Spanish Literature Archives - International Bookshelf: Women in Translation

Translating Survival

This week’s novel portrays issues that have become all too familiar in recent weeks: long lines and shortages at grocery stores, ruthless price gouging, and grim acts of violence. As timely as such topics may be in the era of COVID-19, Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas turns to Venezuela, where an unfolding economic crisis has transformed daily life into a fight for survival. One of the first works of fiction to emerge about Venezuela’s current calamity, It Would Be Night in Caracas compels us to ask: What does it take to survive in a world where law, order, and social cooperation are in dangerously short supply?

As Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic article noted last month, Venezuela has long served as convenient straw man for various political agendas in the developed world. It Would Be Night in Caracas renders the conceptual real through the dilemma of Adelaida, burying her mother in the midst of rampant chaos and corruption. Since she lived alone with her mother, any tenuous connection to community seems lost. Another death, this time of an old friend and neighbor, may give her the means to escape Venezuela. While reading this novel, I was struck by how it chronicles a journey from language and thought to action and how it handles complex historical and political circumstances.

The novel opens as Adelaida stands graveside at her mother’s burial, grappling at once with personal loss and the hellscape that surrounds her. The first university graduate in her family, her mother once taught “private tutorials” for students, obsessively “outlin[ing] the basics: subject, verb, and predicate…” At first, Adelaida emphasizes language in her approach to widespread scarcity: “We could only watch as everything we needed vanished… ‘Lose’ became a leveling verb, and the Sons of the Revolution wielded it against us.” But when dealing with paramilitaries, protesters, or looters, this type of linguistic currency holds little sway. Her apartment, once a safe haven of books and her mother’s memory, is overtaken by a female gang. Tellingly, their ring leader destroys a volume of poetry, assuring Adelaida that the only word that matters is “hun-ger” as she knocks her out with a gun. Survival means traveling light, discarding sentimental or intellectual baggage along the way.

What does this journey from ideas to action signify? Because the plot involves mistaken identity, NPR describes it as The Talented Mr. Ripley without the thriller elements. But a closer (if older) corollary is Greek tragedy, Antigone refusing to abandon her brother’s body. Similar to The Remainder, a disconnect between the living and the dead drives conflict, but Adelaida has neither friends nor the luxury of defiance. When she breaks into the apartment of her neighbor, Aurora Peralta, and finds her dead, taking over her space is the only option. She crosses paths with Santiago, the younger brother of a close friend, but she cannot save him. “Santiago could be anything: a martyr, a killer, an informant…I realized I was utterly alone.” In a world of murky motives and ruthlessness, her survival leaves no room for memory or past ties. Instead, her future lies in Aurora’s closet, where she finds a Spanish passport application.

This perspective could be grim, but instead, it’s a compelling slow burn that reveals the measures to which we resort when a sense of community is no longer possible. Some reviewers took issue with the lack of political context, yet that raises an intriguing question: To what extent must the novelist serve as historian? In contrast to some abstract playground of geopolitics, this depiction of Venezuela plays upon the nerves rather than the brain. As Adelaida contemplates leaving, she looks out at Caracas and observes how “electric currents of misery and beauty were shooting through the city.” In these troubled times, this terrifying and explosive city offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked selfishness and greed.

Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas, trans. Elizabeth Bryer (HarperVia, 2019)

Photo Credit: Car burning during 2014 Venezuelan protests via Alamy.

Translating Memory and the Strange

Just in time for changing leaves, trick-or-treaters, and tales of horror, I sat down to reread a book that has stayed with me for a decade: Edith Grossman’s translation of Carmen Laforet’s Nada. A strange gem of a novel, Nada explores the plight of Andrea, a college student grappling with her bizarre family in Franco-era Barcelona. Portraying a diverse cast haunted by the memory and legacies of the Spanish Civil War, Nada manages to terrify without a single ghost or ghoul.

I’ve noticed that the most effective translations meld tones and narratives seamlessly, making no sudden movements that leave the reader bewildered. Nada is no exception, carefully balancing Gothic and coming-of-age genres; Andrea must reconcile her memory of her well-to-do Barcelona family with the horror they’ve become. In a plot device similar to my recent take on The Other Woman , we get a compelling glimpse of a female friendship with ulterior motives—a connection that, oddly enough, works to the narrator’s advantage.

When I first read Nada, I was about Andrea’s age and dealing with a rough transition to college life, so the alternately scary and amusing depiction of her relatives had a lasting impact. Despite some difficulties on her trip to Barcelona, Andrea arrives in good spirits, excited to begin university—until she knocks on her family’s door and “it all seem[s] like a nightmare.” This twisted family reunion includes her befuddled grandmother; her disapproving aunt, Angustias; her uncle Juan, whose face resembles a “skull” alongside his “disheveled” wife, Gloria; and her second uncle, Ramón, a charismatic violinist with a shady past.

