Below you'll find Scott's wonderful interview with Katherine Silver first published in the Bloomsbury Review, September 8, 2008.

SCOTT ESPOSITO: Your first translation was Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska, in 1986. You translated it first and then found a publisher for it. Could you tell me a little more about this experience? And is translating it first and then finding a home typical of your translations since?

KATHERINE SILVER: I don't really know why I translated it. I just loved it, I wanted to translate it, and then I thought, "let's see if I could get it published." This was all very seat-of-the-pants. I had a few contacts that I used, and I got in touch with some editors—everyone said they loved it, but no one wanted to take it. I guess it was just a little off. And then this wonderful editor at Pantheon loved it and published it.

SE: Did you have any formal training in Spanish or translation?

KS: Not really. I was studying Latin American literature at the time and I had one course in translation, but other than that I don't have formal training. Just a B.A. But it was the '80s, the Boom was in full swing, and a lot of things were getting translated, so I was excited. It seemed a lot more was going on in literature over there than here.

SE: I sometimes feel that way right now. Of course, a lot of the stuff we're just getting to here was originally written in the '70s and '80s. Many translators have told me that a big part of their job is finding a home for the book, that actually finding the right publisher and getting it accepted is almost as much work as the translation itself. Has this boon your experience?

KS: Yes, absolutely. If I want to translate the books I like, for instance Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya or My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, it's incumbent upon me to find a home for them. Right now I'm in a great position to do this because some of my books have been successful. I also feel like right now there are more editors out there and more small presses doing translations, and they recognize that translators are one of the best sources for finding new translations. So now I'm at the point where a number of editors will trust that I understand the market and take me seriously when I want to publish a book.

SE: Do you feel that right now things are starting to look better for translations?

KS: I feel like there's more consciousness. Undoubtedly there are great financial constraints, but there's a viable community. People like Words Without Borders, Archipelago Press; even though translations remain marginal and small, it seems like the people doing them are getting together and acting more deliberately.

SE: It seems like whenever people are talking about translations, they're talking morally or normatively. That is, people always seem to say they're good in and of themselves, or there's some kind of moral righteousness behind reading translations. What's your opinion?

KS: I think it's a matter of how much a culture is willing to look outside of itself. If you take a person who doesn't want to look beyond herself, that person is probably very self-centered and narcissistic. Cultures that are willing to look and see what's out there, I feel like there's more dynamism, and if you look historically, whether its Alexandria or Spain or whatever, when there are chunks of outside culture being brought into these societies there's been a lot of intellectual and cultural growth. There's a constant cross-fertilization. So I think it's a measure not only of the health of a culture but an important way to be in touch with the other and keep from objectifying people far away.

SE: At Frankfurt this year, Lawrence Venuti gave a speech where he saw translations as working sort of like a network. The more you have awareness of another culture's literature—and just that culture in general—the more context you'll have for a translation, and if publishers create a real context for translations then people will read better and they'll be more interested in what you're publishing.

KS: I agree completely. And as a translator, you know that everything is context. A work isolated from its context is understood in a completely different way.

SE: Speaking of context, you've been all over the Hispanic map—Mexico, Spain, Chile, Peru, Columbia. Are you thinking of the context when you translate these?

KS: Well, you have to keep in mind, I'm translating a text, not a culture. All I can do is try to give context within the text. The bigger context—that Jorge Franco will be understood differently if you've read Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa—is up to the reader. From that perspective, it's unfortunate that in the U.S. publishers want to stick with only one author . . .

SE: That's a business decision on their part.

KS: Yes, exactly, "let's put all our energy into this author." But then you lose the context.

SE: And Venuti was more or less saying the opposite, that if you take the long view and try to build up a real context, you actually stand a better chance overall of developing a product that people will want.

KS: I think that's absolutely true. But lately publishing is notorious for lowering its sights. One of the big changes is publishers used to keep authors in print for longer. They used to put more work into building up a readership, but now if it hasn't sold in 6 months they shred it.

SE: And this is exactly Venuti's point. The first volume of Proust, when it was published in the U.S. in English, it took years to sell a few thousand copies. And he's far from the only one. Thomas Mann . . . lots of others.

