The world is strange, and we make it stranger by living here. Uruguayan author Mario Levrero knew that better than most, and in his debut collection of short stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, one is guided by extraordinary vision and delightful humour along the writer’s gallery of fantasies and absurdities, impossible events and otherworldly journeys, all of which are made real and cemented into reality by thought and emotion. In this interview, translator Annie McDermott speaks about being drawn into Levrero’s singular voice, working with co-translator Kit Schluter, and distinguishing imagination from invention.
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Georgina Fooks (GF): How did you first encounter Mario Levrero’s work, and what drew you to his writing?
Annie McDermott (AD): It was through a series of strange coincidences—which seems fitting. I was living in Brazil at the time, and I happened to go for lunch with a Mexican writer called Juan Pablo Villalobos, who was also living in Brazil at the time, and he is a great fan of Levrero. He wrote a great piece for Granta about how he became a fan before he’d even had the chance to get his hands on any of Levrero’s books—because they used to be so hard to get hold of—and he became a fan based on the titles alone.
He recommended him to me, and I happened to be going to Uruguay on the way home from Brazil, and I picked up a copy of one of Levrero’s novels. I remember that as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I’ve never read anything else like it. He has this amazing voice, this kind of strange, absurd, quite deadpan voice that is like nothing else. It’s also very warm, and also really engaging, and also very companionable and a really pleasant narrator to spend time with.
At the same time, Juan Pablo Villalobos had also been enthusiastically recommending Levrero to Stefan [Tobler] from And Other Stories, so it all happened in parallel in a very pleasing way, and that was how I came to end up doing some samples and eventually translating Levrero’s books.
GF: In some ways it’s not surprising that Levrero was introduced to by another writer, because he feels like a writer’s writer, especially because of his wit. The title of the collection, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, shows his humour, and his style is certainly distinctive. How did you feel about trying to capture the voice and that style, and bring it into English?
AD: I’ve translated a lot of different voices by now, and a lot of writers that I’ve translated are ostensibly ones who I might have more in common with—perhaps younger Latin American women—who are dealing with contemporary problems in the world today.
And yet, for some reason, it’s Levrero’s voice for which I’ve never had to go looking for very far. I feel like he’s the writer whom I sound the most like, or that I fit the most easily into, which is funny, because he’s an elderly, misanthropic, reclusive Uruguayan man writing several decades ago in a flat in Montevideo. But I think there’s something about the sense of humour.
From when I began to read him, and definitely from when I began to translate him, I’ve always felt like the voice is just there—something that I kind of slip into, rather than having to go hunting for, as I have done with other writers that I’ve worked on.
GF: That really comes through in the translation—it’s such an expressive voice. Did you find that voice with the stories in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, in comparison to other works of his that you’ve translated?
AD: It’s definitely the same voice—and it’s definitely, instantly recognisable, I think, as the same voice. But it’s also the same voice at completely different ends of a literary career. In The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, it’s the voice of a writer who’s just trying out being a writer. Some of these stories are the first things he ever wrote when he wasn’t even sure what he was doing. They were experiments.
Levrero says something really interesting about the way that a person’s writing voice can resemble them—that it’s a bit like the way a person might resemble themselves in a dream. So you might dream about somebody, and sort of know that it’s them, even though the person in the dream doesn’t outwardly resemble the person from your life at all. I feel like it’s the same with his voice; you always know that it’s him. But the stories in this collection are quite varied at the same time in voice and in tone. ‘Jelly’, this quite long, strange, B-movie-esque short story is a very slow, weary voice, with lots of commas—quite an alienated voice compared to ‘The Boarding House’, which is almost overflowing with comic, preposterous, absurd content. And then ‘The Basement’ is a story written to entertain children. It’s interesting how they are all very different genres, yet they all sound like him.
Levrero’s thinking always goes to a similar place, by similar routes—even if that place is somewhere that you’d never expect, and by routes that you’d never be able to imagine.
