The Grammar of Emotions | A Conversation with Claudia Hernández

By Julia Sanches

Named after the method of farming, Slash and Burn, Claudia Hernández’s debut novel, is the story of an unnamed girl swept up in a civil war who becomes a woman and mother struggling to make a life for herself and for her daughters in the wreckage of a (victorious) postwar period. About the novel Mexican author Yuri Herrera has written: “Claudia Hernández’s prose is the controlled breathing of someone who knows that memory is another battlefield. Like her protagonists, tough and lucid women, Hernández knows how to cross these battlefields.” Based on twenty-five years of interviews, this is a quiet, generous portrait of resilience and resistance set against a violent political backdrop that extended, in the twentieth century, from Central America down to Argentina.

Despite being the translator of the English-language version of Slash and Burn, I only know so much about Claudia Hernández, and for some reason I’ve shied away from the details of her biography, perhaps projecting onto her the anonymity of her protagonists. I know she is the author of several short story collections and has taught subjects ranging from mathematics to screenwriting to both schoolchildren and incarcerated persons. We share a love of birds, and I have a photograph somewhere on my phone of three green parrots called lovebirds—I think they’re lovebirds—nestled under her chin. In person Claudia gives the impression of listening so intently you might be tempted to look away; Slash and Burn is the result of such attentive listening. When we talk about the English translation of her novel, she calls it “ours,” and sometimes even just “yours.”

The following interview took place over email, in a mixture of English and Spanish, in separate hemispheres, during the final weeks of an enormously difficult year and the very beginning of what we hope will be a better one.

Julia Sanches: When we met about a year ago, though it seems much longer, I was struck by the fact that you said you’d done nothing when you wrote Slash and Burn, that you’d merely listened. I’d love to know more about what you mean, and how this plays into your writing process.

Claudia Hernández: The thing is, no part of Slash and Burn came from me: for twenty-five years, I collected testimonies from the war and its aftermath. During that time all I did was pay attention and let myself be guided. I listened attentively to what people had to tell me the moment I asked them about their experiences, pored over the recordings to try to understand how they were able to make sense of their experiences and reconstruct the facts, and continued to listen to the residues of emotion that kept on echoing in my head.

I can’t say there’s any part of myself in this book except for my profound respect for the people who participated in those extraordinary circumstances. Not even the style was a decision I made: it simply honors how the people who were active back then understood themselves and spoke of their lived experience. My involvement, then, was not much different from that of a person who harvests fruit from an orchard and puts them somewhere they can align themselves harmoniously on their own.

You, on the other hand, enter a project with full awareness and preparation. Not only do you refer to a selection of books to help you understand the context of the story you’re about to translate and read others to better grasp the author’s stylistic possibilities, you also look at the books the authors you translate were reading as they wrote. Could you explain what your translation process is?

JS: As a translator my relationship to a text is unique. I don’t have access to the material or to the author’s thought process; to the backstories that inform a novel’s characters and the ways they behave, for example, or the twenty-five years of research, and everything else that you as the author have incorporated into the book for reasons that may never be clear to anybody else. Faced with this lack of information, what I do is read around the work and try to piece together voice and lexicon by constellating other voices, styles, and pieces of information—not just historical, social, and political but anything that can give me access to the novel’s substrata, the underground material that feeds into what lies on the surface of the page. It can feel a bit like creating a patchwork quilt, where the patterns on the squares of fabric slowly blend into each other until the seams become indiscernible. Not everything I read ends up materially in the translation, but it’s still there, static buzzing around the pages. It’s for this same reason that I’m always curious to know what the authors I translate were reading while they wrote their books; it’s about finding clues that can lend texture to the translation.

Aside from that my creative process is to just do. I pay close attention to the words in Spanish or Portuguese or Catalan, and render into English what they feel like, to me, in a way that makes sense but that also respects the nuances and particularities of the source text. Lately I’ve been trying to practice slow translation, and my first drafts are much less messy than they used to be. I find that the more I’m able to figure out from the get-go in terms of tone, the easier it becomes to sustain the voice for the length of an entire book.

