Veracruz, Exposed and Exported: An Interview with Sophie Hughes
Fernanda Melchor, transl. Sophie Hughes | This is Not Miami | New Directions | April 2023 | 160 Pages
This Is Not Miami is Fernanda Melchor’s newly translated collection of cronicás or, as she put it in the author’s note, relatos exploring the underbelly of Veracruz, where readers are forced to directly confront the psyches of disturbingly sympathetic murderers, trace community formation through informal retribution and immolation, and bear witness to the carnal, fetid atrocities of dismemberment. Melchor is particularly challenging for translators: she’s perhaps best-known for her propulsive multi-page sentences with shifting narrators, the blending of reportage and mythology, the peppering of slang, and a palpable sense of grime that seeps off the page.
Sophie Hughes’ translation of This Is Not Miami balances respect towards Melchor’s style with self-assertion. Far from direct, Hughes twists phrases, weaving her respective complexity into the prose while maintaining Melchor’s affecting, sublimely grotesque voice. Written earlier in her career than Hurricane Season and Paradais, This Is Not Miami finds Melchor in a place of artistic discovery, deeply entrenched in a journalistic tone but subverting it through the infusion of the colloquial and profane, hinting at her later formal inventiveness. Hurricane Season, too, was inspired by the news, a chronicle detailing a murder motivated by witchcraft, exploring similarly bleak ecologies, an individual crime that implicates the place which bore it. But tonally, This is Not Miami takes greater distance, not taking this descent into her compressed walls of prose, laden with violence and chaos, but a less intrusive style, laying bare the broken voices of suppliants. However, even between the relatos, organized somewhat chronologically, written from 2002 to 2011, one can track the development of her voice into her dense, relentless, and physical blur of language.
I had the opportunity to speak with Sophie Hughes to discuss the challenges of translating such a singular literary voice in an attempt to not only sketch, in a pseudo-hagiographic manner, a portrait of Melchor’s early career, but to explore universal translation questions, whether it be inter-linguistic rhythm or the preservation of indeterminacy.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Narciso Novogratz: The term historia, both story and history, feels like an ambiguity Fernanda Melchor explores throughout This Is Not Miami. Melchor describes her difficulty in denominating a genre for this collection, crónica, relato, and (sentimental) literary realism, all imperfect, ultimately claiming that there is an inherent fiction baked within language, purposefully undermining her journalistic project. Especially considering her excursions into human subjectivity, an intentionally anti-journalistic topic, where do you locate and how do you define truth in these narratives?
Sophie Hughes: The South African writer J.M. Coetzee wrote that “the condition of truthfulness is not perfect self-knowledge but truth-directedness.” In that interview, he was discussing confessional writing, but maybe we can borrow the idea to think about any sort of biographical writing, including this kind of crónica, which recount events that really happened to people. In her introduction to This Is Not Miami, Melchor describes her effort to lead the reader towards a perspective “closer to individual experience than to the news story,” and it seems to me, as her reader, that this is a kind of truth-directedness: not seeking perfect knowledge of the crimes or mysterious events that took place in Veracruz, but, in Coetzee’s words again, showing an “attentiveness and responsiveness to an inner impulse.” In other words, she is never not interested in the motivations and reactions of her characters, fictional or non-fictional.
NN: Melchor theoretically introduces the text by centralizing ineffability: words rebel against the authorial intention, failing their role of mimesis. Tasked with translation, I imagine this imperfect encounter with language is heightened. When translating this text, what were the limits you encountered? Similar to how language fails to capture the entirety of the lived experience, were there moments of inevitable and accepted loss in this act of translation?
