American Literary Translators Association

A Glimpse of the New Literary Digital Puzzlescape

My writing assistant, Washi, bright and shiny in this rectangular image. Not yet ready for Hollywood Squares!

Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve just finished up with two virtual conferences, the American Literary Translators Association’s, which was to have been held in Tuscon, Arizona and went to Crowdcast, and Women Writing the West, slated for Colorado Springs, which ended up on Zoom. Kudos to all the many volunteers who made these conference conversions-to-virtual possible, and on relatively short notice! There was a learning curve, indeed! I did my nitpicks on their respective post-conference surveys, but in all, I’d call both conferences well done, well worthwhile to have participated in, and I am sincerely grateful.

For the American Literary Translators Association I read an excerpt from my translation of Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum’s short story “The Aunt,” and for Women Writing the West I gave a break-out workshop on poetic technique for fiction and narrative nonfiction. I also pitched a bunch of agents and editors, something I always find worthwhile for one reason or another (that would be another blog post). And there were cornucopias of readings and panels to Zoom in on. I guess that’s a new use of that verb.

Will I participate in another virtual writers conference? ~~You betcha. I’m already planning on the Biographers International virtual conference scheduled for spring 2021.~~ UPDATE Jan 2022: Meh.

It was weird, though. And frankly, the benefit of attending a conference isn’t quite so much in the quality of the panels, workshops, and readings— valuable and appealing as those may be— so much as it is the chance to get together with friends and colleagues old and new whether in scheduled meetings or serendipitous chats over coffee during the breaks, or say, in the evening, at a reading. For me conferences are about the people, and having to view those people boxed in Hollywood-Squares-style on a screen, and interact via computer program, and all while being recorded… Ick.

On the other hand, a real world conference can be far more expensive, time consuming, and exhausting—as you might guess if you read my report on AWP 2019. But I think that those massive conferences have had their Chicxulub. Post-corona, I wouldn’t be surprised to see AWP and some others, such as ALTA and Women Writing the West, return to their real world versions, however, on a much more modest and with tandem cheaper virtual options on offer—the latter at once appealing to new groups of participants and cannibalizing demand for the former. Many may remain virtual conferences permanently.

I took two lessons from these two recent virtual conferences, both surprising to me.

First, it’s really nasty, event after event, day after day, having to look at people’s grayish and distorted faces, swaths of oddly tilted ceilings, peculiarly placed pictures, and random household clutter. Ergo, turn the lights on, and clean the joint up! Get the camera elevated enough to avoid pointing at the ceiling (this can be accomplished by sitting the laptop on top of a fat book), and sit back a ways, so your face looks more natural. Thank you.

Second, email follow-up, always vital to making a conference worthwhile, has become even moreso.

The saddest, though unsurprising, thing to me about these virtual conferences was the fate of the book fair. Both conferences offered a virtual bookstore—at a click from each conference’s online brochure, the books of keynote speakers, award winners, panelists, could be found for sale online. But I missed both of them. By Jove, I already spend too much time sitting in front of a screen! Back when these conferences were held in the real world, however, strolling and browsing the conference book fair was always a joy.

Dear writerly reader, these virtual conferences may be here to stay, they do have some attractions and important benefits, and of course I would agree that, as I’ve heard others say many a time in recent months, they are “better than nothing.” I do not consider them an unalloyed “development,” however, for in turning us into disembodied images, and herding these images into the little boxes dictated by software programs, they seriously impoverish us as human beings.

