Response — Gisele Sanchez

    "Destination Unknown" was a wonderful title for this talk—partly because of its relevance to Ásta's book, but also because I can't say I knew where the conversation was going half of the time. This wasn't a bad thing, of course, and it made for a very interesting few hours in which I was constantly taking notes. Overall, I left the talk wanting to read the poems again and try to define the layers of meaning Ásta and Vala referenced in the talk. 

    The first thing that caught my attention was how close Ásta and Vala seemed, I thought it must be a lot of fun to work with someone you are so close with. And, for a while, I thought Ásta's unwillingness to define her poems or break them down for Vala was strange, after hearing how in tune they were with one another, I figured their translation process must be a unique one and that seems to work very well. From what I could tell, Vala's translation was really amazing. I especially thought her word choice, specifically the sheriff, was really great. The sheriff' from the poems reminded me of the whimsical turnip head character from "Howl's Moving Castle,' which matches the description Ásta gave of the original word for 'sheriff,' which was very satisfying to hear.  

    As for the reading, Julia Sanches' translations of "Slash and Burn" and "Dogs of Summer," read a bit messy, which explains why I heavily agree with some choices she made, and not with others. Firstly, in "Slash and Burn," I found that while her translation was pretty close, certain word changes she made seemed unnecessary considering how close English and Spanish are. For example, at some point she says, "quieten his nerves" instead of "calm his nerves" when the original phrase was, "le calmara los nervios." "To calm his nerves" would have been a perfectly fine translation. Other times, she makes an attempt to domesticate the work, but it ends up sounding dated or formal. For example, she uses the word "licking" instead of "la tunda," in reference to the protagonist being physically punished by her mother. Here, "licking" sounds quite off, and something like "whooping" or "spanking" would have worked better.

    In "Dogs of Summer," aside from the completely different title, her biggest translation choice that I didn't like was her tendency to slip into a country accent. For words like "abuela'"(meaning grandma) she would use "nan," and for "papas" (meaning potatoes) she used "taters." What is probably worse than that is that it wasn't consistent. Some parts would be country, like "nan," while others were left foreignized, like "tía" or "señora," which are perhaps even less familiar Spanish words to an English audience than "abuela." 

    Overall, there were aspects I liked, and aspects I didn't. I supposed that it was better than disliking the entire translation, I only wish Julia had been a bit more thorough and consistent with her choices. Otherwise, I could appreciate how she made some attempts to preserve the original Spanish.