International Booker Prize interview: How Annie McDermott translated ‘Not a River’

Annie McDermott has been shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize for translating Selva Almada’s Not a River from the Spanish.

In the novel, three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?

The jury said that “Not A River moves like water, in currents of dream and overlaps of time which shape the stories and memories of its protagonists…”

Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, writers such as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

In a conversation, she spoke about translating a trilogy, the “soundscapes” of the novel, researching on online fishing forums, and more.

Your first experience of literary translation was of translating short stories by Juan Pablo Villalobos. Please describe the experience.
It all began in Mexico City. I’d just finished my master’s degree in English literature in the UK and then on a bit of a whim, I ended up moving to Mexico City. I moved there without really knowing much Spanish at all.

I remember sitting on the plane with my how-to-speak Spanish book, learning the numbers, things like that. And while I was there, I was learning Spanish and just really falling in love with Mexico and with Mexican Spanish and a lot of the slang in particular, which is just so multifaceted and amazing.

It eventually became an obsession – collecting different examples of Mexican slang that I could find around me. I think some of the first translations I did were just in my head trying to think of the exact perfect translation of all these different slang expressions.

Once I was back in the UK, I found myself really missing the place and the people. And also the language. Meanwhile, Juan Pablo Villalobos had posted some of his short stories to his website. They were full of Mexican slang that I had so come to love.

I really loved his absurd sense of humour. He relishes the language and it moved me to have a go at translating some of them. What I remember from the experience are certain phrases that I was really happy to bring into another language. I sent my translations to Juan Pablo Villalobos who liked them and said, yes, I could submit them to some magazines if I liked. And. I did, although I think I was, I remember being very, very young and optimistic and I think I sent them off straight to the New Yorker thinking, this is going to be easy.

It didn’t go exactly as my expectations but I did get them published eventually. It was a lot of fun.

And when did you decide to pick translation as a career?
I think it was when I was still in Mexico. I had quite a few friends who were studying literature or involved with literature and were translating in the other direction from English to Spanish.

They would ask me particular questions about what certain phrases meant in English or what things like kippers were. I remember having to explain the meaning of kippers, the fish that you might have for breakfast that are so pungent. It made me realise that this was actually an activity in translation.

Until Mexico, I had led a very monolingual life and I hadn’t really experienced what it was to exist between languages. As soon as I realised that translating literature was a possible activity, it struck me that it was something I had already started to love.

Writing was always frustrating because sometimes I did not have enough ideas of my own to write my own fiction. As it turns out, one of my favourite things is to write other people’s fiction. I’m happy to let the others do the hard stuff – come up with the plot, the characters, all of that. I’m happy to deal only with the language, which seems like such a luxury to me.

Including Not a River, you have translated two novels by the same author. Is it a kind of a trilogy?
Yes, it is. Not a River is the third book in this loose trilogy. Though I can’t call it a trilogy because the characters aren’t the same. However, it’s the same sort of world and it’s the same sort of questions that are being explored. They explore the ideas of masculinity and men’s worlds in different ways, but they also look at what it is to be a woman existing in these men’s worlds.

This trilogy ends with Not a River and the first book is, The Wind That Lays Waste, translated by Chris Andrews. It’s followed by Brick Makers, which I translated.

Tell us more about Selva Almada, the writer.
Selva Almada is a writer from Argentina and belongs to the same generation as Samantha Schwebelin and Mariana Enriquez, who are also doing really exciting, amazing writing.

Selva grew up in the province of Entre Ríos, which is a small town. It is a completely different world from Buenos Aires and this provincial upbringing of Selvas has had a huge impact on her writing. She says that writing from the province is both a poetic and a political decision.

Poetic, because it shapes the language of the novels she writes. She writes in La Argentina Profunda, or the language spoken deep in Argentina. Someone from Buenos Aires might not recognise many of these words

Political, because of her perspective. She likes to look from the margins rather than from the centre. That’s what she’s doing in terms of the subject matter of her novels and characters. She says she feels more comfortable looking in from the margins. These are the things that make her writing really exciting to me.

