At the Edge of Realism | An Interview with Fernanda Trías
Interviews
By Annie McDermott
The setting: a dingy apartment in a down-at-the-heels coastal city. The characters: a woman, her father, her daughter, and a canary. Clara, the woman, has moved in with her newly widowed father to look after him, and gradually looking after him becomes an obsession. Increasingly paranoid about the dangers lurking outside, Clara turns the apartment into a kind of fortress, which soon becomes a prison—a human-size version of the canary’s cage.
Fernanda Trías’s The Rooftop is a novel about love and fear, about the darkness underpinning our protective instincts and the claustrophobia of human relationships. It’s also written in some of the sharpest, cleanest, and most beautiful prose I’ve ever had the pleasure of translating, and I was delighted to be able to discuss all these things with Fernanda in this interview.
Annie McDermott: You wrote The Rooftop so young, at just twenty-two, and I’m curious about what the process was like. Did you know when you started writing that it was going to be a novel? Did you have a sense of how the plot would develop before you began, or did it surprise you?
Fernanda Trías: I knew it was going to be a novel, because for years that had been all I could think about: writing (from the beginning I was writing novellas, and only much later did I write my first short story). I lived for it, breathed for it, and I imagine that’s how it has to be, because without an extreme passion I don’t think you can get anywhere with the quixotic business of writing . . . especially if you’re a woman and you come from a small country in Latin America (I exist on many margins). But I didn’t know exactly how the plot would develop. I had the initial images: the bird, the gloomy apartment, and the sick, defeated man. I also had the narrator’s tone of voice, which I could hear inside my head, but I didn’t have the details. The details of the plot developed bit by bit, as I felt my way through the writing. It was dizzying, but I let my intuition guide me. After all, I was only aspiring to “fail better.”
AM: It’s a deeply disturbing, even harrowing novel. Did that make it difficult to write? It definitely made it difficult to translate—there were some scenes, like when Clara surprises her dad with the fish tank, that I practically had to cover my eyes as I worked on. Mostly in the early drafts, though; after that, I was focused more on the words than on the events being described, and your perfect sentences were what got me through.
FT: Yes, the process involved a lot of angst, but at the same time it was a way of escaping a greater angst: the existential angst of youth. There was something pleasurable about escaping my reality and immersing myself in another that was unsettling, dark, ominous. A bit like the pleasure you get from muscle pain the day after exercising. What’s more, I was almost “hypnotised.” I wanted to keep going to find out how the story would progress. I wrote the first draft in two sittings of about a month and a half each (with a pause in the middle during which I felt stuck and had to wait for the story to become clear). But then I spent another six months just working on the phrases, reading out loud, editing.
AM: That doesn’t surprise me at all—every word in the book lands exactly right, and the sparse, precise prose is what gives the novel so much power. One of my favorite parts of the translation process was talking about my English version with you and realizing we both cared enough about things like commas and repeated words and awkward internal rhymes to discuss them late into the night. Which makes me wonder—as a writer who normally has such control over her words, what was it like to read them back in someone else’s translation?
FT: I think it’s every author’s dream to find a translator who understands that words aren’t just a vehicle for telling a story but a substance in their own right—that phrases can be music, rhythm and sound. And, conversely, any author’s worst nightmare is ending up with a “deaf” translator. (Although there are plenty of “deaf” authors, ha ha.) So it was a real joy to know that I was speaking “the same language” as you. I could tell you that something sounded off and I didn’t need to explain much more; you understood right away and suggested solutions. I honestly think that literary translation is a work of “co-authoring,” of rewriting. I’ve seen books ruined and made unreadable by bad translations. At the same time, I know there are books where the plot is good but the prose is poor, and a good translator can improve the prose and improve the book.
Reading the translation of The Rooftop was an exciting experience. I had a very strong feeling of estrangement and kept asking myself: did I write this? It’s a great privilege to be able to read the translation and talk to the translator and both benefit from each other. Unfortunately, I can only do this in English and French. The other translations of La azotea and Mugre rosa (Pink Slime) that are underway—into Danish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, and Greek—will always be a world that’s inaccessible to me.
AM: While translating the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to portray the accent of Carmen, Clara’s neighbour, an immigrant from what Clara dismissively describes as “some European country.” It’s an almost cartoonish version of her accent—“I von’t say a vord”— because we see her through Clara’s eyes, and Clara sees her as almost cartoonishly grotesque. And Flor, Clara’s daughter, has a lisp. She’s always begging to go and “thee the birdieth” outside the flat. What made you include these distorted voices in the novel? What role did you want them to play?
FT: For the narrator, everything that’s outside herself and the one-way street of her relationship with her father is incomprehensible, grotesque, almost obscene. As if the world outside the two of them were nothing but an affront. And so, in her eyes, everything is distorted, and because it seems other and threatening it becomes repulsive. Carmen’s foreign accent turns her into a symbol of otherness—of that other which, because it’s a mystery, will always be a threat. We’re all frightened of things we don’t understand, of things that seem different, which is why we live in a world divided by hatred, xenophobia, transphobia, etc. (These prejudices are all really just extreme forms of fear, which is why literature can be an important weapon in the fight against hate: because it brings us closer together; because it builds bridges of empathy.) Carmen, as a foreigner, sets off Clara’s fear of the outside world. But it’s not only Carmen. It’s also the women in the shop and the staff at the court. It’s just that Carmen contains it all within herself and becomes the symbol of “the other,” which threatens to destroy the safe nuclear family.
