One-Handed // a multivaried array of poetry by Translators, Mexicans, Scots, and Google

When is a translation not a translation? When is it a different version of the text? What would happen to the poem if it were written by someone from another culture? Who wrote the poem, the author or all the cultural-historical context and readings that informed the author? These are some of the questions I want to explore with my project One-Handed, which will get all my favourite translators and Mexican and Scottish poets speaking to each other through their work (and mine!). This is a playful experiment which will be published as an ebook only, and which I hope to bring to you very soon. 

The idea behind the project began during my MLitt in Creative Writing: I was struck by how differently literature, and creative writing in particular, is conceptualised and taught in Mexico and in the UK, and the possible resulting differences in what kind of writing is produced and published in either country. Mexico with its eternal rebellious spirit, in which transgression has become the standard and genres are considered to be a thing of the 19th century, versus the UK with its focus on more subtle nuances and subject-matter, ranging from nature poetry to Oulipian wordplay to fantasy fiction, in which whether or not someone is 'conforming to the norm' isn't really something that needs to be discussed. I found the differences staggering, and this is how I started trying my hand at translating Mexican poetry into English, to see what kind of explosive magic might happen. Still, with my leftover bits of Mexican rebellious spirit, I couldn't really bear to simply put together a bog-standard anthology.

Thankfully, attending the Translation Summer School held by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the University of East Anglia gave me some very good food for thought which would later crystallise into my idea for One-Handed. There, Adam Thirwell and Tash Aw presented their project Multiples, published by Granta, an experiment in which a story would be translated several times by different writers, always coming in and out of English so we could read the process, in a game similar to Chinese whispers. (Read more about the book in Daniel Hahn's article in The Guardian). What I found really fascinating about this project is that the more the translation departed from the original, the more interesting the game became: the whole project seemed to be deliberately set up to cause mistranslations, celebrating infidelity as far more interesting than fidelity. Which made us, a room-full of professional translators, shift in our seats with some degree of unease. One of the most interesting jumps in the sequence of translations, was when one of the author/translators --though it's unclear which-- was so intent into bringing the story into their own culture that they changed the name, occupation and entire life story of the character and brought him into China, possibly also in a specific historical period. Indeed, the character could not have been more thoroughly translated--or should we say colonised? Tash Aw actually went so far as to say that Zadie Smith's translation was 'rather prim,' inasmuch as she had not attempted to undermine or alter the story in her translation in any way. Quite a statement about our life's work as translators. And it really got my brain cells moving.

When is a translation not a translation?

Another project which really inspired me was Transversalia: Horizontes con versos / Horizonte in verkehrten Versen, edited in Berlin by Rike Bolte, in which she really got Latin American and German poets speaking to each other telegraphically other through their writing. She paired up Latin American poets with German poets working on similar themes, and got them each to provide a poem, which would then be translated into the other language, and which the other poet in the pair would write a "poetic telegram" in response: a brief, visceral response to the other's translated text. The results were then translated back, creating a very interesting bilingual anthology at the same time as a fertile ground for dialogue between poets from both cultures.  

All this lead me to want to put together a One-Handed collection after my own poetry collection Manca, which is about to go to print this week in Mexico with Tierra Adentro. For this project, I call all my favourite Mexican poets to re-write my book in Spanish by following the exact same methodology which I followed to write it. I then plan get their poems translated into English by my favourite translators, and present the results alongside translations of my own poems by my favourite Scottish poets. Most of the Scottish poets, thankfully, will have very little knowledge of Spanish, so their translations are going to be versions based on literal translations, which, correct me if I'm wrong, actually used to be considered a valid method for translation back in the day when people weren't so multilingual. Except here the literal versions will be provided by GoogleTranslate, just to be a bit more deviant. What I am aiming to play with is all the space for error, and the borders of what would traditionally not  be considered as translation, or even a piece of original writing, questioning the nature of writing, translation, authorship, plagiarism, appropriation... Can the same poem be written again and again by different people, as Borges famously questioned in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote? And could this not in fact be considered what translation essentially consists of? And the question I ultimately what I want to get at is: with our modern faith in individuality, have we lost sight of how collaborative and multiple our processes actually are, often without us ever taking notice? 

Self-published authors: revolutionaries or weirdos who will die alone?