GF: You mentioned ‘The Boarding House’, so I wanted to ask you about that while we’re talking about style and voice, as that story is narrated in one sentence—a stream of consciousness that’s meticulously constructed. You mentioned that you found the voice easy to maintain for Levrero: did that feel true for this particularly impressive narrative exercise, and how did you approach it?
AD: When [co-translator] Kit Schluter and I were dividing up the stories, that was the story that I really wanted to translate, because I think it’s one of the most amazing short stories I’ve ever read, and I just like that feat of grammatical wizardry. I wanted to have a go at doing in English, and it was some of the most fun I’ve had translating in ages—but it was also very, very complicated. It involves a lot of annotating of the original, because it’s one sentence that holds it all together with these huge subordinate clauses, blooming off from one another. I wouldn’t know how to draw a diagram of what’s going on in that sentence, but it was a lot of highlighting certain elements at a time, and making sure that they read consistently as a sentence or as a clause.
I think comic English writing has a tendency to go in for elaborate language as part of what happens in British comedy—thinking of P.G. Wodehouse, or a bit of Oscar Wilde—but the language can become too flowery. I had to simplify the language because the grammar is so complicated that it just didn’t work at all if the language was complicated, too.
GF: The question of this cohesive voice is interesting, in the context of British English, as you and your co-translator bring different Englishes to the text. How did you work together during the translation process, and was there any kind of negotiation about the question of voice? It feels quite harmonious across the different stories.
AD: That was the really fun part of working with Kit on this collection; I speak British English. He speaks American English, but we both have a very similar sense of humour, and I think we both found the same parts of these stories funny and enjoyed them in the same ways. We each edited each other’s stories, and a lot of the edits would just be like: is this word funnier? I remember Kit had Carlos, the boy from ‘The Basement’, on the ‘prowl’ for his grandfather at one point, which I love. Sharing a sense of humour with your co-translator is a great thing.
The publisher had wanted some kind of consistency and for the text to be in UK English—and it mostly all is. But there were a few points when Kit just could not countenance a particular bit of British English that just seemed too preposterous to him. For example, in ‘Beggar Street’, when the protagonist says it’s too dark inside the cigarette lighter—it’s a common problem with cigarette lighters, you can imagine—he goes back for a torch, and Kit says that as far as he’s concerned, and as far as any American is concerned, a torch will be a flaming torch. And that seems absolutely crazy to me. But he said no, that’s what every single person in the United States is going to imagine. So we put ‘flashlight’ for the avoidance of doubt.
It was also a choice to use UK English to have consistency with the previous Levrero publications that I’ve translated, because the voice feels so seamless in the Spanish.
GF: There are some stories that credit you both as the translators, like ‘The Basement’. How did that more actively collaborative process work?
AD: For that story, Kit had already done the first draft long ago, because he’s wanted to translate this book for some time. It was a more involved back-and-forth editing process, and we felt like we’d each put a lot of ourselves into it by the end. It felt like it sort of belonged to both of us, so it seemed right to credit both of us as the translators. I think we’re both really happy with how it came out.
It was a really pleasing process, because there were things from Kit’s first draft that made it all the way to the end, because they just seemed absolutely inspired. Choices with comedy, with voices, with certain atmospheric things. Your first instinct is the best one, and there are some things of Kit’s in it which I think are absolutely great.
GF: Translating comedy can be challenging; do you have a favourite moment of comedy in the collection?
AD: Maybe the obvious one is from the titular story, checking on the thinking-about-Gladys machine and finding that it’s purring away softly as usual. But I think the comedy is an absurd, strange, weird atmosphere that permeates all of the stories—often in just a little aside. Even when deeply surreal, strange events that are taking place, Levrero’s instinct is always to couple it with something a little absurd, a little odd.
GF: There are definitely lots of moments of absurdity throughout. You’re often in a world that you slightly recognise which is then made surreal, but in a sly and amusing way.
