La villa

Links to online interviews with Bolaño translators & editors (updated)

Below are web links to profiles-interviews with Bolaño translators, editors, and publishers in English.

(updated Feb. 6, 2013)

CHRIS ANDREWS: Translator of, among others, By Night in Chile and Last Evenings on Earth.

"The Chris Andrews Interview", The Quarterly Conversation

"RTW 2007, E-Panel: Literary Translators", Emerging Writers Network, 18 July 2007

"Interview with Chris Andrews", The Mookse and the Gripes, 16 July 2009

"Found in translation", The Australian, 20 March 2010

"This Week in Fiction: Roberto Bolaño", The Book Bench (The New Yorker), 14 April 2010

"Chris Andrews", Bombsite, June 2012

"Out and About: A Panel Discussion with Bolaño Translators Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer", Now That It's Now, 15 November 2012

NATASHA WIMMER: Translator of, among others, The Savage Detectives and Between Parentheses.

"Nine Questions for Natasha Wimmer on The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño", Conversational Reading

"Interview with Natasha Wimmer", hey small press!

"The Natasha Wimmer Interview", The Quarterly Conversation

"Questions for Translator Natasha Wimmer", The Savage Detectives Amazon page

"Stray Questions for: Natasha Wimmer", Paper Cuts, 21 December 2007

"Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño’s “2666”", Words Without Borders, 2008 [essay]

See also: "Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives" [pdf, essay]

"Natasha Wimmer on Translating Bolaño’s 2666", Vulture, 14 November 2008

"Interview: Natasha Wimmer, Translator of Roberto Bolaño's 2666", Sound of the City (Village Voice), 25 November 2008

Excerpted in: "Lit Seen: Joshua Ferris at Housing Works, n+1, Bolaño's Hit Translator", Village Voice, 26 November 2008

"Exclusive: Natasha Wimmer Tells Us About Translating the Next Great Latin American Author", Flavorwire, 2 December 2008

"Conversation: Roberto Bolano's '2666'", PBS NewsHour [audio], 23 January 2009

"Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño and the Translator's Task", Powells.com, undated

"A translator's task – to disappear", Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 2009

"Natasha Wimmer", Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2009

"Natasha Wimmer on Forthcoming Bolano Books", Center for the Art of Translation Blog, 21 September 2009

"TWO VOICES: Translator Natasha Wimmer in Conversation with Daniel Alarcón"

"Lit&Lunch with Translator Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolano" [audio], Center for the Art of Translation Blog, 10 October 2009

"Translating Sex", Granta (online only), 17 May 2010

"Editors' Week: Interview with Natasha Wimmer", Center for the Art of Translation Blog, 4 October 2010

"Translating Bolaño: An Interview with Natasha Wimmer", Sampsonia Way, 17 January 2013

LAURA HEALY: Translator of 3 poetry books by Bolaño: The Romantic Dogs, Tres, and The Unknown University.

"Interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s “The Romantic Dogs”", Words Without Borders, 12 March 2010

ERICA MENA: Translator of the poems in Tres, an excerpt of which appeared in Words Without Borders.

"Making the Translator Visible: Erica Mena", Three Percent, 15 December 2009

See also.

PROFILES / INTERVIEWS WITH EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS

"A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career", NYTimes.com, 9 August 2005

"A Writer Crosses Over", The Washington Post, 8 April 2007

"Poets and Gangsters: Discovering Roberto Bolano", NPR, 28 April 2007

"Andrew Wylie Puts Roberto Bolaño On the Market", The New York Observer, 21 October 2008

"Editor Lorin Stein Discusses Roberto Bolano's '2666'" [audio], NPR, 27 January 2009

"Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi", Poets & Writers, 1 July 2009

"Chris Faatz Interviews Barbara Epler of New Directions", PowellsBooks.Blog, 5 September 2009

"Q&A with Lorin Stein", Las obras de Roberto Bolaño, 28 January 2010

"Interview – Lorin Stein on Literature", Notes from the Underground, 9 March 2010

"Roberto Bolaño: Literary Lion, Cash Cow?", The Q: GQ, 14 May 2010

"Barbara Epler" [audio], Bookworm on KCRW, 25 March 2010

"This Week in Fiction: The True Bolaño", The New Yorker, 16 January 2012

Translation talk with Chris Andrews

You could almost argue that [domesticating translation] brings the languages closer together, because it makes the original language version more familiar in a way. You can immerse yourself in the story when you’re not being alarmed by syntactic unfamiliarity.

You could make an argument for a certain degree of domestication in a first translation of an author to give the author a good chance of getting out there into the reading public. And I think what happens when an author becomes famous and well-loved and had a durable appeal, is that often a retranslation will be more foreignising — and this has happened recently with Dostoevsky, for example — people have retranslated Dostoevsky in a more foreignising way.

