I been missing every time I’ve looked at a tree? I think she’s unique in that respect.
Another thing Eva does is make it possible for every woman to be a poet. She is able to convince readers that this twenty-four-year-old with a master’s in sociology—who is constantly bucking against the world and can’t hold down a job at a café or even navigate modern life—contains deep wells of poetry. As far as Eva is concerned, everyone is capable of possessing the sensibility of a poet. Everyone has it.
HI: Contrasted with these moments of lyrical beauty are scenes that are intensely graphic and violent. As a cat owner, for instance, I really struggled! Were there particular episodes that were really hard to work on or render?
JS: I don’t think you’re alone in that. I also have two cats, and my first thought for that specific scene in the novel was—why? They’re so cute. Just why? And then she goes into such detail about how she is going to murder these cats. It was a struggle, but I focused on the details, on trying to figure out exactly how to describe the rope running along the ground, the way she pulled it, closing the refrigerator door:
Tied to the refrigerator handle is one end of a rope that runs along the dusty floor and up the wall into the window. I hold the other end with both hands and reel the rope in one bit at a time. It lifts off the floor, tenses, and when it’s as taut as it can get, I give it a yank. The fridge door rises like a dead man, then slams shut.
One of the few reprieves we have as translators is focusing on the details. This is horrific, but I will translate the elements of this sentence until I get it to work.
Also, death is everywhere in that section of the book; she’s constantly eating lamb, and they’re also really cute. You don’t see her murdering the lamb, but you know the lamb has been murdered. There’s this scene where she and the shepherd are running around trying to feed lambs that have been rejected by their mothers, and it’s grueling work. Eventually, she asks, “Can’t we just eat them?” And he laughs at her because they’re like two days old, all skin and bone. But that just makes their eventual end more explicit.
Apart from this, I do struggle with beginnings and ends. I had a very difficult time with the last paragraph in the book, in which there’s a huge tonal shift. She becomes . . . maybe spiritual isn’t quite right, but whereas up until then she’d focused on the material of survival, here she gets a little loftier.
HI: It’s interesting, because she has this impulse to consume the baby lamb, but she’s also trying to produce a child. So, there’s this impulse to devour the young that she’s trying to generate.
JS: But she only wants to produce it to the point that it’s in her body. She doesn’t want to actually have a child. She just wants to have the experience of gestation.
HI: Speaking of materiality, I’m interested in the thematic link between the titles of these novels: Permafrost, Boulder, and Mammoth. How do you see these novels’ titles as linking them, and what do they evoke?
JS: In your review, you pointed to the sort of immobility and weightiness of these three terms, which I hadn’t thought of yet. Eva actually came up with the titles before writing the novellas. One day she decided she would write a triptych of novellas called Permafrost, Boulder, and Mammoth. Then she decided to create women who embodied these three concepts. So in Permafrost, you have this character who has sort of closed herself off emotionally, be it from her family or romantic partners. Then in Boulder, you have this character who is quite immovable. She does not want to be tied down by family. She does fall in love with Samsa and agrees to move and change for Samsa, but there’s a limit. The book spells out the reason for the name—which is the nickname that Samsa gives the narrator: “She doesn’t like my name and gives me a new one. She says I’m like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element.” In Mammoth, we have this character who harkens back to something more primal. Of all these characters, Boulder is the only one who is actually given the name of the book. The main character in Permafrost doesn’t have a name at all, and the character in Mammoth is referred to as Llanut, which is the name of the mas or farmhouse she lives in, though it also means woolen or ignorant, stubborn.
HI: I definitely found something mythological about the novel—but I tend to see myth everywhere.
JS: I think if Eva read her reviews—which she doesn’t—she would appreciate that, because she rarely reads living authors. As far as I know, she reads a lot of translations of Greek myths, and she must have read Ovid at some point.
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. She has translated three novellas by Eva Baltasar: Permafrost, Boulder, short-listed for the International Booker, and the newly released Mammoth. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.
Hilary Ilkay is an Associate Fellow in the Early Modern Studies Program at the University of King’s College. She is a Managing Editor for the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Journal and an Assistant Managing Editor for Asymptote.
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