When asked by non-writer friends why I haven't self-published my writing, I answer adamantly that there is a huge stigma associated with self-published authors: those are the desperate kind, who didn't write a book good enough for it to be picked up by a proper publisher. A sort of cringe akin to being the only single person at a dinner party organised by your relatives who you have nothing in common with and who have already accepted the fact that you are a weirdo that will die alone but nevertheless still make a point to discuss it at every opportunity.

Despite overwhelming evidence of huge success stories that keep cropping up about self-published authors who have made it big by going solo, I still resist the notion of putting my work out there as a self-published venture.

Why do I still think the stigma lives on? Because it is an attitude I perceive in publishers who I really trust and respect--the ones who have brought me my favourite authors in beautifully, impeccably produced books (often with the help of state funding), and who obviously have good taste and know what they're doing and take literature seriously. And because there is a kind of systemic violence against self-publishing, particularly if your work is literary fiction or poetry: you know, just little things like how newspapers and magazines don't really tend to review self-published books, how literary awards don't consider self-published books, how self-published authors don't get the cooshy jobs, and how the Society of Authors does not consider somebody who is self-published as an actual author and thus cannot become a member, unless he or she has sold above an X amount of copies. (As if most traditionally published authors reached that target on a regular basis?)

But maybe, just maybe, it is only a matter of time before authors stop caring what old-fashioned dudes in linen suits think? Because ultimately, it's the readers who are actually going to buy and read the stuff. We maybe just need to work a little bit more at our 'marketing' strategies, what with the very unsexy label "self-published" that authors get, whilst musicians and visual artists who publish (i.e., make publicly available) their work on the internet are away being trendy and indie and all the rest. In our case it is the independent publishers who seem to have dibbs on the label "indie" so perhaps authors need to wait their turn for the spotlight or else be doomed for ever by publishing through newer means.

But writers can and should and do and will take advantage of this crazy world that is the Internet, just as visual artists and musicians have been doing for the last decade. Maybe self-publishing will even become cool, have its own kind of edginess? We admire the "home-made" qualities of indie records, the warm distorsion that comes with recording on tape, the spontaneity that comes with a live video posted on the go. Often records are produced to sound as if they were recorded using poor-quality or vintage equipment, when in fact all the modern cons were available. Why shouldn't a few typos and non-professionally-edited books emanate this same kind of "home-made" charm? The way cut-and-paste zines get a bit of street cred for being hand made?

And I think there will be space in this world for all, publishers and bookshops and self-published authors and indies and Amazon and all the rest. This is just the kind of shift in production and distribution methods which inevitably brings about a change in power structures. Which sounds pretty healthy to me. Almost like some kind of revolution.

Love books? Then love piracy. A tale about a land with no bookshops.

Back in the day, in the capital of North East Mexico, a city of no less than 3.5 million people, there was a distinct lack of bookshops. There were a few dusty second-hand bookshops on Calle Washington in the city centre: Librerías Cerda et al. And then there was Librería Castillo, in the shopping centre near my house, selling mostly Paulo Coelho and cookbooks, as well as a few bookshops dedicated exclusively to school textbooks. Growing up, this is what I had access to. There was no way to order books online. If you were lucky enough to be able to travel 900 km to Mexico City, then you could get anything you wanted. Otherwise, you had to wait for the yearly book festival, and gorge yourself. Spend all of your savings buying everything you found remotely interesting, making sure you had at least enough to keep you going for a whole other year. A stall dedicated to each publisher/bookseller. A massive conference hall full of books, spilling out into the corridors. Free to attend with free readings and events. It was paradise for one whole week every autumn.

In university, we had to read most of our books from the photocopy of the photocopy that our professor smuggled back from communist Russia. Or at least that's what it felt like. We even had our favourite photocopy shop, called Tecnocopias. They were so well organised that they had all our recurring orders on file: Bakhtin, Margarita Dalton, Foucault, the Russian formalists, María Luisa Puga, Deleuze & Guatarri, Hélène Cixous, Josefina Vicens, Susan Sontag, or even classics like Homer or Unamuno or Flaubert or Cervantes or the odd Icelandic saga here and there, ready to be photocopied to order. Most of the time, the front cover and the page with the copyright information were not included. We had no idea in what year it was originally printed or who had published or translated this stuff. It didn't matter. They had failed us. Half an hour's wait and about 100-200 pesos (depending on the length of the book) gave you a heavy folder full of bond paper; optional spiral binding and plastic covers for an additional fee. I always bought my books unbound. That way I could carry around only the chapter I was reading, or put the chapters in the order I required, or make my own tailor-made anthologies. I still have a few crates of these precious photocopy-books in storage somewhere. I wonder how many royalties these authors and translators lost because we had no bookshops? And who the heck cares? How many people went out of business because of us? What would copyright legislators have expected us to do? They probably would have preferred us to not study at all.