I am ever-haunted by E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”

Notes on Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute

The Book As Thoughtform, the Book As Object:
A Book Rescued, a Book Attacked, and
Katherine Dunn’s Beautiful Book White Dog Arrives

Waaaay Out to the Big Bend of Far West Texas,
and a Note on El Paso’s Elroy Bode

Translation on the Menu, Plus from the Archives: “Café San Martín”– Reading Mexican Poet Agustín Cadena at the Café Passé in Tucson, Arizona

For me literary translation is a yoga, a labor of love, and a form of homage to both individual writers and poets and to Mexico, the country where I have lived for most of my life. For many years now, with one exception, and not counting the work of editing a magazine and an anthology, I’ve focussed on translating Mexican contemporary poems and short fiction that, with a bit of effort (and on occasion, by synchronistic magic) end up in literary magazines and small press anthologies. Payment usually: two copies of the publication. News flash: Not a way for anyone to make a living. But it is a wonderful thing to do, and I sincerely encourage writers and poets– most especially poets– to give translation a go. You don’t need to speak the original language fluently (though I do, in fact, speak Spanish fluently). The important things are firstly, getting permission (usually not a problem); secondly, a willingness to make the dedicated effort to understand the original (which may require a dictionary and the help of a native-speaker); and thirdly, an ability to render the work with equivalent art in one’s own language. This is why poets so often make the best literary translators, even when they cannot speak the original language.

Our world needs translation. It’s such fun to be able to share a discovery. Sometimes in undertaking a translation one makes a new friend–or deepens an already existing friendship. And from a purely selfish point of view, for the translator it can be a most stimulating and refreshing exercise in wrestling with the languages– the original language and one’s own. As an artist, translation shakes me up, it keeps my own writing and poetry fresh.

I’ve got a long list of translation projects… many to be aimed at literary magazines, and a few with more commercial possibilities…. right now, however, I’m still working on my Far West Texas book and, relatedly, the 22nd podcast for the Marfa Mondays series, which I hope to be able to post this month. But next month at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) virtual conference I will be back on Planet Translation, albeit briefly, to read an excerpt from a short story by Mexican writer Rose Mary Salum. Apropos of that upcoming powwow, here’s a post from the archives about my reading of a poem by Agustín Cadena at that same conference in 2015. I’m not Cadena’s only English language translator, by the way– my dear and esteemed amiga poet and essayist Pat Dubrava has also translated a large batch of Cadena’s short stories. They are brilliant. She’ll be reading some Cadena at this next ALTA.

Café San Martín: Reading Mexican Poet Agustín Cadena
at the Café Passé in Tucson, Arizona

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog December 14, 2015

Sparkling sky and only a jeans jacket on the night before Halloween, University of Arizona students everywhere, in witches’ hats and zombie makeup: that’s how it was in Tucson when, as part of the American Literary Translators Conference “Café Latino” bilingual reading fiesta at Café Passé in Tucson, I read my translation, together with the Spanish original, of Mexican poet Agustín Cadena’s poem “Café San Martín.” That translation appears in poet Sarah Cortez’s recent anthology, Goodbye Mexico (Texas Tech Press).

> Read Cadena’s poem and about Goodbye Mexico here. (NOTE: This link goes to the old blog on blogger.com. I’ll update the link as soon as this post is migrated.)

> Listen to the recording of my reading of Cadena’s “Cafe San Martin” in the Café Passé as a podcast here.

Alas, Cadena could not be in Tucson because he lives in Hungary, where he teaches Latin American Literary in Debrecen. Follow his blog, El vino y la hiel.

Cadena’s name and many works — he is incredibly prolific and writes in almost every genre–were mentioned many times over the course of this year’s ALTA conference. My dear amiga Patricia Dubrava, who also translates Cadena’s poems and short fiction, shared a panel with me on the following day.

> Read about that panel, and my talk for that panel, here.

It was an extra special honor to read Cadena’s poem and my translation because not only is Cadena a treasure of a writer– among the very finest Mexico has ever produced– moreover, he has translated many of my works, including the most recent Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution (as Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana).

And a very special thank you to Alexis Levitin, my favorite Portuguese translator (and, by the way, editor of Brazil: A Traveler’s Literary Companion), who organized and MC’ed the reading.

