Pedro the Vast, the debut novel from Chilean writer Simón López Trujillo, was translated into English from Spanish by Robin Myers. The novel has been called “mind-blowing” by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and follows a eucalyptus farm worker who survives a deadly fungal outbreak and becomes the focus of scientific obsession and religious fervor, while his abandoned children struggle to interpret his transformation as their separate reckonings collide in an unforgettable, catastrophic end.
In our latest interview series, “Writer/Translator,” we ask a writer and their translator to interview each other about their work. Below, Trujillo and Myer discuss rewriting, intertextuality, and the role of politics in translation.
Robin Myers: I always love hearing about the path from the book a person intends to write and the book they end up writing. What was the novel you imagined writing when you started work on Pedro the Vast, and what surprised you most about what happened along the way?
Simón Lopez Trujillo: In a way, this novel was a major lesson in what to make with the intentions I have when I’m writing a book. I started working on Pedro the Vast in 2018 and the first draft was completed in early 2019, but the main editing process took place between 2020 and 2021. In the meantime, not only the Covid-19 pandemic happened, but also – and more importantly – the social outburst of October 2019 in Chile. That context, marked both by intense violence and police brutality, but also by a new effervescence that opened the possibility of a new social change, pushed me to transform the novel into a sort of “protest novel” (novela de denuncia). During the hiatus between the first and second draft, I did a lot of research on big forest companies in Chile, their dependency on decree-laws and the dispossession of peasant land in the south of Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and social leaders such as Rodrigo Cisterna (a forestry worker killed by the police in 2007, to whom the novel is dedicated). All this research resulted in an extra 100 pages or so, mainly of information that I wanted the reader to have in mind while reading the novel. But when my editor finally had the chance to revise this second draft, she told me: “Look, why don’t we go back to the previous draft?” I immediately said: “What? But this involved so much work and research…” And she replied: “Yes, but you’re losing your tone.” Then, I went back to the original draft and realized that she was right. I had unwittingly given up the very thing that had led me to write the novel in the first place: a strangeness in the language and story fleshed out by voices and characters that I wasn’t in absolute control of, but which I wanted to follow. And it was this curiosity that made the book feel like a novel, and not a mere device for my own personal political intentions or beliefs. This does not mean that I don’t believe in “political literature” or anything like that – of course I do. But I also believe that nowadays, in times of complex political turmoil and an excessive velocity in the circulation of discourse (where authorship seems reduced to a mere authorial image, and literary content to what “content” means in social media), we must be especially aware of what the actual pace of literature is. Because I don’t believe it moves as fast as we think. Reading, writing, and translating literature are still silent, slow, mostly solitary experiences. And maybe that’s why a good book affects us so deeply: because we feel its language is related to our own private experience. Because we can hear it as if it belonged to us, in a way, and we process it at the speed of abstraction. I’m talking about a slow, deep sense of hearing/reading, something akin to what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls “the production of presence” –which is precisely what the mere meaning or content of a novel cannot convey. A strange intimacy, more connected to the mystery of human sensibility than to our intelligence, and more proximate to the realm of political imagination than of political discourse.
RM: One of the things I most admire about Pedro the Vast (and one of the parts I most enjoyed wrestling with as a translator) is the wide (wild!) range of voices: human and non-human, first person and third, with all kinds of different registers in the mix. Was there one of these voices that came to you first?
