Posts featuring Brenda Lozano

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 20, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Peera Songkünnatham

This week, our editors report from Thailand, Sweden, and the USA.

Around the world, the way we read is changing: Eva Wissting digs into book sales data in Sweden and finds a spike in digital subscription services amid the pandemic, Peera Songkünnatham reports that Thai poets are reinventing a classic form, and Allison Braden rounds up a slew of Women in Translation Month events. The annual celebration, dedicated to shaking up the canon, makes for a perfect moment to envision the heady, vivid future of literature.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A literary project called Bokbastionen (“The Book Bastion”) is finally about to launch in Sweden. The Swedish Arts Council has granted Svenska Bokhandlareföreningen, an association of Swedish booksellers, 400,000 SEK to support in-store events with authors. Although it was the challenges posed by the pandemic that led to the idea of supporting booksellers, coronavirus restrictions have delayed its start because gatherings have not been possible until now. Finally, the first event supported by the project will be held this coming week at a poetry festival in picturesque Söderköping. The initial plan for Bokbastionen included twenty author events this year, but about half of these will spill over into next year instead. The interest to host events has been particularly large among smaller, independent bookstores, which now are looking for ways to create interest among readers and book lovers.

Even though the pandemic has had severe consequences for much of the cultural sector, book sales have had a positive development in Sweden, according to a new report from the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the first half of 2021, overall book sales have increased by over 10 percent, but there is an ongoing shift between sales channels. The largest growth is in digital subscriptions with almost 20 percent, followed by an almost 15 percent increase in online bookstores. Physical bookstores, on the other hand, have had an 8 percent decrease in sales during the first half of this year. Both digital and printed books increased in sales, by 14 percent and 7 percent respectively, indicating that ebooks are not replacing physical books. Out of all book sales in Sweden, almost 80 percent take place online—50 percent through online bookstores and 28 percent through digital subscriptions. The report concludes that book sales have been greatly influenced by the pandemic. More customers have turned to online options, including digital subscription services. Though there are more bookstores closing down permanently than there are starting up, readers seem to be returning to physical bookstores as vaccination rates increase. 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…