And does that alienate people?

Sometimes it alienates readers who are used to the earlier version. There’s also the issue of things being retranslated more for publishing reasons rather than literary reasons. There are already good translations out there but publishers know they can turn a dollar if they say, ‘this is the new and definitive version’, people will buy it.

More at Seemed like a good idea at the time.

A fascinating singularity

WH Staying on the topic of Bolaño for a little longer, what do you make of his extraordinary recent fame in the Anglophone world? I don’t think that when you started working with his writing this would have been the case. Has it got something to do with his sudden death? Or was it inevitable that he would receive the recognition that he has?

CA Back when I started in 2002, Bolaño was already very well known in the Spanish-speaking world because he had won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. But that didn’t mean he was bound to be well known eventually in other languages. The Germans and the Italians had picked up on him fairly quickly, and, interestingly, the first book they both translated was Nazi Literature in the Americas. When the first couple of English translations, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, came out in England, they weren’t published in America straight away. Those books didn’t go very well at all—they didn’t sell very well—although they got good reviews; there wasn’t much interest. It was only a little bit later with the first book of stories, Last Evenings on Earth, which had been commissioned by Harvill in the UK, but was published first in America by New Directions, that there was a bit of buzz around. Only then did I start to think that the others would be translated, because with the first two I really wasn’t sure there was enough interest.

His premature death also may have had something to do with the excitement around his work, but not that much. He’s a writer who invented a commanding, distinctive style, in the largest sense of the word—a way of organizing experience as well as words—which is a pretty rare achievement. That spoke to many readers, for a number of reasons—I’ve heard, for example, that he is an antidote to the North American model of the professional novelist groomed by creative writing schools. There might be something symptomatic about his success, but I think that the main reason for it is that he is a fascinating singularity.

Chris Andrews interviewed in BOMB.

Zombie story

Oscar Villalon, former book editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, reads an extract from "The Colonel's Son" by Roberto Bolaño, one of the pieces from The Secret of Evil.

Evil contents

The Secret of Evil, the posthumous selection of prose pieces by Roberto Bolaño, is out this month from New Directions. It's translated by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. I've yet to read it but here's the table of contents. The three pieces marked with asterisks were also published in Between Parentheses, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

0. Preliminary Note

1. Colonia Lindavista

2. The Secret of Evil

3. The Old Man of the Mountain

4. The Colonel's Son--Animated and excerpted (not online) by Granta. Most likely based on the zombie flick Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) (via comment).

5. Scholars of Sodom--About V. S. Naipaul's critique of Argentina. Excerpted in NYRblog. See also links to Naipaul’s essays from The New York Review of Books: Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard, The Corpse at the Iron Gate, and Comprehending Borges (via Ricardo Blanco's Blog).

6. The Room Next Door

7. Labyrinth--Excerpted in The New Yorker.

8. Vagaries of the Literature of Doom*

9. Crimes

10. I Can't Read--Excerpted in Harper's.

11. Beach*--Read a background of this story here.

12. Muscles

13. The Tour--Read a translation by Venepoetics.

14. Daniela

15. Suntan

16. Death of Ulises

17. The Troublemaker

18. Sevilla Kills Me*--A short controversial and unfinished piece. I read an essay by Jorge Volpi (I think through Google Translate) criticizing Bolaño's Spanish editor Ignacio Echevarría for publishing it.

19. Days of Chaos

THE FINISHED COVER

See related posts on The Secret of Evil here.

With thanks to Michael for the contents and cover image.

"Scholars of Sodom"

Argentineans are not especially popular in the rest of Latin America, but I can assure you that no Latin American has written a critique as devastating as Naipaul’s. Not even a Chilean. Once, in a conversation with Rodrigo Fresán, I asked him what he thought of Naipaul’s essay. Fresán, whose knowledge of literature in English is encyclopedic, barely remembered it, even though Naipaul is one of his favorite authors. But to get back to the story: Naipaul listens and notes down his impressions but mostly he walks around Buenos Aires.

- "Scholars of Sodom", Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews, from The Secret of Evil (2012), excerpted in NYRblog (read more)

Ghosts, the animated short

Or trailer.

Ghosts from susie kirkwood on Vimeo.

Created by Susie Kirkwood and Jill Summers. Original score by Daniel Knox. Based on Ghosts by César Aira, trans. Chris Andrews.

(via The Millions)

A peeing incident

A strange thing happened (one of the many strange things that will happen in this story and carry it and perhaps turn out to be what it’s really about): when they got to the swimming pool, Lautaro asked Carolina if he could have a pee. She, of course, said yes, and then Lautaro went to the edge of the pool, pulled down his trunks a bit and peed into the water. That night, Carolina said that she’d been embarrassed, not for Lautaro, but because of what Alexandra might have thought. The fact is Lautaro had never done anything like that before. The swimming pool wasn’t really busy, but there were a few people, and my son is not some wild boy who pees wherever he feels like it.