SLT: I think it probably was the voice of Pedro’s sermons. For me, it’s no accident that the novel opens with that voice, that lyrical and mystical tone, italicized precisely because we don’t know (as readers but also me as writer) its true origin. He begins by confessing precisely this confusion: “If that’s what looking is—you know? I don’t know what I saw, but I saw so much.” It was important for me to work with that feeling of having seen something that you then can’t describe, because that is a way of talking about a certain form of reading, one that usually happens when I’m reading poetry. It’s a strange experience of being carried through a field of images and music, where sense is more a movement than an arrival at a specific point of meaning. In a way, all the main voices of this novel (Pedro’s, Patricio’s, Giovanna’s) are marked by this sort of poetic expansion, because my writing was very much inspired by the language of others: Juan Rulfo, scientific papers on fungi and biology, the testimonies of farmers and forest workers persecuted and killed by Pinochet’s dictatorship, Cristina Rivera Garza, Juan Emar, and “two Spinozas”: Baruch Spinoza, the God-intoxicated rationalist philosopher, and Juan de Espinosa Medrano, a Peruvian poet, priest, and preacher. Both lived and worked during the 17th century and in very different ways: Spinoza’s Ethics is written in extremely dry, heavy logical-mathematical language, while Espinosa Medrano’s La novena maravilla is profoundly baroque, brimming with metaphors and symbols. Every fragment of Pedro’s sermons was written by taking fragments of these “Spinozian” texts and rewriting them until that mystical italicized voice appeared. It’s a voice that seems both above and beneath the surface of the text. That, for me, is the fungal function in the novel: a metaphor for intertextuality. Pedro the Vast is profoundly inspired by that concept and, specifically, by that of rewriting (reescritura): the idea of writing through and with the voices of others. This notion was fundamental for me when I was mainly a writer of poetry, and it’s also a feature of the works of some of my favorite poets, who also tend to be translators: for example, Soledad Fariña, Rosmarie Waldrop, Mirta Rosenberg, and Leónidas Lamborghini, who write or wrote with a language profoundly marked by the experience of translation. As if what they saw and felt (and also had to wrestle with) in the fertile darkness of the in-between were a more intense way of approaching the poetic voice than the more traditional notion of the lyrical “I”: some kind of homogenous subjectivity that simply speaks, without worrying about whether what he says is the “right” choice because he (thinks he) is the sole “owner” of its language.
But while I was writing Pedro I was interested in the very opposite: a language whose speaker is not his owner. In fact, I wanted to advance in the direction of a “disappropriated, ownerless writing,” as explored by Rivera Garza in The Restless Dead. This, for me, is the case of Pedro after he gets infected. I truly think that his voice was also very much inspired by my own experience as a translator. Because that’s the thing with translation: you are not the owner, and you have to choose. For each word in the foreign language, there are multiple options in the language you are writing in, and you’re always responsible for making the right choice. Besides, since everybody wants to shoot the messenger, I think the task is to achieve the sense of something final, indisputable where words are free from objection. For me, this is the only way, as a translator, to become invisible, to survive, but also to mimic the most fundamental feature of writing literature: that is, to feel the language, the written word, as a sort of destiny. To enter the text not as a contingent fact but, instead, as the definitive path for what lies beyond the words. And this, for me, is linked to the metaphoric, to language employed as a vessel for seeing more than what one can see. Donald Davidson once wrote that “metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” whose grace lies not in what the metaphor means (which is actually more the task of metonymy), but in what it makes us “see.” In traversing this expanded field of countless associations where things are no longer identical to themselves. I sincerely think that this aspiration intoxicated much of the spirit of the novel: poetic language employed not as mere figurative speech, but as radical world-making. An opening, a bursting out of the experience of the self.
RM: Could you talk a bit about some of the other writers and works (or other artists and works of art) that influenced you in Pedro the Vast?
SLT: For this novel, I was very influenced by the work of Chilean and Latin American writers who explore the rural territory and rural consciousness not with a folk or naturalistic approach, but with some sense of the visionary, the poetic, and even the hallucinatory. In this sense, Juan Emar’s Ten (recently translated into English by Megan McDowell) was a sort of lighthouse. He goes to the rural land, pushes through it, reinvents it, and manages to find, as a result, a new sort of avant-garde language and vision of things. In this same vein, the writings of José María Arguedas, Marta Brunet, Carlos Droguett, and Manuel Rojas were of major importance to me, as well as more contemporary authors such as Samanta Schweblin (Fever Dream), Marina Closs (The Depopulation), and Juan Cárdenas (The Devil of the Provinces). Nevertheless, my main influence was, without a doubt, Juan Rulfo. Personally, the naming of my protagonist as Pedro is a Platonic gesture in his direction: Pedro Páramoconceived as the perfect, pure, and ideal model from which Pedro the Vast sprouts out as a contingent, humble, imperfect copy. Of course, these are two completely different characters, but Rulfo’s sense of space, time, image and language were a sort of distant murmur that enveloped and followed the contours of my own writing.
I also did a lot of research on subjects like fungi, Spinoza, the history of timber companies in Chile, and their relationship with Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here, works like Anna Tsing-Lowenhaupt’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Marilena de Souza Chaui’s La nervadura de lo real: imaginación y razón en Spinoza, Manuel Acuña Asenjo’s La rebelión de los trabajadores forestales,and Thomas Miller Klublock’s La Frontera: Forest and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory were fundamental.