KS: Right.

SE: So, another question related to context. Spanish can be spoken quite differently depending on which country you're in. Do you ever feel barriers when you're switching from one dialect of Spanish to another?

KS: Peruvian Spanish is definitely the easiest for me. I lived for some time in Peru, and I feel like when I read Peruvian authors I can feel the music of the language come through better. Colombian Spanish was difficult for me. I've never been there. What I found helped was doing subtitles for a Colombian movie. I had to listen closely because the actual dialogue was much different than the screenplay.

SE: So having familiarity with the spoken Spanish helps you get at the rhythm of the language?

KS: Yes, absolutely. Peruvian prose, it has something that's always different for me. Even this one author who's lived in Paris for 30 years. His prose is still very Peruvian. His word choice, his references, it all makes more intuitive sense to me than what a Colombian author would write. I have to work a lot harder to hear the Colombian prose.

SE: This hearing, is it something you feel like you can translate and bring to the reader?

KS: I'm not sure. I guess the best I can hope for is if I can hear it and internalize it, then when I translate it'll be replicated on the page for the English-language reader.

SE: I wanted to ask you about fidelity versus transparency, one of the big debates in translation, maybe the biggest; fidelity being a literal translation and transparency being a more holistic one. Is this something you feel like you can have a philosophy on? Or do you just have to take it book by book?

KS: I actually take it word by word. Well, to start out, I don't think either fidelity or transparency is possible. These exist in theory, but I think it's sort of like a Marxist discipline: there's the theory and there's the practice. They do intermingle, but translation is really a craft. It's very hands-on, very practical, and translators have to be able to compromise between these paradoxes that exist within the discipline. Really, you have to always be aware that every decision you make as a translator is some kind of a compromise.

SE: So you can inform yourself with theory but in the end it really comes down to what works?

KS: I think your loyalty has to be to the text. Nabokov talks about faithfulness to the word versus faithfulness to the meaning, and sometimes they're contradictory. So you just have to become comfortable in paradox.

SE: You mentioned Nabokov, and of course there was a huge row when he translated Eugene Onegin. It seemed like there a lot of people weren't comfortable with compromise or existing within the paradoxes.

KS: In that case, Nabokov talked about those two things—fidelity to the word and to the meaning—and then he went all the way over to the literal side. He was proving a point, but he was Nabokov. We can't afford to do that.

SE: Would you be a fan of his translation?

KS: I think it was an interesting exercise. It points out certain things, and people can learn from it. But is it something that's marketable? Will someone publish it if I do it? No. As a stylistic exercise, Nabokov's translation may be valuable, but I don't think it's practical. It just isn't readable.

SE: What about books that people would call "unreadable" in the original. Is that something you're interested in translating, even though the end result may be very awkward?

KS: Oh yes, absolutely. If I felt like something had an aesthetic or artistic value, even if maybe only ten people would be able to appreciate it in English, I would want to try and translate it. So I'm not saying every translation has to be accessible to the masses, no, but being true to the original is important. But then what exactly does being true mean? True to the exact words? Obviously not. The rhythms? Maybe. You just have to try and recreate some kind of parallel experience.

SE: Something you've mentioned before and something I've heard from other translators is this idea of translation as a very concentrated form of reading. Could you go into exactly what this means for you?

KS: It' a particular kind of very close reading. You have to unravel every word, every image—you can't skip over anything. I think most readers, certainly myself included, will inevitably skip over certain things while reading. But with translation you can't do that. You have to unravel everything. It's like the images and ideas are tangled, and you have to untangle them so that you can put them back together in the new language. It's like holding up a magnifying glass to skin: you see every pore, every blemish, and also all the beauty.

SE: When you're looking so closely, do you ever lose perspective? Like where you're looking so closely at one word or one idea that you start to lose view of where you are in the text?

KS: Yes, and that's why you have to review translations three, four, five times. It could be something as simple as repetitive words; you were so close to the text that you didn't realize you were repeating a word that the author didn't—or maybe the opposite. But despite that, I don't think you can ever read too close as a translator. Maybe from a practical perspective you can—there's a deadline on any translation and this is a very practical enterprise—but from an artistic standpoint you can't read too closely.

