Pola Oloixarac [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 12 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here.

Today we’re featuring Argentine author Pola Oloixara, whose “Conditions for the Revolution” was translated by Mara Faye Lethem. Mara has translated a number of really interesting books, including Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World Albert Sanchez Pinol’s Pandora in the Congo and David Trueba’s Learning to Lose. She wrote the piece below about her experience working on this story for Granta.

Translating Pola

There is plenty about Pola to intimidate anyone. Her Facebook fan page proclaims her “The Wonder Woman of the 21st Century”. She is an expert on orchids. Her dimpled smile could launch a thousand ships. Her writing is terrifically brainy and peppered with references. So when I tried to step into her shoes, to channel her spirit to lead my fingers across the keys like a Ouija board, it involved more than the usual leap of faith. Screwing up my courage, I opted for some serious deconstruction and research, then worked to put back together the pieces while maintaining Pola’s ever-present humor.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are Argentines. (Or was it Argentinians? Or Argentineans, as my spell check insists?) I’d translated authors from Argentina before. But never an Argentine as Argentine as Pola. The fact that her work is intensely local one of her assets, but for a translator who has never set foot on Argentine soil, it presents some challenges. I enlisted a porteño informant who wouldn’t laugh in my face when I asked such questions as “What do they sell at kiosks in Buenos Aires?” (Thanks, Nacho!) But the real challenge was not in the slightly different conjugations, the unfamiliar foods, the different school system, the slang.

The biggest challenge for me when translating this story had to do with that ineffable sense of place or, perhaps better put, the culture and politics embedded deep in language. There are so many things I take for granted when translating work from Spain or Catalonia, where I have lived for many years, that have to do with the context. Here we have a Secretariat of Linguistic Politics, officially acknowledging something many countries don’t: our choice of words is often a political act, albeit very subtly, or unconsciously.

“Conditions for the Revolution” has as its backdrop the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, and swap clubs and unrest that sprang up around it. Along with certain terms, like caceroleantes, which have no perfect translation, the atmosphere of the story was, for me, swimming in unfamiliar waters. But isn’t that one of the great things about being a translator, that we are transported to other worlds and have to find our way back to our own, leading the English-speaking reader by the hand?

– Mara Faye Lethem

And to give you a taste of Oloixarac’s work in Lethem’s translation, here’s the opening of “Conditions for the Revolution”:

That morning, Mara went by her mother’s house to get some clean clothes. She slid between the armchairs in the living room and the coffee tables overflowing with magazines; she didn’t want to run into her. On the modular shelving in the library, flanked by books by Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel García Márquez, the computer screen showed an unfinished game of solitaire. Mother Cris wasn’t there. She’d been a little depressed because Quique, her current lover, had way too much time on his hands. At first he wandered around Cris’s house, leaving his toothbrush there, and then kindly (suspiciously) offering to cook, until one day she gave him a hard stare and said, look, I think that, these days, the most important thing in a relationship is respecting each other’s space, but if you need to, please let me finish, if you really need to, you can stay here. Quique was of medium height and had brown eyes and a disorientated air about him, but he seemed stripped of everything that makes disorientation an attractive or romantic trait.

‘You don’t recognize me because I let my grey come in and now I have a ponytail.’ He had brought his snout closer.

Cris would have preferred that he didn’t make such direct mention of the ponytail; she was enough of an adult – and alone, not getting any younger – to know she could stand the sight of the ponytail, but not talking about it. Quique wasn’t intimidated by Cris’s sideways glances, the deliberate nature of some of her absent and distracted moments. He read it as a display of parameters, a female logic lubricating its own version of the conquest seconds before launching, insatiable, into mating. The sweetness of desperation was an inalienable asset in middle-aged ladies for whom casual sex would soon be a piece of Grandma’s jewellery that nobody would want to touch. Quique was an optimistic guy. He narrowed his eyes, fulfilling his civic role of mensch playing at seducer:

‘In those days I already had you in my sights, but you were with somebody else.’

Cris pursed her lips, trying mentally to distance herself from the scene: for the moment, being the recipient of Quique’s attentions was far from flattering. But ‘somebody else’ awoke Cris’s interest (vanity disguised as interest) from its lethargy and, overcome with complicity, she used the opportunity to laugh hysterically. And yes, she was always with somebody or other. Quique felt as if the fat men of the Metal Workers’ Union were urging him on, gesturing at him with full arms as if he were in a car and wanted to park; you go ahead, he thought, as he slipped his thumb cautiously through the loop of Cris’s jeans. With a quick glance, Cris detected his hand hanging close to her proud ass, her personal PR agent; unable to renounce her chance at playing the coquette, Cris commented: Hmm . . . dangerous. I’m the type that falls in love, so if I were you, I’d think twice. If Quique had been twenty years younger, he would have made a bet with himself as to how long it would take him to penetrate her anally; now, mature and serene, he stuck out his tongue slightly before touching her lips.