Posts filed under 'latin american literature'

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2024

July 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our Summer 2024 issue!

With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.

In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest from the Latinx, Greek, and Filipino literary worlds!

This week, our editors direct us towards the profound and plentiful artistic productions emerging from border crossings, diverse encounters, and cross-genre interpretations. From a festival celebrating multicultural writings, novel adaptations of classic canons, and the newly elected fellows to a prestigious international residency, these developments in world literature remind us that within the schematics of difference, shared passions grow and proliferate to create unities.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

Between June 21 and 23, Hispanic and U.S. literary enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco for the International Flor y Canto Literary Festival. Originally founded by Latinx poet Alejandro Murguia, acclaimed poet and professor at San Francisco State University, this year’s lineup featured a diverse variety of poetry readings, literary workshops, and movie screenings—all open to the public. Participants included Latinx and Mexican writers, poets, and directors dealing with topics such as identity, multiculturalism, language, and resistance. Most of the events took place at the legendary Medicine for Nightmare bookstore, a unique promoter of Latin American and Latinx literature in San Francisco.

One of the most exciting events was a poetry workshop led by the Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. Titled “¿Quieres escribir pero te sale espuma?” (Do you want to write a poem but only foam comes out?), the workshop encouraged new writers to try out different techniques to overcome writer’s block. In another event, Reynosa read from her most recent book, Iremos que te pienso entre las filas y el olfato pobre de un paisaje con borrachos o ahorcados. The collection portrays life around the Mexico-U.S. border in the nineties, told from the perspective of a bicultural family dealing with gender violence. The works in the book are long poems of mostly short unrhymed verses, using colloquialisms endemic to the north of Mexico, in a fast paced and highly rhythmic prosody. They also include fragments from songs by the iconic Latinx singer Selena. In her reading, Reynosa usually sings these musical portions, highlighting the sonic elements in the poems and their cultural significance. READ MORE…

To Follow the Poet Into the Tunnels: On the American Translation of Carlos Soto Román’s 11

July 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sarug Sarano

By discourse I mean a poem, a textual device that runs through a particular set of psycho-historical contingencies.

The following essay investigates the indelible wounds of the 1973 Chilean coup—which brought to end the democratic socialist government of elected president Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Seen through the fragmentary, poetic method of poet Carlos Soto Román’s collection, 11, Sarug Sarano examines the public role of the text as reflection, bringing pieces of recollection, ghostly testimonies, and sustaining structures to their archival and political context, ensuring that one does not forget about the terrors and erasure that continue to infiltrate the present.

I searched for you among the ruined, I spoke with you. What was left of you saw me and I held you.

—Raúl Zurita, “Song For His Disappeared Love” (tr. Anna Deeny Morales)

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Yet So Alive: A Collection of Groundbreaking Latin American Horror Stories

April 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

The horror in all of these stories slithers in stealth . . .  it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024

For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.

Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 1, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from Central America, France, and the United States!

This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.

While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.

After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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Tampoco tenemos nombre / We, too, are nameless: A Conversation with Ilana Luna

May 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

When I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling . . .

I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title? 

Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.

AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?

IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself. 

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What’s New in Translation: May 2023

May 15, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Matthew Redman, and Rubén López

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

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Where the Poems Live: In Conversation with Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott

March 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by M.L. Martin

There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that . . .

Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time. 

Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible. 

I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’ 

M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?

Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor. 

Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation. 

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Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

July 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”

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To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda

March 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?

Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. 

In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.

Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?

Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.

RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.

MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito

December 2, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s rare for a novel to so deftly balance character and plot. It’s even rarer for a complex plot to sprout from such unlikely sources . . .

A winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Fabio Morábito’s El lector a domicilio is the first of his works to appear in English—and having read it, we can only hope there’s more to come. It’s hard to think of recent novels as well-rounded as this, which is why we’re delighted to announce it as our November Book Club pick: in just over two hundred pages, it delivers rich characters and riveting plots; it balances heart with humor; it sets us up only to shake our assumptions. More importantly, though, it finds value in lives that are often neglected, prompting us to fully see, hear, and touch those around us—an especially timely reminder as we continue to emerge from our pandemic solitudes.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, Other Press, 2021

If ever a novel was deviously set up for stasis, it’s Fabio Morábito’s latest. Its protagonist, thirty-four-year-old Eduardo Valverde, is “stuck in second gear” after a case of reckless driving costs him his license, part of his job, and much of his time. Already living at home with an ailing father, he must now serve as a home reader to some of the other “elderly and infirm” in Cuernavaca—many of whom spend their days alone or half-silently with others, in dim rooms at the end of long passageways. Meanwhile, Eduardo has either cut or strained all ties with friends and family, and doesn’t seem keen on forming new ones; he, too, lives in “his own little world,” and while his court-mandated gig beats scrubbing public toilets, his heart just isn’t in it.

