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The Translator’s Voice is a new monthly column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
After a traumatic event leaves her life broken, Marilé—protagonist of Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle—makes the difficult decision to take what remains of herself, and start fresh in America, leaving all too much behind. It’s a book concerned not only with recovering from trauma, but also the power of writing to clarify thoughts, and using books to learn a culture by. Marilé’s journey—from Argentina, to America, and back to Argentina again—is powerful and challenging. I was lucky enough to talk to translator Frances Riddle via Zoom from their home in Buenos Aires, about this difficult character, the connection a translator has with a work, the distance between a translation and the original, and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian Battaglia
This is not the first time you’ve translated Claudia Piñeiro—your translation of Elena Knows was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year. Could you talk a little bit about what interests you about her work and how you undertook these projects?
Frances Riddle
This was really an exciting project for me. Claudia Piñeiro is a force to be reckoned with in Latin American literature. When I moved to Buenos Aires in 2010 I wanted to read the local literature. So I was asking around, “Who should I read, what should I read?” And my mother-in-law said, “Oh, you have to read Claudia Piñeiro. She’s a huge deal.” So she let me borrow this book, Elena Knows. I still have that copy (so don’t lend me books. It’s been 13 years and I haven’t returned it!).
It was the very first book I read when I moved here and I was trying to understand Argentine literature; literary translation felt like this impossible dream. It can be hard to break into being a literary translator. So, ten years later, to translate someone like Claudia Piñeiro and to have it be the first book that kind of inspired the whole journey was really a “full circle” kind of moment.
Ian Battaglia
When you’re translating an author that you have previously translated, does that change your process at all? Do you feel more familiar with her work now? How do you think about it differently?
Frances Riddle
Probably, yeah. When you’re just reading, you kind of just go through a text really quickly, staying on the surface. But when you’re translating something, it’s such a slower and more focused process of reading. And so you see the same themes start to appear in different books. I think that’s really interesting. I think you really understand the author on a much deeper level when you’ve done a few books by them.
Ian Battaglia
I’ve always been curious if the translator is potentially the author’s closest reader in a way. You have to not only read it deeply, analyze it, but in a way you’re subsuming it, you’re teaching it to others, you’re conveying it to another reader.
Frances Riddle
Absolutely. Translators often see issues that the editors don’t even pick up, because we’re reading the book like five or six times, from start to finish, with all of the subsequent passes and edits, and then the proofreads come back and you have to read it again; and eventually you don’t ever want to see it again in your life. It’s a very in-depth, intimate process. The book you’re going to pick up, A Little Luck, that English version, I wrote every single word. It’s a very deep, intimate connection with the text. It’s someone else’s book, but you feel like nobody knows it better than you.
Ian Battaglia
One of the first translator interviews I did was with Sam Bett and David Boyd, and that’s something David had said as well: the book the reader reads is one that I’ve written every word of. I think it’s really important to establish that connection. Would you talk a bit about your process for translating a novel-length work? Where do you start?
Frances Riddle
I’ve talked to other translators and I feel like almost everybody has a similar process, with slight variations. I think there’s nobody that teaches you this. It just feels like the natural way to do it. I don’t like to read the book first if I haven’t read it already. I want to just jump in and see what this text is going to be like in English. So I do a first draft where I’m just banging it out, I’m not even thinking about how it sounds. I want it to be as close to the original as possible, even if it sounds horrible; and a lot of times, the way that it’s written in Spanish or the words that are chosen sound bad when you just vomit them over into English. And so with that first draft, sometimes I think about how you hear about people’s computers getting hacked or something, and I think, “Oh my God, if this ever came to light, this first draft…” It’s so horrible. Some texts will spill over easily into English and sound good, but some texts sound almost like gibberish in parts when they’re in this first pass. But I like to do it that way because that’s as close as it can be, right? The literal translation. I’m going in to change things but first I want to at least have a register of what it said, exactly. Then I go back and I check my translation against the original. Some translators don’t do that, because it’s slow and annoying. But I might have missed a word. I might have changed the meaning, because it said they didn’t do this and I forgot the “not,” and so it changed the meaning completely. I think that’s a really important step and also because sometimes you won’t have quite understood something and then reading it again, you’re like, “oh wait, no, this is what it’s actually saying.” So after carefully checking the translation I’ll edit the text just in English and I try not to look back at the original much. Sometimes there will be a word that there is a literal translation for and there is a lot of overlap between what the two words mean in both languages, but the usage of it in Spanish will be different from how it’s used in English. So it doesn’t really work. You end up having to change things. I want the reader to have a good reading experience. There’s different schools of thought on this. There are some translators that say we should be shaking up the English reader and letting them understand other structures and other word usages by leaving it as close to the original as possible. But I don’t know, maybe I’m too much of a people pleaser. I want the reader to have a seamless reading experience; just suspend reality, and be able to live in this book without even thinking about it. So I rework things a lot to make sure they sound smooth to me, to my ear, in English.