Meanwhile, Flor, the girl, is a late developer because she receives no education or stimulation. Clara, although she’s shut up in the apartment all the time, is an absent mother, lost in her own obsessions, her paranoia, daydreaming and always wanting to be elsewhere (on the rooftop). I think the daughter is the great victim of this whole story, as children usually are in dysfunctional families.
AM: Montevideo is never mentioned by name in the novel, but it makes its presence felt: the rambla where Clara’s dad is desperate to go for a seaside stroll; the apartment blocks with flat roofs and courtyards where people hang out their laundry; the cold winters and hot summers; even the soldiers that Clara remembers from her childhood during the military dictatorship. How important is Montevideo to the novel?
FT: I like working with unnamed spaces: cities that could be any city, that could be anywhere. It’s a kind of Kafkaesque legacy, which is also typical of the Uruguayan literary tradition. Onetti, Levrero, and Marosa di Giorgio all invented their own worlds. Also, the lack of a name gives the story a slightly “dreamlike” quality, places it at the edge of realism.
But there’s still that essence of Montevideo in the novel: grey, shabby, in decline. I’m thinking of the Montevideo of the 1980s, when I was a girl and we’d just emerged from the military dictatorship. The city has changed a lot in the past fifteen years, but I was no longer living there by that point. Maybe because of the oppression you could feel in the air as a result of the dictatorship, I grew up feeling “trapped” inside my city—a city which, I felt, lacked diversity. There were no different ethnicities, different cultures, different foods, different accents. And I desperately wanted all that. From a very young age, I felt the need to get away. I felt overwhelmed by the homogeneity, and that heightened my sense of not belonging, of being different. I think lots of people who grew up in small towns and cities feel the same. In my case, when I was a teenager, I travelled to New York, where I have family, and spent some months there. That completely changed my outlook on the world and made me feel all the more claustrophobic in my city. As a result, the city of Montevideo finds its way into many of my texts, and it’s always an oppressive, malign, suffocating city for the protagonists.
AM: There’s something very pleasing about The Rooftop coming out in English so soon after the translations of The Luminous Novel and Empty Words by the late, great Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, who you’ve described as your mentor. I definitely see similarities between The Rooftop and his work: the importance of images and dreams, the way the reader is kept almost hypnotised, a kind of directness in the prose, the odd touch of absurd humor. I’d be so curious to hear what you have to say about that—whether you think Levrero has influenced your writing, and if so, how.
FT: I’m really happy you can see those similarities. I think only a very sharp reader would notice them, and most of all someone who’s practically studied the books (we could talk for a long time about how a literary translator reads). Because, in a superficial, obvious sense, ours are very different tones, very different voices. Our imagined worlds are different as well. However, I think those points you mention are all key to the “Levrerian” influence or teachings. And also because Levrero and I share one fundamental influence: Kafka. In Levrero, the Kafkaesque is mixed with fantastical and dreamlike elements; in my case, with everyday reality and family conflicts. I don’t know if you choose your teacher and the influence arises from that, or if it’s the other way round: that the resemblance is already there and the teacher chooses you as a result. What I mean is that Levrero always talked about “telling stories through images.” He talked about the world of dreams as a world much more real than “reality.” But when I analysed my early, unpublished texts, the ones I wrote before meeting and reading Levrero, those elements were already there. I’m very sensory, my thinking is very concrete, and I wrote in that way almost intuitively from day one. What’s more, if Levrero and I were able to be such good friends, it was because we shared a particular kind of humor—sometimes dark, sometimes absurd, sometimes childish and playful, his much more laugh-out-loud funny than mine—and we also shared certain nightmares. So, to answer your question, I think that “when I woke up, the influence was already there” (ha ha). [Translator’s note: this is an allusion to the famous one-sentence short story by Augusto Monterroso: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”]
AM: The Rooftop has been such a sensation in the Spanish-speaking world, and has been published so many times, in so many different countries, that I shudder to think how many interviews you’ve already had to do about it! Still, after all those interviews, is there anything you wish people would ask you that they never do? Is there anything you wish people talked about more?
FT: By this point, I think I’ve been asked all possible things, and even some impossible things. But what I do find interesting and striking is how the book is read in such different ways depending on the country and the culture. In some countries, there’s been a lot of emphasis on the topic of incest. So far, no one’s mentioned it to me in the English-speaking world, perhaps because they’re less Catholic countries and women there have been writing and publishing for longer, so it doesn’t seem as shocking for a woman writer to approach a taboo subject. In other countries, we’ve talked more about fear and the family as the setting where the very worst things can (and do) happen. In Mexico, where the book came out during the pandemic, there was more talk of confinement and of the invisible, threatening “other” that could be read as the virus, and so on. The great thing about books is that they can be read differently as the world changes around them. I’m curious to see how the book will be read in cultures I’m not familiar with—in Turkey or Greece, for example. But what matters is that books open up spaces for dialogue, bringing us together, and, most of all, helping us learn to listen to each other.
Annie McDermott’s translations from Spanish and Portuguese include The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías, Empty Words and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, Dead Girls and Brickmakers by Selva Almada, and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translated with Jethro Soutar). She has previously lived in Mexico and Brazil and is now based in Hastings, in the UK.
More Interviews