Report on Megan McDowell

 Megan McDowell’s “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation”

Lia Galván

Megan McDowell – a translator from Latin American literature into English – gave a lecture on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 as part of Boston University’s Literary Translation Series. She was introduced by the series curator Professor Keith Vincent who mentioned her impressive resume. McDowell’s translations have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and have won several prizes such as the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, and the Premio Valle-Inclán. In her lecture, “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” McDowell discussed the questions she has been asked the most during her translation journey and shared her ongoing reflections about the most appropriate way to answer them. 

The first question that McDowell addressed was “How long does it take to translate a book?” This is a question that she is often asked in interviews, and McDowell grew tired of giving the same answer that translators have given over and over again: “It depends on the book”. Instead, she took the question seriously and resolved to time herself while she was working on different texts. She came up with some very interesting numbers. Our Share of the Night, a book of 582 pages, by Mariana Enriquez took her 505 hours to translate while Chilean Poet, with 369 pages, by Alejandro Zambra took her 303.5 hours. Austral, with 224 pages, by Carlos Fonseca took her 102 hours. She also made a distinction between the time it took her to write a first draft of the book and the time it took to edit it; translation took the most time –315 hours– while copyediting took about 100 hours. But the most impressive number she shared was that she took roughly 45 minutes per page between translating and editing. This might seem like a long time to devote to a single page, but it actually shows that McDowell is a fast and efficient translator. McDowell encouraged the rest of the translators in the room to time themselves as a part of a collective endeavor to professionalize literary translation and to make publishing houses and society, in general, acknowledge the work of literary translators. Translators deserve to have recognition and to be paid accordingly in order to live off this profession instead of it being considered a hobby or a part-time job. 

The second question McDowell addressed was “Are Translators Writers?” When she did her first interview for a magazine she felt blindsided by this question and ended up giving an answer that she later regretted when it got featured as the first quote from the interview: “Maybe I’m not brave enough [to be a writer].” In saying this, she was trying to indicate her admiration for the writers she has translated and their ability to be vulnerable as they share their personal stories with the world. She felt, however, that the phrasing of the question itself might be detrimental to the image of the translator. What she resents the most about this question is the idea of having to answer “I’m just a translator” since it minimizes the huge amount of work that goes into translation as well as its creative and aesthetic aspects. She encouraged the audience to create a literary community where answering “I’m the translator” is as well regarded and respected as answering “I’m both writer and translator.”

She then mentioned the similarities and differences between the two creative endeavors. Translators never face the empty page as authors do. They don’t have to come up with the characters, plots, or setting. But they share with novelists and poets the craft of shaping the language  and establishing the tone, rhythm, humor, and effects the story might have on the readers.  Empathy, she argued, is fostered by both types of jobs. She also pointed to the fact that an author like Mariana Enriquez is the only one who can write a Mariana Enriquez story while any number of people can translate her stories.  And yet all of those translations will be different.  “I am the only one capable of doing a Megan McDowell translation”, she noted, thus underscoring that translators also have personal styles and individual capabilities that distinguish them as artists.  

The next question she took on was “How Closely Do You Work With Your Authors?” In her experience, she explained, translation has become a vital part of the editorial process of the writer she is working with. McDowell stated that she has been lucky to have very close relationships with the authors she has worked with. “It’s one of the main advantages of working with live authors,” she mentioned as she related how she has been able to ask authors about the choices they made in their literary texts in order to translate them in the best possible way. In many cases, her translation process involved either rendering clear what was obscure in the source text or changing certain images to work better in English. McDowell feels confident about doing this because she has had the chance to discuss these changes beforehand with the authors. She also talked about her close relationship with writer Alejandro Zambra whom she has translated since she was a graduate student. Zambra trusts her input and she is one of the people to whom he sends the manuscripts of his books before they are published to ask her for her feedback. McDowell highlighted this relationship as an example of how writing and translation can complement and serve as inspiration for each other in the creative process.

The next question McDowell talked about is “How do you approach the untranslatable?” to which she answered that for her “anything is untranslatable” or “everything is translatable” meaning that everything can be translated even words with very specific cultural implications. She gave the example of a book she was working on by Colombian author Margarita García Robayo which had the word “estupro”. This word is literally translated to “statutory rape”; however, McDowell didn’t feel that translation captured the meaning of the source text. She was able to ask the author directly about the word who explained that in Colombia it had different connotations and was used in a colloquial context that means something closer to feeling “betrayed”. In this way, McDowell was able to translate something apparently “untranslatable”, thus, proving that there are always ways to address the words that might have foreign meanings and communicate them to the target audience. 

McDowell’s approach to “the untranslatable” is a way of rebutting the idea that things “get lost in translation” – a phrase she hates because it casts translation in a negative light instead of focusing on the whole new book that is gained from translation. “Change is the whole point of translation,” she points out as she talks about the more “radical” decisions she has taken in her translations in order to have the best possible version of the book in English. She referred to a poem within Chilean Poet which might appear “untranslatable” since the speaker reflects on the words that are male and female in Spanish. For instance, the wind is male (viento) while the snow is female (nieve). In order to carry across this meaning to the target audience McDowell took a creative approach in her translation adding phrases that were not in the original such as “in my mother tongue the word for earthquake is masculine” making clear that the poem is talking about words in Spanish. She continues to imitate the aesthetic proposal of the poem while adding examples that differ from the source text but give off a similar effect; for example, she adds seven lines that were not in the source before addressing the wind and the snow. She mentioned that she felt confident about taking this approach since one of the main themes of the novel is expressing ourselves with the words that are available to us, thus, allowing her to use the words that are available in English to transmit the meaning of a poem that reflects about Spanish. 

