This interview grew out of conversations with Wendy Call while she was Translator-in-Residence at the Iowa Translation Workshop, where I was a graduate student. We discussed her recently-published translations, in trilingual editions, of three books of poetry by Indigenous Latin American authors: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater by Irma Piñeda, and How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, co-translated with Shook, by Mikeas Sánchez. We also spoke about her role in conceiving and editing the inaugural edition of Deep Vellum’s new anthology Best Literary Translations.
If you are reading this and thinking, “What? Trilingual book? How is that even possible?”—you are not alone! In the interview, we dive into the nuts and bolts of Wendy’s collaborative process of translating, editing, and laying out books that repeat poems across three languages—Indigenous Mesoamerican languages, Spanish, and English—as well as the linguistic, poetic, and political challenges and opportunities that accompany this project. Along the way, Call speaks about her background as a land-rights activist in Oaxaca, Mexico, the connections between poetry and linguistic activism for Indigenous Latin American writers, multi-lingual composition and translation, the importance of publishing and reading Indigenous poetry, and more.
Jack Rockwell: How did you begin translating? And, how did you begin translating Indigenous Mexican literatures specifically?
Wendy Call: My beginning as a translator was my beginning as a translator of literatures originally written in Indigenous Mexican languages. I was a grassroots organizer for the first ten years of my professional life. Even though my job was organizing and fundraising, I often ended up playing the role of a staff writer, as well. That included writing everything from grant proposals, to press releases, to policy papers. Eventually, I branched out into other freelance writing, especially activist journalism, which led me to learn about social movements in southern Mexico. I began to read Indigenous Mexican literatures as part of that learning process.
I was still learning Spanish at that time. To get a deeper understanding of these poems and stories and different short histories, I would translate them into English, just for myself. I didn’t think of what I was doing as literary translation at all. I thought of it as a deeper kind of reading, and also a way to improve my Spanish—and to learn various Spanishes, because the language’s variants are so diverse. A lot of the local Mexican literature I was reading began in an Indigenous language.
It was around this time that I took my first and only literary translation workshop: a collaboration between the University of Oregon and the Universidad de Querétaro, in Mexico. It was a two-week intensive with participants from both the US and Mexico. I applied not because I was interested in translating literature and publishing it, but because I was working on a book about a social movement in southern Mexico, and I had many hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews in Spanish that I needed to render in English. I wanted to figure out how to do that respectfully. Thinking about the cultural context that goes along with simply quoting someone in an essay or a book chapter, I wanted to learn how to capture in my English translations some of the nuance, the elegance, and the rhythms of what people were saying to me, in these Spanishes that were inflected with Indigenous languages.
Could you speak more about the relationship between language politics and other kinds of activism by the Indigenous Mexican communities you were working with? How are translation and your other work as an activist connected?
There is not a separation between language politics and other kinds of activism. In Mexico, I was living and working in a region called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Because of the geographical importance of the isthmus, that region has a long history of people going there and taking things away from it. It has been part of important trade routes for thousands of years, and has histories of colonization predating the arrival of the Europeans.
I had been working for grassroots nonprofits as an organizer, primarily on environmental and economic issues. Those were the frameworks that I brought to what was essentially a multifaceted movement for Indigenous peoples’ autonomy, in the face of economic globalization. In that part of Mexico, globalization was manifesting as large industrial development projects: new highways, industrial shrimp farms, tree farms for paper pulp. As far as the local folks were concerned, this was just the latest chapter in a history of economic colonization that went back further than the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s, to the arrival of the Mexica much earlier.
Language politics and translation were enmeshed in the anti-colonial movement I was writing about. I was attending meetings and conferences and strategy sessions that happened in a mixture of Spanish and the Indigenous language Mixe. Often, there were also folks attending from other grassroots organizations, so they spoke in a different Indigenous language, or perhaps only Spanish. Translation was constant—in and out of Spanish and various Indigenous languages—of people’s testimonies, experiences, and demands. I became very interested in how these linguistic dynamics played out, and how they related to power, and who had dominance in any given discourse.
So, originally, I wanted to learn about literary translation so that I could do what was essentially journalistic translation. I was reading a lot of national and international news coverage of what was happening in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and often it included translated quotes from local people that made them seem uneducated or provincial. And of course that wasn’t accurate. It was, intentionally or unintentionally, an artifact of not translating carefully, and perhaps not understanding larger context.
Sometimes at one of these gatherings, someone would speak for fifteen minutes in an Indigenous language—Mixe or Zapotec or Chinanteco, for example—and then the interpreter’s Spanish version would be about four minutes long. When we Spanish-speakers would ask about it, the person—often a teenager—who was interpreting would say something like, “Well, the person kind of repeated themselves a lot; our language is not as direct as Spanish.” That made me think a lot about different rhetorical strategies, and how interpreter is really the right word for what that person was doing. They weren’t just taking what had been said in one language and translating it into another language. They were thinking about their audience, and how their audience would perceive the response, and what that audience would want to hear from all that had been said.