SE: In terms of the practical side, you've worked with small presses and big presses in the past. Is there a notable difference between them?

KS: Sure. I mean, I feel like each press is different, but with large presses you definitely get the feeling of more hands in the pie, more people you have to work with. And the marketing end tends to come into play at an earlier stage. Or sometimes what happens is you're translating a book and at some point the editor or whoever realizes it's not going to make a lot of money, so they start to lose interest and just want to push it through.

SE: Kind of like when you're having a conversation with someone at a party, and at some point they just decide you're not interesting and you can tell they've tuned you out.

KS: Exactly. And I would say that's happened to me more at large presses, but it has happened at small ones too.

SE: One more practical-oriented question: I noticed you got a nice NEA grant, and there was the Rainmaker grant that supported the publicity behind Senselessness. Together they amount to a fair amount of money. On both a personal and a systemic level, do you feel like translations get enough support in the U.S?

KS: No, definitely not.

SE: Personally and industry-wide?

KS: Yes, both. Even if I had full-time translation work, I couldn't make a living off it. I know translators who are translating a ton, really hustling to get a lot of work, and they're barely making ends meet. It's ridiculous, what we get paid—if you look at it by the hour, it's really sad.

SE: In other countries is it possible to make a living as a translator?

KS: Oh, yeah. I'm going to Norway in July, and I'm going to stay with two translators. They make all their money off translations, and these people aren't rich, but they get along fine. But in Norway 40 percent of the books are translated, so it's hard to make comparisons. Holland is the same way—it's practically supported by the state. Even in Canada, where the French-English thing has developed the industry a lot more, there's support. It's just a whole different attitude. But these are very small countries, so to a certain extent the government has to subsidize translations.

SE: Has to?

KS: I think so. Translators in those societies are the real renovators of language. They're an important part of the vitality of the language.

SE: More so than the authors?

KS: No, but almost equally so. I mean, with 40 percent of the literature, translators are establishing norms almost as much as the writers. So it's a very different role than being a translator into English.

SE: I'm thinking that with the Web and television and all the kinds of media out there, there are a lot of different ways for languages to intermingle and cross-fertilize. Where would you rank translation—or maybe just literature—among those?

KS: I wish translation were doing more, but I think literature is still very important. With Spanish-language novels, there's a lot of injection of English language and English-speaking cultures; Jorge Franco does some very interesting stuff with putting spoken English into his characters' mouths. And then that brings up a whole other question: How do you show that when you're translating Franco to English?

SE: This reminds me of your translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco's Battles in the Desert. This is a novel set in the '50s in Mexico and he uses a lot of English words to show the infiltration of American culture. In the Spanish it's very jarring, because you'll suddenly see flying saucers in English, and it looks completely out of place. How do you replicate that experience in the translation?

KS: Typographically, you can put it in italics. Or maybe you would put a marker, just add "we knew these words in English." Or spell them differently, the way a Spanish-speaker might spell it. It might not be totally kosher, but sometimes you need to do these things. It's hard to recreate that jarring experience, though.

SE: What about cultural referents? Do you keep them, create a new context?

KS: It's hard to generalize because I feel like it's always on a case by case basis, but I will say that you need to be very conscious of certain elements in your own world. In Latin America people are much more class conscious than here; in the U.S., relations are expressed more in terms of race or region. So the question becomes, Do you leave it in the Latin context or translate it into an American one. In Senselessness, the narrator at once point starts his day como Dios quisiera, as God would have wanted, but he says this just after he finished a tirade against religion. It makes sense in a Latin context, but not in an American one.

SE: It reminds me of the time I spent in Mexico, where I sometimes would come across Catholic atheists. It makes perfect sense if you're Mexican.

KS: Exactly. So because of these cultural differences, I struggled over keeping or discarding that phrase, and in the end I decided he's a Central American in a Central American country, so he should say it. But it remained a very tough decision.

SE: Getting back to rejuvenating the language, stretching the language, was there a specific point in the translation of Senselessness that you felt like you were doing this?