McDowell also explained a method she uses quite often in her translations, the stealth gloss. This is a strategy that allows her to introduce contextual information in the text without having to resort to a footnote. In a stealth gloss, the translator adds words that weren’t in the source text in such a way that it doesn’t distract the reader. McDowell strives to make her glosses fit  with the voice of the character or the narrator. In this way, her stealth glosses appear seamlessly within the rest of the text.  This stealth gloss is one of the ways McDowell leaves her own personal mark in her translations. She has a special sense of pride or ownership over them. She compared her translation process to when one first reads a book and feels a special connection with it. In this sense, she sees herself as a protector of her reading experience and she looks at the target text as something she has to take care of every step of the way to ensure it provokes a comparable reading experience for the target audience. 

McDowell wants to do right by the texts she translates, even if on some occasions that might mean leaving her name off of the cover for marketing purposes. The fact that she is willing to give up her credit in the process really speaks to McDowell’s devotion to the texts and her desire that they will do well in the literary market. She would become practically an invisible figure if this meant that the text had greater chances of finding a wider audience in the target culture. McDowell’s stance shows the love she has for the source texts and how she devotes herself to creating comparable target texts which will allow the target reader to fall in love with the texts in the same way that she did. 

This led her to her last question “How do you come up with the titles?”. Her answer to this was a way of highlighting the whole team of people that is behind a translation and which we normally don’t address. She gave the example of the book Distancia de rescate by Samantha Schweblin which she thought would be directly translated to “Rescue Distance”; however, the marketing team assigned to the book didn’t like the title and instead decided to translate it as Fever Dream. This experience was very telling for her on how the title of a book changes the way readers interpret and understand its story. She reflected on how in many interviews people asked about what percentage of the book was reality and what percentage was a dream. This was a question that the source audience didn’t mention as often. The contrast between the literary interests of the source and the target audience highlighted the way the reception of a book can change due to the translation choices. Her examples also emphasized the mediated nature of translation and how authors, publishers, and marketing are also involved in the process of getting a translated book into the hands of a reader. 

At the end of the lecture, McDowell encouraged people to ask her any other questions that came to the attendees' minds or that they have experienced as translators. She reminded the audience that she saw translation as an ongoing conversation and that the public’s voice was a very important part of it. This resulted in a long session of questions and answers where the engaged audience was a great match with McDowell’s easygoing attitude and accessibility. The audience's questions resulted in McDowell sharing a bit more of her personal story. She related how she got into translation motivated by her love of reading. She explained how she saw translation as a way to exercise what she calls “creative reading” where translation becomes a way of expanding her reading experiences as she rewrites a story in the target language. There was also great admiration from the audience stemming from the fact that McDowell makes a living from her translations. The public’s interest in her translation journey led her to relate how she has been able to live off her translations since she worked a long time in an investment bank and lives abroad in Chile. She reflected upon this fact and mentioned that she wasn’t sure that she would be able to live off her translations if she lived in the U.S. Her answer underscored the fact that there should be an active effort from publishing houses and the public in general in legitimizing translation as a professional career. 

The class discussion that followed this lecture was very interesting and quite heated in regard to certain aspects. The students mentioned that her approach was very different from Amelia Glasser’s – the first speaker of the series– as various classmates found McDowell’s more approachable. “It was as if Glasser’s talk was a Ted Talk and McDowell’s a YouTube video,” one of the students commented. This comment highlighted McDowell’s easy-to-follow discourse which appealed to both experienced translators and students who are only beginning to be interested in this art form. Another student reflected that she wasn’t expecting to find the talk that interesting since she doesn’t study Latin American Literature, but she was positively surprised by McDowell’s lecture as what she said could be applicable to translators who work in all kinds of languages. Some students found her overall journey inspiring, as they have been told that you can’t live off literary translation, and they were appreciative of the fact that McDowell shared her experiences, techniques, and also a list of publishing houses that work with translations. There was a brief and heated discussion surrounding the question “Are translators authors?” Some students weren’t convinced by the idea as they found translation more of a derivative type of work– like copying a painting. Other students defended translation as writing, and some echoed McDowell’s idea of separating these two realms and appreciating translation as a professional endeavor in its own light by recognizing all the creative and technical aspects that go into it. 

I found McDowell’s lecture enjoyable and easy to follow. She reflected on some of the main issues translators find nowadays and how translation is still considered a derivative work. She always highlighted the fact that she was talking about her own subjective experience, and, in doing so, she inspired a conversation where the attendees were able to share their own experiences and questions as translators. She also highlighted the great amount of literary skill that goes into translating and she challenged the traditional notion of fidelity by showing that sometimes it is necessary to take creative liberties in a text in order to create the best possible version of the text in English. Moreover, by sharing how her observations and feedback have altered the creative and editing process of the authors she works with, she showed the collaborative aspects that can take place during a translation process. Her lecture was a grounded and inspiring talk that challenged myths about literary translation. McDowell set out to articulate better answers to the common questions about translation and succeeded in doing so while at the same time inspiring the audience to keep on asking questions and crafting answers that highlight translation as a creative work.