My favorite rare book historian Michael F. Suarez, SJ gives this excellent talk for TEDxCharlotteville:
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AND FROM THE MADAM MAYO ARCHIVES…
Poco a poco (bit by bit), since January of this year I have been migrating selected and updated posts from Madam Mayo’s original Google Blogger platform to self-hosted WordPress here at www.madam-mayo.com. Madam Mayo goes all the way back to the Cambrianesquely Blogasonic Explosion, I mean, um, 2006… This past week I’ve worked a bit on the translation posts, among them:
TRANSLATING ACROSS THE BORDER Originally posted October 29, 2015 Edited Transcript of a Talk by C.M. Mayo at the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)
Muchísimas gracias, Mark Weiss, and thank you also to my fellow panelists, it is an honor to sit on this dias with you. Thank you all for coming. It is especially apt to be talking about translating Mexican writing here, a jog from the Mexican border, in Tucson—or Tuk-son as the Mexicans pronounce it.
I grew up in Northern California and was educated in various places but mainly the University of Chicago. As far as Mexico went, until I was in my mid-twenties, I had absorbed, to use historian John Tutino’s term, the “enduring presumptions.” Translation: I had zero interest in Mexico.
You know that old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans?
C.M. Mayo and Wendy Burk at the “Translating the ther Side” panel American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, Tucson, 2015. Mark Weiss, chair of the panel, is in the back on the right.
American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference 38, Tucson, October 29, 2015 Panel: “Translating the Other Side” Moderator, Mark Weiss Panelists: Wendy Burk, Catherine Hammond, C.M. Mayo
Edited Transcript of Talk by C.M. Mayo
Muchísimas gracias, Mark Weiss, and thank you also to my fellow panelists, it is an honor to sit on this dias with you. Thank you all for coming. It is especially apt to be talking about translating Mexican writing here, a jog from the Mexican border, in Tucson—or Tuk-son as the Mexicans pronounce it.
I grew up in Northern California and was educated in various places but mainly the University of Chicago. As far as Mexico went, until I was in my mid-twenties, I had absorbed, to use historian John Tutino’s term, the “enduring presumptions.” Translation: I had zero interest in Mexico.
You know that old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans?
What brought me to translating Mexican poetry and literary prose was that I married a Mexican—my fellow graduate student at University of Chicago— and we moved to his hometown, Mexico City, in 1986. I am happy to say that we are about to celebrate our 30th anniversary.
For me, as a writer, and as a translator, these decades, mainly spent in Mexico City, have been a grand adventure in learning and exploring the cultures, histories, and geography of Mexico and of course, learning Spanish. I cannot claim that I speak and write Spanish like a native—I started learning Spanish when I was 24 years old. But after three decades in Mexico… well, after three decades of living in any country, if you haven’t learned the language, at least to level of conversation and daily business… I was about to say something unkind.
My husband has his own and very distinguished career as an economist but I call him my Translation Assistant. Although I would say I am fluent in Mexican Spanish, as all of you well know, literary translation can be fluky-tricky. Many a time he has rescued me from what would have been toe-curling embarrassment. May we all have our translation assistants.
Includes my translations of work by T. López Mills
It was back in the early 1990s, when I started writing my own poetry and short fiction, that I had two epiphanies. First epiphany: I could do this! I mean, I knew some Spanish and at the same time, I could write literary fiction and poetry myself. I was beginning to get my own stories and poems published in well-regarded literary journals, such as the Paris Review, The Quarterly, Southwest Review. That gave me a shot of confidence. To this day, I really believe that the best literary translators are not necessarily the most fluent, the most perfectly bilingual, but rather, those who can render the work into the same literary level in the target language.
And the second epiphany was that appallingly little Mexican work was being translated into English.There were some books, mainly from university presses, the occasional anthology, and here and there, a poem in a literary magazine, but I was in Mexico City, in Coyoacán, I could see what was going on, the rich, flourishing literary culture. It was obvious to me that this was not registering in the literary communities north of the border, not the way it should.
Includes my translation of a story by Alvaro Enrigue
For me, getting to know Mexican poets and writers was not difficult. Back in those days of yore, before the Internet … well, one important poet, Manuel Ulacia, was my neighbor. We would often see each other out walking our dogs.