KS: Well, throughout the book really. This is why I wanted to translate it. Specifically, I liked Horacio's sentence structure, the way he loops and keeps coming back to leitmotifs, certain words and phrases. Then there was the way the prose changed, how these sentences from the report he's editing began to infect his thought. So, whereas at the beginning the narrative had very normal Spanish syntax, by the end this inflection has infected his narrative. Doing that was challenging for me; I had to create very twisted syntax in English without making it sound contrived. It was something entirely new to me. The closest I can remember is what Hemingway tried to do in For Whom the Bell Tolls, having a Spanish-speaker speaking in English, but I don't think it worked well there.

SE: I remember in that book Hemingway also used thou and thee to replicate the informal address in Spanish. What did you think of that?

KS: I didn't like that either. I try to figure out how we indicate formality and informality in English; we use sir, for example.

SE: Now Moya is a big comma-user in Senselessness. To a large degree these commas regulate the pace of the sentences, and the sentences are always changing speed. If you compare Moya to someone like Proust of Henry James, these writers have long, elaborate sentences too, but their sentences always seem to move at the same speed, whereas with Moya we're up and down depending on the narrator's erratic consciousness. What was it like trying to reproduce this effect in English?

KS: One thing we did, and this was Barbara Epler's suggestion, we got rid of the serial commas. I liked that a lot because it made the adjective/noun combinations more fluid, like they were all one unit, and it let the comma be more of a pause in these long sentences. If we had cluttered up the book with things like serial commas I think we would have lost the impact of the punctuation.

SE: And do you feel like you were successful in keeping Moya's rhythms?

KS: I think I was. This was the big challenge of the book, keeping Horacio's rhythms, and I think it worked. It wasn't the same rhythms as the Spanish obviously, but I think it mimics the effect. Whenever I see Horacio read the book out loud, I'm always very pleased. I can see him getting into a rhythm with the English, even though he's not pronouncing the words quite right, he gets into his own rhythm and he seems to have an intuitive sense of the text. And whenever I see him read, it's like a layering: it's his work on the bottom, and them my translation, and then him again reading it—interpreting it, really—and drawing on both.

SE: When I saw him read at City Lights, I really thought it was an excellent performance. It felt just like how I'd expect this narrator to be talking to me in English, right from Moya's accent to how he read, especially how he enunciated these leitmotifs that are an integral part of the first chapter, "I am not complete in the mind" and "one-thousand-one-hundred pages."

KS: Yeah, I really like the mixture, the layers of subjectivities.

SE: Could you explain a little more about that phrase, "layers of subjectivities"? I've heard you use it before in regards to translation.

KS: It's kind of a scientific term, like when you sit in the therapist's office and there's an intersubjective relationship: there are two subjectivities, yours and the therapist's. So I see the literary work as this creation of a subjective mind. And then I come in and start interacting with the text. To a certain extent I have to go back to the author, but I'm still very much interpreting it on my own.

SE: And you don't like to think of this process as building a bridge, right?

KS: No, definitely not. The best analogy is a piece of music, where the score is the original and then someone comes and plays it. Is the interpreter invisible? No. The interpreter doesn't shadow over Mozart, for instance, but she adds to it. So in the end, when you read my translation what you're reading is Moya, but it isn't too.

SE: And do you ever feel like you're overshadowing too much?

KS: No, if anything I'd say I'm the opposite, I try too hard to be literal. Once I was in proofs reading over a manuscript I'd translated and I was horrified when I saw I had someone standing with their arms crossed. We don't say that in English; we say twiddling our thumbs, maybe, but never standing with arms crossed. I had just taken it directly from the Spanish. So I'm always somewhat in fear of missing something like that.

SE: Do you think there are translators that are guilty of the opposite, or embellishing too much?

KS: I try not to read other translators' work critically, so I don't know. I think with academic translators there's a tendency to overdo it because they feel a need to make a text sound foreign, there's a whole bunch of theory they're following about bringing the foreign into English.

SE: It's always jarring to me when you read a book written in, say, the 19th century and there's a new translation of it, and then the translator feels the need to update the language. It's just never really made any sense to me.

KS: Well, retranslation in general is fraught because you have to be very careful not to create anachronisms, but at the same time you have to try and renovate the language. That's a whole other subject, about why we need new translations.