While that condensation was often done with the best intentions, I finally realized that it was slowing down my understanding of the deep dynamics at play. For example, if I asked a question about something that had happened in the last ten years, the interpreter might limit the response to the time period that I had asked about. But I would learn later that the person speaking had started their answer by referring to events that had taken place seven hundred years ago. From their perspective, those long-ago events were completely related to what had happened in the last decade.
You have a few books coming out right about now, but I suspect they’re all products of quite different timelines. Can you talk a bit about how you started working on these projects?
Yes, I have three books coming out between January and April 2024. The first one I started working on was Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater, by Irma Pineda, translated from Spanish and the Isthmus Zapotec. I began translating individual poems of Irma’s in 2007, when a neighbor of mine in Seattle—who, like Irma, is from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—asked me to do so. She had sent me her first five books, which came out between 2005 and 2008. I went through those books picking poems I liked and translating them, thinking about which ones worked best in English, and why. Irma worked with me really closely on the translation process, but she left the selection entirely up to me. She didn’t impose any restrictions, or even say, “Well, why don’t you translate one whole book?” I didn’t know any other translators; I really had no idea what I was doing when I began working on the book that became In the Belly of Night and Other Poems. In spite of years of submissions, I could not find a US publisher for it, so eventually Irma suggested her Mexican publisher, Pluralia, might be interested. They came out with a trilingual (Isthmus Zapotec / Spanish / English) edition in 2022. Eulalia, a small press based at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, picked it up in 2023.
Among the poems that I originally included in the manuscript of In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, were many from her 2007 book. I eventually I decided that was too difficult to excerpt; it was like ripping chapters out of a novel. Even though many of the poems were lovely on their own, I just wasn’t doing them justice, breaking that 2007 collection apart. So I took them out of In Belly of the Night and Other Poems and eventually I translated all of that 2007 book as Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater.
I pitched Nostalgia to many poetry-in-translation presses that I admire, and eventually to an imprint called Phoneme, managed by poet-translator Shook, which is part of Deep Vellum. Eighteen publishers had said “no,” or ignored my submission by the time I got to Phoneme. I remember thinking if Deep Vellum didn’t take the book, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really wanted a book for Irma Pineda published in the US, but I was wondering if I would have to look for a British or Canadian publisher. I was really grateful that Shook was excited about the book, and then Will Evans, the publisher at Deep Vellum, was excited about it, and it came into the world in January. At Deep Vellum, I’m in really wonderful company, with the great range of work that they publish.
The publication process was completely different for Mikeas Sánchez’s book, How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, which is translated from Spanish and Zoque, published by Milkweed in January. I met Mikeas Sánchez in 2011, shortly after my co-translator Shook—yes, Phoneme’s founder, the same person who published Irma’s book—met her and began translating some of her poetry.
In 2018, Mikeas wrote to me and asked me to translate some of her poems into English, so she could submit them to a US literary contest. I translated the six poems and sent them to the contest—which for some reason never chose a winner. After we gave up on that contest, those poems were picked up pretty quickly by journals I really admire—World Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Pleiades. This was very surprising to me, as I previously had encountered a fair amount of resistance to publishing trilingual poetry by Indigenous writers.
Mikeas sent me her 2019 book, How to Be a Good Savage, as well as her earlier books. I quickly realized that she should have a book in English—and I believed that there would be an enthusiastic audience for her work in the US. One thing I’ve struggled with throughout my work as a poetry translator is that the US readership of poetry is, in some ways, quite narrow. Not only do relatively few people in this country read poetry, many of them read quite narrowly. It can be very hard for poets from other parts of the world who are not connected to trends in contemporary US poetry written in English to find a way in—even if they have an English-language translator advocating for them.
I got in touch with Shook, who had translated and published about twenty of Mikeas’s earlier poems, and we talked about the possibility of co-translating a book. Around that time, I met Milkweed’s director, Daniel Slager, at the international conference of the Association for the Study of Literature in the Environment (ASLE). And so Shook and I pitched the book to Milkweed. We submitted the proposal on Earth Day 2020 and How to be Good Savage and Other Poems was published in January 2024. It was almost completely a pandemic project.
It was true serendipity that the two books were published just a week apart—one I had begun working on a decade earlier, and the other less than four years earlier.
