Dahlia de la Cerda 

The inspirations behind Reservoir Bitches

My book is about women in Mexico who survive in violent contexts such as the narco-sphere and do whatever they can with what they have to stay alive. I was inspired by the highly complex Mexican context, where everyone is both a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. In the face of violence, we do what we must to survive, which often falls into morally grey areas. 

How I wrote my longlisted book 

This book took me five years to write. I was able to write it thanks to the support and funding of state and federal grants in Mexico. There are several grant programs in Mexico that support and encourage artistic creation. For me, these grants meant buying time. The monthly stipend helped me cover my living expenses so that I could dedicate myself to writing. 

I believe the biggest challenge I faced – and continue to face in my creative process – is financial. I need to buy time through literary grants in order to sit down and write, because otherwise, working to sustain my life takes up all my time, leaving no room for creative work. 

Another major challenge I faced was the ethical dilemmas: I constantly questioned how to aestheticise violence, whether it is ethical to do so, and how far I could push the boundaries when discussing such complex, violent, and sensitive topics. 

Throughout the writing process, people kept telling me that the themes weren’t appropriate, that my perspective wasn’t the right one, that my tone wasn’t right, that this wasn’t literature, that no one would want to read about these topics, and that nobody would care. But I always trusted my intuition and my literary work. I don’t know if I was writing something truly special, but I did feel that I was creating something capable of connecting with people. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading 

The book that made me fall in love with literature as a teenager was Frankenstein. I think it was the book that left a deep mark on me and made me want to write horror. It showed me that horror could be a means to explore much more complex topics – social issues, social violence, and structural and systemic violence. 

The book that made me want to become a writer 

The book that made me think, this is what I want to do, I could write like this, was El vampiro de la colonia Roma, specifically because of the way it handles language. I come from a working-class, barrio background, and the language used in this book is the same popular speech spoken in Mexican neighbourhoods. 

Seeing it in a book meant that the way I spoke was valid, that there was nothing shameful about my way of expressing myself, that there was linguistic richness in it, and that there was literary beauty there, too. From that moment on, I thought, I want to write like this, I want to capture the linguistic richness found on the streets of Mexico. 

The book that changed the way I think about the world 

There are many books that have changed the way I see the world – books that, after reading them, made me feel like a completely different person. But the most recent one is Seguir Siendo Bárbaros. 

It changed my perspective because I had always kept in mind a phrase by Virginie Despentes that says, ‘the fear of losing your reputation is a bourgeois concern’. That phrase unsettled me because, for me, my reputation has meant social mobility, a class shift – it has meant being treated better and experiencing less discrimination. 

But after reading Seguir Siendo Bárbaro, my thinking shifted a bit. I now believe it is important to keep being barbarians, to resist domestication, and not allow ourselves to be tamed in order to be integrated into certain spaces, like the literary world. 

A book written in Spanish that everyone should read 

A book in Spanish that I think everyone should read is Andrea Abreu’s Panza de Burro (Donkey’s Belly). It left a lasting impression on me because it also uses orality and colloquial language as a literary tool. It takes the beauty found in everyday speech – the language of working-class neighborhoods and communities, places where people are often thought to have nothing to say, where beauty is supposedly absent – and brings it into literature. 

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read 

Not a River (No es un río) by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott. 

Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary 

The inspiration and process behind our translation of Reservoir Bitches   

We divided up the stories first, each translated a batch and then did an edit on the other’s stories. Finally, we workshopped them all together. For later passes, we edited the whole collection straight through in order, together. By the end of the second pass, we sent our remaining queries to Dahlia, who answered our questions and also shared the Italian translator’s queries for our reference (there was some overlap, but our questions were mostly really different, which was interesting to see). Since each story is told from a different character’s perspective, across a wide range of demographics, one challenge was making each voice distinct, and creating a colloquial language in English that echoed the linguistic vitality of the original. In terms of inspirations, because music plays such an integral part in the narrative, we listened to the songs referenced in the stories many times and watched the music videos, more for pleasure than anything else.   

