TWO VOICES: Translator Natasha Wimmer in Conversation with Daniel Alarcón

In this audio, celebrated author and Guggenheim fellow Daniel Alarcón talks with Natasha Wimmer about her translators of Bolaño's masterworks, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The audio was originally recorded on October 7, 2009.

They start the conversation by discussing why Wimmer got into translation to begin with. As she notes, translation is often seen as the closest form of reading, and "we become translators because we love to read." She opposes the reading done by translators—done "at the slowest possible pace"—to the reading we did as children, which was a very speedy and immersive kind of reading.

Wimmer than talked about her first translation, which she described as being a very hard book to translate. It was the Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, a noted Cuban writer who counts Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver among his literary inspirations. Citing Gutierrez as a very unadorned and idiomatic author, Wimmer expressed her opinion that "the more lyrical [a book] is the easier it is [to translate]." In conjunction with this, Wimmer talked about the tension between making a text feel natural versus retaining something of its foreignness.

Wimmer and Alarcón also talked about two of the other great translators of Latin American fiction: Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa. Wimmer explained her thoughts on Rabassa's surprising contention that he rarely reads the books he translated before he translates them, as well as on Grossman's magisterial work. The conversation then turned to how Wimmer came to join this lineage along when Chris Andrews, the translator of a number of Bolaño's other works, declined the chance to translate The Savage Detectives and 2666. While also discussing Latin American writers, Wimmer talked about Bolaño's relationship to the Latin American Boom writers—although Bolaño made extremely acerbic, dismissive remarks against them, he also admitted that they taught him much. The Boom writers were writers of exile, explained Wimmer, whereas Bolaño transcended the question of exile, posing as more of a post-national figure.

The conversation also of course included Wimmer's work with The Savage Detectives and 2666. While translating these books she spent some time living in Mexico City in order to absorb the Mexican Spanish that Bolaño frequently uses in both works and pick up cultural clues, like "El Santo," a famous Mexican wrestler who appears in The Savage Detectives. Here, Wimmer and Alarcón talked about two of Bolaño's most famous slang words: simón and simonel. Wimmer broke down the difficulty of having to translate this word that Mexicans understand to mean yes/no, and which has no direct equivalent in American English.

As a bonus, you can hear Wimmer read from The Savage Detectives in this audio presentation and see her and Alarcón in conversation at our YouTube channel.