What would you like to tell us about the novel?
The book begins with three men out on a boat fishing, and they catch a huge ray by shooting it, which is a pretty unusual way of catching a ray on a fishing trip. They haul it into their boat and sail back to shore and hang it from the branch of a tree in the sun where it slowly starts to rot. This causes a lot of tension among the people on the island who are shocked at this little disregard for the ray and the natural world.

Selva has talked about how small-town life in Argentina sometimes feels like a trunk with a false bottom. You have the everyday life of just ordinary everyday things going on, but then there’s this false bottom beneath which there are mysterious supernatural things going on and these hidden forces and tensions play a role in her stories too.

Of all the books in the trilogy, Not a River is most directly related to Selva’s own upbringing. She talks about it as a homage to her upbringing in Entre Rios because the characters Enero and Negro make her think of her dad and his friends, for example, who always used to go off on these mysterious weekend fishing trips.

They were mysterious to her when she was a child because she would wonder why they came back so hungover and without any fish. The preparations involved taking lots and lots of meat to barbecue and wine and beer and ice cubes. Nothing that had remotely to do with fishing!

So she was thinking, what are they getting up to? And so this book begins with these like childhood intrigues and imaginings about what these men were getting up to in a world without any women in it. That’s what these trips tend to look like.

When I was reading the novel, I felt atmosphere itself is a character in the novel.
That’s a really good way of putting it because the atmosphere is a huge part of the novel and the texture of the language itself. It’s a very sparse, stripped back kind of language.

There’s absolutely nothing extraneous in it. There are no wasted words. There are no chapter headings, anything like that. The text just winds its way down the page.

You talked about bringing the Argentine rural soundscape into English through translation. I liked the word that you used, “soundscape”, in your translator’s note. How did you deal with it?
I think soundscape is a useful word because the language in this book is used as much for meaning and as a patchwork for different kinds of language.

Partly it’s the spoken language of Entre Rios. This is the way people spoke when Selva was growing up. It’s the way her dad and his friends would speak. So one of my concerns was how to translate a language that’s so specific to a place and make it feel like a plausible way for these characters to speak in English.

She also uses words in Guarani, for example, which is an indigenous language of Argentina. It has influenced a lot of the Spanish spoken in this area. So many plants and animals are described using Guarani words. That also becomes part of this soundscape, part of the sounds of those words.

Then there are the silences and the pauses. It’s a book that’s as much built of silence as it is of words, I think. And so the task for the translator is quite complicated. Added to that is the fishing vocabulary, which has to also fit with these characters voices.

I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy, for example. He’s an absolute genius. He showed me how few words you need in order to say what you mean in English, I learned how to strip sentences back to almost nothing and how powerful that can be. I also spent a lot of time on fishing forums and watching YouTube videos of people on fishing trips to see how they were talking about their catches. I must’ve spent around two days on just the very first line, where one of the men says, “Pumpin real, she’s hugging the bottom, get her up”.

It took huge amounts of hours on fishing forums because it is a specific phrase that you would say when trying to land a ray. It’s about the need to unstick the ray from the bottom, but that’s not what you’d say in English. You wouldn’t say unstick it so I had to find that she’s hugging the bottom from some fishing forum on the internet.

I also made decisions about which words to keep from the Zalabez original, which are sometimes Spanish words and sometimes Guarani words as well. I kept them partly untranslated because many Zalabez readers from elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world would be unfamiliar with these words as well. I thought it would be okay if my readers encountered words that they were unfamiliar with.

And even some idiomatic usage to drink out of a tree.
It’s the sort of phrase that I was looking for where you don’t read it and think, Oh, we must be in South London, we must be in New York. It feels like something people would say as slang

Even though it’s local, it doesn’t immediately send you somewhere too far away from the island. So that was something I also had great fun doing.

Harshaneeyam’s podcast focuses on translated literary fiction from around the world.