But let me back up for a broader perspective.
Mexico shares a 2,000 mile border with the United States, spanning the southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and the greater part of Texas. And Mexico has some of the richest literary traditions in the world.
It starts with the codexes of the Maya and the Aztecs, and others—and as a quick side note, there is a book forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press by archaeologist Dr. Carolyn Boyd, in which she argues that the White Shaman rock site near the U.S.-Mexico border in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, which is thousands of years old, is actually a codex— and basing some of her arguments on the work of Mexican anthropologists, Dr. Boyd has decoded it. It tells the story of creation. And so we can think about “White Shaman” as the first known book in North America. North America, of course, includes Mexico. And the Texan side of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands was once part of Mexico.
And speaking of books, you may recall the hullabaloo about the 14.2 million dollar sale of a copy of the first English language book printed in the New World, The Whole Booke of Psalmes of 1640. Well, that was more than one hundred years after the first Spanish language book was printed in Mexico City. That was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana, printed in 1539. And there may have been an even earlier book printed in 1537, Escala Espiritual par llegar al cielo, but no known copies survive.
My anthology of 24 Mexican writers on Mexico. Read more about this book, including excerpts, here.
In the prologue to my anthology of 24 Mexican writers, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, I write, “Mexican literature—a vast banquet—is one of the greatest achievements if the Americas. And yet we who read in English have gone hungry, for so astonishingly little of it has been published.”
Mexico: A Literary Traveler’s Companion was published in 2006 and although I know many of you and other members of ALTA, and other translators, have since then published many Mexican works in translation, and anthologies, this scarcity, this appalling scarcity of translations of works from our neighboring country, continues.
I could go on with names, book titles, and numbers from the publishing industry, but it would be too sad. To give you the simplest and most concrete sense of how sad this situation is, when the sales team asked for blurbs for Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, I really had a problem. Of course there are many anthologies of English language writing about Mexico. But Mexicans writing about Mexico? I would have to ask a Mexican for a blurb. But what Mexican?
Octavio Paz? Yes, he won the Nobel Prize. But he was dead.
Carlos Fuentes? He was in the anthology himself, so asking him for a blurb would have been awkward. Anyway, he wasn’t answering his email.
Sales reps and bookstore buyers, for the most part, did not recognize the name of any Mexican writer.
Salma Hayek? I suggested.
The sales rep answered, “WOW! That would be AWESOME!”
(No offense intended to Ms Hayek, an accomplished Mexican actress and producer. But methinks a blurb from her, had I been able to wrangle one, would have carried about as much clout as that of, say– to scramble it into Texanese, porquois pas– a rodeo barrel racing champion opining on the national polo team.)
We ended up using a blurb that Isabelle Allende had provided for the Traveler’s Literary Companion series itself—a series from Whereabouts Press that includes many countries, among them, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and as far afield as Australia and Viet Nam.
And I managed to wrangle a blurb from Isabelle Allende’s translator, a translator who is a queen among us—I know many of you will recognize her name—Margaret Sayers Peden. She wrote:
“This delicious volume has lovingly gathered a banquet of pieces that reveal Mexico in all its infinite variety, its spendid geography, its luminous peoples. What a treat!”
Apart from the anthology and various
contributions to other anthologies and literary magazines, for a few years I
founded and edited Tameme, a bilingual
literary journal of new writing from Canada, the US and Mexico. That was a
project I did with my dad, Roger Mansell,
who had 25 years of experience in the graphic arts and printing business in San
Francisco. So if I do say so myself, the three issues of Tameme and two
chapbooks were quite beautiful and they should be collector’s items.
Unfortunately my dad passed away, and with my own books to write, Tameme
was more than I could handle.
Apart from Tameme, the largest translation
project I have undertaken to date is a strange one, and I bring it up because I
know that for many of you the question of rights is a concern. A book that is
out of copyright, you can grab that, you can translate that. Go to it!
Francisco Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910
Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was overthrown in
a coup d’etat and murdered. Madero was a Spiritist medium, that is, he believed
he could communicate with the dead—and so can you! His secret book, Spiritist
Manual, written in 1910—the year he launched the Revolution—and published
under a pseudonym when was president elect in 1911, is… all about that. And I
translated it because nobody else had.
