#julia sanches

[granularbrain]

A successful suicide, these days, is heroic. The world is full of unscrupulous people certified in first aid; they’re everywhere, gray and unassuming like female pigeons but aggressive like mothers. They foil death with cardiac massages and careful Heimlich maneuvers. They’re a pack of thieves. You can’t even ram an olive pit down the wrong tube without them forcing you to spit it out, even if they break ribs or puncture lungs in the process. And there you are, covered in dry-martini puke, the olive pit hurled like a trophy at a corner of the room. I wouldn’t mind dying in a corner. It should be possible to rent corners for dying in peace, without interference or self-activated oxygen tanks dropping down on you at the very last moment, corners where safety precautions guarantee—where they assure you—a proper death.

– Eva Baltasar, tr. by Julia Sanches, from Permafrost

[shaeiki]

"It's not that I want to die, but that I have to. It's my truth. Life belongs to others, it always has. I am here and I see it passing, life passes by other lives; life is a mirage that is real and unfathomable, and it flows through the lives of others, sating them with water, bloating them into double chins. The fact that my turn had come was an accident. Not an accident à la Porphyry - not this time - but logical in a neoscholastic sense. My life is an accident, predicable and transgressive. It gives no ontological meaning to my existence, but rather occupies it like a sentinel, where it grows strong and renders me absolute. Self-justified, life destroys me."

Eva Baltasar, Permafrost (tr. Julia Sanches)

[wordshaveteeth]

Ah, the old days! The old days are always better. The present knows this and chooses to punish us out of jealousy.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder

[whilereadingandwalking]

“In this strange, dark story, [Eartheater by Dolores Reyes, translated by Julia Sanches,] a girl’s craving for soil alienates the people around her, especially when her first taste reveals to her the circumstances around her mother’s death. As she grows into a young woman, living with her loyal brother, word begins to spread about her ability: a taste of earth, and she can see visions of people who are missing or murdered. People begin to appear at their door, desperate and willing to try anything to find their loved ones, and discover the truth. It’s an eerie and compelling read driven by the narrator’s honest and rich voice. 

Content warnings for rape, murder, pedophilia, violence, drug use, domestic violence.”

—review pulled from my list of Argentinian books available in English translation, published for Book Riot. 

[smokefalls]

I've always had a nostalgic streak, always wanted to live in another decade.

Natalia Borges Polesso, “Dreaming” from Amora: Stories (translated by Julia Sanches)

[womenintranslation]

“It’s worth noting that many of us translators are members of a workforce—and rather vulnerable ones at that—and as much as we’d like to burn everything to the ground and build a brave new world, our decisions are often informed by the need to pay our bills.” 

Q&A with Julia Sanches, a literary translator who works from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French into English

From The Magic Word blog @ Books Are Magic Bookstore:

What is the role of the translator in decolonizing translation? In your regional/linguistic focus(es), are there certain stereotypes or tropes you have to avoid?

I’d like to push back against this question because I think decolonizing literary translation, its publication and reception has to be a collective effort. It’s worth noting that many of us translators are members of a workforce—and rather vulnerable ones at that—and as much as we’d like to burn everything to the ground and build a brave new world, our decisions are often informed by the need to pay our bills. And our labor is tied to and dependent on the gatekeeping of others. If an executive editor at X publishing house decides to make it their policy not to consider books that haven’t been awarded prizes or sold X number of books, they are perpetuating a certain power structure. If they read a certain book from Korea, say, and decide it is not Han-Kang enough to make their list, they are participating in a form of reductiveness. If they think a diverse literature begins and ends with books that are written in a single language—that “diversity” begins and ends within the borders of the United States—then they are perpetuating a colonial mode.

....click here for complete interview

[granularbrain]

I have the frightening urge to end this relentless unease by leaping out of the window. A lousy idea—the window isn’t far enough from the ground.

– Eva Baltasar, tr. by Julia Sanches, from Permafrost

[wordshaveteeth]

It is easier to put up a facade than it is to loosen the bolts you’ve been tightening, turn by turn, day by day, inside a house.

- Eva Baltasar, Boulder