– from "I can't read" by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews, Harper's Magazine

Aira contra Marías

It's one of the breathtaking literary fights of recent memory. In the Insatiable Booksluts' Death Match series, the métier of Argentine boxer César Aira was pitted against Spanish slugger Javier Marías. The prose in contention? Aira's Varamo and Marías's Bad Nature, complete with a vintage rating system and a well-served prize trophy.

Watch the electrifying rounds and find out the (very close) results here.

Evil cover

Published by New Directions, 2012

(Thanks, M. Pollack!)

Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira

It may seem odd that the text I chose to translate, El Cerebro Musical by César Aira, is bound by a cardboard cover. It is difficult to make out the title and author that are hand-painted on the cover in red and orange against a yellow background, mirroring the red lettering on the cardboard itself. One can still read the address in Buenos Aires where the box was made, and the words "INDUSTRIA ARGENTINA" are still legible under the title. The barcode on the back is not a proof-of-purchase of the book, but rather of some lost transaction made by the supermarket Día. It is a flimsy cover, hardly protecting the text within, but no other copy of this book has these same features. This uniqueness is what has made Eloísa Cartonera, the publishing house in Buenos Aires that creates these cardboard books, an inspiration to other "paper picker presses" throughout Latin America, the subject of documentaries, and the starting point of my own investigation.

...

Much like Eloísa Cartonera, Aira seems concerned with "much more than just books." He saturates the markets with books marked with his name, if only to demonstrate that no book is the Aira. There is a certain disposable quality to this saturation of the market and it becomes a personal choice which Airas are worth reading and which are 'throw-aways.' [Eloísa Cartonera] converts what was thrown away into a piece of art. Coupled together, Aira and Eloísa Cartonera break down the components of the book into their simplest forms—cover and text—in order to suggest how stories are ephemeral, just like the cardboard ...

- from a thesis called "On Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira: Much More Than Just a Translation of El Cerebro Musical" by Stephanie Reist, Williams College. Eloísa Cartonera is a small publishing house and cooperative in Buenos Aires; it specializes in books bound in cardboards. Reist's study covers the emergence of "cartoneros", issues on translating Aira, and a full translation of Aira's story "The Musical Brain." The story appeared in the New Yorker last month in Chris Andrews's translation. The thesis is available (pdf) here.

Photo story

And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

- from "Labyrinth", a story by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in The New Yorker. The story was accompanied by an interview with Barbara Epler, New Directions publisher, in the magazine's blog.

See also: interview with Natasha Wimmer about her translation of the Bolaño novel The Third Reich.

Limpidity and deformity

One quality that’s distinctive among writers of an experimental bent is his limpidity: his prose rarely draws attention to itself; most of the time, the reader is fully occupied imagining what is being recounted and described. Aira has said that the “correctness” of his prose, which he has sometimes rebelled against (as in “How I Became a Nun”), may have been a side effect of his work as a translator. But as anyone who has read him knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well … deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.

- Chris Andrews talks about his translation of "The Musical Brain" (subscription only) by César Aira, at The New Yorker blog. Read more from the interview here.

Juan Villoro

Juan Villoro, born 1956, is a novelist and journalist from Mexico City. His most celebrated novel is El testigo (2004, The Witness) which won the Herralde Prize. He is the author of several novels, short stories, nonfiction works, and children's books. Although no full-length book of him is currently available in English translation, he seems to be one to watch out for.

Links:

"The Red Carpet" (trans. David Noriega) is Villoro's essay about the political landscape of Mexico. The original Spanish is here.

Sololiteratura has his selected works and reviews of his books in Spanish.

Other translated pieces available online are a story published in n+1; fiction and nonfiction from Words Without Borders, and an excerpt from El testigo (trans. Chris Andrews) in The Quarterly Conversation.

"A childlike joy in storytelling"

If his books met with no resistance, that would mean that they weren’t upsetting accepted standards for judgement and setting new ones, which is what they’ve done in Argentina, where Aira is a strong pole of attraction and repulsion. 

Chris Andrews talks to Scott Esposito (link) about his translation of Varamo by César Aira.

Three of Aira's translators interviewed

Listen to Chris Andrews, Katherine Silver, and Rosalie Knecht's hour-long interview by Colin Marshall at The Marketplace of Ideas. (SPOILER ALERT: In the third segment of the interview, Rosalie Knecht described the ending of How I Became a Nun.)

http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/who-is-c-sar-aira-translators-chris-andrews-katherine-silver-and-rosalie-knecht



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