In both of the translators’ notes, you talk a lot about reality, or surreality. As a long-term translator of Levrero, what do you think of the question of reality in his work?
AD: One of Levrero’s first publishers described him as a realist writer who lives on another planet. So basically, he’s determined. He’s assiduously attempting to relate to what’s taking place in the world around him, and he wants you to really understand what things are like, what things feel like, what things sound like, what things smell like, how he responds to them. But those things are utterly fantastical. This is because of what imagination is to him. As far as he’s concerned, imagination and invention are completely different things, and he’s not interested in invention. That’s just making stuff up. Anyone can do that. That’s artificial. It doesn’t tell you anything true, whereas your imagination is made of the images and the goings-on deep in your consciousness that you don’t necessarily know about, but you can gain access to it—perhaps by dreams, which he talks about as a particularly common way.
Our imagination is always up to something, and he’s recording what that is. He’s recording something that’s really going on. And this is why Levrero doesn’t want to be considered a fantastical writer or a writer of science fiction. He’s writing about experiences that have really happened to him, although he says it’s not the kind of experiences that you see in most biographies. It’s this very idiosyncratic approach to the imagination that defines all of his work and all of his life.
GF: The story ‘Jelly’ stands out within the collection as it feels further removed from our reality, and it’s set in more of a dystopian world. What kind of genres do you think Levrero is playing with? And does a knowledge of genre inspire your process?
AD: I think ‘Jelly’ stands out for quite a few reasons. One of them is the tone. It’s a darker world, and there’s definitely a feeling in ‘Jelly’ of a kind of dream logic at work. But also it’s something fully realized than that. We sort of know the geography of this strange, dystopian landscape, which maps in a strange way onto Montevideo.
It’s much darker in tone, and the voice is very different as well. I think the B movie feel of it is definitely there with the jelly that’s eating everything. It feels a bit like The Blob, and Levrero was a big fan of B movies, but at the same time it’s psychologically much stranger and much more complicated. The jelly, in a way, feels almost incidental. What’s really bothering the author is a strange sense that his day-to-day existence is futile, as well as his fruitless search for this woman that he met in a patisserie. Those elements are absolutely at odds with the B movie genre, so he’s playing with a lot of different strands and weaving them into something which is quite unlike anything else that he wrote, or anything else that I can think of.
He spoke about experimenting with the writing too. He talks about using all of these commas, and how he wanted that to mimic the breath of a weary person as they’re making their way onwards. This strain, this slow rhythm of exhausted onward motion. The sentences are almost monotonous. The commas do the opposite of what you often want punctuation to do, which is to keep writing varied, and to carry you along. I remember fighting to keep a comma as it was written in Spanish, when he says: ‘my lips got dirty, from the chocolate.’ It makes it sound so lumbering, but it was deliberate. It’s interesting also for him to be playing with B movie tropes, but not with the exciting, fast-moving, grammatical or syntactical equivalent of a B movie soundtrack.
GF: When you talk about punctuation and breath, how did you incorporate rhythm? Were there any other moments where you read things aloud to check if they sounded like?
AD: With ‘Jelly’, it was a journey. The translation that I initially handed in had much fewer of those commas I mentioned, and it sounded a lot more like the other stories. As I sort of smugly told you at the beginning of this conversation, I always feel like I know how to translate Levrero—but I don’t, because he’s sneakier than that. And so when the edits came back, the editor had said that some of these sentences feel quite monotonous. And then when I looked back at the original, I thought, actually, far too few of the sentences are monotonous. Instead of making the sentences less monotonous, I made every single one more so. Kit had read an interview with Levrero, or maybe a letter, where he talked about wanting the commas to replicate the breath, so that gave me ammunition to put all the commas in. And the editor said: this sounds brilliant, this is working now. It was a bit of a roundabout process, but it taught me something about translation. There’s a saying: ‘Punctuate the translation. Don’t translate the punctuation.’ But I think sometimes actually you do have to translate the punctuation. Sometimes it’s not enough to punctuate your translation as you see fit. Sometimes the trend of punctuation is important.
