Language is a tool which shapes our humanity — a sanctified entity whom embodies the power to seduce, yet simultaneously, destroy us. Language is an anomaly, one whose whisper may be raspy, in fact it leaves scratch marks onto the human condition. But then we’ve metaphors, pseudonyms, even undecipherable inscriptions left behind by our ancestors which we crave to fully comprehend. O—pity the tongue!
Amidst this fascination I spoke with two translators, in the fall of 2019, Audrey Harris and Matt Gleeson; on their work translating Amparo Dávila’s novel, The Houseguest. The three of us had surrendered to Dávila’s words; they tumbled around in our throats, a tango worthy of infinite threads spilling out —softly, crooked, brazen. Although, there were remnants of our conversation which we had wanted to elaborate on; that being said, were are thrilled to further our dialogue on the language arts, and hope that as a reader (or perhaps a linguist) you might find yourself intrigued by our inherent obsession with translation.
GINA JELINSKI: Before your practice as a translator, what were you doing for work? And, what led you to your initial fascination with translating?
AUDREY HARRIS: I was a book publicist in New York, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then for Harper Collins. I loved working at Farrar, Straus because their books are very literary and they publish excellent works in translation. While I was there, I remember being excited that we published Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels in English, and I particularly remember when we published Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and all of the commotion it caused. All of the assistants were invited to the launch party. Bolaño wasn’t there, but I remember meeting the book’s translator Natasha Wimmer at the party. I remember that she had wild curly hair and wore glasses, and that my heart was beating wildly when I approached her- she was such a star to me. I asked her if she had any advice on translation, and she just looked at me and said, use a thesaurus, or a few of them. I thought she was putting me down at the time but now I consider it very good practical advice.
MATT GLEESON: I’ve worked in libraries and bookshops (including my beloved City Lights in San Francisco), copyedited academic books, waited tables and bartended, worked for a film festival in Mexico, tutored high schoolers in math, taught literature workshops to students in Oaxaca, and more. Several of those jobs I still do: literary translation didn’t suddenly pay the bills! My fascination with translation was a pretty natural outgrowth of loving literature and enjoying the challenge of reading in other languages.
GJ: How might you set up your environment when getting started on a translation?
MG: When I write—when I create a new text where there was none before—I have no idea where I’ll end up, and I don’t know precisely what I have to do to finish it. I just know I have to show up and be available, like a fisherman going out to sea. But when I translate, the map is very clearly laid out. There’s a text already. It’s impossible to be 100% faithful to it, and there may be difficulties. But the author has laid the path. It’s almost impossible to get lost, because the text exists already and at every moment it’s insisting, it’s telling me what it is and what I have to confront next. Perhaps because of this, I don’t need to set up my environment methodically. The work can easily absorb me and I become compulsive. I can idly start translating while in my pajamas waiting for the boiler to heat the water for my shower, and get sucked in for hours. Words I was chewing over will suddenly occur to me while I’m walking on the street, or riding the bus.
AH: I have my original copy of the book, the best copy that I can find. I read through the story, and identify difficult words and passages, which I translate first, sometimes with multiple possible translations for one word. At the bottom of my story I write, in ink, questions and analysis, as I would when preparing to teach the story, or to write an essay on it. My apartment has to be quite clean and orderly before I get started, and I try to eliminate distractions by muting my phone and not checking emails. I’ll often end up doing quite a bit of research as I translate, looking up place names, literary references, listening to songs if they’re mentioned in the story, and so on. I find it an extremely soothing task to translate, one that can make me forget absolutely everything else, because I’m disconnected from everything else except the task of entering and interpreting the writer’s world. These days I’m trying to be conscious of setting up a more ergonomic space for translating and writing, because bending over a laptop while in a seated position can create terrible neck problems.
GJ: Do you think there are still languages out there that have yet to be discovered?
AH: Discovered by whom?
MG: Well, if anyone speaks them, then they’ve already been discovered. But surely there are languages of the future that don’t exist yet and will be “discovered” by their eventual speakers. Languages are constantly mutating, including English and Spanish (really, there are multiple Englishes and Spanishes). New shoots and runners that we can’t even imagine are sure to be thrown out in the future.
GJ: Which types of languages do your gravitate toward most, and why- such as isolating languages, agglutinating, polysynthetic, as well as inflecting?
AH: Last summer, I was conversing with a very perceptive man who asked me about how I had become interested in learning Spanish. I described being fascinated in my early teenage years with San Francisco’s Mission District, which was then still heavily Spanish-speaking. I remember hearing music- Spanish rock or salsa music- playing in the streets on a Tuesday morning, and wandering into a bakery where the woman working there who sort of doted on me and cheered me on for my attempts to speak Spanish with her, and I remember she gave me pan dulce, and wouldn’t accept any payment. It felt like I was in another world, one with different values and currencies, a world that coexisted with my own, but that I could only unlock through language. After explaining all this to this man, he smiled and said, “so you chose to learn Spanish for social reasons.” And I think that’s true.
