New & Upcoming Spanish-English Translations: An Interview with Megan

INTERVIEW

New & Upcoming Spanish-English Translations: An Interview with Megan McDowell

BY ALYSE MGRDICHIAN

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Megan McDowell, a literary translator, has tackled many Spanish-English translations in her career—she has partnered with some of Latin America’s most prominent writers, and her list of projects is extensive (to say the least). I met Megan last year, in September, when I was compiling interviews for one of Shelf Media’s Read Global features: Celebrating Women in Translation. Megan and I spoke via conference call, and we had a good conversation about her journey as a translator—if you would like to hear that aspect of her story, as well as the stories of other female translators, visit Shelf Media’s October / November 2021 issue and give it a read. I learned a lot through those conversations, and I felt I got to know Megan well. At the time, her most recent translation had been The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a collection of short stories by Mariana Enriquez—I can testify that it’s an electrifying and unsettling read—but she let me know that, in 2022, she’d have lots of new projects hitting the shelves! So, we circled back around and had another conversation, this time about her most recent translations.

Chilean Poet, a novel by Alejandro Zambra, is the first of her projects we discussed. But how did she meet Alejandro? Megan tells me: “I first started translating Alejandro when I was working on my Master’s degree, around 2007, when I worked on The Private Lives of Trees for a translation workshop I was in.” To be able to have your first translation published is especially rare, and Megan counts herself lucky for that.

“But I feel especially lucky,” she continues, “that not only did I get to work with a great writer, but I found a great and generous friend in Alejandro. I’ve translated all of his books since then and many stories and essays, and you could say we’ve developed together over the years, him as a writer and me as a translator. And our process has grown more collaborative over time—he sends me drafts of his works as he’s writing, and seems to value my input as a reader, and I’m constantly asking

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him questions as I translate, so the whole thing is just a long conversational backand-forth.”

“But I feel especially lucky,” she continues, “that not only did I get to work with a great writer, but I found a great and generous friend in Alejandro. I’ve translated all of his books since then and many stories and essays, and you could say we’ve developed together over the years, him as a writer and me as a translator. And our process has grown more collaborative over time—he sends me drafts of his works as he’s writing, and seems to value my input as a reader, and I’m constantly asking him questions as I translate, so the whole thing is just a long conversational back-and-forth.”

Chilean Poet was, for Megan, one of two pandemic projects. “I guess I worked on the book for a good two years,” she says. “I love the book’s tone— conversational, hilarious, tender, and of course poetic. Translating the poems themselves—the ones the characters write and the ones they cite—was a particular challenge, but an enjoyable one, and I can even say I’m proud of how they turned out. Every time I read the book, I find new things to laugh and marvel at, so translating it was a satisfying and even enriching process.”

Megan’s second pandemic project was Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez’s first novel to be translated to English.

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Megan tells me, “It’s so, so good. It’s a fantasy-horror novel that centers on the fatherson relationship between Juan, a ‘medium’ who channels a supernatural force called the Darkness, and his son Gaspar, who grows up unaware of who his father is, but is very affected by the consequences of his gift. The process of translating it has been intense. This is the longest book I’ve ever translated (around 736 pages), and that in itself is a challenge—its sheer weight is intimidating. But the world of the novel is captivating, and it’s easy to get into a ‘flow’ state when I’m working on it, I don’t feel the time pass. You know you’re working on something good when that happens.”

Megan has been working with Mariana since 2015, and recounts how their relationship formed and grew.

“Anne Meadows at Granta asked me to write a reader report on Las cosas que perdimos en el Fuego (Things we Lost in the Fire), and when I absolutely loved it she asked me to translate it. I jumped at the chance. Since then I’ve translated another collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and her newest, the novel Our Share of Night, which will be out later this year in the UK and early next year in the US. Mariana is a delight to work with—aside from the fact that I love reading and re-reading her books, she’s very generous with her time and she trusts me with her work, for which I

am forever grateful.” Megan’s third and final 2022 release is Yesterday, a novel written by the late Juan Emar. Emar died in 1964, but Megan met him through his stories in 2005. “It was when I first lived in Chile,” she tells me. “An ex-boyfriend read some of his stories out loud to me. I thought they were like nothing I’d ever read before—it was like getting inside the head of a crazy mathematician and seeing where his tangled logic would take you.”

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Megan recounted how Emar spent some time living in Paris and Spain: “That’s where he was influenced by surrealism and the avant-garde movements of the period, and he brought that sensibility to a Chilean context and used it to rebel against the stubborn realism that reigned there in the early twentieth century. He was never appreciated in his day—people didn’t know how to read his work, and he wasn’t really valued until much later. He’s kind of a cult classic in Chile. He wrote four books, all very short, and when those were either panned or ignored he renounced publishing his work, but he never stopped writing. He spent the rest of his life working on an ambitious work called Umbral (Threshold), which wasn’t published in its entirety (some four thousand pages) in Spanish until 1996.”

“When I started working on Yesterday for a class,” Megan continues, “I didn’t really know what I was getting into—when you read Emar, you get the impression of a writer who is lighthearted and strange, but translating his brand of absurdist philosophizing isn’t easy, as I soon found out. But Yesterday is possibly my favorite of his novels. It follows the narrator and his wife as they go through the events and experiences of a single day and try to extract some kind of ‘conclusion,’ as they put it. They start the day by watching a beheading, then go to the zoo, where they sing with some monkeys and observe a fight between an ostrich and a lion. They go to the studio of a painter friend who is obsessed with the color green, and to the narrator’s family home, where they involve him in a strange bet. The book ends with a delirious meditation on time that revolves around a urinal and a fly. Now, there are some readers who will think this sounds ridiculous, and others who are about to head out to the bookstore—we know who we are.”

This particular translation, for Megan,

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has been an endeavor spanning years. She tells me, “After that translation class, I kept working on the book, coming back to it every once in a while and re-working the translation. This book is unique in that way, because it’s something I’ve worked on my whole career, and I’ve seen how the way I read and translate changes and improves over time. Just because the book is published now, I don’t think it means I should stop— maybe I should keep coming back to it for the rest of my life.”

I personally look forward to reading these books, especially those centered around magical realism (my favorite genre). I hope you’ll check them out! Megan also has some future projects on the horizon, which you can look forward to. New Directions, who published Juan Emar’s novel Yesterday, also bought his story collection Diez, so Megan’s translation of that will be forthcoming. Also, fans of Carlos Fonseca can look forward to a new novel from him, which Megan is working on now, that will be out next year with FSG (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux). And this year, Megan is pleased to announce that there will be a new collection of stories from Samanta Schweblin, called Seven Empty Houses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the English PEN award and the Premio Valle-Inclán, and been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.