Far from the opulent hospitality Andrea expected, this ragtag crew is so grotesque as to be humorous. When Andrea asks to wash up after her trip, her aunt’s severity is ridiculous: “You’d dare to take a shower this late?” She despairs, thinking that even the bathroom seemed like a “witches’ house” complete with a “macabre still life.” Even worse, her family is quick to draw her into their ugly dysfunction. Juan is unstable, frequently punching Gloria while she is holding their baby. Ramón seems especially sinister, shifting between charm and underhanded opportunism; there’s some suggestion he’s a former spy who was tortured during the Civil War. Angustias watches Andrea like a hawk, convinced she must chaperone her to protect the family’s reputation.

In spite of her miserable home, Andrea creates a content life for herself by forming a friendship with Ena, a fellow student with a magnetic personality. She first approaches Andrea to meet her “famous violinist” uncle, Ramón, but she and Andrea rapidly become close. Ultimately, Ena begins an affair with Ramón, but cuts it off abruptly. As Andrea soon learns, Ena’s mother was once obsessed with Ramón, who accepted money from her wealthy father to abandon her; her daughter’s affair enacts revenge for this humiliating memory. Juan’s wife, also tormented by a love triangle with Ramón, reports his black market dealings to the police. Rather than face police torture and ruin, Ramón ends his life and a dark battle of the sexes simultaneously.

Though these cycles of hurt and retaliation seem momentous in scope, Andrea also indulges in fun and experimentation. She regularly parties with a would-be Bohemian crowd, college students who pride themselves on “imitating” Picasso and whose prosperous circumstances are a far cry from her poverty. Eager to carve out her own identity, she accepts when Ena’s father offers her a job in Barcelona: “…I’d go back to Madrid with him. We’d travel in his car.” A friendship begun for retribution creates an escape route.

Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers have observed how Carmen Laforet was a little-known breath of fresh air, a respite from pompous Franco-era literature. Nada presents the seamy underbelly of that rigid society: the loss of cultural and individual memory, fractious relationships, broken art. Andrea’s determination to survive is the triumph that makes this novel worth reading.

Carmen Laforet, Nada, trans. Edith Grossman (Modern Library, 2007)

Photo Credit: Image by Daria Nepriakhina from Pixabay.

WITMonth Week Three

Though this book made the Man Booker International Prize short list, I had planned to review it later, considering my recent post about Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. But revisiting South America with Sophie Hughes’s translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder is more than worthwhile.

This unusual novel explores the legacy of Southern Cone dictatorships through its three protagonists: Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma. Shared family history unites them, as their parents formed a resistance cell during the Chilean dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Felipe and Iquela are childhood friends, but when Paloma arrives back in Santiago to bury her mother, it triggers a madcap chain of events in which all three set off for Argentina in a hearse to retrieve the body. The Remainder’s two great strengths are its alternating narrators, allowing for effective shifts in tone, and its experimental form, which uses language and typography to examine loss, remembrance, and generational tension.

Normally I’m distrustful of multiple narrators, as they can be jarring. Here, this fractured style fits the characters’ struggles. Felipe, who narrates his sections as a single run-on sentence, opens the novel with macabre mathematics: “…how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting…by using this apocalyptic maths to finally, once and for all…subtract them.” This calculus of absence fails to impose order upon a tangled web of remainders. Iquela’s mother, the sole survivor of the cell, is a recluse; Felipe’s grandmother frequently succumbs to despair; Paloma, who lives in Berlin, often seems bewildered by her parents’ home country.

While Felipe persists in this grim task, Iquela’s account orients us with a clear progression. Paloma’s parents escaped to Germany during the dictatorship era, but her mother recently died of breast cancer. She ships her body to Chile, but the plane is diverted to Argentina because of raining ash in Santiago. Unwilling to wait, she convinces the others to travel there in a rented hearse. If Felipe’s perspective falls well within the realm of South American gothic, then Iquela adds a humorous element that almost satirizes that genre. She mocks Felipe as “Mr. Light and Breezy” and describes how he sings “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as they leave Santiago. For all their closeness, their relationship has a terrible precedent. During a time of torture and forced disappearances, one narrator’s father informed on the other, creating an orphan.