Q & A: Ellen Cassedy,
Translator of On the Landing by Yenta Mash,
Master Chronicler of Exile

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: “The Apaches of Kiev”
by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly and Much More

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:
Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

Café San Martín: Reading Mexican Poet Agustín Cadena at the Café Passé in Tucson, Arizona

> Read Cadena’s poem and about Goodbye Mexico here. (NOTE: This link goes to the old blog on blogger.com. I’ll update the link as soon as this post is migrated.)

> Listen to the recording of my reading of Cadena’s “Cafe San Martin” in the Café Passé as a podcast here.

Alas, Cadena could not be in Tucson because he lives in Hungary, where he teaches Latin American Literary in Debrecen. Follow his blog, El vino y la hiel.

The audience was also especially distinguished, including Jeffrey C. Barnett, Mary Berg, Ellen Cassedy, Dick Cluster, Pamela Carmel, Jill Gibian, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Suzanne Jill Levine, Angela McEwan, Barbara Paschke, Liliana Valenzuela, and so many other writers, poets and literary translators of note.

And a very special thank you to Alexis Levitin, my favorite Portuguese translator (and, by the way, editor of Brazil: A Traveler’s Literary Companion), who organized and MC’ed the reading.

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: “The Apaches of Kiev”
by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly and Much More

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico’s Secret Book

Translating Across the Border

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers: Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

Yours Truly and Patricia Dubrava with a chapbook of my translation of a short story
by Agustín Cadena. We both translate Cadena.

For the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference in Tucson late last month, apart from participating on Mark Weiss’s excellent panel “Translating Across the Border,” I proposed and chaired a panel that addressed a topic that, in truth, could have been considered for translating poets and writers in any of the populated continents:

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:
Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

The panelists were Yours Truly (transcript of my talk follows), Jeffrey C. Barnett, Patricia Dubrava, and Clare Sullivan.

In the audience: several very distinguished literary translators (lotus petals upon y’all). The Q & A was extra crunchy, and in true ALTA fashion, in the sweetest way.

(Seriously, literary translators, and especially the crowd that regularly attends ALTA conferences, are angelically generous and encouraging. If any of you reading this have ever thought of trying literary translation and/or attending a literary translator’s conference, my recommendation is, YES!)

LAS TRES AMIGAS: Yours Truly, Clare Sullivan, and Patricia Dubrava.

Jeffrey C. Barnett, C.M. Mayo, Patricia Dubrava

Transcript of C.M. Mayo’s Remarks for the panel on

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:
Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

ALTA, Tucson, Arizona,
October 31, 2015

I started translating in Mexico City in the early 1990s. Mexico City is Mexico’s capital, but it’s not analogous to Washington DC or, say, Ottowa, Canada. The megalopolis, “the endless city,” as Carlos Monsivaís calls Mexico City, is like Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, all piled into one. In other words, its the political capital, financial capital, publishing capital, cultural capital, and television and movie capital. Oh, and business capital, too. Yes, there are other important cities in Mexico, and they have become more important in many ways, and some of them have some excellent writers and poets. But Mexico City is MEXICO CITY.

Back in the early 1990s, the ruling party, the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power, about to enter the last decade of its more than 70— yes, 70—years in power. How did it last so long? There are many answers to that question but the main one relevant for our topic at hand is that the PRI attempted to bring everyone, whether farmers, campesinos, industrialists or intellectuals, and that would include poets and writers, under its own big tent. It had its ways. Stick and carrot— or bone, as Mexicans like to say.

You may be aware that after two consecutive presidential administrations under the PAN or the Partido Acción Nacional, over the past decade, Mexico’s Presidency has since returned to the PRI. But it’s not exactly a return to the past. Not exactly.

I’m not going to get all political on you, I simply want to underline the fact that back in early 1990s, the Mexican literary establishment, concentrated in Mexico City, was heavily influenced by and subsidized by the PRI government. Just to give you a notion of this: If you were to go into a library and look at some back issues of the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine of the time— of course that would be Octavio’s Paz’s Vuelta— you would see a large number of advertisements from government-owned entities and Televisa, the party-allied television conglomerate. There were literary gatekeepers, as there are everywhere in this world, but in Mexico City at that time, they were very few and ginormously powerful. Octavio Paz was king.

