What particular translation challenges arose as you brought Layla Martínez’s Woodworm into English?
Sophie Hughes: Woodworm is a story of two isolated women, a grandmother and granddaughter who live in rural Spain in a house that’s teeming with dark family secrets going back generations. And after a boy from a wealthy landowning local family mysteriously disappears in the granddaughter’s care, she’s working as a sort of nanny there, both women give their sides of the story. This is the novel’s sort of meat, which turns out to be a story of class repression as much as of the skeletons and saints and spirits in their own closets, of which there are plenty.
Because the novel is narrated in alternating chapters with each woman taking one side of the story, essentially, it really seemed to cry out to be co-translated. Annie McDermott and I are both serial drafters. So I think it’s fair to say that we’re both the writers of both of their voices, but we did actually initially take a part each, as actors in a play might. What this showed us is that although the two protagonists have ostensibly opposing views on lots of things and are also two generations apart, they share a lot of linguistic mannerisms, as family members often do. And over our many drafts, it felt especially important to listen out for shared figures of speech and localisms so that the women can be talking at cross purposes and contradicting each other on the facts, which keeps us on our seats as readers plotwise. But their conflicting narratives actually belie togetherness and a really poignant togetherness. The inherited language really helps to underscore their helplessness, the helplessness, especially as women, because this really is a sort of feminist tale of revenge. Their helplessness to be natural inheritors of the sordid reputation of their family and their ancestors’ wounds. In practice as translators, this is most obvious in the quippy tone of voice that both of them employ regularly. And their notable silver tongue—they’re both quite gabby women. Annie and I had a lot of fun trying to find phrases such as six of one, half a dozen of the other, or I’m being sponged off. Phrases that felt colorful but at the same time didn’t make these women sort of fall into pastiche and for it all to sound a bit silly. So we had to tone down certain areas of their language, where in the Spanish there might have been abbreviations or local language, and we’d find other ways to pull it in. If there was a beautiful metaphor in the Spanish we’d find hopefully a good equivalent in the English that felt colorful and fun without feeling like we were hamming it up.
Annie McDermott: Another challenge when translating this book was the long sentences, particularly in the granddaughter’s sections. The more agitated she gets while she’s telling her story, the more language comes tumbling out of her mouth, this kind of torrent of words spilling out, bubbling up, like the rage that her family had been swallowing for all of those generations. Layla [Martínez] manages something really amazing with these sentences, which is that she writes these long sentences, sentences often with no punctuation in them at all, but they sort of behave like short sentences. It’s funny, instead of being kind of these mellifluous, impressionistic kind of stream-of-consciousness sentences, they’re all kind of jagged edges and barbed wit and cynical asides delivered with impeccable timing.
When we started the translation, we were very, Sophie and I, very fixated on getting the tone of the granddaughter’s voice right and the texture of it, this kind of, what we kept calling the chispa, kind of the spark of her writing. And we thought, well, to do that, we’d probably better get the kind of pacey, punchy tone of the language by cutting up these long sentences. And that’s what we did in the sample that we translated in order to get the job in the first place. But then the more time we spent with the book, and I think this often happens, I think books kind of teach you how to translate them, the more time you spend with them. And the more we worked on the book, the more we realized that actually cutting the sentences up was exactly the wrong thing to do because, well, it was completely, it wouldn’t have been true to the language of the original at all. And what we needed to do was find a way of making our long sentences in English have all of the kind of pace and punch and chispa of Layla’s long sentences. That took a lot of reading out loud, and a lot of thinking about rhythm, and I ended up reading some writers in English that I think work well with long sentences. I read Max Porter, for example, and . . . I also read Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, which has some very good long sentences, to see how English can, how you can do that in English. It was a lot of fun trying to get that right. And it’s always a lot of fun making English behave in new and unexpected ways when you’re translating, which hopefully is something that we did with Woodworm.
Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. Her translations and writing have been published in McSweeney’s, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The White Review, Frieze, and The New York Times. Hughes has worked with the Stephen Spender Trust promoting translation in schools and is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe, published in 2020 in collaboration with Hay Festival. She lives in Trieste.
Annie McDermott‘s translations from Spanish and Portuguese include works by Selva Almada, Mario Levrero, Fernanda Trías, Ariana Harwicz, and Lídia Jorge. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2022 she was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán.
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