In The Remainder, form is crucial. Felipe’s chapters descend from 11 to 0, while Iquela’s are designated by open parentheses: “().” That blank space complements these three, whose lives often seem a disjointed afterthought to their parents’ activism. At one point, the parentheses are filled with a repeated sentiment from Iquela’s mother, whose memory is a “topography of her dead”: “(I do all of this for you I do all of this for you…).” Unlike the famed photographs of the disappeared, survivors’ histories feel surprisingly mundane; many older figures in The Remainder have gone into exile, divorced, or died of natural causes. Yet their children carry terrible knowledge, a realization that ‘a rat’ wasn’t a rodent, ‘a movement’ wasn’t an action, and ‘the front’ wasn’t the opposite of ‘the back.’” Sophie Hughes navigates these linguistic challenges expertly, depicting Paloma’s distinctive Spanish and the cell’s militant language in a way that English-language readers can understand and appreciate.

Coming of age under unique social and political pressure is a powerful theme emerging in this Woman in Translation Month series. As one of a generation of Chilean writers reckoning with a dark history, Zerán raises a compelling question: Do children who bear the weight of their parents’ past have a future? Sophie Hughes’ thoughtful rendition of this dilemma merits every accolade it has earned.

Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder, trans. Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: Suddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations. Read previous editions here and here.

Translating Political Terror

Buenos Aires is a city of ghosts. For many, this sentence conjures the enduring cultural scar of the Dirty War: thousands of forced disappearances during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. For me, it calls to mind a rainy winter morning when I wandered the Recoleta Cemetery, trench coat collar turned up against the chill. The neat rows of sarcophagi mimicked the posh streets just outside the gates, evoking a strange commune between the living and the dead. The eerie stories of Things We Lost in the Fire push this idea to a horrifying conclusion: Buenos Aires is a city of monsters whose tentacles reach well beyond the city limits.

This sinister collection has a masterful translator at the helm: Megan McDowell, acclaimed for her work with Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, and Diego Zúñiga. She notes how Enriquez creates a world where “haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs, and criminal pollution.” I’ll focus on a few of these interwoven themes, drawing relationships between the supernatural and corruption, between violence and the feminine.

Among the stories, “Under the Black Water” enmeshes social consciousness and horror, opening with a DA exasperated at the sight of a corrupt policeman: “The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt.” The effectiveness of McDowell’s translation is on full display here; every word feels crucial. In a slum where “the reasons for killing poor kids [are] many and despicable,” a pair of cops have beaten two teenagers and thrown them into the Riachuelo, the polluted river surrounding Buenos Aires.

The consequences of this tragedy extend beyond police brutality and environmental devastation. As a priest warns our lawyer protagonist, one of the boys has returned after waking up “the thing sleeping under the water,” a sinister creature inspiring cult-like worship in local residents. Intermingling the grotesque and political critique runs the risk of privileging one element over the other. With such intense sociological and ecological issues, who needs Cthulhu or the creature from the black lagoon (and vice versa)? But with a horrified priest and a death cult at hand, the river monster feels like a fitting final act in a world gone mad. There is also a religious subtext, an underlying tension between Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian cults with uncertain rituals, that would be intriguing to trace in Enriquez’s other works.

Things We Lost in the Fire also offers an intriguing perspective on women and violence. In Enriquez’s tangled world, female characters are victimizers, victims, enablers, and horrified witnesses of brutality. Depicting a marriage on the skids and an ill-fated trip to the Paraguay/Argentina border, “Spiderweb” illuminates a fine line between boredom, contempt, and the sinister. The narrator regrets her hasty marriage to elitist and verbally abusive Juan Martín, a reaction her family shares. As he becomes a petulant presence on their day trip to Paraguay, her cousin, Natalia, reminds her that “death is the only problem without a solution.” Though far from a pleasant character, Juan Martín is also the only one willing to point out atrocities of the Paraguayan dictatorship. When he expresses outrage at the sight of soldiers sexually harassing a waitress, the protagonist has a visceral reaction: “…he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night…And all because he needed to be a hero and prove who knows what.”

The message seems clear; there is no room for egoistic idealism, and desensitization is the only way to survive. Yet her other observations signal complicity rather than determined indifference, as when she fantasizes about “hand[ing] him over to [the] soldiers and let[ting] them do as they pleased with him.” By the time we reach a mysterious conclusion, the story’s scattershot insect imagery—droning cicadas, dying ladyflys, glowing fireflys—seems a portal into a primal landscape where no one is exempt from violence. In drawing connections between cruelty and the dark impulses of a woman’s mind, Enriquez makes a unique contribution to horror literature, while also reflecting on the viciousness of a grim period in South America’s history.

I’ve so often heard short stories described as “middle brow,” consigned neither to high literature nor mass market appeal. It’s a fate Things We Lost in the Fire doesn’t deserve. As haunted as the streets of Buenos Aires, these stories need to be read.

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire, trans. Megan McDowell (Hogarth Press, 2017)

Photo Credit: Anthony, “Black Spider,” via Pexels.com.