This is apparent to several of his listeners. “You come to our house,” one berates him, “sit on our sofa, open your briefcase, and with that magnificent voice of yours you read without understanding anything, as if we weren’t worthy of your attention.” To be fair, though, he’s not exactly dealing with a rapt audience. The Jiménez brothers are more eager to taunt him with vocal antics than take in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the Vigils lose focus on Verne’s The Mysterious Island when they can’t read his lips (they appear to be deaf), and they don’t bother to mention it until he brings it up; Coronel Atarriaga drifts off like clockwork after two or three pages of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

The characters’ mix of decrepitude, distance, and detachment sprouts from their broader environment. Once worthy of its nickname as the “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca has long since been “expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any godforsaken town of emigrants”—even “the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting.” The remaining population lives “closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls,” and these walls have “infected” them: “everyone walk[s] around stone-faced.” It is the product of “unchecked danger” at the hands of drug lords and mobsters, one of whom routinely visits the Valverde furniture store to collect a “protection fee.” But even this rattling occurrence is mentioned almost in passing, thus avoiding the immediate strike of conflict. The novel’s context in its first few dozen pages, then, seems hardly ripe for character or plot development. READ MORE…

The Full Spectrum of Phrases: An Interview with Annie McDermott

July 28, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

I like to jump around and work on different passages at random; it’s a way of coming at them fresh and seeing what stands out.

Annie McDermott is a London-based literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English, bringing to readers the works of acclaimed Spanish-language authors like Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, and Selva Almada. She now adds into her exceptional oeuvre Brenda Lozano’s Loop, a fragmented novel that takes the form of its protagonist’s personal notebook, kept while her boyfriend Jonás is away in Spain. A wonderfully wandering text that traces the myriad pathways of the mind, Loop is the English debut of one of Spanish-language literature’s rising stars and an immersive, innovative introduction to Lozano—who is already a widely influential writer in her native Mexico. I recently had the pleasure to correspond with McDermott over email, and quickly took to her; she is as excellent an epistler as she is a translator, her prose suffused with wit and poise. During our exchange, McDermott graciously shared with me her approach to dialectical difference, her fragmented method of translation, and her love of phrasal verbs. 

Sophia Stewart (SS): You translate fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. How did you come to pursue both of these languages? What’s your literary-translation origin story? Do you find you enter a different “zone” depending on which language you’re translating?

Annie McDermott (AM): I learnt Spanish by mistake and Portuguese on purpose—or maybe “by chance” is more accurate than “by mistake.” I moved to Mexico after finishing university, on a bit of a whim, and ended up staying for a year, teaching English and learning Spanish and living the sort of bilingual life that I’d always found both completely fascinating and completely distant from my monolingual upbringing in the south of England. I realised I loved spending time in the space between languages, and that was what led me to think about translation. I then moved to Brazil, to São Paulo, with the specific aim of learning Portuguese so I could translate Brazilian literature as well.

As for the zones: I think mostly the zone depends on the text rather than the language, but the zone does change from language to language as well. I learnt both Spanish and Portuguese as an adult, and when you learn languages as an adult you often vividly remember the circumstances in which you first encountered particular words, meaning that your existence within that language is strewn with all these different memories of people, places and situations. So in a sense, switching between languages means switching between different sets of memories.

SS: Allow me to geek out for a second, because I studied Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in undergrad. With so many regional differences in Spanish, how do you approach issues of dialect in your work? Translating, for instance, a Mexican author and an Argentine author would be totally different, from the conjugations to the slang. Did you learn a specific dialect of Spanish first, and then expand out to others from there? Do you feel most comfortable with a particular dialect?

AM: What a great thing to study! I’m jealous. Yes, there are so many regional varieties, and it’s one of the things that makes Spanish such a fascinating language. One of my favourite things is looking something up on the WordReference forum and finding an extensive thread full of people weighing in from different countries, and even different regions of different countries, each with a completely different idea of what the word means.

I learnt Spanish living in Mexico, and it’s definitely Mexican slang, rhythms, and speech patterns that I feel most comfortable with. When it comes to translating other varieties of Spanish, I think the important thing is remembering how little you know—it’s so easy to be tripped up. This is another reason why I’m in awe of people who translated before the internet; nowadays, you can watch films and videos, and read news articles, social media posts, etc. etc., from whichever region you happen to be working on, and get a feel for it that way as well. READ MORE…

Tapestry of Coincidence: An Interview with Fate Author Jorge Consiglio

July 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most mundane things become unrecognizable.

Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?

Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.

AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?

JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.

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