Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss
More than half of my life has been lived in translation. I moved to America when I was eighteen, and although my mother tongue is Spanish, I am so fluent in English that I talk like a native speaker. When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss. The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to thinking of something in Spanish, for example, which then comes out strangely in English, or cannot be said in English at all, not in the same way. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.
I wrote my first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, while I was working as a freelance translator and interpreter. I translated articles, wrote captions for documentaries, but the work I liked doing the most was simultaneous interpretation. That’s when two people (or one person and a roomful of people) who don’t speak the same language want to communicate and an interpreter does a real-time, live, continuous translation of what is being said without interrupting. There was a sparkling brain feeling that came with the labor of listening to someone speak in Spanish, then having my mouth open and speak English—like I was a spirit medium at the crossroads of language. I was always impressed that my brain could perform such a task, that I could listen and immediately translate, and then, while still speaking, tune out my own voice and listen again, translate again, continue to speak, following the speaker’s thoughts.
Simultaneous interpretation was just