Though Octavio Paz met his maker some years ago, in some ways things remain the same. Mexico City is where it’s at. The government still plays an important, although lesser role. Letras Libres, successor to Vuelta, remains a leading magazine of influence, and in fact it does publish some of the best writing you’ll find anywhere.

But since the early 1990s there have been political and economic sea-changes in Mexico. Power is more dispersed. Other political parties have become far more powerful. On the right and the left they rival the PRI and on many an occasion, beat the PRI at the ballot box.

And even more than the political and economic changes, the technological changes have been sea-changes. I’m talking about the rise of digital media, from blogging to YouTube, podcasting, Tweeting, FaceBooking, and publishing— and by the way, amazon is now in Mexico with www.amazon.com.mx.

To find a Mexican writer to translate, you no longer have to travel to Mexico City and get chummy with the powers that be who can make recommendations and, perhaps, invite the anointed to tea. Now, say, from Boston or Hong Kong or Cleveland, you can follow any given Mexican writer’s blog, and comment thereupon. Or, say, send her a Tweet!

I would love to tell you the story of how, in the late 1990s, I started my bilingual magazine, Tameme, which published many Mexican writers, and my experiences with putting together the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion— no easy task, since the idea of the TLC series is to provide writing about the whole country— and that would include writing from and about Baja California, Yucatan, Chiapas, Chihuahua…

At present I am translating short stories by four Mexican writers: Ignacio Solares, a novelist born in Ciudad Juárez, long based in Mexico City; Agustín Cadena, who was born in the state of Hidalgo and is living in Hungary; Araceli Ardón, who was born in San Miguel de Allende and lives in Querétaro; and yet another, Rose Mary Salum, who is from Mexico City and is now based in Houston, Texas.

But I don’t want to take time from my fellow panelists and what I hope will be a rich question and answer session. The main thing I want to emphasize is that, as literary translators, we can play a powerful role in influencing who is and who is not read in English.

Whom to translate? It’s good to ask for advice from the powers that be of the literary establishment in, say, Mexico or Cuba or Chile, and maybe even choose to translate one of them. They might be blast-your-wig-to-the-asteroid-belt fabulous! But we also have to recognize that there are power structures in literary communities, some of them entangled with political structures, and we need to acknowledge and examine, in our own minds, and our own hearts, what part we play in that or choose not to play. And why.

# # #

Catamaran Literary Reader and My Translation of
Mexican Writer Rose Mary Salum’s “The Aunt”

On Seeing As an Artist: Five Techniques for a Journey to Einfühlung

Diction Drops and Spikes

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Q & A: Roger Greenwald, Poet and Literary Translator of Gunnar Harding

ROGER GREENWALD, POET AND TRANSLATOR
Photo by Alf Magne Heskja

I got poet Roger Greenwald on my radar when we crossed paths at last year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference in Milwaukee [see my post Why Translate?], and I began to read his gorgeous latest translation, Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding. (Greenwald’s latest book, actually, is Slow Mountain Train, more about that after the Q & A. Important point: I have always believed, for it has always been my experience, that the best literary translators are poets.)

Gunnar Harding, a jazz musician, painter, essayist and a translator himself, is one of Sweden’s leading poets. Surely Harding is one of Sweden’s most prolific as well; Greenwald has selected numerous poems from more than a dozen of his books. Strange, witty and jazzy, Harding’s poems wing from the moon’s Sea of Tranquility to nickels in a jukebox (“Rebel without a Cause”).

> Visit Greenwald’s webpage for the book, which includes some of the poems and a video of the launch, here.

> Read the review by Christine Roe for Words Without Borders. “Spanning a lifetime of poetry, Guarding the Air pays homage to tragically under-translated Swedish literary legend”

> Gunnar Harding on Swedish Wikipedia
(Note: I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, but alas I could not find much else on Gunnar Harding. Caveat emptor.)