Simón Lopez Trujillo: There’s a beautiful short poem in your book Having that says: “How will I know/ which voice/ was mine?”. It made me wonder: do you think translation has affected, influenced or shaped your own experience as a poet and a writer? Does it have some similarities or points of contact with the experience of living abroad, considering that you have lived in different parts of Latin America?
Robin Myers: Translation has affected me and my writing in more ways than I’m even fully conscious of, I think. I mean, some ways are pretty clear: as I explore other writers’ styles, registers, resources, and approaches, and as I do my best to inhabit them as a translator, I’m constantly reminded of what’s possible – and I feel pushed to explore, in turn, what I might otherwise assume is my “natural” voice. In this sense, translation is also a perennial reminder that every voice is learned: it’s from listening to others (reading others) that we come to speak (and write) however we speak (and write). Every voice can change. I love how your question also probes at what it means to live somewhere else. For me, this living-elsewhere – mostly in Mexico and more recently in Argentina – means an experience of continual, generative discomfort, even and perhaps especially when you start to feel comfortable where you are. To paraphrase my poet-translator friend Adalber Salas Hernández, migration means having one foot in one place and another foot in no place at all. You’re always learning to walk, and you can’t take any ground entirely for granted. There’s both melancholy and wonder in the vertigo of it all. I aspire to this wondrous discomfort, and to this neverending beginner’s-mind, as both a poet and a translator.
Going back to the first part of your question, though, I’ll also say that translation has made me a less anxious writer. I’m far less nervous about not writing than I used to be: about the fallow periods themselves, and about the sense of loneliness that can come from feeling unable to write for a while. Because when you translate, you are writing, but you’re never alone.
SLT: Perhaps this is too simple a question, but when and why did you start translating literature? And did you have or still have any role models, any literary translators that serve as inspirations for your own work?
RM: It’s not too simple a question at all! I started translating in earnest when I moved to Mexico City in 2011. I’d translated a handful of poems before, but it was then and there that I began to translate the work of young writers (mostly poets at first) I met on arrival, poets who became my friends. Beyond any more abstract interest I had in translation, though, these early experiences gave me a new way of being where I was – in a city that beguiled and challenged and stimulated me; in the company of people I admired and came to love. I translated in hopes of being more there, if that makes sense. Gradually, translation evolved into more of a practice, as well as a livelihood: for many years, I translated non-literary texts for income, and I also started translating more literary prose, which is now the bulk of my work. As for role models, there are so many translators I look up to that I couldn’t possibly name them all here! But to mention a few, Sophie Hughes and Katherine Silver have been among my lodestars for many years. More recently, I’ve gotten to know Julia Sanches and Rosalind Harvey, and I revere them both as translators and as organizers for translatorly rights and labor conditions.
SLT: In our complex times, when we’re constantly confronting horrors we thought were a thing of the past, when everything seems beholden to a nonnegotiable urgency, what do you think the political role of translation is or remains?
RM: To answer this question, I’d like to share some words from other translators I admire.
Johannes Göransson: “Translation brings in alternate canons and texts, and in so doing it also opens up alternative models of authorship. Rather than the singular great author, translation foregrounds the collaborative element of writing as well as the cultural issues and contexts at play in both the creation and transmission of the text… A poetry [or literature in general] that is profoundly engaged with foreign poetry is a poetry that is aware that nations are not homogenous, that while the institutions of literature are almost always hierarchical, writing itself is not.”
Jen/Eleana Hofer: “For years I’ve been thinking and writing through ideas around the ways translation can generate empathetic not-understanding as an alternative to simplistic and often essentializing or assimilationist ideas around the way texts in translation can provide a ‘window’ into other cultures… At its most radically politicized, translation can function to interrogate and destabilize our ideas about how language functions to make meaning, and can therefore invite us into an awareness of how our own modes of perception are configured, encouraging us to use the tools language offers — as the daily currency of thought, experience and communication — to reconstruct the very foundations on which our currently distressing world rests.”
Olivia Lott: “The reason I translate is to use my position within the United States and my native tongue subversively, to contribute to the dismantling of the imperialist vision of Latin America and to express my allyship with this struggle.”
Jeremy Tiang: “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?”