Can the two of you talk about how Pink Slime came into the world—first, the germ of the original language, and then the translation?

Fernanda Trías: I met Heather in 2013 while I was studying at NYU. She has an incredible grasp of the Spanish spoken in the Río de la Plata region, covering Argentina and Uruguay, and a sharp poetic ear. We had been wanting to work together for years, but when it came time to translate my previous novel The Rooftop (Charco Press), it didn’t work out. So I was really excited to finally get the chance to work with her on Pink Slime.

As a writer, I focus a lot on the sound and rhythm of my prose. I like it to have a sculptural, almost performative quality. I read the manuscript aloud over and over until I get the musicality just right, so translating my work is always a challenge. Plus, since I’m also a translator from English into Spanish, I tend to be very picky about every little nuance in the language. It was important to me that the translation felt natural, like a rewrite, even if that meant tweaking the original sentence.

That’s where total trust in your translator comes in, and that’s exactly what Heather and I achieved—a true collaboration where we rewrote the text together. More than once, Heather pointed out places where English just couldn’t achieve the same effect I’d created in the Spanish, and I preferred to reimagine the underlying sentence than to lose the flow in English.

Heather did a full translation first, then I compared it with the original, flagging places to discuss. From there, we reviewed the entire text together over Zoom. It took months, but I think that’s what made the translation feel so solid.
 

What particular translation challenges arose as this book was brought into English? Were they points that the author anticipated, or was there something of a process of discovery in which the author found that the translator shed light on unexpected aspects of the original-language work?

Heather Cleary: One challenge I encountered while translating Pink Slime connects directly to two of my favorite aspects of the book, which are the texture of its prose and the relationships between the characters. Fernanda is so precise with her prose: she really captures the sensation of moving through a city stripped of not only most of its inhabitants, but also of most of its natural and human-made sounds. This muffled quality, which is likened at one point to living inside an egg carton, is juxtaposed with the very vivid emotional landscape of the narrator’s inner world, where she struggles with her unresolved feelings for her ex-husband, who has survived exposure to the red wind but is confined to the hospital; her fraught relationship with her mother; and her love for the young boy she is paid to watch because his parents can’t handle the insatiable hunger caused by his rare illness. Weaving these two elements together felt a bit like playing the piano, with one hand tracing a soft melody while the other taps out crisp, sometimes minor, notes.
 

Fernanda Trías was born in Uruguay and is the author of three novels and one short story collection. In the US, Pink Slime has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature, and internationally, has received the National Uruguayan Literature Prize, the Critics’ Choice Award Bartolome Hidalgo, and Mexico’s International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. She is the recipient of two British PEN Translates Awards, for The Rooftop and Pink Slime. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Bogotá.

Heather Cleary is a writer and award-winning translator of poetry and prose whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Bloomsbury 2021).