Translating History

Laura Méndez de Cuenca

Laura Méndez de Cuenca

Finishing a big writing project is double-edged. First there’s the euphoria: free at last! This stage is followed in approximately one hour by postpartum blues: it’s over? What’ll I do now?

In July I completed translating and editing the biography of an early Mexican feminist, Laura Méndez de Cuenca: Indomitable and Modern Woman (1853 – 1928) by Mílada Bazant, noted Mexican historian. Almost a year from start to finish, the project had several hiatuses when either the author or I could not work on it. Life intrudes. Actual work time was six months.

The original book is in its third edition. Ms. Bazant and I reduced it by 100 pages for the English version, ended with 325 pages, counting the introduction. She was wonderful to work with, communicated clearly, asked for my suggestions and often took them.

I cared about Laura Méndez, an extraordinary woman, by Chapter 2, wanted to intervene in her life. Laura, don’t get involved with that poet, please! Or defend her from her repressive society, which never forgot or forgave her great sin of having a child out of wedlock. Some of her best years were spent out of the country, in San Francisco, St. Louis and Berlin. She loved Berlin. Noting that city’s many bookstores, she wrote, “Where we put a pub, they build a bookstore.”

A project of a year’s duration permeates your life in many ways:

  1. Reading a newspaper, I find myself automatically revising its sentences. Superfluous modifiers! Conditional tense for no reason!
  1. I glance at a review of New York photographers and it begins: “New York street photographers were among the great flaneurs of the twentieth century.” This word made fashionable by Baudelaire meant “passionate spectator,” and figured in European aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably when Laura lived in Berlin, 1906 – 1910.
  1. Harry MacLean has a Denver reading for his first novel: his previous books have been nonfiction and he does a mini-lecture on differences and similarities in writing fiction and non-fiction. I recently translated in Mílada’s introduction some of what he says—about history’s gaps and using what’s probable to fill them, tiptoeing on the precarious edge of fiction while writing history.
  1. A friend just back from Nicaragua saw a man begging for money to buy water and I recall Laura Méndez’ lifelong concern with the need for sanitation, access to clean water. In 1890s Mexico (crazy infant mortality rates, typhoid epidemics, shared latrines) she believed such improvements were essential to progress.
  1. I hate footnotes. I had 30 – 40 per chapter to decipher. One morning I woke from dreaming I was lecturing on footnotes. Horrors.

La pareja de poetas viajó en ferrocarril, el modernísimo medio de transporte recién inaugurado en 1873 por el presidente Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, hacia su primer destino fuera de la capital de la República, Veracruz, que era, desde la época colonial, la segunda ciudad en importancia en el país -después de la Ciudad de México- pues había sido la principal ruta comercial y cultural entre México y España.

The pair of poets and their surviving children Alicia and baby Horacio traveled by train to Veracruz, their first destination beyond Mexico City. The railroad was a modern means of transportation, inaugurated by President Sebastían Lerdo de Tejado in 1873, and since colonial times Veracruz had been the second most important city, being the principal commercial and cultural connection between Mexico and Spain.

The Spanish above is the first sentence of Chapter 5. In my translation it is the first two sentences and I thought it worth mentioning that Laura and Agustín had Alicia and baby Horacio with them, and they were the surviving children, because before this, Laura’s babies had died, soon after birth or within months, or in one case, at three years of age. It was typical of the times, and incomprehensible to us now.

In the St. Louis chapter, I researched a reference to Twain and suggested explaining that “the Gilded Age” was meant as a pejorative. A stanza of Laura’s translation of a Horace ode sent me to various existing English translations, but none matched hers, which she translated from Latin to Spanish. Fruitless hours later, I uneasily translated the stanza myself. I cut much St. Louis background, needed for Mexican readers, perhaps, but most Americans know agriculture has always been a core industry of the heartland. And so on.

It was not only a translation job, putting Spanish into good English, although that is difficult enough. It was not only unbraiding complex Spanish sentences into simpler English ones. Every chapter arrived from the author with a question: should this stay or go? I discovered I love editing.

But it’s done. I miss my weekly email from Mílada. I feel empty. What’s next?

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8 Responses to Translating History

  1. Jana Clark says:

    What an incredible opportunity that was, Pat. I can’t believe you did it at the same time you were back in theclassroom. Bravo!!

  2. Congratulations, Pat, on completing your book-length translation! Or perhaps I should say translation and rewriting, with all those editorial changes you needed to make in order for the book to be more accessible to U.S. readers. It sounds fascinating.

    • dubrava says:

      Mil gracias, Andrea! I learned so much doing it. And Mílada was wonderful. Looking forward to seeing you at ALTA.

  3. What a wonderful, revealing, intriguing post! Adding and cutting material with the new audience in mind … well, it had never occurred to me. What a task! And what passion and intelligence it takes to do it well. I’m sure Ms. Bazant is grateful she found her book in the hands of a translator/editor instead of a translator alone. Bravo! Any idea when the book will be out?

    • dubrava says:

      Joe, she had interest from Nebraska but nothing definite. It seems to be common these days, at least for academic presses, to ask the author to get the book translated before they’ll consider it. Mílada was fortunate her university was willing to pay the cost, and has connections with history departments in the U.S., so I feel confident it will happen.

  4. Bob Jaeger says:

    Congratulations, Pat, on a long job well done. Sounds like a book I’ll have to read. “What’s next” indeed—how ’bout a little down time?

    • dubrava says:

      Down time? Daughter and grandson next week, and school starts the week after! I’ll be fine…really.

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