As I said in my panel talk last year,
I cannot deny other motives and the millions of other participants in that Revolution of 1910. But its spark, and the way it played out, and, I believe, Madero’s murder, become a radically different story once we take into account his Spiritism.
My aim with my book and my translation of Madero’s book is to deepen our understanding of Madero, both as an individual and as a political figure; and at the same time, deepen our understanding of the rich esoteric matrix from which his ideas sprang, in other words, not to promote his ideas nor disparage them, but explain them and give them context.
It is also then my aim to deepen our understanding of the 1910 Revolution and therefore of Mexico itself, and because the histories are intertwined, therefore also deepen our understanding of North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and more— for as long as a book exists, should someone happen to read it, it can catalyze change in understanding (and other changes) that ripple out, endlessly.
Such is the wonder, the magical embryonic power of a book, any book, whether original or in translation: that, even as it rests on a dusty shelf for a hundred years, or for that matter, an unvisited digital “shelf,” if it can be found, if it can be read, it holds such potential.
To conclude: I mainly translate contemporary Mexican
short fiction and poetry. It is a labor of love and, as an English language
writer who lives in Mexico City, a way for me to engage with Mexico and with my
Mexican colleagues. And finally, translating is a way to bring what I can,
whether it be a monster on a platter or algún taquito sabroso, to the
literary banquet.
To quote myself again from the prologue of Mexico:
A Traveler’s Literary Companion, “Throughout Mexico there are so very many
writers whose work has yet to be translated, or, though translated, deserves a
far wider readership in English.”
Any and all of you who have an interest in
translating Mexican literature— know that you have my heartfelt good wishes.
At ALTA, I spoke on two panels and read an excerpt from my translation of a work by Mexico’s great novelist and short story writer Ignacio Solares. (Had the scheduling permitted, I would have loved to have also shared new translations of works by Mexican writers Agustin Cadena and Rose Mary Salum. Here’s to ALTA in Tucson, Arizona in 2015!)
Herewith the transcript of my talk for the second panel, “Why Translate?”
WHY TRANSLATE? THE CASE OF THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO’S SECRET BOOK
A (slightly edited and expanded) transcript of C.M. Mayo’s talk for the panel “Why Translate?” American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) Conference Milwaukee, November 15, 2014
I translate for the same reasons that I write. There are many, but we have limited time, so I will focus on two, which are: I want to understand, and I want to share that understanding.
Sharing might just be with myself, as in a diary entry, or with a cadre of of loyal readers and any Internet surfers who happen onto this blog, Madam Mayo. Sharing ramps up, of course, when we start talking about books.
People have many different and varied motivations for writing and publishing books— and for some, one of them is nothing less than to change the world. Or maybe, to change our understanding of some aspect of the world— and so change the world.
FRANCISCO I. MADERO, President of Mexico, 1911-1913
TWO SYSTEMS: THE HEAVILY INTERMEDIATED AND THE RELATIVELY DIRECT
Whether in its original language or as a translation, a book is a vector for a set of ideas, a very unusual and efficient vector, for it can zing ideas from mind to mind, spreading out over great distances and, potentially, far into the future.
Books can travel through two systems, or rather, an array of systems: at one extreme, the heavily intermediated, and at the other, the direct.
Our commercial publishing industry constitutes that first extreme. To give a stylized example, a book comes into the hands of an agent, then an acquiring editor, perhaps a developmental editor, a copyeditor, a book designer, a formatter, a cover designer, the proofreader, the printer, the delivery truck driver, the warehouse employees, the distributor, the sales rep, the bookstore’s buyer, and so on and so forth until, finally, the cashier hands the book to its reader. Very possibly multiple corporate entities and dozens of individuals play some role in bringing a book to any given reader.
At the other extreme, I scribble on a piece of paper and hand it to you.
I submit that we tend to over focus on this heavily intermediated system; we often overlook the fact that it is not the only or even necessarily the best way for a book to fulfill its purpose.
TWO BOOKS BY FRANCISCO I. MADERO
I’m going to focus on two books, both political, both by Francisco I. Madero.
If you are at all familiar with Mexican history, Francisco I. Madero needs no introduction. If Mexican history is a mystery to you, the main thing you need to know is that Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913.
