When And Other Stories asked me to edit the first English translation of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, I was excited because I’d heard about this young Mexican who was being hailed as the great new voice, though I hadn’t yet read him. The original work was bewitching (and slightly mystifying too, before I “got” what it was doing). I’d never read anything quite like it: a story about a journey – the classic quest to find and rescue a loved one who’d been put in danger – that was at once contemporary and timeless, in a language that was at once crude and delicate, of the streets and of myth.
Makina is the lovable, pure-hearted heroine sent to rescue her brother, who’s disappeared somewhere on the “Other Side”. I first took the story as a poetic-realistic account of a Mexican village, its local drug lords, the travails of the border crossing, the hidden life of immigrants folded into American society – until Lisa Dillman, the novel’s superb translator, explained that it was also a tale of the soul’s journey through Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Its nine chapters loosely allude to the nine levels of ordeal, hence titles like “The Place Where People’s Hearts Are Eaten”. Everything acquires a double resonance: if Makina is that indispensable figure, the village telephonist, she’s also a medium between worlds…
The book’s allegorical nature – responding so well, through the reassertion of an archaic past (defolklorized, thank goodness) in the present, to Mexico’s anxieties about social disintegration – is one of its many distinctive features. This also offers special challenges to a translator, as she works to keep all the allusions alive without acrobatics. Another nice difficulty is that, not content with lashings of slang, Herrera has sly neologisms balance out the ancient echoes. Mexican popular diction is already lyrical and almost literary in many ways, making standard American equivalents to the swear words sound merely rude. Lisa has wrought a text that’s as layered, graceful and inventive as the original, giving a sense of the ground-breaking prose of this sweet and violent work.
Lorna Scott Fox works as a translator and editor. Her latest translation was Teresa, My Love by Julia Kristeva, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in November 2014.