The third book I’m publishing this spring is Best Literary Translations 2024—which was also a pandemic project. In 2019, in an email exchange with Daniel Simon, the Editor-in-Chief of World Literature Today, we were lamenting that Pushcart generally doesn’t offer prizes to work in translation. I joked that there should be a “Best American Translations,” like we have for short fiction, poetry, and essays, etc. He wrote back that it was a great idea and I should do it. I just laughed. More than a year later, Daniel and I ended up in the same Zoom breakout room during the annual (virtual) conference of ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association. He brought up the idea again. We ended up spending the next two years getting the project off the ground. We have a team of four series co-editors, and our first edition was guest edited by Jane Hirshfield—who was truly a dream to work with, in every way.
One of the most notable and unusual things about these books you’ve been publishing is that they’re trilingual, with Indigenous Mexican languages, Spanish, and English all facing one another in different arrangements on the page. Can you tell me more about the decision-making behind the process to publish these books in this form? What was important to you about publishing trilingual editions? What were some of the challenges specific to it?
I did not realize how unusual trilingual publishing was in the US until I started trying to do it. There is one particularly important antecedent for my work, which is Words of the True Peoples: An Anthology of Mexican Indigenous-Language Writers, published by University of Texas Press. The anthology was published in 2005—the same year that I attended my first and only translation workshop. The series of three books was edited by Carlos Montemayor—a really important Mexican scholar, writer, poet, lover of poetry—as well as the US scholar Donald Frischmann. The series began as Frischmann’s Fulbright project in the Yucatan Peninsula. In those books, the Indigenous language appears first, then English, then Spanish. It’s a large format book, so all three appear in the same page spread. The literature is heavily footnoted, explaining the differences between the Indigenous-language and the Spanish versions. It’s very scholarly, but also has beautiful translations.
When I began pitching Irma Pineda’s work, it was important to her that all three languages appear together. Sometimes a literary journal would suggest that we include just the Spanish or the Zapotec, because they wanted to publish bilingually—since that’s simpler. That didn’t work for us because I hadn’t translated straight from the Zapotec version, but rather had worked from the Spanish version for my earlier draft, and then revised the translations after deep conversations with Irma about the Zapotec versions. At the same time, publishing the poems only in English, or only English-Spanish, erases the Indigenous language. There were just a few cases where Irma agreed to have something published only in English, if the literary journal was one that never published originals—like Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, or RHINO. But if the journal ever published originals, she was very clear that she wanted both originals published alongside the English.
And so, it was clear from the beginning that these had to be trilingual books, to highlight the Indigenous language and help people understand the cultures and languages—Zoque and Zapotec—in which these poems are rooted. Even if readers can’t make sense of what’s written on the page, it is still important for readers to see it. There is still a prevalent belief among non-Native and non-Indigenous folks throughout the Americas that these are oral traditions and languages, and that they don’t have written forms or written literatures. Although it is true that some languages didn’t have a written form until recently, Isthmus Zapotec, for example, had a written form nearly 2,500 years ago. And in any case, you can have a long literary history without having a long written history.
Having books come out in these languages is part of the effort to ensure these languages’ survival. Many Zoque and Zapotec speakers are in the diaspora; they do not live in their home communities. This means they don’t have other people to talk to day-to-day. Having books available can be important to these languages thriving.
At first, many of the US-based publishers and editors I pitched were uninterested in this work. Some would say things like, I don’t understand how someone could translate something that’s already bilingual, or It doesn’t make any sense to translate something that’s bilingual. Or, in versions both implicit and explicit, the message I received was, “We cannot figure out how we would publish a trilingual book.” Of course, every one of our publishers did figure it out. Each publisher has made its own decision regarding the layout of the book and the order that the languages appear. Each solution has worked wonderfully, uniquely suited to each particular project.
In your introduction to In the Belly of the Night and Other Poems, you stress that Irma Pineda writes her poetry in both Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec, sometimes simultaneously. She calls them “‘mirror-poems,’” and you point out that written like this, the poems are “responding and contributing to two poetic traditions” simultaneously. Similarly, you and Shook explain in your translator’s note to How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems that Mikeas Sánchez wrote the poems of that collection sometimes first in Spanish, sometimes first in Zoque, and sometimes side-by-side. Has working with these authors and their multilingual literary production had an impact on how you think about or practice translation? Or writing?
Working with these authors—particularly with Irma Pineda—is what has permitted me to think about and practice translation. I sometimes joke that I earned my degree in translation from Irma Pineda’s Translation University. Our collaboration has also changed how I think about writing. Having come up in the tradition of literary journalism, I was deeply rooted in the paradigm of the Aristotelian story arc. I was devoted to the process of molding the real world’s chaotic events to the structure of traditional narrative—which of course Aristotle took from drama, not from lived experience. Our real lives don’t have narrative arcs, we impose that arc on them. Working with these poets, learning about their multilingual processes, and also about the cultural and historical events that inform them, broke open—in the best possible way—my writing process and my formal range as a writer.
