Interview with Natasha Wimmer

As I mentioned earlier, things have been pretty much shut down around here the past few days, so we’re a bit behind. Nevertheless, this stray questions with Natasha Wimmer from Paper Cuts is definitely worth checking out.

Natasha is one of the rising stars among translators, thanks in no small part to her translation of Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. (She has also translated Mario Vargas Llosa and Laura Restrepo.)

For all Bolano fans, here’s a nice tease for 2666, which is supposed to come out from FSG later this year:

Long stretches of the novel are set on the Mexico-U.S. border and inside a prison. And that’s not all. Bolaño really gives the translator a workout. I also researched Black Panther history, pseudo-academic jargon (actually, some of that came naturally), World War II German army terminology, Soviet rhetoric, boxing lingo, obscure forms of divination and forensic science vocabulary, among other things. If that makes the novel sound like a hodgepodge, I promise it’s not. Even the most obscure detours are thoroughly Bolaño-ized – filtered through his weird, ominous, comic worldview.