His first book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910, or The Presidential Succession in 1910, published in 1909, served as his political platform in challenging the old regime. Though it was after the stolen elections of 1910 that Madero declared the Revolution on November 20, 1910, informally, we could say that the Revolution was launched with this book.
The first page of Madero’s La sucesion presidencial en 1910. “To the heroes of our country; to the independent journalists; to the good Mexicans”
Francisco I. Madero’s secret book, Manual espírita, written 1909-1910 and published in 1911.
Apropos of Madero’s two books and the two systems to bring a book to its readers, the heavily intermediated and the relatively direct, a bit from the opening of chapter 2 of my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution:
When we talk about a “successful book,” usually what we mean is one that has a brand-name publisher, enjoys prime shelf space in bookstores, and earns its author buckets of royalties. In other words, we talk about it as a commodity—or, if we’re a mite more sophisticated, a hybrid commodity / work of art / scholarship. I say “we” because I am writing and I presume you are reading this in a time and place where books are no longer banned by the government, their authors no longer casually imprisoned—or worse. Lulled by endless streams of made-for-the-movies thrillers and romances, we forget that, as Ray Bradbury put it, “A book is a loaded gun.”
Francisco I. Madero intended his Manual espírita to be a beam of light, to heal Mexico and the world with his consoling concepts of the nature and meaning of life. However, it is a book that stands on the shoulders of his first book that was, indeed, a loaded gun: La sucesión presidencial en 1910, published in the winter of 1909 when Don Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who had stolen the presidency in a coup d’état and ruled Mexico on and off for over thirty years, was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday and, as Mexico’s so-called “necessary man,” take for himself a seventh term.
Madero had no interest in the capitalist concept of a book’s success; he wanted La sucesión presidencial en 1910 in people’s hands, and as fast as possible, and for that he did not need bookstores, he needed a jump-start on Don Porfirio’s police. He paid for the printing himself (a first edition of 3,000, and later more) and, as he noted in a letter:
[T]he first precaution I took was to hand out 800 copies to members of the press and intellectuals throughout Mexico, so when the Government got wind of the book’s circulation, it would be too late to stop it. . .
MADERO’S SECOND, SECRET BOOK
Now when we come to Madero’s second book, Manual espírita, or Spiritist Manual, there are two reasons the subtitle of my book calls it his “secret book”: First, he wrote it under a pseudonym; second, incredible as it may sound, for the most part, historians have ignored it. A few have begrudged it a footnote; only a very few— so few that I can count them on one hand— have dared to write about it in any depth and seriousness.
The 1924 edition published by Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona
In 1911 five thousand copies of Madero’s Manual espírita went into circulation, one assumes, among Spiritists. It was reprinted in part by Madero’s enemies, the Reyistas, as an attack– their message being, “Madero is the true author, you see what a nut he is.” And I discovered that in 1924 Casa Editorial Maucci in Barcelona brought out a reprint (print run unknown). I do not know what influence the Manual espírita may or may not have had in spreading Spiritism, whether in Mexico or abroad—it would make a fine PhD dissertation to delve into that question— but as far as historians of Mexico are concerned, until very recently, and apart from a very few and very hard-to-find editions published in Mexico, essentially, the Manual espírita disappeared into the ethers.
I hasten to clarify that I did not self-publish after a string of rejections. I have already published several books, two with university presses and two with major commercial publishers, among others, so I know that, with patience and persistence, should those have proved necessary, my work would have found a home. My decision to self-publish was a deeply thought-out strategy, specific to my circumstances and specific to this title. In short, I decided to skip the heavily intermediated system, which for this book probably would have been a university press. My three reasons:
First, I am not an academic angling for tenure, and as I have already published several books, as a writer and a translator I did not see much to gain by going to a traditional publisher, and in fact I had a lot to lose, mainly time and control;
Second, in English, alas (would that it were otherwise) books on Mexico are not particularly commercial, which makes me suspect that, whatever its merits may or may not be, mine would have taken a shoulder-saggingly long time to bring forth a contract I would have been willing to sign;
Third, for many readers, Spiritism is at once disturbing and beneath their notice. Let’s say, all this concern with the Afterlife and communicating with the dead creeps them out, as would a book on, oh, alien abductions or crop circles. And I believe this explains why even many of the leading historians of the Mexican Revolution do not know about Madero’s Spiritism, or know next to nothing about it. To give you an idea, one major textbook does not deign to mention it, while another textbook, also published by an important university press, blithely labels Madero an atheist, which is rather like calling the Pope of Rome a Protestant.
