Aurora Venturini’s posthumous English-language debut Cousins has been called a masterpiece that is morbid and darkly funny by The New York Times Book Review. Part of the reason is the beautiful translation done by Kit Maude. Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires who has has translated dozens of writers from Spain and Latin America.
We caught us up with the translator to learn more about his process and what it was like translating Cousins.
When you first begin to translate a work, what is the first thing – or first few things – you do?
Well, there’s footage of me literally jumping for joy when I heard I was going to get to translate Cousins, this was one I really, really wanted. So there’s that, but I guess a translation begins when you’re reading the text for the first time – just as a reader. Because of what I do for a living, I can’t read anything in Spanish without immediately wondering how it would sound in English; it can be quite distracting but it also helps inform what I think of the text. That means that by the time I actually sit down to begin a translation, it’s been simmering away in my mind for quite a while. And the interesting thing about that is how often the text will confound your memory of it; all the surprises it has in store when you really get down to reading it – that’s all translation is at heart, the closest read you can imagine.
What is the relationship like between the author, the text, and yourself?
It’s different with each author and text. Of course, a major variable is whether the author is still with us or not – Venturini isn’t, for instance, although she was such a strong personality I often thought I could hear her mumbling away in the background while I worked, something along the lines of “Don’t fuck this up, Kit”. And I hope to goodness I didn’t, she seems eminently capable of cursing me from beyond the grave. Some authors want to be involved in the process, others don’t – either way is fine, so long as you’re strong and diplomatic enough to assert your opinion properly. I often find myself saying “trust me”, which must be infuriating. But you’ve missed out an important player: the reader. There’s an argument to say that translators (and editors, who are also crucial parts of the process, I was lucky enough to have some wonderful ones working on Cousins), are just as responsible to the reader as they are to the author. Asserting yourself can be hard, because I tend to hero-worship my authors, these extraordinary beings who have wrestled with the blank page and won.
With Cousins specifically, what was the most challenging aspect while translating the work?
Getting the voice right! The voice is everything in this novel. That and persuading copy editors and proofreaders to leave out punctuation when every fiber of their being is telling them that it needs to be in there.
As someone who has translated quite a few non-English books, what would you say is the biggest difference between works from around the globe and American writing?
Firstly, we’d need to define what we mean by American writing, because the term encompasses an enormous multiplicity of different cultures and histories, branching out and interweaving right down to each individual story and experience. And they’re always shifting and interacting with one another to create something new; if you accept Borges’ postulation that writers create their own precursors, then it’s happening in the past, present and future. Sometimes, I worry that the MFA industry is beginning to standardize something that really oughtn’t to be standardized. But to actually answer your question, somewhat contradict the above and indulge in rank generalization (for which apologies), I’d say that the biggest difference about American writing is how often it happens strictly within national borders – stories from other countries tend to travel more widely and when they don’t, they just happen to be set wherever they are because that’s where the author wanted to set them. With American writing, you often get the feeling that the setting is purposeful: it really means something that the main character grew up in the Bronx, say, or Miami, or Wyoming – there’s a sense that the story is trying to actually shape our idea of those places and connect them to the larger, shared and far too often tragic project of America as a whole. And it’s amazing how over the decades and centuries, different generations and waves of immigrants have bought into that idea; rolling up their sleeves to get on with it the moment they arrive. Of course, similar things happen in other countries but not, I think, with such a strong sense of being part of a larger, deeply flawed and very much unfinished construct. There are good and bad sides to that, the danger of succumbing to parochialism is always lurking, which is why it’s so important to make sure there’s plenty of translated fiction and stories from elsewhere in the world circulating in the literary bloodstream.
If you can answer, what else are you working on translating that we can look out for?
I recently finished the first draft of a collection of stories by Camila Sosa Villada, whose extraordinary novel Bad Girls was published by Other Press last year. The stories are amazing; they expand Camila’s travesti universe in really interesting, fun and supremely intelligent ways. One, Afternoon Tea, has already been published by The White Review with more forthcoming elsewhere – when I finished, I excitedly remarked that I could easily find homes at magazines for all of them but it was gently pointed out to me that the publisher might prefer holding some back for the book. The collection is called I’m a Fool to Want You and it’s coming out in 2024.
debutiful 