SH: I’m very interested in thinking about perfection in art, but it’s also true that if I set out worrying about failure or what I was going to inevitably lose in my translations, I’d never start! If you dissect any literary translation, you will see the meticulous decision-making process that’s gone into it. You should be able to see then that translation is a process of negotiation—there will be some wrangling, there will be occasional smooth substitutions, and there will be compromise and resourcefulness. I’m more interested in thinking about how I can be tactful than how not to lose things. For example, if I want dialogue between two people fighting to sound realistic, I probably won’t be able to translate their slurs or offenses literally or closely. Rather, I think of what a person might scream in their language. I turn my ear away from the original and towards the target language. This act doesn’t betray the author’s choice but honors the intention behind the phrase. I’m not going to translate a hardy dockworker down at the port of Veracruz, who, on hearing police sirens approaching, says “Hay pedos” literally! But it’s fun and pleasing seeking little links between spoken Spanish and English and coming up with a translation like “I smell trouble” over another option like “There’s a problem” or “Something’s up”—the former being a solution that is idiolectic and also nods to the literal image in the Spanish turn of phrase.
NN: Considering this is not your first Melchor translation, what were the specific difficulties of This Is Not Miami? Relative to Hurricane Season, from an outsider’s perspective, the text seems more translatable, that is, less packed with her gripping odysseys of sentences and vulgar polyphonies. I imagine this assumption I hold is both wrong and reductive. Moreover, as one of her earlier works, how do you read This Is Not Miami in the broader context of Melchor’s career (and the development of her singular literary voice)?
SH: I’m really glad to have translated This Is Not Miami (written before Hurricane Season and Paradais) after translating those other two novels. In one crónica, “Life’s Not Worth a Thing,” the reader will notice the long run-on sentences and almost comic, vital garrulity that have been so praised and admired in the novels and which are so exhilarating to read. Translating this collection, I feel like I’ve had a privileged and intimate view of the genesis of one of the great prose styles in the Spanish language of our times. As to difficulty, I like translating dialogue best (in another life, I would have liked to be a screenwriter, I think), and, in a way, Melchor’s novels, even when told in the third person, still read like dialogue or monologue, even stream of consciousness, so I have to say I find this stylistic trait or device enjoyable, if not easy, to translate.
NN: When discussing Hurricane Season, you describe a tender sympathy towards Melchor’s monstrous characters. The characters we encounter in This Is Not Miami, bracketing Melchor’s blurring of the fictional and real, are, at least, based on actual people performing real actions. They are not merely fictive but corporeal. How do you relate to the people in this collection, with their exposed (and broken) psychologies?
SH: Once more, in her introduction to This Is Not Miami, Melchor stresses the complex and contradictory relationship between fiction and reality, which are not antonyms. To me, the fictional character of Luismi in Hurricane Season is as real as the taken-from-real-life character of the boyfriend Jorge in "The House on El Estero" in This Is Not Miami. While reading Melchor or any great writer, I exist in the reality of the fiction, where I think we can learn most about our world and human nature.
NN: Veracruz is not merely a setting, a place where stories occur, but operates nearly as a character. I understand you lived in Mexico City years ago, but did you ever go to Veracruz while translating? Especially considering the dense forest of slang found in Melchor’s prose, how did you attempt to lessen the distance between you, a Brit, and the text's location?
SH: I’ve never lived in Veracruz, only visited. From a practical point of view, it would have made my life easier to know the streets and vernaculars of Veracruz intimately, but this is nothing that can’t be overcome with research and discussion with the author. For example, Melchor would send photos of maps and streets and sometimes even drawings to help me visualize something in order to then set it down in English correctly. I run a lot of the phrases by her, and she reads the finished draft. Once, in Hurricane Season, when I was really at a loss to understand a word, she explained to me she’d made it up! You don’t have to go into a translation knowing everything about the book and its setting, but you should aim to come out of the process knowing everything about the book and its setting.