Ian Battaglia
Could you talk about some of the key complications between translating in Spanish and English?
Frances Riddle
Well, the sentence’s word order is often different, and what constitutes good style in English and Spanish are different. So in Spanish you can have a really long sentence where you don’t even know who the subject is until the end. And then if you just spill that over into English—it depends on the tone of the book; that might work for certain books—but maybe it sounds clumsy and confusing. I try to strike a balance between what the original did and what I’m doing with the English. But sometimes I feel like it wasn’t a major stylistic choice and so I can break a sentence up, or flip it around and put the subject at the beginning, the way that we like to read things in English. I would say Spanish doesn’t mind repeating things and can have baroque, roundabout ways of saying things whereas in English, we’re like, “Say it once, say it clearly. Move on.” They can mix metaphors like three times within a sentence.
What constitutes good style is different. So it’s always kind of this tug of war, like “What do I do? Do I leave it like it was, and it sounds like Google translate, or do I change it and it sounds smoother?” There’s this kind of ethical dilemma that I feel like you have as a translator. What to do, how much to intervene and to change things.
Ian Battaglia
A Little Luck takes place in Buenos Aires, where you yourself live. Have you, or did you, visit any of the locations mentioned in the book, like Temperly? Did your familiarity with the setting change or impact your translation at all?
Frances Riddle
Well, one thing I definitely related to [Marilé] with is that she starts dating and then marries this guy who lives out in the suburbs; he lives outside of town, and she moves out there. I also met and started dating a guy who lived outside of Buenos Aires. I moved in with him, and I hated living outside the city. Immediately I was like, “We have to move back into the city.” He didn’t like any of the apartments that we found in town and it caused a lot of conflict. I was like, “You only wanna live with me if it’s comfortable for you out in your neighborhood where you’ve lived forever!” We’re now married; it’s been thirteen years. But we moved back to the city and I was very happy to have done that. [Marilé] is kind of too passive, and a little bit too submissive. I was like, “No, don’t move to that house in the suburbs, finish school! Stay close to your friends!” Buenos Aires is a huge city and it’s hard to get around. Traffic is horrible. Public transportation takes forever. You’re not gonna see those friends very often anymore. It’s a different world. And I think this is conveyed in the book, that she’s really moving to this very closed-off world of this upper class, private school, and the oppressiveness of that.
Ian Battaglia
In the book, writing is really important as Marilé uses writing to process the traumatic event from her past and discover how she feels about certain things that have happened. Going off the idea that one is able to discover things while writing, I’m wondering what sorts of things you discover when you’re translating.
Frances Riddle
I think that translation is really kind of a crash course in writing. I’ve translated something like twenty books. So basically I’ve already written twenty books; right? After a certain amount of time you start to think, “You know, I could write a book.” But I find it so much harder to actually write. Let’s say I get time to work on my own writing. It’s so much slower for me, because you’re translating from your thoughts and your imagination into words. It’s another form of translation, but for me, it’s so much harder. I’ll have a bunch of tabs open and I’ll be like, “You know what? I haven’t checked Facebook in like two years. Let me do that.” I’ll find any possible excuse to not write. With translation, it’s like, this is what it says in Spanish and I have to make it say that in English. It’s a clear assignment. Also a clear deadline. But I think translating is probably a great exercise for anybody who wants to be a writer. You start to understand writing on a different level. You say, “Oh, Claudia Piñeiro always adds a mystery or some form of suspense to all her books.” A Little Luck is not a crime novel, and Elena Knows wasn’t either. But she’s really smart to drop in a mystery from the very beginning. And if you’re like me, super nosy, you have to keep on reading. Because you’re like, “What happened? Who is the person she left behind? What’s this traumatic event?” And you start to kind of imagine it. But she always plays with your expectations. It’s never exactly what you thought. As you’re translating—and like I’m saying, reading this book so many times and getting so intimate with it—you’re learning the art of writing.
