10 Questions for Will Howard
- By Franchesca Viaud
We always wanted to have a bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar and call it “The 67”
and fill it with album covers
from that oh-so-glorious year
for western pop music,
call it “The 67” and put it on an enormous sign
next to Warhol’s banana.
—from Pablo Texón's "The 67," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was in high school, I translated an excerpt of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus in an English class. I’m sure my translation was awful, but I enjoyed the part of the assignment where we had to write a one-page reflection on the process and justify the decisions we made. You could say it was my first translator’s note. I still like writing about translation. I like reading about it, too. In fact, one of the projects I’m pitching now is Laura Wittner’s Living in Translation (Se vive y se traduce). It’s full of pithy wisdom. One of my favorite lines: “When I’m finishing a translation of a novel and re-read the first pages I translated, I find in them the naïve and tentative style typical of the conversations we have with someone we’re getting to know and who will become a great love, someone with whom we will create an intimate and shared language.” I think that’s also true of my relationship with translation more broadly. I’ve re-read my first translations, and they’re marked by hesitance. I’d like to think I’ve built a rapport with translation since then.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
The writer who has had the greatest influence on my work is Kevin Moffett, my creative writing professor from college. He helped my writing mature not just through his comments on the pieces I submitted in workshop, but also through his reading recommendations, which became part of my personal canon. I would put him up there with Elizabeth McCracken as one of my favorite short story writers. They’re among the few authors who consistently make me laugh out loud. McCracken also happens to be Kevin’s former professor. He once assigned a story of hers and, before we discussed it, he joked that we’d better not say anything negative about his beloved mentor’s work. When I reminded him of this anecdote, he said, “That’s good pedagogy.” I told her the same anecdote when I met her at a reading and she said, “Well that’s just good pedagogy.”
What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve worked various teaching jobs. The most recent one was in a town called Avilés in northern Spain, where I taught English and (occasionally, inexplicably) math. Before that, I worked in a café at a fashion photography studio, where I served models and celebrities. I still remember some of their orders: iced almond milk latte (SZA), jasmine tea (Cynthia Nixon), small americano (Megan Rapinoe), large guacamole (Kim Kardashian).
What did you want to be when you were young?
Rafa Nadal. This aspiration turned out to be a crush.
What drew you to translate this piece in particular?
When I was still in Avilés, I went to a reading of four poets writing in minoritized Iberian languages: Asturian, Basque, Catalan, and Galician. Pablo Texón was the Asturian writer, and “The 67” was the last poem he read. I loved how it glorifies the past only to reveal the naivete of its own nostalgia. I also admired how it moves between what I might loosely describe as public and private language. The speaker intersperses his invocations of all these iconic artists with the names of his childhood friends. Pablo is an amazing reader, and Asturian is a mellifluous language, so hearing “The 67” aloud only heightened the poem’s textual pleasures. I later emailed him to ask if he would send it to me, and he sent me the full manuscript it appears in, Cantar de ti mesma.
“The 67” was the first poem I translated from Asturian. From what I could tell, no one else seemed to be translating (into English) from this language with only 250,000 speakers. I later found out that there was indeed at least one other Asturian-to-English translator, Robin Munby. We became friends when I moved to Madrid where he had been living for the past several years. Robin has been working hard to put Asturian literature on the map in the English-speaking world and has published some stunning translations from Asturian. I recommend checking out these poems by Raquel Menéndez in Robin’s translation.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
When I’m translating or editing, it’s one of the rare moments of silence in my life. My housework and subway rides, on the other hand, are accompanied by music (lately, it’s a lot of Fiona Apple and Chappell Roan) and podcasts (Exploration: Live! and Hablemos, escritoras, for example).
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
It’s not exactly a ritual, but there’s a Post-it with a quote from Se vive y se traduce stuck to the bottom of my monitor. It says, el agujero negro de la traducción. The black hole of translation. It serves as a reminder to step away from the computer when I’m getting sucked in too deep and have lost perspective.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My first readers are usually my mom and my friend Eliza Harris. They’re astute and generous editors. I feel very lucky to have their eyes on my work.
What are you working on currently?
I’m polishing my translation of a book called Barb by the Chilean writer Megumi Andrade Kobayashi. It’s about a mother and daughter who are taken to a Japanese American internment camp. Cynthia Rimsky described it as a “novella haiku” for its economy of language and precise imagery. I’m trying to do justice to these qualities. This is the second piece I’ve translated by Megumi. She’s an academic who only recently started writing creatively. She has likened this discovery to entering a room in her house she’d never seen before.
What are you reading right now?
I’ve just started My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, recommended to me by Kevin Moffett and lent to me by Robin Munby.
WILL HOWARD's writing and translations have appeared in Brevity, DIAGRAM, Passages North, The Offing, Poetry, and elsewhere.
