READING THE WORLD: Natasha Wimmer Interview

(For Reading the World, I conducted a number of interviews with translators of RTW books. These interviews are meant to get a variety of translators' opinions on matters common to all translations, and to let each translator discuss their particular book. These will be posted throughout the month. This is the fifth. The fourth was with Humphries Davies. The third was with Howard Curtis. The second was with Karen S. Kingsbury. The first was with Katherine Silver.)

This is an excerpt from a longer interview I conducted with Natasha for The Quarterly Conversation.

How did you first become familiar with Bolaño's work, and how did you become the translator of The Savage Detectives?

I first read The Savage Detectives around the time that Farrar, Straus and Giroux was considering it for publication. I thought it was one of the most exciting books I had read in years, but I didn't think there was any chance I would get to translate it, because Bolaño already had a great translator--Chris Andrews. But as it happened, Andrews wasn't able to take on the project, and I was the very fortunate runner-up.

Did you have any particular reasons for wanting to translate Bolaño?

It was clear from the beginning that translating Bolaño was the chance of a lifetime. I felt the way Gregory Rabassa must have felt when One Hundred Years of Solitude fell into his lap. The Savage Detectives wasn't just an amazing novel--there was also something clearly consequential and new about it. I hadn't really heard much about Bolaño before I read The Savage Detectives, so the way I felt about it wasn't shaped by the consensus that was already emerging in the Spanish literary world that Bolaño was the writer of his generation. It was the novel itself that bowled me over.

One of the distinguishing things about Bolaño's oeuvre is that his novels are all linked via common characters, locales, themes, and/or events. The Savage Detectives occupies a very central place since it's such a wide-ranging book and there's a lot of crossover between it and other Bolaño books. When translating Detectives did you find any use in Bolaño's other novels?

I don't think I used the other books as references, per se, but I definitely had a good time picking up correspondences and making connections. The short stories, especially, were interesting for the different angles they provided on characters and situations. And of course the essays in the non-fiction collection Entre parentesis (which has yet to be translated into English) were fascinating for the autobiographical light they shed on the novel.

Others have noted that Bolaño represents a challenge to translators because he uses a lot of idiomatic language. Did you find this difficult?

Yes, it was difficult. Idiomatic language is always one of the translator's biggest challenges. Bolaño draws on slang spanning continents and decades, from Mexico in the 1970s to Spain in the 1990s. Some of the nuances of this are inevitably lost in English. It would be futile--and worse--to try to translate Mexican slang from the '70s into American slang from the '70s, say. And anyway, there's nothing "period" about Bolaño's usage--he isn't trying to recreate some particular era in language. What he does instead is create a heterodox style of his own, and I tried to capture that as best I could, with a mixture of timeless expressions and more eccentric word choices that weren't (hopefully) in danger of sounding hackneyed.

Read more from this interview here.

Comments

[Jason Boog]

Nice look at the nuts and bolts of translation. The Savage Detectives was one of my favorite books of the year, inspiring me to go back to primary sources in Spanish for the first time in my reading life.

What a beautiful thing--to be drinking coffee in Mexico City discussing pulp fiction and street slang with friends.

Thanks for this interview...