December 16, 2024

Our eleventh issue of Huizache features exciting translations of both prose and poetry.

The poetry translations include works from three prominent poets: Chen Xianfa (China), Eunice Odio (Costa Rica), and Iván Arguelles (Mexico/U.S.)

Born in 1967, Chen Xiafa is a Chinese poet and essayist whose sparse, lyrical work is the winner of the Lu Xun prize, among other awards.

Eunice Odio (1919-1974) is considered one of the most preeminent Costa Rican poets. She was born in Costa Rica, travelled widely, and spent a significant portion of her life in Mexico City. 

Iván Arguelles, who died this past year in Berkeley at the age of eighty-five, was a prolific, innovative Mexican American poet associated with City Lights and the Beats and Surrealists in his youth. In midlife, he shifted his focus to epic book-length poems.

The fiction translations feature two extraordinary Mexican women writers: Amparo Dávila (1928-2020) and Guadalupe “Pita” Dueñas (1910-2002).

Of Pita Dueñas, her translator for Huizache, Daisy Magallanes, summarizes: “Her concerns were materialist and rooted in colonialism, class, gender roles, power dynamics, who decides who is ‘mad,’ her identity (she was Lebanese Mexican y de Jalisco), and much of her own lived experience (cuentan that she too grew up with a fetus in a jarrón; she used it as a metaphor for the violence enacted by the Patriarch controlling and deciding the fate of the fetus—pretty pertinent to today, sadly).”

Reflecting on her approach to translating Pita Dueñas’s work, Magallanes adds: “With Dueñas it is clear to anyone who reads her that she was also a poet, que el sonido de las palabras tal cual la forma is just as important to her. So I spent a lot of time reading her work out loud, marking the cadence, the alliteration, the mutability of the diction she uses to create that veil that is neither here nor there; much of what I am talking about is paying attention to and then capturing the demarcations of her singular pen and then thinking: how would I say this with my lived experience? So that allowed me to make decisions about when not to translate and leave her words in Spanish because these moments in the text capture the essence of culture, region, and wordplay.”

In a celebration of Amparo Dávila in the LA Review of Books (June 2020), Matthew Gleeson, one of her translators, recounts that she “fell out of sight sometime after the 1970s, only to be rediscovered and lauded, at the beginning of the new millennium, as one of the country’s great masters of the short story.”

Most recently, asked to reflect on his translation for Huizache, Gleeson offered these insights on the process: “I think one of the most important components of literary translation is deep and sensitive listening to a written text. And I think it’s more fruitful to pay attention to what the words are doing, rather than what they (supposedly) are or mean in some inherent way.”

Co-translator, Audrey Harris, added: “Where we can, Matt and I have retained original Spanish words in our English translation, for things like foods and street names. In Dávila’s writing, a particular challenge arises in the passages where her characters mentally spin out of fear or delirium. Here, we took some liberties of phrasing in order to capture what we felt is the spirit of the original text while keeping the writing fluid and engaging.”

From the sparse voice of Chen Xiafa to the haunting work of Amparo Dávila, Huizache 11’s translations offer stylistically eclectic works of poetry and fiction. As a translator, I appreciated the editorial decision to publish the Chinese and Spanish originals of the poems alongside the translations as a way of honoring multilinguality. Regarding the short stories, I was struck by the translators’ different perspectives on when to retain the original Spanish as well as by this subtle notion (articulated by Gleeson) of focusing on what words are doing, which I read as focusing on their effect, on how they function within the larger work.

– Florencia Milito, Huizache Staff