Was there another way? Probably. Some entrepreneurial student could have set up a small publishing house and re-printed all these titles, or the photocopy shop could have paid royalties to the authors (though they were selling at the cost of just ink and paper), or somebody could have set up a small distributor and ordered in the titles, if the reading lists could have been made available a year in advance... Did we have the time or money or knowledge to figure all this out? No.

Plenty of bookshops have since opened in Monterrey, and I'm sure a lot of these titles are now available to buy legitimately. But what about the rarities, the out-of-print, the obscure, the highly specialized? Surely these deserved to be photocopied again and again, or in modern terms, distributed online in electronic versions, for free. Funded not by the market forces or by the nearly empty pockets of students, but by the government. And the in-print, readily available should also be available electronically to people who can't afford it, so that no student in any country has to work 20+ hours a week while studying just to be able to afford to buy the books they need to read.

I am so happy that we broke all the rules. I hadn't realized how anarchist and DIY we had to be to earn our degrees. I hope many more students in universities in remote or not-so-remote communities around the world are doing the same. Love books? Then love piracy. There is no other way for culture to spread at the speed it's supposed to. Buying books legitimately is only for wealthy, first world countries who step on the heads of "underdeveloped" nations, mess with their civil wars, impose unpayable debts, and steal all their oil. Why should they have the right to hinder the "illegitimate" distribution of ebooks as well?

On being a mystical interpreter in Scottish courtrooms

Interpreting in court in Scotland I stand beside the booth of the accused. "Milord, could I ask the fiscal to speak slowly so as to allow the interpreter to translate to the accused," I say, interrupting the fiscal and  addressing a judge wearing a neat gray, curly wig and starched white collars. The solicitor defending the accused mumbles through tattered black robes that resemble the wings of an old bat or vampire. When the accused speaks, I say, "I'm guilty" or "I'm not guilty." When referring to myself, I speak in the third person, saying "the interpreter." When the solicitor refers to himself, I say in Spanish, "if I could ask your Lordship to consider..." Etc. I am all the "I"s in the room, my goal is to disappear, to become simply a transparent medium, a facilitator for others' speech. I do not have a name, I am anyone who speaks. There is something truly mystical in being an interpreter, sitting at the heart of all these matters that have nothing to do with me but which become temporarily my own. Becoming many different people, allowing myself to be the embodiment of countless selves. 

Little paparazzis, celebrities to no one

I have a favourite tree in Glasgow. I go and sit in it whenever I feel a bit agitated, or happy, or sad. It works for all emotions really. It is carpeted in soft moss and hangs over the river Kelvin. It's actually two trees intertwined with each other. Beautiful creature. Anyway, one day I was sitting in this tree, gazing over the river and feeling absolutely nothing. Suddenly I turned around to see a Chinese woman flagrantly taking a picture of me with her bright pink smartphone.

Neither of us knew what to do. She stood there frozen for a few seconds holding up her phone. I had turned around really abruptly and directed my gaze directly at her, as if I knew I was being looked at. But I wasn't really thinking of anything, and although I was surprised to find myself being of photographic interest to a random passerby, I wasn't particularly annoyed. But I made no attempt to make her feel better either. She looked absolutely terrified, as if embarrassed for blatantly invading my private moment of contemplation, and very awkwardly put the phone away and continued walking.

It made me think that we are no longer alone in this world. As if suddenly we have all become little celebrities, and can't do anything without the danger of being captured by a slew of cameras. We need to go around under cover, sunglasses and hoods, and try and stay off everyone else's radar. Or we need to be hyper-conscious of how we present ourselves to the world.

I imagine this woman posting this image somewhere (why else take a photo if not to post it somewhere?), with a comment on how romantic life in Scotland is. Something really cheesy that has nothing to do with how I was experiencing that moment. Now I am for ever trapped in this cheesy, unrealistic image of Scottish life, perhaps liked by friends back in China who wistfully dream of going abroad, and doing a PhD at Glasgow University, for example. The picture elicits in these hypothetical friends mixed feelings of inspiration and envy, happiness and self-loathing. The usual Facebook experience. Which makes me think of social media as similar to reading Hello! magazine. Except we are much more involved because it is our real life friends living wonderful lives. How much do we project onto these images, and are we able to deal with it?