I’ve gravitated to Spanish, and to other Romance languages (Portuguese, and next I’d like to learn more Italian, since my sister just moved to Trieste) because of a desire for connection to their people and their culture. So my answer is that I do gravitate to Inflecting languages over others, but it’s been originally for social reasons. Though I would love to speak and translate Swedish, Japanese, Mayan, and too many other languages to list here. Every time I hear someone speaking in another language I have a desire to speak with them in that language; every time I read another language I wish to understand it. That said, I do think that translation is a social act, because it involves delivering a text from one group of people to another. My friend, the translation scholar Isabel Gómez, who teaches at UMASS in Boston, thinks about translation in terms of gift exchange theory, and I like that idea, of translation as an exchange of gifts between the writer, the translator, and the reader. Along somewhat similar lines, there is a Quechua word, Chasqui, that means “person of relay.” During the Incan empire, Chasquis were young messengers charged with carrying messages in the Tahuantinsuyo postal system. Using coca leaves for fuel, they delivered messages by foot in a relay system, and had to be strong runners and swimmers. They would use quipus, or a system of knots, to convey their messages, or they would repeat the words until they memorized the entire message. Later, the word Chasqui became a more general term for someone who carried news or ideas from one place to another. I also think the Chasqui could be a fitting symbol for the translator, someone whose specific function is to carry words across large expanses of geographical territory.
GJ: To taste another dialect is to further inquire the vocal prosody of our ancestors, and evoke identities long forgotten. We cannot deny that this is indeed the ecstasy that language provides us with. We saturate our lives with stories; we are unravelling the tide and witnesses to its divine influence over us. Can you break down these elements, in your own experience with the language arts?
MG: I definitely share your enthusiasm for the wonder of language, but I think I might describe its elements differently.
I guess I feel that, when used as an act of conscious communication, language is inherently a translation—a translation of something that isn’t words into words. It’s also, thus, inherently imperfect, inherently failing to capture everything that the not-words are and do and feel like. But because human beings are so embedded in language, the words can strike up the most remarkable echoes, concepts, images, and feelings inside us: words have been passed down from ancestors but can be constantly remolded by us and the people around us, they have their own plasticity and sound and presence, and they’ve also become fused with personal sensations and images inside us through constant use and association. Really, these systems of symbols escape our control. Sometimes words even act on their own, not to translate anything, just to create a play of sounds and shapes and references. And the things around us have inexhaustibly deep character and presence too: say, a particular oak tree. You can use the word “oak” functionally, to indicate a type of tree in a set of directions; or you can use the word to unlock an incredibly complicated set of traits and qualities and memories of encounters in a reader. It’s wondrous that everything in and around us, all of experience, is inherently uncapturable in some way. It’s also wondrous that words can put thoughts and inhabitable worlds inside us that weren’t there before.
And this all makes me very hopeful and sanguine about translation. If the original imperfect translation of not-words into words can do such amazing things, why can’t the imperfect translation from one language to another do equally amazing things?
GJ: Recently I’ve discovered Icelandic and Latin. I’m no expert, but I really love the word Echidna (Latin), which means a spined, burrowing, egg laying, ant eating mammal of Australia. Then there is the Icelandic word for mysterious, which translates to leyndardomsfuller. Sometimes it’s the definitions that cause me to obsess with certain words, when other times it’s word itself —isolated, a song on my tongue. What words, in any language, do you find yourself falling for?
MG: I’m a sucker for juicy- or absurd-sounding words, like “refunfuñar” in Spanish, which basically means to grumble with annoyance or sputter with rage. I kind of want to laugh with delight every time someone uses it. I also have a particular appreciation these days for simple words that describe relatively irreducible or concrete things. Colors—and not fancier words like “dun” or “ochre,” but the simplest ones: “red,” “black,” “green.” The names assigned to animals, plants, foods, geological features, bodily phenomena: “carpenter bee,” “radish,” “castor bean,” “sandstone,” “pork chop,” “tepache,” “sweat.” Using them feels like being sensually in touch with the world.
AH: I love the Spanish word ‘fugaz,’ which means ‘fleeting.’ It’s almost onomatopoeic, because it rolls off the tongue so quickly, with the final ‘z’ sounding more like an ’s’ than what we think of as a ‘z’ sound in English. I love how the first syllable, ‘fug,’ is also the first syllable of the word for ‘fugitive’—‘fugitivo.’ I would never have stopped to think about the connections between the words ‘fleeting’ and ‘fugitive,’ but in Spanish the connection is spelled out clearly by identical first syllable, which derives from the Latin prefix -fug meaning ‘flee’ or ‘move’ (meanwhile the English ‘flee’ comes from the Dutch word ‘vlieden’). In Spanish, the phrase “estrella fugaz” means a “shooting star.” I like the idea this phrasing suggests that when we see a star streaking across the sky, it must be a fugitive star, hurrying to hide itself in the night sky. It reminds me of the last lines from the William Butler Yeats poem, “When You are Old,” when Love “hid[es] his face among a crowd of stars.”