The book that made me fall in love with reading   

(HC) I was completely obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a child, from before I could read the stories on my own well into my pre-teens. I guess in a way it makes sense, given how sleuthy translation can be.    

(JS) Heather makes an excellent translation detective, for what it’s worth. I have a horrible memory, but I hazily remember the wonder and accomplishment I felt after finishing Black Beauty as a little kid in the U.S. In Brazil, as I was trying to read my way into learning Portuguese, I devoured Tintin and Asterix and Obelix.   

The book that made me want to become a translator     

(JS) When I was growing up, I had no idea that you could translate literature; it’s not the kind of thing we were taught about in high school in the early 2000s. At university, in Edinburgh, I was studying English literature and quickly got bored of ‘the canon’ and gravitated toward courses in working-class literature and Black American literature instead. For my final paper, which I think we called a dissertation, I decided to look at Jean Toomer’s Cane and Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma. Even though I could read the original Portuguese, I was told I needed to work from an existing translation, I assume so that my professors could follow. The only translation in circulation at the time was by E.A. Goodland, and it felt like a very different reading experience than the one I was having, so I found myself re-translating sections for my thesis and got hooked. The rest is history.   

(HC) My translation origin story also involves homework. I was writing my undergraduate honors thesis and it wasn’t coming together the way I’d hoped it would; Richard Sieburth – a celebrated translator from French and German who taught in the comparative literature department, where I studied and worked as a receptionist – offered to advise on a new thesis if I wanted to try my hand at translation. With all the hubris of youth, I chose Mariana Pineda, a play written in verse by Federico García Lorca, as my first project. I remember losing myself completely the first time I sat down to translate; I think I worked for six or seven hours straight, loving every minute of it, every thorny linguistic puzzle. And the rest, as Julia says, is history.  

The translator whose work I always look out for   

There are so many wonderful translators out there, and so many wonderful small presses that focus on publishing great literature in translation, like Tilted Axis and Fitzcarraldo in the UK and Transit Books, New Directions, and Two Lines in the US. Their catalogs are perfect recommended reading lists. But if you’re looking for translators to follow, this longlist is a great place to start. We’re both long-time admirers of several of our colleagues in this cohort, and look forward to getting to know the work of the others.     

The book I’m reading at the moment   

(HC) I’m completely captivated by Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. An exquisite narrative, darkly funny at times, that reads like a series of prose poems about being undead, which is to say, about being alive. The last book I read and loved this much was The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş.   

(JS) It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over is fantastic! I read it in a mad rush while sick with Covid in the tropics, which feels exactly right. At the moment, I’m teaching and therefore reading whatever I assign to my students. Last week, we read Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran (translated by Kira Josefsson), a linguistically rich and achingly quiet book that follows a Vietnamese family ‘in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland’. This week, it’s Igiaba Scego’s Adua (translated by Jamie Richards), and next week, Marguerite Duras!   

A work of fiction originally written in Spanish I’d recommend to English-language readers   

(JS) Last year I read and greatly enjoyed Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn’s translation of Daniela Tarazona’s Divided Island, a slippery narrative about a woman with a neurological disorder who splits in two following her diagnosis. It’s pure poetry, and Lizzie and Gerry are (very hardworking) wizards.    

(HC) I remain in awe of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest—a dizzying leap into questions of gender, identity, and madness catalyzed by the appearance of a mysterious woman on the narrator’s doorstep—and the incredible feats of translation performed by Sarah Booker when bringing it into English.    

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read   

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette). We’re also both Marie NDiaye fangirls (we return often to Self-Portrait In Green in Jordan Stump’s perfect translation, though technically that one wasn’t IB-nominated). And then there’s also Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichy (translated by Nichola Smalley).   

Why is translated fiction so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?     

This is pure conjecture, of course, but it might be that, by seeking out narratives constructed in languages other than English, younger generations are pushing back against tightening borders, the scapegoating of immigrants and refugees, and cultural isolationism, to name just a few. Also worth pointing out is that, while perhaps a new development in Anglophone contexts, reading in translation is a common practice around the world.