ROGER GREENWALD attended The City College of New York and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. His poetry has appeared in such journals as The World, Pequod, Pleiades, Poetry East, Prism International, The Spirit That Moves Us, The Texas Observer, Great River Review, and Leviathan Quarterly. He has won two Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Literary Awards (poetry and travel literature) and has published two books of poems: Connecting Flight from Williams-Wallace in Toronto and in April 2015, Slow Mountain Train, from Tiger Bark Press in Rochester, New York.

C.M. MAYO: In a sentence, why should readers pick up this book?

ROGER GREENWALD: This selection spans the whole career of a major poet whose work is accessible and appealing– and also strong in both idea and feeling.

C.M. MAYO: What were the challenges for you as a translator?

ROGER GREENWALD: First I had to understand each poem in depth, of course, and in this case that meant understanding not only the language and the “argument,” but a broad range of allusions to other literary works, paintings, recorded music, places, people, and so on. (I’ve put pointers to these in endnotes.)

The biggest challenge, as always, was to write in English poems that had something like the voice and the music of the source. People assume that it is easier to translate poems written in a colloquial voice than to translate work full of neologisms, broken syntax, word play, and other notoriously “tough” features. But the fact is that those features give a translator license to be creative and sometimes to sound “strange”; whereas to translate a whole book in a colloquial voice, getting the literal sense and the line units and the music right while never once sounding odd or “translated” is just as hard or harder.

C.M. MAYO: What advice would you offer others who might consider undertaking a poetry translation?

ROGER GREENWALD: Translate into your native language. If you’re not doing that, you need to collaborate with a poet whose native language is the target language. Try to live for at least a year in the country that your poet and his or her language come from. Read not just the major works from that country’s literature, but some of what children read in school years, like fairy tales. Get to know some of the art and music. Watch TV and listen to radio. And ask a lot of questions, especially about the language, its idioms, its peculiarities. When you start understanding friends’ jokes, stand-up comics, and locally made comedy films, you will know your cultural immersion has worked.

C.M. MAYO: As a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), can you talk about what the benefits have been for you as a translator?

ROGER GREENWALD: The greatest benefits have come from sharing knowledge and experiences with other translators. Seeing and hearing their work and discussing how they approached certain texts gave me useful insights into practice. But it was also important to learn about how to navigate relationships with authors and their publishers, how to find suitable potential English-language publishers, how to present work to those, and how to avoid getting burned by unfair contracts. Simply hearing, in the Bilingual Reading series at ALTA conferences, a great range of usually unpublished work, some of it still in progress, has been an ongoing source of delight and inspiration.

And beyond that, it’s worth saying that literary translators have to be some of the most interesting people in the world, with extremely diverse backgrounds, experiences of foreign cultures, and knowledge of wonderful writers who are little known in English, even if their work has been translated and published. So it has been great to get to know my fascinating colleagues!

C.M. MAYO: Are there are other associations you would recommend?

ROGER GREENWALD: None that I belong to. But I have had it in mind for some time to look into the Authors Guild, because it is focused on advocating for fair treatment of authors and translators. And this seems to be an issue of growing concern as digital media undermine publishing revenue, and as companies like Amazon demand deep discounts and exert downward pressure on the sale price of both paper and electronic books.

[C.M.: See my post Shout-out for the Authors Guild.]

C.M. MAYO: Where can readers find a copy of this book?

ROGER GREENWALD: I’m happy to say that the publisher of Guarding the Air has excellent worldwide distribution. So readers can buy it directly from the press at www.blackwidowpress.com (choose “Modern Poets” or use Search); they can order it through any independent bookseller they care to support; or they can buy it on line from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

It’s also worth remembering that readers can ask their public library or their college library to acquire the book.

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From Roger Greenwald’s new book of poems, Slow Mountain Train: