While it is a joy to be able to publish without gatekeepers– joy enough that I for one have been blogging every Monday and oftentimes more often since 2006– a curated presentation of poetry and prose, that is, the traditionally edited literary magazine on ye olde paper, has not disappeared, nor will it, and thank goodness.
As an ex-literary magazine editor myself (Tameme), I have a big heart full of appreciation for such magazines. And when they are as unique, and as beautifully edited and exceptionally well-designed as these two, I want to get up on the top of the roof and toot a tuba– or something!
CATAMARAN LITERARY READER
Founding editor Catherine Segurson describes Catamaran
as “pages full of color, inviting images, and engrossing stories, poems and
essays—all from curious and inventive minds.”
Indeed: standouts in this issue include a poem
and an essay by Richard Blanco, and the
several paintings by Bo Bartlett, whose “Via
Mal Contenti” graces the cover. More about artist Bo Bartlett in this
brief video:
Catamaran makes a special effort to
include literary translation in every issue. N.B.: Catamaran’s contributing
editors include essayist and translator Thomas Christensen and
poet, teacher, and noted translator Zack Rogow.
“Thank you for this journal which combines spiritual issues, imaginative issues, esthetic issues. All of those, I think, need to be in the mix for the richly lived life, the richly observed life.”
This Fall 2016 issue opens with a splendid essay
by poet Mark Doty, “Luckier / Rowdyish, Carlacue, Wormfence and Foosfoos.” Just
for that yonder-galaxy-beyond-the-Cineplex-title: Another thank you!
ABOUTFRANCISCO I. MADERO, Leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution; President of Mexico, 1911-1913
My piece in Tiferet about Madero’s 1911 Spiritist Manual did not include any of my translation, but you can read some of that here. Caveat: If you are unfamiliar with metaphysics you might find Madero’s Spiritist Manual… oh, I guess I would say… wiggy-zoomy.
In which case, I invite you to read my book about that book, my own wiggy-zoomy attempt to give it some cultural-historical-political context, which is available from amazon and other major sellers, and the website offers several lengthy excerpts, as well as extentive Q & A, a podcast of my talk for the University of California San Diego US Mexican Studies Center, the Centennial Lecture for University of Texas El Paso, and several other talks and interviews here. (My personal fave is Greg Kaminsky’s Occult of Personality.)
P.S. & P.S.S.
P.S. For those of you, dear readers, looking to
publish in literary magazines, everything I have to say about the oftentimes
crazy-making lottery-like ritual is here. If
you are audacious enough to start your own journal, I say, go for it! Please!
(But bring a case of apirin and a few wheelbarrows of dough. The green kind.) I
have more to say about literary magazines, past, mine, and future, here.
And for an interview with an editor who managed to establish an unusual level
of financial viability, be sure to check out my podcast
interview with Dallas Baxter, founder of Cenizo Journal.
P.S.S. If you’re wondering what’s up with Marfa Mondays, stay tuned,
the long overdue podcast 21 is still in-progress. Listen in to the other 20
podcasts posted to date here.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
GUNNAR HARDING, Swedish literary legend
> 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 Flightfrom 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.
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. 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.
