After walking into Herter Hall’s Translation Annex, you are greeted by a small metal book cart, sidelined in between the two double doors and filled to the brim with translated novels, short stories and poems.
One day, Ilse Meiler, a UMass graduate student with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, decided to stop and browse the shelves. On Mar. 10, she led the University of Massachusetts Translation Center’s third book club meeting based on a title she had picked up.
“Trash,” written by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, has been translated into Spanish, English and French. Meiler’s favorite is the English version translated by Jadine Pluecker, but not for its lack of Spanish — rather, the very opposite.
“It shouts at you,” Meiler says. “You are constantly reminded of the fact that you’re reading a translation and that you’re not getting unmediated access to the text.”
The book club was co-founded earlier this year by Regina Galasso, Associate Director of the UMass Translation Center, and Breanna Lynch, a project manager at the center. The two aimed to shed light on the importance of translated works — which account for only three percent of the U.S. publishing market — through monthly meetings to read and discuss translated novels.
“It’s a good excuse to bring people together and help readers become more conscious of translation,” Galasso said. She described conversations she’d had in the past with people who loved to read but were unaware of the magnitude of translated works. “They’ll be reading Murakami, I’ll bring up something about translation and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I never really thought of it that way.’”
The club’s last book, “Human Acts,” touched on the topic of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. Lynch recalled being stunned by how direct the parallels felt to modern-day America, reading this around the time that Minnesota protests were occurring in response to ICE.
The leader of the last session, Toki Lee, provided her own personal translation of the first page, for readers to then compare to what the author had written. “The nice thing about these sessions is the people who lead them all speak the language,” Lynch added.
This month’s read, “Trash”, is set in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city that borders El Paso, Texas. Meiler, who has family from both regions, said this is what initially caught her eye and described her delight at finding a book that spoke to her, not just in terms of theme and language but also geography.
“So much of what’s talked about in Juárez is that it’s one of the most dangerous cities in North America to be a woman,” Meiler said, referring to the drug and gang violence that is prevalent within the region. “But the fact that [‘Trash’] makes it into something that is a secondary and not a primary plot is quite exciting to me.”
At the start of the meeting, each attendee was asked to rate the novel. Many agreed that it was interesting in terms of storyline, but what really distinguished it was the choices made in translation.
Characters are often referred to as mija (darling) and chiquitita (little one), or pendejas (stupid b*tches) and putas (whores) — often used interchangeably, as either a rebuke or term of endearment, which speaks to the complexity of these character dynamics. Natural fillers and sentence starters — mira (look), oye (hey), pues (well) — are interwoven within bouts of English exchanges. That is exactly what the novel is: an ongoing exchange of reciprocal dialects, an interlingual and nonlinear demonstration of these women and their stories.
“[‘Trash’] is an activist translation,” said Meiler. “It’s not pretending not to be. The translator is present and what they have done is make the book more accessible and rich and beautiful.” She describes it as a book that has “gained in translation.”
One member commented that she’d had to look multiple phrases up while she was reading, while another, Dona Kercher, flipped through pages and read passages she’d analyzed throughout the book, with flawless pronunciation and wore a name tag that read “I speak: Spanish/English.”
Kercher spoke about going abroad in college and falling in love with language. She has been teaching Spanish, film and women’s studies for over thirty years at Assumption University.
She was surprised that much of the discussion revolved around the book’s translation and was excited by the club’s premise. “It could really go either way. You could talk about politics and the border, femicides, class structure, the trans women, the marginality of the characters.”
Dalia Cristerna-Román, another attendee, is originally from Mexico City and recently moved to Amherst after living in Canada for eight years. She now works as a linguist with heritage Spanish speakers and families who have moved to the United States. Oftentimes, she says, families find themselves contending with the adjustment of learning English while trying to keep the Spanish alive at home.
“Their relationship with language is more emotional, but it’s also at odds with the majority,” Cristerna-Román said. “If you are in Mexico, it’s a given that English is what you should learn — it is what gets you further, gets you opportunities. But with a book like [‘Trash’], it’s almost a rebellion,” she added. “You have to put in some effort. It’s a symbolic border.”
After reading the Spanish translation first, she was interested in what people had to say about the English version. “Even people that haven’t read both come with a lot of knowledge,” she commented, which is a phenomenon that she describes as linguistic intuition. “You can learn some Spanish just from reading translated books.”
The club will host two more meetings: one in April, on the book “Neighbours,” written by Lília Momplé and translated by Richard Bartlett and Isaura de Oliveira, and one in May, “Heart Lamp: by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.
Cecelia Johnson can be reached at [email protected].
