The Writing Life

Grossman : So if there's the slightest difference or change you catch it immediately. That's interesting and a little disconcerting. Do you ever change things in your original because of the translation?

Montero : Well . . . the titles, of course. A title is a very significant part of any book. It is the door to a story. For this reason, I always feel a bit reluctant to make any changes. For example, Tu, la oscuridad should be "You, Darkness"; it was changed, however, to In the Palm of Darkness , which is entirely different. And Como un mensajero tuyo , which is literally "like your own messenger" or "like a messenger sent by you" -- a verse by Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Italian poet -- was changed to the very dry The Messenger . I am not happy about this, but titles in English for the American market are influenced by many factors, and publishers everywhere fall prey to commercial pressures and adapt the title to whatever they think will sell books.

Grossman : So you see the title as the door to the story; do you see the translation as the same house you were building when you wrote the novel?

Montero : I never see a translation until the first draft is done.

Grossman : Yes, I never speak to an author while I'm in the middle of translating. There's a reason for that: I want the translation to come out of my own independent perception of the text.

Montero : Very good. That way you don't have any preconceived ideas about the book, no conversation with the author. Nothing! You're approaching it like any other reader.

Grossman : And I have always preferred to work alone, without the author, until the end. Then I'm happy to have the author involved. There are always so many refinements to be made. For instance: I've sometimes wondered about the Caribbean "accent" in your writing, Mayra. I don't try to capture "accents." I try to create an English that reflects the Spanish. So the "accent" in Spanish -- in your case, a particular Caribbean inflection -- in a sense, is not my concern. The English is my concern. For example, the level of English that the characters speak -- I need to gauge that carefully.

Montero : I am very Caribbean, and it's not easy to capture that Caribbean essence. Do you remember when we were working on my new novel, Dancing to Almendra ? We had to spend a great deal of time on the telephone talking about some of these expressions. It's a novel with a lot of slang -- especially the unique Cuban "jerga" that contains African, Spanish and even Chinese dialects.

Grossman : It's important that the translation "feel" the same way and have a comparable rhythm -- that's more important than individual words.

I'm curious, though: Do you read English-language authors?

Montero : Of course. When I was an adolescent, Edgar Allan Poe was my favorite -- maybe because I was susceptible to nightmares. Through the years, I've also read Truman Capote, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and many, many Russian authors in Spanish translation. Remember that I grew up in Cuba when the Soviets were our friends: I read Gorky, Chekhov, Mayakovsky. I read a lot of poetry during those days, too.

In recent years, I find myself reading books in English about voodoo, which interests me enormously -- like the one by Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti, the bible of voodoo. Or the book about voodoo poisons by Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness . And there is another -- very important for me -- Divine Horsemen, by Maya Deren. She was an American dancer and filmmaker who went to Haiti in the '50s and stayed there for a long time. She wrote a splendid book about her experiences.

Now I also try to read fiction in English . . . I try . . . . Believe me, I can read or even write English better than I speak it!

Grossman : That happens to everybody who studies another language: They can read better than they can speak. So, who is your favorite English language writer?

Montero : Poe. Joseph Conrad. Jack London.

Grossman : Jack London -- how interesting. I think his star has waned in the United States. And is it Poe's poetry or his prose?

Montero : His prose. Poe is actually my greatest literary influence. After him, Horacio Quiroga, Julio Cortzar and especially the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier. It's Carpentier that I read and reread. El siglo de las luces (translated as Explosion in a Cathedral ) is my favorite novel in the whole world. I also look for new writers, new voices, especially in Spanish because I write in Spanish -- Antonio Muoz Molina, who lives in New York, and the Chilean Roberto Bolao, who passed away about two years ago. But I wonder, how do you find that voice in the other language when a writer has such a distinctive voice in their own language?

Grossman : Well, that's what translators do. They try to find the voice in English that matches the voice in Spanish, or whatever the language may be. Or, at least, that's what I try to do. I don't know exactly how I do it. I hear the Spanish and then I start to "speak" the English mentally. I don't know any other way to explain the process. Although you're the writer and I'm the translator, in a very real sense we're both writing a book. I'm writing it in a different language. I'm following you. I don't have to deal with the blank page, but I'm writing nevertheless.

Montero : I think it's quite hard for the translator, precisely because you don't have to deal with the blank page. Dealing with the full page can be very difficult. Then there's the additional problem when a writer changes style or content from book to book.

Grossman : Yes. But with you two things stay the same. One is the way you deal with language. You are precise, poetic, strong. And your view of human beings and the view of the human condition is always recognizable. I told somebody that your books often reminded me of Graham Greene's -- there's a sense of a moral order in the universe to which we have to conform.

Montero : I don't know who said many years ago that the writer writes just one book through his whole life with different titles, different characters -- and I agree with that. I think, at least in my case, I tell just one story with all kinds of twists and turns.

Grossman : That's true. It's like music. You can tell who the composer is after a bar or two because of particular stylistic characteristics. I read a paragraph or two of a writer, and I know exactly who I'm reading. Just as you would never hear Miles Davis and think he was Dizzy Gillespie, or that Mozart was Ives, it would be hard to mistake your writing for, say, Mario Vargas Llosa's.

Montero : You know that musicians as well as authors are always looking for their own language. But it's more than the language. It's something to do with ethics and aesthetics.

Grossman : Ethics and aesthetics. Which brings us back to what we were saying earlier about language and story -- what, in fact, does an author have to say about the world, and how does he or she express that vision? Ethics and aesthetics -- the blend of the two is the essence of all art, isn't it? For the writer as well as the translator.