GF: You talk about Levrero’s ability to surprise you, even though you think you know him well, and that feels fitting for the way he writes. The thing about ‘Jelly’ that really struck me was the violence of it, in contrast to the absurdity of the jelly. You mentioned that the darkness in ‘Jelly’ is related to the futility of everyday life. But what do you make of the role of violence in these dream worlds?
AD: For Levrero, the imagination—the subconscious, our dreams, all these areas of our minds that we don’t necessarily have access to or understand—is the stage where the drama of life is playing out. And he acknowledges, or he realises, that this drama of life has to contain multitudes: it can contain absolute, sublime moments, and it can contain a lot of darkness. It has to be much more capacious than everyday life, or what he always referred to as so-called reality. So I think it’s about pushing at the limits of what’s going on inside our heads and showing that they can contain anything, including darkness.
It’s important to see that darkness as another strand running through his work, because I think you could misunderstand Levrero quite easily by listening to the way that I talk about him. You might think he’s a whimsical, comedic writer who tells you funny jokes about his cousin Alfredo and entertains you. But he’s also deeply serious, and the world of his mind is deeply strange and deeply weird. It’s not just some kind of light-hearted whimsy.
GF: There is definitely a multiplicity to Levrero. Considering these multiple realities, are there any kind of traditions or references you feel like he’s participating in or subverting?
AD: He has a very funny set of influences. Alice in Wonderland was on my mind, for example, and the writing of Lewis Carroll, which definitely feels like a big influence on ‘The Basement’. But it’s really tough to think of literary trends or traditions contemporaneous to him in Latin America or elsewhere, because I think he’s very deliberately not fitting into them. It’s almost easier to imagine what he’s avoiding than what he’s trying to emulate. He’s definitely not interested in writing political fiction. There’s a little nod to that in the note to this edition—which was originally included as a note to the 1995 edition—in which he talks about how nobody really read the book when it first came out, because it wasn’t dealing with the big themes that everyone wanted books to be dealing with.
He was writing at the time of the dictatorship in Uruguay, and there are hints of that throughout his writing; he’s endlessly horrified by the effects of that on people’s freedom—of thought and in general. And his refusal to write political writing is not simply a desire to avoid engaging with quite important stuff—in a cosseted or insulated way—but rather as an act of resistance against what was going on around him at the time, about insisting on that freedom.
GF: What major themes do you see that drive his work?
AD: Inspiration is constantly on his mind, either because he’s seized by it and setting out on a great literary adventure, or because it’s just out of reach and he’s longing for it to come back, which is the case in his later writing, like The Luminous Novel and Empty Words. He’s always very aware of whether he’s at a time of great inspiration in his life or not, and that’s a huge part of his sense of self. Related to that, a big theme is transcendence and these transcendental moments of breaking free of something, learning something, experiencing something to the fullest—which is a kind of sensual pleasure or epiphany. This is to him, I think, the stuff of life, and what he seeks and what he feels very frustrated by not always finding. And the domestic is there, always; there are always houses, always buildings. As he got further through his life, he became more reclusive, but his work sees the domestic as something antagonistic, a place of potential interruptions, of potential inconveniences and insultingly arduous housework and all of that business. But it’s also an interesting way of exploring what it is to live in the mind that you live in. We live in our houses, we live in our minds, and I think the way that you see him and his narrators interacting with homes is a way of understanding how he sees us interacting with the spaces of our own minds.
Annie McDermott’s translations from Spanish and Portuguese include The Luminous Novel and Empty Words by Mario Levrero, as well as works by Fernanda Trías, Selva Almada, Ariana Harwicz and Lídia Jorge. In 2022, she was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate.
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, Hopscotch Translation and The Oxonian Review. She studied poetry translation at the BCLT Summer School in 2022 and is currently completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at Oxford, specialising in Argentine poetry.
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