Un-finishing Fiction | A Conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza
Interviews
By Sarah Booker
Cristina Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Project) opens with one of the author’s more surreal works: “Yoko Ono’s Yes.” Here, the narration places the reader within the story’s audience—a discrete community—and invites them to view events from an altered perspective. But the story also asks the reader to answer the call to say “yes” and, ultimately, take a leap of faith into the unknown. This theatrical story sets the stage for a collection that spans over thirty years of Rivera Garza’s career, brought into English in translations by myself, Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, Alex Ross, and Rivera Garza.
I recently had a conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman (who translated Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink for Semotext(e)) about the intensive experience of translating story collections that span a writer’s life. Such projects typically entail a deep engagement with many different aspects of an author’s life, as well as insight into the development of their ideas, phrasing, and imagery. For all involved, I think this process requires self-reflection and time travel that may not always be comfortable.
Having first emerged over the course of many years and in dialogue with longer projects, Rivera Garza’s stories reflect her evolving interests and showcase her experimentations with technique. Collecting and publishing these translations necessarily recontextualizes them. Doing so has also created new opportunities for the author to make revisions. As such, I understand this collection to be an extensive conversation: between the present Rivera Garza and the writers she has been; between texts; between translators, editors, and author; and between genres and technologies. Indeed, this is one of the things I love most about working with Rivera Garza. Working on one text never means working on a singular piece of writing. Rather, it means following reverberating images, chasing down references, and exchanging questions and ideas with the author. With all this in mind, Rivera Garza and I exchanged emails about this collaborative project that is her New and Selected Stories.
Sarah Booker: The process of collecting and selecting the stories for this collection was quite extensive. On my end, I worked closely with Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker at the Dorothy Project to propose a list of possible stories to include, some of which had already been translated and others which had yet to be translated. I’ve been working on your stories for a long time, going all the way back to the dossier Aviva Kana and I prepared for Latin American Literature Today. For this project, I went through your collections La guerra no importa (1987), Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002), La frontera más distante (2008), and the still unpublished Diminutus. I was looking for stories that stood out for their plot, themes, or techniques and that would dialogue well with other pieces. Danielle, Marty, you, and I then worked on this list throughout the translation process, taking away pieces that weren’t necessarily adding something and adding others where we saw holes. We also revisited stories that Lisa, Francisca, and Alex translated many years ago. In my understanding, we were trying to create a sense of the evolution of your work through this collection. How did you understand and experience this process?
Cristina Rivera Garza: At its very heart this was such a collaborative process, one in which I always felt accompanied, knowing the book was in the best hands possible. Your initial reading and suggestions about the selection and ordering of the material were right on target. Marty and Danielle were aiming for a book that could provide attention to specifics while simultaneously giving an idea of a larger project and experience with writing. Both continuity and discontinuity mattered here. There was a lot of work involved in the coordination of translators as well as in the revision of translations up to the last detail. I had to reacquaint myself with the materials, reading with care and trying to understand the decision-making process at each stage. I embraced the writers I have been, as they have been. I did not want just to republish the stories, but neither did I want these versions to betray the energy or desire that triggered them in the first place. And this is a tough act, one at once uncomfortable and intriguing. I wanted to be un-finishing these stories, unlocking their now-time, making them aware of the present that was invoking them.
SB: One thing I’ve come to really enjoy about translating your work over an extended period of time is the opportunity it’s given me to see how you develop and experiment with ideas across different kinds of writing. Your Detective character, who features in The Taiga Syndrome, La muerte me da, and various short stories, is a particularly good example of this. But I also really love your extended meditation on the intersecting spaces of the River Pripyat and blog space to imagine the very few inhabitants of abandoned, dangerous places. How do you use writing as a space of exploration?
CRG: The more I write, the more I realize I am, in fact, writing a single, continuously branching, deeply interrelated piece. In any case, the quest is open enough to allow for different interconnections within (and without). What at one point may have appeared as a surprising deviation might later emerge as a pathway able to fuse with existing concerns. I am often surprised by these turns and twists. Some characters are relentless, emerging again and again in short stories, novels, and even essays, very much out of their own volition. Some themes are recurrent, although, like good obsessions, they escape the radar of my consciousness. There are evolving concerns with form, and the dance between these concerns and the ethical strata of much of what I write has occupied much of my waking time. I now believe I have used the short story as a ground to confront specific challenges that would become unmanageable in larger contexts, such as a novel. The scope of the short story, its tautness, so to speak, allows for this initial experimentation, which later may transpire (or not) in other forms.
