{"id":434102,"date":"2020-08-26T14:53:56","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T18:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=434102"},"modified":"2020-08-26T14:53:56","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T18:53:56","slug":"spanish-language-speculative-fiction-by-women-in-translation-witmonth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/08\/26\/spanish-language-speculative-fiction-by-women-in-translation-witmonth\/","title":{"rendered":"Spanish-Language Speculative Fiction by Women in Translation. [#WITMonth]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s post is by Rachel Cordasco, founder and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation<\/a>, co-translator of\u00a0<\/em>Creative Surgery<\/a>\u00a0by Clelia Farris, and is working on a book about speculative fiction from around the world.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has<\/em> given us several excellent works of Spanish-language SFT by women, so at least there\u2019s that. With novels and stories exploring such themes as mass surveillance, cannibalism, and nanobot rebellion, readers who hadn\u2019t yet heard about these texts are in for a treat.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"The beginning of the year brought us three short SFT texts\u2014two from Mexico and one from Cuba. Bibiana Camacho\u2019s \u201cThe Other Woman<\/a>,\u201d translated by Cecilia Weddell and published in World Literature Today<\/em>, tells the chilling story of a woman who realizes that her reflection is not her own. This awareness comes first as she gazes into her bathroom mirror, and then while she\u2019s riding the metro: \u201cI touched my chin and cheeckbones, and though I felt my fingers\u2019 contact, I felt that I was stroking a stranger\u2019s face, one that belonged to some other woman.\u201d Eventually, the chaos that starts to unfold outside of her stalled train mirrors the woman\u2019s fear and panic at this unexpected change in her appearance.<\/p>\n

This story is about shifting identities on multiple levels. As translator Cecilia Weddell points out in her accompanying essay \u201cTranslation as Masquerade,\u201d the author\u2019s name itself is a pen name, taken up because it is the author\u2019s beloved grandmother\u2019s name. Furthermore, \u201cThe Other Woman\u201d can only be rendered into English via translation, which, in this case, is done by a woman who is not the author. As Weddell notes, Camacho\u2019s story is both the same and different in English translation\u2014recognizable yet different from the original, a reality that lies at the heart of translation itself. And yet, according to Weddell, \u201cI cannot say if my translations are as good as what they re-create, but I know the work can be done well.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"Malena Salazar Maci\u00e1\u2019s \u201cThe Salt in Her Kiss<\/a>,\u201d translated by Toshiya Kamei for The Future Fire<\/em>, is a dreamlike fantasy about a woman who grows up in a forest, sheltered from everyone and everything by her grandfather. Upon his death, she escapes and wanders into a city, where she is forced into marriage by a cold, unfaithful man who ultimately abandons her. Eventually, she makes her way to the sea and couples with a mermaid, who helps her give birth to herself as the mermaid she always felt herself to be.<\/p>\n

Salazar Maci\u00e1\u2019s second story in English this year, \u201cEyes of the Crocodile<\/a>,\u201d also translated by Toshiya Kamei but published this time in Clarkesworld Magazine<\/em>, is the tale of a nanobot rebellion.<\/p>\n

Nanobots of various types, originally designed to \u201cinstill in us the traditions handed down from our ancestors many millennia ago,\u201d wind up turning against their human hosts. One woman takes it upon herself to bring them back into line and save herself in the process. The author\u2019s two other stories in English were published in 2019 on\u00a0 SFinTranslation.com<\/em> and in Mithila Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"May and August of this year brought us two books by women authors from Argentina: Little Eyes <\/em><\/a>by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell) and Tender is the Flesh<\/em><\/a> by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses). Like Schweblin\u2019s earlier works in English\u2014Fever Dream<\/em> and Mouthful of Birds\u2014Little Eyes<\/em> is a disturbing and surreal text that invites us to rethink our everyday reality. Set in a world that could be our own in just a few years time, it imagines that people can go out and purchase the equivalent of a small stuffed animal (called a \u201ckentuki\u201d) that also has cameras for eyes, wheels for legs, and a motor. Inside of that creature is technology that allows a person on the other side of town or the other side of the world to direct it and give it commands. The owner of the creature knows this, and the person \u201cinhabiting\u201d the creature knows that they know this. And because this is Samanta Schweblin, we<\/em> know that nothing good will come of this arrangement. Eventually, kentukis proliferate and their owners begin to see them as more than just mobile cameras, but as living creatures with rights and desires. The human connection to technology that it doesn\u2019t fully understand, however, leads to unanticipated horrors.<\/p>\n

Speaking of horror, Bazterrica\u2019s Tender is the Flesh<\/em> offers us a world in which a virus has made animal meat inedible. Forced to look for other sources of protein, humans quickly turned to cannibalism, legitimizing it by using genetically-modified humans that are raised and slaughtered like the animals before them. One day, the protagonist, who works in one of the processing plants, falls in love with one of the humans he\u2019s supposed to \u201charvest\u201d and the moral questions that have been forcibly stifled in this new world burst back out into the open.<\/p>\n

Alternately surreal, dreamlike, and horrifying, these works of SFT by Spanish-speaking women authors show Anglophone readers just how diverse and intriguing this literature is. And there\u2019s certainly more to look forward to in the coming years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s post is by Rachel Cordasco, founder and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation, co-translator of\u00a0Creative Surgery\u00a0by Clelia Farris, and is working on a book about speculative fiction from around the world.\u00a0 Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of Spanish-language SFT by women, so at least there\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":434142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[64656,66386],"class_list":["post-434102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rachel-cordasco","tag-women-in-translation-month"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434162,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434102\/revisions\/434162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}