Ian Battaglia
It’s not just writing that plays a big role in her recovery, but books as well; as Marilé comes to America, she gets recommended all these books, which become this sort of cross-cultural touchstone in a way. I thought there was a really interesting metaphor between translation and this sort of plot point in the book. I’m curious if you read it that way, or what you thought about the power of books, especially cross-culturally, to share emotional moments like that.
Frances Riddle
You’re so right. I hadn’t thought about it in that light. I moved to Buenos Aires and began to really focus on what’s going on in Spanish language literature, and she’s doing the exact same thing that I did, just the other way around. For me, having come to South America, I’m interested in reading the local literature. [In doing so,] you understand the culture on a deeper level. So I understand her doing that. It’s part of her immigrant experience. That’s part of her process of integrating into this new culture.
Ian Battaglia
Piñeiro’s work is often connected to crime novels, but both these books are a bit different, especially A Little Luck; it ends on a very different note than most crime novels do. How do you think this book sits in the genre, or among her other works?
Frances Riddle
Yeah, she kind of has this reputation for being like a noir /crime writer, because one of her most famous books was a crime novel. So I guess you’re kind of stamped with that label. Having translated more of her work though, you realize that’s not the full picture because Elena Knows definitely wasn’t a crime novel. There was a death in it, but no. This book also couldn’t be called crime fiction. Maybe she’s in some kind of different category that I don’t know the name for. The book I’m translating now, too: it’s a follow up to one of her books in which a murder happened and the murderer is out now and she’s asked to commit a crime and there’s a lot the reader doesn’t know. But it’s not crime fiction and it’s not a mystery in the Agatha Christie sense, like a whodunit, even though she’s intentionally using those kinds of techniques, those tools from crime fiction. She’s using them in novels that you can’t call crime novels.It’s working, whatever you call it. These are books that keep you turning the pages, and that people like to read.
Ian Battaglia
Is there anything else that you’d like readers to know about this book, about your own work, or anything I missed we should talk about?
Frances Riddle
Well, in another interview about this book, they asked, “What was the hardest part of translating this book?” And it wasn’t too hard. The book I’m translating now by [Piñeiro] is very hard to translate. It’s full of puns—she was not thinking about me when she wrote it, because it’s very difficult. This one was pretty straightforward for me; but I had such a hard time with the fact that this character had just left her child. I couldn’t handle it. I was judging her so much. I have a six-year-old son and there’s nothing in the world that would make me leave him. No way would I willingly not watch him grow up. But I think that’s probably the conversation [Piñeiro] wants us to be having. Men abandon their children and nobody thinks, how could this possibly ever happen? Mothers are held to a higher standard; things are demanded of mothers that aren’t of fathers. Also, she went through this really traumatic event that I haven’t been through. So I don’t know what my brain would do if that had happened to me. I feel like she wanted us to say, “Let’s not judge other people. You don’t know what you would do in this situation.” A lot of her work kind of talks about motherhood and the pressure of it, the inescapability of it. And about judging others. I think that was something interesting, as a mother too, to start to analyze that a little bit. These pressures that we put on other women, and ourselves.
Ian Battaglia
It’s sort of a feminist reading in a way; acknowledging this double standard: it’s not unheard of for a man to abandon his family, but for a woman, it’s almost completely unthinkable. And it sets off all this pressure in the book.
Frances Riddle
Yeah. I feel like the main character is the person you feel like you should be sympathizing with. And for the main character to be doing this, you’re like, “wait a second!” It was hard to sympathize with her at times. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from the perspective of a woman who’d abandoned her child. There’s that Alice Munro story, but there’s not a lot of precedent for it out there in literature. It was interesting to have to sit with this character. I think Claudia likes to write characters that are not wholly sympathetic, that generate some conflict in the reader. Like, “Do you agree with what this character is doing? Do you think that they’re making a terrible decision?” But I think Claudia wants us to be doing that. She’s doing a lot, and I think she’s doing it very intentionally, and that’s one of the reasons why she’s this huge name in Latin American literature. She’s able to connect with readers because she’s doing big things in her books, things that may even be polarizing.
FICTION
A Little Luck
By Claudia Piñeiro
Translated by Frances Riddle
Charco Press
Published July 11, 2023
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