1. What attracted you to literary translation?

It’s the perfect solution to a problem I didn’t know I had – I’ve always loved writing and dealing meticulously with words, but I don’t have the imagination to write books of my own. As a literary translator, however, I can write other people’s books – I can spend all day turning sentences around, in the words of Philip Roth, without having to come up with tricky things like plots and characters myself.

2. What do you think it would take for there to be more available Spanish translations in the US?

Access to funding is crucial here, especially when it comes to smaller, independent publishers, which are often the ones most inclined to publish interesting literature in translation. Spain’s in a good position in that sense, with translation grants available from the Ministerio de Cultura and Acción Cultural Española, so I think it’s important to make sure that as many publishers as possible are aware of these grants, and that the application process is accessible to publishers who don’t necessarily speak Spanish.

3. Is there demand for Spanish literature in the American market?

Any discussion of demand in relation to translated literature in the US has to happen in the shadow of the famous ‘3% problem’, with 3% being the proportion of books published in the US each year that are translations. I’m not sure if this figure has changed in recent years, but either way, it’s not great! (A quick Google search reveals that in Spain, for example, the proportion of translations published each year is around 21%.) However, there’s also good news: books translated from Spanish, including books from Spain, make up a lot of that 3%. There’s a dedicated, enthusiastic readership out there for those books, and a whole community of presses, booksellers, translators, reviewers, bloggers etc. who are passionate about promoting them.

4. Name some of your favorite Spanish authors?

I’m a big fan of Luisa Carnés, who I sometimes describe as a communist Virginia Woolf even though I know that’s far too simplistic. Her 1934 novel Tea Rooms, about a group of women working for miserable wages in a fancy Madrid café, against a backdrop of strikes, political rallies and social unrest, is a modernist masterpiece, as radical in its politics as it is in its form. Like so many women writers of her generation, Luisa Carnés didn’t get the recognition she deserved for a long time, and it’s been great to see the work the publisher Hoja de Lata has been doing to republish her in recent years. It’s exciting, too, to see her beginning to be translated into English – I believe Catherine Nelson is working on a translation of Tea Rooms, and Robin Munby has just published his translation of her short story, ‘The Snitch’, in the Resistance issue of the Cambridge Literary Review.

Skipping forward to the present, I’ve also been really swept away by the work of Sara Mesa lately, particularly Four by Four (published in 2020 by Open Letter, translated by Katie Whittemore) and Un amor, published by Anagrama in 2020. She’s a writer who’s in perfect control of her prose – she writes in these sparse, stripped-back, perfectly-balanced sentences that must be extremely difficult to translate, but Katie Whittemore does a brilliant job. 

5. What makes Spanish literary translation unique?

An interesting thing about translating Spanish-language literature for US publishers is the huge number of Spanish speakers there are in the US, and the level of familiarity that even non-Spanish-speakers there have with the language. This has all kinds of implications when it comes to translation – for example, it can make you feel freer to include Spanish words in your translations without leaving the reader completely confused. However, this is then complicated by the way Spanish words take on new meanings and connotations in the US context that they don’t necessarily have in Spanish spoken elsewhere. One definition of the word ‘barrio’ in Merriam-Webster, for example, is ‘a Spanish-speaking quarter or neighborhood in a city or town in the U.S., especially in the Southwest’ – which, needless to say, is not a definition that appears in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española.

6. Is there fair recognition of literary translators?

This is something that’s improved a lot in recent years, at least in the UK and US – not only are translators named much more frequently, on book covers and in reviews, for example, but there’s also a greater interest in and understanding of what the translation process actually involves. As for whether that’s leading to improvements in pay and working conditions for translators, however, I’m not so sure. For example, there may now be a lot more understanding of the skill involved in translation and the importance of a good translation to a book’s success, but there isn’t really such a thing as pay progression for literary translators – the rate for someone with decades of experience and plenty of prizes will often be the same as the rate for someone translating their first book, which is just one of the many reasons why literary translation is a pretty unusual profession.

7. What work have you enjoyed the most translating?

An impossible question! Although perhaps the most bizarre, all-consuming and unique translation experience has been the year I spent working on The Luminous Novel, the cult Uruguayan author Mario Levrero’s legendary novel about failing to write a novel. It’s a huge book and I worked on it full-time for a year, during which I visited Uruguay, met many of Levrero’s relatives, friends and students, took a creative writing course based on the ones he used to run, accidentally developed a Solitaire addiction to rival Levrero’s own, and generally became temporarily subsumed in the Levrerian universe.

8. What author would you have liked to translate the most?

I don’t think I’m the only translator who would have loved to work on Easy Reading by Cristina Morales – it’s a wild ride through the squats, courtrooms, supported housing units and experimental dance classes of Barcelona, and includes minutes from the meetings of anti-capitalist collectives, a memoir written on WhatsApp and a whole section made up of fanzine-style collages. It’s challenging, provocative, and pushes at the boundaries of what’s acceptable in pretty much every sense. Jonathan Cape are publishing it next year in Kevin Gerry Dunn’s translation, and I can’t wait to see what he does with it, or what English-language readers make of it.

9. Who has been the most challenging author to translate?

Every book presents different challenges, and every book can feel like the most challenging book you’ve ever translated at one point or other in the process! Sometimes a book can be difficult because the narrative voice is so far from your own that you feel as if you’re in uncharted terrain (for example with Selva Almada’s Brickmakers), but at other times the difficulty arises when the voice is so close to your own that it’s difficult to keep the two apart (which was a challenge with The Luminous Novel – perhaps surprisingly, since the narrator is a misanthropic, reclusive sexagenarian Uruguayan man).

10. Is it necessary for a literary translator to also be a writer?

Yes, very much so! You choose every word of the translation, just as the author chooses every word of the original text, and if the translation is going to be as great a literary work as the original – which is definitely the aim – you need to do it just as well as the original author did. I wouldn’t say that literary translators and authors are doing exactly the same thing, however: obviously, authors are also dealing with structure, plot, characters, etc. But if writing books from scratch is one kind of writing, then translating them is another – the purest kind, some people say, because the plot, characters, structure etc. have already been decided before you begin, and you deal only with the words themselves.

11. What would you recommend to Spanish publishers in order to encourage translations?

I think communication with people who know the English-language market is key, be they agents, English-language publishers or translators working into English. It’s very helpful that there’s Acción Cultural Española funding available for sample translations, for example, and it would be great to see Spanish publishers actively working with translators to produce samples of books they’re interested in selling. Translators often have in-depth knowledge of the English-language publishing market, and will be able to suggest which presses could be a good fit for particular books, or what different presses might be on the lookout for any given time.

12. What are the creative requirements of literary translation?

I think it’s absolutely crucial to be creative as a literary translator, in order to do justice to the authors you’re translating. David Bellos´ book Is that a Fish in Your Ear? mentions research which found the vocabulary of books in translation to be narrower than the vocabulary of books originally in English. I’ve been haunted by that ever since I read it, because it’s completely the wrong way round! Translation should be about stretching the English language into new shapes and making it do things it’s never done before in order to contain all these texts that it’s never contained before. I think sometimes translators’ eagerness to make a translation sound ‘natural’ and ‘right’ can lead us towards clichés or stock phrases, when in fact the challenge we face is something far more difficult: to make new and different ways of using English also sound ‘natural’ and ‘right’.