Almost exactly two years ago, when we were writing each other about the translation of Slash and Burn, about what I had been reading in order to make sense of the characters’ voices—Carson McCullers, Anna Burns—and figure out how the syntax of your writing would sound in English, you wrote the following: “Would it be helpful if I told you that what I try to set down (sometimes apparently with masking tape) is the grammar of emotions rather than language? I learned from survivors that this is how to move from thought to speech and from speech to fact.” This became a sort of mantra for me, by which I mean I thought about it all the time and it informed my translation of your book. Could you explain how the grammar of emotions differs from the grammar of language, and why that was what you decided to set down?

CH: I decided to set down the emotions when I understood they were related to the cultural context and that the moment I was trying to depict would not have been complete without that through-line.

I noticed how the discourse of the people I spoke with would falter when they had to answer questions about their life experiences (which were often liminal) that had still not been assimilated, or were in progress. After we had grown closer, and I asked them to return to that subject, they moved with total freedom from thought to speech and from speech to fact.

It took me a while to understand that the name then reminisce then show sequence used by people who’d taken part in those events was impossible to carry across when formulated in conventional ways. [Had I relied on conventional formulations], the readers would only have been allowed to participate in the action, and they wouldn’t have people’s rich psychophysiological reactions—their adrenaline, their unease, and, as concerns the third section of the book, how precipitous the present feels to them.

You know, I was interested to find that, for you, translation is more than just a vocation. It’s a commitment to diverse voices, a cause you and your colleagues have taken up. Could you explain how you came to understand translation in this way?

JS: I’m not sure translators into other languages frame literary translation as we do in Anglophone publishing, where, for reasons that should be obvious by now—imperialism, cultural dominance—translated literature is the exception, not the norm. At the moment, literature in translation, especially from underrepresented languages, continues to be treated a bit like immigrants are in America: they need to be better than, cheaper than, more beautiful, and better morally in order to justify their presence within the borders of Anglophone literature. Maybe it’s the case that any artistic practice that takes place on the margins requires a strong sense of commitment; otherwise, it would be too easy to drown out, obviate, muscle off the map. On top of that, because Anglophone culture is so dominant, literature in translation is by nature disruptive—of a status quo and of existing power structures—and disruption often demands some justification. Though it’s also worth noting that this fact does not make the act of translation by nature morally good; the translator also has the power to erase difference and perpetuate colonial tropes.

When we met that one time, long ago, I remember telling you about a collective of translators I am a part of called Cedilla & Co., which arose from what at the time we identified as the need to make more room for literary translation in mainstream publishing. Then, as we grew, and as time passed, our focus began to change. Right now we’re in the process of organizing a series of literary translation clinics with the Center for Fiction in New York, where we hope to make the business and craft of literary translation more transparent for translators and non-translators at all stages of their careers.

I expect we’ll treat literary translation as a cause and a commitment until it no longer has to be one, until publishing diverse voices from around the world becomes second nature to the Anglophone world.

It’s been a few years now since Laguna Libros published your novel in Colombia. Are there any particular moments or characters in Slash and Burn that you still think about often?

CH: Would you believe me if I were to tell you I still think about the characters and the moments that brought on my first short stories and that the feelings that compelled me to write about them are still very present? Back then, a good friend of mine encouraged me to keep writing in order to “exorcize” the emotions generated in me by the incidents we’d lived through as a society. He suggested I might feel better if I brought them to life. But what ended up happening is that, instead of going away, the emotions simply became more intense, and other scenes and voices began to flood my consciousness and memories. Rather than let go of them, I’ve opened up a permanent place for them in my life and my heart. Also with me are the people who shared their experiences for these stories, even if our lives have taken us in different directions or if in the end they occupied less space in the text. Which is why I have always tried to be careful when I choose the stories I write. I have learned in the process that I don’t only listen to my characters, feel what they feel, and “become” them while I write: my characters stay with me long after the story is done.

Are there any in particular that stayed with you?

JS: There is so much of Slash and Burn that has stayed with me, but one of the moments that I return to often happens toward the end of the book, when the mother’s friend acts as a mirror for her, and lists for her all the suffering she has carried in her body since the war, without a word of complaint. I think often of the mother in Slash and Burn, of how headstrong and proud she is, how generous and resilient, and I think this scene in particular beautifully illustrates her enormous fortitude.

Claudia Hernández is the highly acclaimed author of five short story collections and two novels, the first of which was Slash and Burn, published in Spanish in 2017 and in English in 2021. Born in El Salvador, she was named in the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39, a list of important Latin American authors under the age of thirty-nine.

Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Her translations include Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques.

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