Like many people who get advanced degrees, I don’t always use mine (a Masters in Spanish Translation) exactly as intended, but I still make use of the discipline and skills I learned and the experience certainly enriched my life. So when I heard that there was going to a panel at Busboys and Poets to discuss young writers from Spain (with the promise of a free glass of Spanish wine to boot), I went to check it out.
"Building Bridges: Spanish & English Language Writers in Conversation” was a discussion between some of the writers featured in Granta's antnology Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists including Javier Montes Alberto Olmos and Andrés Barba along with renowned American writers Peter Manseau, Azar Nafisi.
The event was hosted by Marie Arana, novelist and Writer At Large for The Washington Post. She started the evening off with a piece she wrote on diversity, mentioning Maxine Hong Kingston as one of her influences. It was a well-written piece that did more than give lip-service to the idea to diversity; she really talked about what it meant to her and what it means in literature.
One panelist noted that he felt that Spanish-speaking media were interested in who was featured in the anthology, while the he felt that English-speaking media (including publications in the U.S., Ireland and England) really read the book and wrote reviews on it. Since the event was sponsored by the Spanish Embassy, the writers present were from Spain. Granta editor Valerie Miles, who was also on the panel, noted that they set out not to have quotas (as far trying to balance selected authors by gender or country).
The three Spanish panelists made clear distinctions between themselves and some of their famous literary predecessors, like Lorca, for instance. They seemed very determined to blaze their own trails.
One aspect of literature that has not brokn from the past in Spain is format: the panelists noted that eBooks are not well-established in Spain (unlike the U.S. where Amazon reported that more people are buying Kindle eBooks than paper books.)
Manseau talked a little about translation and some of the other authors shared their experiences with it as well, including a funny anecdote about how one found that in a country with strict religious mores, his works were transformed: prostitutes became tailors and a sex act was changed to a game of cards.
Manseau referred to Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, expressing the notion that the task of translation is unifying: ‘imagining a place where we can all communicate in the same language.’
While I remember some of the author’s theories being questioned in grad school, this made me smile. Who doesn’t like to be reminded of the nobility of the profession on chose to study?
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