A Conversation with Anne McLean

As I have mentioned before, it is my great regret that I cannot read literature in any other language. Unless you count children's board books. Two years ago, I fell in love with Anne McLean's translation of Julio Cortazar's The Diary of Andres Fava (published by Archipelago). Since then, I've noticed just how many of my favorite novelists she's translated, from Javier Cercas to Ignacio Padillo.

This week sees the release of Cercas's latest novel, The Speed of Light. McLean was kind enough to answer a few e-mails about her latest translation, other projects she's working on, and the difference between American sentences and Spanish sentences.

Archipelago tells me you're translating another Julio Cortazar book for them. Can you tell me about this project?

With pleasure! The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute is from the opposite end of Cortázar’s career, first published in 1983, and written in collaboration with his American-born companion Carol Dunlop, who wrote most of her contributions in French. It’s a genre-defying book, ostensibly a travelogue about a 33-day trip from Paris to Marseilles in their red VW camper van (aka Fafner, the dragon) stopping in every single rest area at a rate of two per day and never leaving the autoroute. The book they wrote along the way could be read as a lesson in how to thrive on restriction, a back-to-basics celebration of the freedom of the imagination, a humorous observation of life in the slow lane.

Daniel Mendelsohn was interviewed on the NBCC blog talking about how it's a shame there is no major American prize for translation. You won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, yes? Do you think establishing a similar prize in the States would help the state of literature in translation here?

Yes, I had the great good fortune to translate Javier Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. I think prizes do have the potential to raise the profile of literature in translation. The IFFP is particularly good as it’s split equally between author and translator, which I think makes it easier to get press and publishers interested.

Roberto Bolaño appears to be the new author in translation to read. Who else should be getting attention?

It’s very exciting that Roberto Bolaño’s brilliant novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) has finally been translated into English. He’s a superb writer.

Bolaño actually features as a character in Soldiers of Salamis, well, a fictional version of him, that is. Cercas has a new novel, The Speed of Light, which I translated. Part of it is set in the States and we’re very curious to see what American readers make of it.

Enrique Vila-Matas is a Spanish author who I think deserves more attention in the English-speaking world, as does Edgardo Cozarinsky, a film-maker and writer from Buenos Aires, whose first novel The Moldavian Pimp is a compelling and haunting elegy for some of Argentina’s wilfully forgotten history.

Speaking of the new Cercas... The sentences in that book are, well, complicated. Was it a particularly difficult book to translate?

Lots of Spanish and Latin American writers tend to enjoy sentences that go on about ten times as long as the average English or American sentence and it's always a dilemma how far to go, or close to stick, when trying to transform foreign prose into something intelligible and palatable for English-speaking readers. Obviously, we strive for fluency and lucidity and all those things reviewers often praise in translated prose, but if you work with a writer who values complexity over lucidity, then you’ve got to try to convey the complexity without letting things get any more complicated than they were in the original.

That said, The Speed of Light is the fourth of Javier’s books that I’ve translated so, no, I don’t think it was actually particularly difficult, although there’s probably no such thing as an easy translation, at least not for me.

When you say complicated, are you referring to sentences like the one that starts at the bottom of p.159 and ends at the top of p.161? (Oops, am I allowed to ask follow-up questions?)

I think that sentence is like a tracking shot through the character’s memory, which is too difficult for him to handle or for the narrator, for that matter, who's going to force himself to write it. The sentence is overwhelming, with stimuli coming from all directions, without giving the reader a chance to catch their breath, but that’s exactly how this particular memory should feel.

It would probably be easier to chop the sentence up and put in a whole bunch of periods to make it read like punchy North American prose but it probably would have been easier for him to do that in Spanish, too.

The thing is, Javier’s narrators are never uncomplicated guys. Reality does not seem simple or straightforward to them and literature is their only way of coping with it. So, that’s got to come across in their English-speaking manifestations as well.