SE: Beyond publishers making money, I've never seen why new translations are necessary. Could you explain why you think we do need them?

KS: Well you have the original, and it exists within its language, and that's a specific context that continues to exist over time. The translation then is almost a way that this context gets renovated. You might even go so far as to say that if a work is worth keeping in existence then you need to keep renovating it with new translations.

SE: Worth keeping on what level?

KS: A cultural level. If Dante had no worth for us today, then you wouldn't retranslate it. The fact that we do so indicates its continual cultural worth. And this is another one of the interesting paradoxes of translation, that even though the original doesn't get old, the translation does.

SE: And are there any Latin American works you think are up for new translations?

KS: There are, but I'd rather not say which ones.

SE: Are there works you wish you'd been the one to translate?

KS: Bolaño, definitely. There's also a Cuban author, Alejo Carpentier, who's just incredibly important. I think he's one of he great Latin American writers, or just one of the greats of the 20th century. He wrote a book translated as Explosion in a Cathedral that's a history of the revolutions in the Caribbean, but it's really a history of all revolutions. It's very baroque and beautiful, just very rich language. When I first read it in the Spanish there were about 30 words on each page I didn't know.

SE: Where do you discover authors like Carpentier? Is it all based on happenstance?

KS: It is and it isn't. There's definitely this web with gatekeepers. Personal connections are very important in discovering new authors to translate, but they can also be problematic when you get into a situation where translators are only relying on certain people. Things can get insular very quickly.

SE: Right now you're working on another books of Moya's whose title has tentatively been translated as "She-Devil in the Mirror."

KS: Yes, it's basically a monolog by this obsessive Central American woman whose best friend is murdered. It starts at the wake and proceeds over the course of about four days. You're not quite sure what's paranoia or delusion or reality. And the whole time it seems like she's talking to her friend, but in the end you realize she's just talking to herself. It brings in a lot of the political corruption of society as she tells this story about these forces that may have killed her friend, so in the end it's this story of a personal and a political breakdown.

SE: Sounds like Lydia Salvayre. In Senselessness there's a lot of the political too, but Senselessness isn't really a political book. It's all very unobtrusive, kind of the way it is in Bolaño where politics is really on every single page even though he may never mention it. Do you find this is a Latin American thing, this politics always being there and not being there?

KS: What I find odd actually is that with so much writing in this country, the politics just isn't there at all. There just seems to be an absence of any sense of the larger world in which the action is taking place—it's all so decontextualized—so maybe what you're noticing is just the existence of that in these works.

SE: Maybe this tells us something about the lot of the Latin American intellectual, the way they're pawns of the state but also dissidents against it.

KS: That's true, but what really drew me to the book was on a deeper level, how it was really about language and consciousness; it's just such an intimate exploration of how language affects our consciousness and world-view.

SE: I agree with that, but I also have the feeling that words can sometimes just be words and they don't have that much power over us.

KS: Sure, but I think this is a very personal subject for Horacio. He gave a talk at the PEN conference about Thomas Bernhard, about how when he read Bernhard he was infected by his words like a virus, and he just couldn't get rid of it. He had to write a book in Thomas Bernhard's style, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in El Salvador, and now here he is still feeling the influence of his style. What I find so interesting about Senselessness is that Horacio is using this infection from Bernhard to create these oddly beautiful quotes from indigenous peoples who speak like this because they are traumatized by atrocities that really happened, and then these inflections from the indigenous people in turn infect the narrator, and then at last the book comes to the reader and might infect her. It's a very deep exploration of the writer's relationship to language and how it effects her, and the effects are very strong: in the end the narrator is not complete in the mind.

SE: I think it's more than just the narrator. At one point he very clearly implicates all of us, he says something along the lines of anyone who'd want to read yet another book about atrocity must not be complete in the mind. On one level it's just a very morbid metafictional joke, but on another he's implicating an entire world where the kind of book we're holding in our hands is not possible and but even desirable.

KS: And the book is a response to the question of how people can deal with such horror, really the horror of our own world. How do the indigenous people deal with the horror, and what does the narrator do with it? Well, he starts to aestheticize it, and maybe that's the only way any of us can approach it.

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