NN: Considering how local the text is, the act of universalizing idioms, for example, connects the Jarocho to the American audience, fashioning characters as bound by human nature instead of a distinctly Mexican consciousness. However, this universalization also erases the cultural specificity of the text. To what extent should a translator bridge the gap between cultures or maintain a level of contrast and inaccessibility? If I recall correctly, you touched upon this subject when discussing your decision to leave certain Spanish terms untranslated in Hurricane Season, that is, the translator's role in mediating this question of othering or exoticization. I would love it if you expanded on such an idea.
SH: I have thought about this concern perhaps more than any other in my translations of Melchor. If I picture a version of my English translation in which I’d left all of the idioms and vernacular in Spanish, it would be a kind of Spanglish, but one so Spanish-heavy that the reader would probably be capable of reading the original, rendering the translation almost pointless. Leaving words or phrases in the original language in a translation tends to do one of two things: either it assumes some knowledge of the original language on the part of the target reader (in the case of Spanish in the US, this could be justifiably assumed, but not in other parts of the anglosphere); or it implies that non-Spanish-speaking readers don’t need to understand the meaning of those particular phrases or words, but just the gist or intention behind them. I wanted to leave in some culturally specific terms (some foods or flora, for example) where the reader can easily fill in the gap of their knowledge as they read (“he went to a bar and drank two caguamas”) without interrupting the flow. But if I leave whole idiomatic phrases in Spanish, then not only the meaning but also the intention behind them is lost on the reader, which runs the risk of disrupting the process of characterization that’s meant to be occurring in their head.
NN: Could you describe your relationship with Fernanda Melchor? How present is she in your process of translation?
SH: It’s a relationship of mutual admiration, and, certainly on my part, awe. She’s there, in a flash, when I need her and leaves me to it when I don’t. Like many authors I work with, she is extremely respectful of the translator’s job. As I’ve hopefully been showing, translation is essentially a recreation of the work in another language, and as such, it requires a certain amount of freedom (that is, ultimately, trust) to produce a great read.
NN: One of the great difficulties of translation, perhaps in the same vein as the earlier question on ineffability, is language's inherent or purposeful imperfection. Texts are necessarily constructed to be open, and in my brief (and failed) attempts at translation, specifically with Vicente Huidobro's Creationist poem Altazor, I have overly applied my interpretation, closing the text. How do you get back to the ambiguity of the text, not imposing your reading but allowing the possibility of the original prose?
SH: I doubt your attempts were failed attempts. It’s sometimes assumed that to translate well is to entirely suppress your voice in order to somehow fully embody the author's voice. However, translation can also be understood more like acting or interpreting. Great actors convince you they are their characters not by denying their own reading of a role or script but by owning it. Translation always feels like a huge responsibility because I’m working on someone’s else text, but there comes a point for me, usually around the third or fourth draft, having read against the original a few times, when I realize I need to let the original text go and trust that what I am hearing and trying to replicate in English is at the very least a valid interpretation of Melchor’s work.
NN: When discussing your translation of Hurricane Season, the concatenations of cursing are translated not purely semantically but primarily considered its rhythmic quality. When approaching translation, how central is the sonic element of the text? Considering This Is Not Miami more directly, considering its use of testimony or, better put, interview, how did you preserve the Spanish prosody?
SH: I think how central rhythm and sound are to any given text depends on what the text is offering in the original language. Because it falls under dialogue, cursing really has to sound realistic in translation, that is, something someone would say. Often, cursing uses figurative language (“He’s a real pig”), and, amazingly, delightfully, all languages develop idiosyncratic images, so being literal is not usually an option (one exception could be something like “X es una mierda” = “X is shit/shitty”). I always try to hear the intent behind what is being said (or yelled, or hissed) and use phrases that roll off the tongue as I imagine the set-up: so the phrase I use might be sibilant and harsh, or plosive to depict an outburst of anger. As a translator, I just want to convey a sense of what the character is communicating. It’s an act of close listening, then careful writing, whereby you give them a voice in English that evokes the voice you hear in Spanish. I’m immensely lucky to do this on behalf of Melchor, a master of characterization.