In our day, what we think of as self-publishing usually includes intermediaries such as amazon.com. In my case this would be amazon.com and Ingram. Ingram’s recent move into the realm of self-publishing is really the topic for another panel, but suffice it to say that for traditional publishing, no exaggeration, this is as momentous as Hiroshima. Ingram is a major book distributor and now also an on-demand book printer, and what listing with Ingram means is that all major on-line booksellers can now, on demand, easily source that self-published book. Libraries can order it, just as they order many of their books from Ingram, and while Barnes & Noble as well as many other major bookstore chains and independent bookstores may not necessarily stock it on their shelves, it’s right there, as easy to order as any other book, on their webpages—again, sourced from Ingram.
As for getting my book into people’s hands, that is a challenge, for without a publisher, I do not have a marketing staff and sales reps. Like Madero with his La sucesión presidencial en 1910, I simply identified key individuals and gave each a copy. These individuals, mainly but not exclusively academics, are experts on Madero, on the Mexican Revolution, Mexican history in general, the history of metaphysical religion, and Masonry (Madero was a Mason).
The process of the book, my little turtle, finding its readers may be a long and winding one, but it is underway [see reviews] and I feel no urge to hurry. Unlike a traditionally published book, which must dash out like a rabbit, digitally available books (ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks sold on-line) are not so heavily dependent on “buzz” generated to coincide with the fleeting moment when a book, thanks to the efforts of marketing staff and sales reps, might be available on physical shelves in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Like grocery stores, brick-and-mortar bookstores must move their merchandize with the seasons and oftentimes, as with the proverbial cottage cheese, even more quickly. Digital bookshelves, however, are of a different nature; at the click of a button, they can unfurl vast dimensions, additions to which impose a marginal cost approaching, or in fact, zero. Now if, on a Tuesday at 4 am, say, seven months or, say, seven years in the future, someone in Oodnadatta, Australia wants to download my Kindle or order my print-on-demand paperback, with a click, he can do just that.
BLASTING THE SOMBRERO OFF THE PARADIGM OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
Will my book with its translation of Madero’s Spiritist Manual change our understanding of Mexican history? Well, I do think it blasts the sombrero off the reigning paradigm to consider that Francisco I. Madero, the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution— an absolutely transformative episode in Mexican history and the first major revolution of the 20th century—was a not only a Spiritist but a leading Spiritist and a Spiritist medium (and, it all relates, a devoted student of the Hindu holy text known as the Bhagavad Gita).
Madero believed that he was channeling written instructions and encouragement from spirits in writing both of his books, and furthermore, in his Spiritist Manual, he detailed his beliefs about such esoterica as astral travel and interplanetary reincarnation, and the moral duty of political action.
For anyone who chooses to open their eyes and look at the overwhelming evidence, the connection between Madero’s beliefs and his politics is clear. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writes in his seminal 1987 biography, Francisco I. Madero: Místico de la libertad, in the case of Madero, “Politics does not displace Spiritism; it is born of it.”
I do not deny other motives and the millions of other participants in that Revolution. But its spark, and the way it played out, and, I believe, Madero’s murder, are a radically different story once we take into account his Spiritism.
My aim with my book and my translation of Madero’s book is to deepen our understanding of Madero, both as an individual and as a political figure; and at the same time, deepen our understanding of the rich esoteric matrix from which his ideas sprang, in other words, not to promote his ideas nor disparage them, but explain them and give them context.
It is also then my aim to deepen our understanding of the 1910 Revolution and therefore of Mexico itself, and because the histories are intertwined, therefore also deepen our understanding of North America, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and more— for as long as a book exists, should someone happen to read it, it can catalyze change in understanding (and other changes) that ripple out, endlessly.
Such is the wonder, the magical embryonic power of a book, any book, whether original or in translation: that, even as it rests on a dusty shelf for a hundred years, or for that matter, an unvisited digital “shelf,” if it can be found, if it can be read, it holds such potential.