In the Fall 2023 issue of World Literature Today, I wrote an essay based on interviews I did with several Mexican and Guatemalan writers about their bilingual writing processes. One thing that I realized from my discussions with them is how much a writer gains access to if they have any multilingual ability. It offers you different ways of putting together sentences, different structures, word choices, and different kinds of metaphorical language. Long ago, my writing teacher (and later co-editor) Mark Kramer told me that one beauty of becoming multilingual is that cliches in one language are new and exciting metaphors when translated into another language. That’s just one small example of how much more creative material you have access to if you are multilingual.
With regard to publishing translations, there is one critique I do accept, which is to ask: “If you don’t speak both of the languages, how could you possibly translate these poems into English?” It is my collaboration with the poets whom I translate that makes is possible. And in the case of Isthmus Zapotec, I’ve been formally studying it for more than two years.
I’ve also been told that this is not a project that I should be engaged in, as a white person, a non-Latine person. That’s a legitimate point of view. While my position can be a fraught one, it has not deterred me. Irma Pineda and Mikeas Sánchez both asked me to translate their work. When I’ve discussed this issue with them, they both state clearly: “I get to choose who my translator is.” I’m very careful not to be pushy when talking to writers about the possibility of translating their work into English. I have occasionally approached a writer saying, “I really love this poem; I’d be interested in translating it in English. Is that something that interests you?” And if she—I work almost exclusively with woman-identified writers—says “no,” it’s really important not to press the point. There are many different reasons why a writer might not want a white person to translate their work into English, or why they might not want their work to appear in US publications, or perhaps not appear in English at all. It’s extremely important to respect that.
You are a passionate advocate for Indigenous literatures of the Americas, across languages and traditions, and you do a wonderful job explaining the political and linguistic stakes of their poetry in all of your translation paratexts and nonfiction writing about these authors. How do you see the political stakes for your translations of Indigenous Mexican authors into English?
The concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” known as ICH, is central to my translation work. Literature in Indigenous languages is both a vehicle for ICH (the history, philosophy, and ideas conveyed by the literature) and it is itself ICH. And beyond that, the individual words that make up the poems I translate are ICH. When I am working with the lines and stanzas of these poems, bringing them into English, I am working with irreplaceable treasures. Something priceless has been entrusted to me and I don’t take that responsibility lightly.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater are only the second and third trilingual books by Indigenous Mexican women to be published in the US, as far as I know. The extreme underrepresentation of Indigenous Latin American authors—and First Nations authors more broadly—means that the literary landscape in the US is less diverse, more of a monoculture. Through translation, we can disrupt literary monocropping.
Only recently have literary publishing circles in the United States begun to see the value of Indigenous-language literatures. When I began to submit Irma Pineda’s work for publication in US literary journals, I did not have quick success. Rejection is the norm in the world of publication, of course, so that wasn’t surprising. What did surprise me was editors’ perceptions of the poetry as folkloric or sentimental. One editor wrote back, in response to poems about ecological devastation and genocide, “We typically look for poems with a bit more edge.” Another, in response to poems about the complexities of migration, wrote to me: “I’m afraid we simply don’t care for these poems, as poems (and one of our staff members who reads Spanish concurs).” I had chosen to translate these poems precisely because of their literary value; I knew they were good poems. All poets and all editors have different aesthetics, but there was an air of dismissal in those responses that struck me as racist. It seemed to me that those editors were unable to step out of their own cultural contexts—to decolonize their thinking—so they could engage with the poems on their own terms. I am enormously grateful to the journal editors who made that leap. I am especially grateful to the editors of journals who supported my translations early on, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Huizache, Kenyon Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
In your introduction to In the Belly of the Night, you write that Pineda “says her two deepest motivations as a poet are to keep her community’s cultural and social history alive, and to celebrate the traditional Zapotec connection to the earth.” As your translations take these poems into new contexts, what are your own deepest motivations, as a co-poet and translator? What would you like for these poems, and your translations, all here together under the one roof of this beautiful edition, to do?
My deepest motivation is to encourage English-language readers to begin to decolonize their thinking—as I challenge myself to decolonize my thinking, and my actions, and my way of being in the world. I also want to be an advocate for political poetry, for ecological poetry. I came to writing, and later to translation, from and through my work as a grassroots organizer. I am—to be honest—not interested in literature that is not in the interest of social change. The situation on this planet is simply too dire.
Jack Rockwell is a literary translator, writer, and editor. His translation of Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized is forthcoming from Astra House in December 2024. Other work has appeared in Full Stop, North American Review, The Chicago Review of Books, Words Without Borders, The Rumpus, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.
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