10 Questions for Pat Dubrava
- By Edward Clifford
"What are you doing here?"
Betania was standing on a corner, two blocks from home. Nervous. She wore an old dress and had her hair loosely tied up in a bun. If it weren't for the carelessness of her appearance, she might have been taken for a novice prostitute.
"What are you doing here?" Álvaro repeated his question.
"There's a jeep in front of the house," she responded.
—from "In Front of the House, All Nigt Long" by Agustín Cadena, Translated by Pat Dubrava, Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
Having been a poet, I decided to find a Mexican woman poet to translate. I had no training, a basic knowledge of Spanish, a love of Mexico and a whim. I stumbled on the Mexican poet Elsa Cross in Allá, a Spanish bookstore in Santa Fe, and decided to translate her complex poems set in India. I had no idea what I was getting into. Elsa Cross was helpful and very patient with me. Eventually a handful of those translations became good enough to be published.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
So many. All writers whose work resonates with me influence me, at least while I’m reading them. In my youth, for example, when I discovered Whitman, I wrote long-lined poems. The Brit Romantics, of course. We still write poetry drawn from that well. Recently Ada Limón and Bob Hicok have touched my writing. These days, I’m devoted to creative nonfiction, influenced by the likes of Alberto Manguel and Annie Dillard. My rewriting is impacted by my translation work. Getting Spanish syntax to flow equally natural in English is a challenge that’s made me a more judicious editor of my own work.
What other professions have you worked in?
Most recently, the de rigueur profession for writers: I taught English, Spanish and creative writing at the secondary level, and now creative writing and literary translation for University of Denver. I spent student years as a waitress, then youth counselor, assistant administrator of a Chicano arts organization, coordinator of regional firefighter and police officer testing, among others. My jobs have been mostly public sector or private nonprofit: I know nothing about the real world. You knew there’s no money in translating, right?
What did you want to be when you were young?
I loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. I thought that meant you played with them all day. Someone took me to a vet’s operating room, where an anesthetized dog lay with its gut split open and I instantly changed my mind. I was ten and that image is with me still…the tongue hanging out of the open mouth, the intestines…
What drew you to write a translation of this piece in particular?
I’ve translated Agustín Cadena’s stories for years, have published twenty of them, have a good working relationship with him and an affinity for his work. I loved the rhythm of this one, how that rhythm embodies its stress and angst. He wrote it for Mexican students in ’68, but now dedicates it to those experiencing such things today, because somewhere, someone is. How ironic that the situation the story depicts is not far removed from what’s happening now. I imagine an entire generation of young Americans is learning to fear the police.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I learned recently from Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses the Celtic word hiraeth, nostalgia for a home to which one cannot return or that never existed. I have that nostalgia, grew up moving from New York to Florida, Florida to Long Island, returning to a different East Coast Florida town each time. I’ve lived in Colorado longer than anywhere else. The place I am often appears in my writing. Mexico, of course, often appears in my translations, and when I visit there, I’m delighted to see landscape I’ve translated.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Carlos Fuentes played classical music at high volume when he wrote. Me, I need silence. In the last drafts of anything—essay, blog, poem, translation—I read aloud again and again, find the places that snag and bump, do what Marge Piercy calls the line work. I need silence for that.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I must be at my desk right after breakfast. I cannot look at email or Facebook or my phone. If I do those things, it’s all over. No one can enter this room. Beginning, the first obstacle, is a mighty wall. Once I’ve surmounted it, I’m hooked, absorbed and will be startled to learn it’s past time for lunch.
What are you working on currently?
I blog weekly, so plenty of nonfiction: 800-word essays. A small press is interested in a collection of the translation essays from the blog, so I’ve been tinkering with those, revising, adding. There’s a novel by Mónica Lavín I’d love to translate. I’ve been working on sample chapters of that, have published a few of them. I continue to translate short fiction by both Lavín and Cadena. And every now and then, I still write a poem.
What are you reading right now?
On Lighthouses, Jazmina Berrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney; Echo on the Bay, Masatsugu Ono, translated by Angus Turvill; Meteor, poems by C.M. Mayo; and Philip Pullman’s second volume of The Book of Dust, The Secret Commonwealth, my latest great escape when pandemic and protest become too much to bear.
PATRICIA DUBRAVA teaches writing and literary translation at the University of Denver. She has two books of poems and one of stories translated from the Spanish. Her translations of Agustín Cadena’s stories have appeared most recently in Mexico City Lit, Exchanges, Asymptote, Numéro Cinq, Cagibi, and Cigar City Poetry Journal, 2019. Her translation of a Cadena story was a finalist for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize in 2017.
