String Theory – Karen Villeda

[Cardboard House Press; 2025]

Tr. from the Spanish by The North American Free Translation Agreement/No America Fraught Translation Argument (NAFTA)

Ambiguity in poetry is famously difficult to translate. 

In Mexican writer Karen Villeda’s String Theory, translated by NAFTA (the North American Free Translation Agreement / No America Fraught Translation Agreement), readers learn in the first few pages that the poet’s aunt Karen (whose name the poet also bears) was found dead by hanging when the poet was a newborn. Many family members believe it was a suicide, but the poet wants to interrogate not only the societal stigma around suicide (“there are dead about whom we must not speak”), but also the possibility that the aunt’s death was a femicide. 

It is into this ambiguity that the translators step, where the way a single word is translated may run the risk of overdetermining or overexplaining, falling in line with one interpretation of events or another. Their task is to create a new version in English that maintains the text’s paucity of hard evidence, its “verticality of sorrow” across the book’s long autobiographical poem. 

For one, there is often grammatical ambiguity in the poem when translating pronouns from Spanish to English. Spanish pronouns can have multiple possible referents, wherein English demands selecting one—for example, the possessive pronoun su, which can mean his, her, its, theirs, or yours. NAFTA shares in their translators’ note that they have sometimes “had to make a conclusive determination as to whether the antecedent is ‘she’ (the deceased aunt) or ‘it’ (a concept or action.)” 

There are many examples of how NAFTA deftly handles these decisions regarding pronouns. For example, they translate “It’s a bit schematic” after the line “It’s not like she was something or someone.” The word translated as It’s (Es in Spanish) could just as easily be She is, given that the aunt is referenced in the previous line, but It’s leaves the line more open to interpretation. Other times, NAFTA’s strategy is not to include a pronoun, such as: “Doesn’t want to talk about it” where the subject in Spanish is not clear, and to insert one would be to overinterpret. They similarly employ the passive voice to avoid overdetermining a subject: “tries to explain it and is told to stop” (emphasis mine).

Another aspect of ambiguity is the repetition of the words something/someone, a frequent refrain that emphasizes the lack of information about the poet’s aunt’s death—and also the impossibility of truly knowing another person, the challenge of trying to reconstruct a narrative while feeling that the aunt the poet never knew is “still here hanging from me.” The vagueness of these terms is preserved in translation: “Something is what leads us to believe there was something more in her. Something more, yes. / Something like an instant unrestrained. / Something like an expectation.”  

Finally, the translators maintain ambiguity by frequently choosing cognate words in English. As a Spanish to English translator myself, I’m often concerned with limiting the number of cognates I use, fearing the tone will sound elevated for English readers when the text is full of Latinate words. But I would argue it’s the right choice for this book—I see it as choosing the most unmediated possible translation, so as not to overdetermine or explain, which could be to take a side or to pass judgement.

At one point, the poet acknowledges that though she shares her aunt’s name, “I haven’t been her.” The next line in Spanish is “No me transparenta, no me reconozco en la sustancia,” which NAFTA translates as “It doesn’t make me transparent, I don’t recognize myself in the substance.” Even those readers without any Spanish will see the similarity in the words—the translators have chosen the cognates and produced what I could call a direct translation. This mode requires great restraint on the part of the translator, but with the goal of allowing the reader to do their own interpretive work.

There are also many moments where the translators’ creativity shines, such as in how they translate cuerda—which, as they point out in their translators’ note, can mean string, rope, cord, or thread. The translators use many of the meanings in English—the title is String Theory, but translating cuerda as “rope” in other places references the rope used in the poet’s aunt’s death. Sometimes, an idiomatic phrase that references string/rope is all that’s needed in English (even where the Spanish repeats cuerda), and demonstrates the translators’ respect for the reader’s ability to do the work of stringing related thoughts together that grasp toward understanding:

Which of these strings would she choose? A string of prisoners. Spinal cord or notochord. A false string. A tightrope. An infinite string. Vocal cord. Strappado. To treat her as if she wasn’t high strung. Strung out. Against the ropes. To string her along. At loose ends. 

NAFTA’s translators also demonstrate that their ears are wonderfully attuned to the musicality of the work, even finding resonances that fit the world of the poem but aren’t directly in the original: “a nostalgia for the substantive and its cordiality” includes the word cord in cordiality. It’s a good reminder that not all is lost in translation, but rather something is often gained.

The poem is written in two parts, where each new page is written in a slightly different form, including everything from prose chunks, to short lines, to quotes in the voices of family members. To me, the most moving sections are those written in numbered lists—many of which begin in fact, as if trying to write down what is known (“she was found with a tangle of curls between her fingers”), and dissolve into speculation about what the aunt was going through at the time of her death. The translators move nimbly with the poet between forms.

The poet’s aunt was either physically alone at the moment of her death, or she was alone psychologically, alone with her murderer. And in her processing of her aunt’s death, the poet often seems alone as well, confronting the family’s religiosity which assumes her aunt is suffering in purgatory, their silence (“Mom doesn’t want to talk about it”), or their presumptions. So it seems especially poignant and beautiful that here, not a lone translator but rather a team of translators came together around this book in community, to give it a new expression—to respect its ambiguity and hold it up to the “Light and, and, / and light.” 

Kelsi Vanada is a poet and literary translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions, 2025) and the chapbook Rare Earth, and the translator from Spanish and Swedish of seven books of poetry and creative nonfiction, including Day’s Fortune by Carlo Acevedo, The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela, and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet. Kelsi was a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Translation Workshop. She is the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ. Find her online at kelsi-vanada.com.