GJ: Do either of you have any language exercises that you tend to practice; when you’re either feeling blocked or just inspired to get to work? Sometimes I’ll write out a poem in English, then translate it into German, Polish, then back to English again. It’s difficult to figure which languages translate correctly, yet all of a sudden I’ve got a piece that is almost unrecognizable from its original form.
AH: I love that exercise! Mine are a bit more boring. I’ll just force myself to write scenes and memories from my own life. It’s inspiring because when I read them I realize that they are original to me, that no one else would write them the way I do. There is no better inspiration for writing than reading a good book. I love reading Borges’s essays on language. Recently I have been inspired by Francisco Goldman’s Say her Name, by the way he pieces together his dead wife’s life, like a scrapbook, blending small scenes of dialog, passages from her journals, conversations with others, dreams, and his own experience of living following her death. For me, team translation is an interesting kind of exercise.
When Matt and I translate Dávila’s stories, from the beginning we establish a constant dialog. One of us will send the other the first draft of a story. Then the other will go through with both the original and the draft, and make tons of notes and comments. Why not translate this word that way? Why not rearrange the phrasing? Why was this choice made? What about x, y, or z alternative? By the time the second one of us has gone over the draft, it’s completely marked up and written over. We’ll go back and forth like this many times, until we are both satisfied with the final result. Often the phrasing we ultimately choose emerges as part of the explanation or answer to a question. If I were to teach translation, I’d have my students translate in pairs or even larger groups, so that they could learn to challenge each other in this way.
MG: With translation, I don’t generally feel blocked, because there’s a text to inspire and guide me. However, exercises that have been incredibly valuable for my long-term translation practice are writing stories and poetry directly in Spanish, and translating my own English texts into Spanish: doing this forces me to reckon with Spanish vocabulary and syntax in a new way, building it from the ground up. It also places me in the position of a learner, a beginner, a child. Different things come out of me. To anyone who wants to deepen their relationship with a language that’s not their mother tongue, I recommend challenging yourself this way.
GJ: If translation has allowed for us to become more in touch with other cultures, why do you believe that we are still struggling with how we treat immigrants? Are there any realistic solutions for the ways in which our government has been intruding on the lives of these individuals —very specifically pertaining to all of the children & their families who have been kidnapped;they are tucked away in modern day concentration camps. I cannot accept this horrid reality which none of our leaders fully address.
We are witnesses to unfortunate realities which are prominently evoking irrational ideologies across the globe. With the current state of our political climate, have we actually evolved?
AH: Compared to other civilizations, in the Americas and elsewhere, the United States is extremely young. Based on our current treatment of non-white immigrants, I don’t think we’ve evolved far enough beyond our original European-colonial project. We’ve created a terrible caste system in our society, and the division of wealth is shocking.
MG: Broadly, translation isn’t only a means toward peaceful coexistence, respect, and compassion; it’s also a means for banks and mining companies to do lucrative business across international borders, or for proselytizers to invade remote areas and “spread the faith,” both of which are examples of things I find profoundly violent. An arms deal between the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia needs translators and people in touch with both cultures at some point along the line. The real questions for me are what are you translating, and why? What kind of power structure are you working for? And also, who’s going to read it? Literary translation seems to be a niche interest in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much effect it has on the larger culture, or how much influence it has on those people who are genuinely ready to deny the personhood of migrants from other lands.
The current, awful climate of growing hatred around the world isn’t just a failure of sympathy. I think it’s deeply rooted in the brute exercise of political power, and partly in long-term colonial and capitalist trends like pursuing profit based on the appropriation of land and bodies and minds, brutally pillaging colonized countries and making certain places nearly unlivable, and creating arbitrary false hierarchies of skin color over the course of centuries. In her book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks proposes not framing the struggle in terms of gaining rights or “equality,” but rather in terms of ending oppression. I think about this a lot. I don’t think I believe in humans “evolving.” I hope that through struggle and hard work, we’ll manage to make less destructive systems triumph. But I think we’ll always be governed by irrationality, and in many ways I’m glad for that: love, wonder, and beauty are as irrational as hate.
GJ: What languages do you believe there is a shortage of translators for?
AH: Sticking close to home, I’ll advocate for indigenous American languages, which are disappearing at an alarming rate. There is so much important knowledge, folklore, history, that is indigenous to these lands and that is contained within the history of these languages. If I could go back and start my Ph.D. over I would love to have learned Maya, Nahuatl, Purepecha, etc. There is also a huge need for legal translators of these languages in Mexico, where indigenous people often get blamed for crimes they didn’t commit and lack important resources to defend themselves.
MG: There are too few people learning and speaking Indigenous languages in the Americas. But that’s not necessarily a question of translating novels. That has more to do with these languages surviving in all their richness, and with having the respect to speak with people native to the land on their terms and in their vocabulary. Even within languages, there are still social cleavages across which we don’t do enough translation. For example, John Keene talks about how there aren’t enough Black writers being translated from other languages: in a given year there might be a certain list of writers from Latin America and Europe translated into English, yet almost none are Black, and this deprives the English-reading public of an important part of the full panorama of those languages and countries. I think he’s pointing out something that’s really important for us to recognize and question.