SB: To return to the Detective I mentioned above, where did she come from? Did you start to write about her in these stories?
CRG: I had worked with characters, at times protagonists, who were obsessive readers, interpreters of all kinds—people whose curiosity got the best of them quite often, and not always for the better. The nameless Detective came to supersede them all. The Detective came to prove, among other things, that distraction is stronger than attraction when it comes to unveiling new worlds. In any case, her stubbornness and fragility first emerged in La muerte me da. When I faced challenges with her character, whether plot-related or more formal in nature, that I could not handle in the scope of the novel, I started to write short stories with her as the protagonist. That’s how we got to know each other so well.
SB: Something else I really love about working with you and your writing is seeing how your writing transforms throughout the translation process. Beyond the obvious linguistic change, you (and sometimes we) frequently make changes to texts. I’m thinking, for example, about the story “The Day Juan Rulfo Died” and our additions of lines from Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of Pedro Páramo. How did the stories in this collection change for you throughout this project?
CRG: That’s what I love the most about the work we have done together all these many years. The openness of it, our mutual capacity to identify an opportunity and to react quickly to it, always with the question in mind: “What else can we do here to turn this into a project of our present?” Adding, deleting, distorting, smoothing out—all these actions, and more, are related to the fact that we have never shied away from posing the uncomfortable but always productive question about our now-time (to quote Benjamin). Listening well and carefully to each other has been central to this process. And I am both grateful and lucky for it.
SB: I feel the same, also quite grateful and lucky! I know much of your work intentionally complicates and subverts genre definitions, but I am curious how you would differentiate your approach to the short story from your approach to longer writing.
CRG: I work as closely as I can with my materials, and they are the ones in charge of defining the “length” or “depth”—the duration in any case—of each project. Some enigmas, after all, take more time or work or convincing to make themselves shareable.
SB: Do you have a favorite story from the collection?
CRG: I have to admit that I am especially grateful to the stories that have accompanied me through what I have come to acknowledge as a breakthrough. I believe “Carpathian Mountain Woman” (translated by Alex Ross) is perhaps one of them. On the one hand, it contained the seed of the Detective (now that I come to think of it). On the other, I learned much about juxtaposition, both in terms of plot and form, while writing it. Colonization and violence, especially gender violence, though not limited to it, lie at the heart of this story, but the strategic repetition of certain verse-like lines and the obliqueness of the point of view of the storytelling allowed for a subtlety that I still find kind of terrifying. I have been very interested in horror and the fantastic as genres or writing registers, and I do believe most of the stories included in this book either wince at or point to or, plainly but quietly, embody this interest.
SB: I also love that story. What was it like to revisit stories you wrote so long ago?
CRG: We have to be open and compassionate with our former selves. As the ground we walk on, our bodies and our writing contain our past and our future. At times, it was like greeting an old friend. At times, it was like looking from behind a dirty window, in utter terror, gaping maw and all, at people I did not even remember having met. At times, it was a nice surprise; at times, it was just a surprise. Once I thought I was not correcting a story as a nagging, know-it-all aging professor, but once I started participating in the un-finishing of the story, the situation changed.
SB: Indeed, time and our changing selves certainly affect how we interact with writing from the past. Speaking of revisiting old work, I know you have recently republished that first collection, La guerra no importa, as Andamos perras, andamos diablos. I’m curious how that came to be. Was there any overlap between the revision of the stories in Spanish and this English translation?
CRG: I have just published a very personal book (and which one is not?) about the femicide of my sister that took place thirty years ago in Mexico City (El invencible verano de Liliana). La Guerra no importa is the only book I wrote while my sister was still alive. As the story unfolded before my eyes, it became clear to me that I had talked to her about this book, even including some scenes connected to her in it. The editors at Dharma thought, as I did, that this was not only a curious fact but also one that may allow for an alternative reading of these initial short stories. We decided on a new title (Andamos perras, andamos diablas: We Go Like Bitches, We Go Like She-Devils), which connects more readily with the feminist concerns of our era, as well as with the rage of so many young women still facing gender violence feel, precisely because of this reason.
SB: Thank you for sharing your writing about Liliana Rivera Garza and for your call to remember her and all the other women killed by femicide. And thank you for your powerful call and mission to keep writing.
Sarah Booker is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on contemporary Latin American narrative and translation studies. She is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy, 2022), as well as Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also appeared in such journals as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:AM Magazine, Nashville Review, MAKE, and Translation Review.
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