Translation is a creative act of empathy, no matter how close or distant the translator may feel from the author’s voice and experience. In the case of her translation of Salt (La sal, Odelia Editoria, 2019) by Adriana Riva, Denise Kripper describes her sense of identification with the author and protagonist as one of the reasons she first considered translating the novel. Kripper and Riva grew up in the same generation in Buenos Aires: “Adriana Riva and I were speaking the same language,” she writes in her Translator’s Note. As she began translating, Kripper’s discoveries only deepened as she shared the experience of pregnancy with the protagonist Ema. Salt explores the immutability of female family relationships over generations, and particularly the challenge of establishing an adult relationship with one’s mother.
The heart of the book is a family road trip between two pairs of sisters: Ema (the narrator) and her sister Julia, and Elena (their mother) and her sister Sarita. Ema and Julia are not particularly close, and Ema resents Julia’s apparent “higher daughter status.” Meanwhile, Sarita serves as a mother figure to her younger sister Elena. Ema’s relationship with her mother is troubled by a childhood fall that she believes her mother witnessed and did nothing to stop, narrated in the opening section of the book. Though Ema’s perspective is suffused with suspicion of her mother, Riva’s genius—and Kripper’s—is to reveal Elena’s care through the voice of a narrator who constantly doubts her intentions.
The women of Salt have a fraught relationship to motherhood, filled with ambivalence. Julia’s life has been defined by an early pregnancy with twins and the challenges of being a single parent: “I don’t know if she was happy; she was a mother,” Ema says of her sister (51). To Ema, it seems that Julia lost her own identity in the process of raising her children, and when they leave home, she becomes unmoored. Elena, their mother, begins her career as a medical doctor, but soon abandons the practice she’s building to become the (never married) life-partner of a sophisticated financier: “By his side, she gave up on making a life for herself and began feeling totally at ease being someone’s wife” (57). After her husband dies, she reveals to Ema a sense of dissatisfaction with her life, that she never stopped to consider what she really wanted to do, never knew.
Meanwhile Ema, heavily pregnant with her second child during the family road trip, reflects on the revelations of becoming a mother for the first time: “No one had warned me about the brutal selfishness of babies…I stayed as far as possible from baby talk, using language designed for keeping my distance. It was my way of working through my anger” (68). She remembers suddenly understanding how easily cases of shaken baby syndrome can happen, something a friend who works at a hospital had seen all too often. Then she reflects on this new awareness: “I learned that love is so close to cruelty that you must stay alert to avoid crossing the line. Becoming a mother was painful” (68).
The anecdote about shaken baby syndrome becomes an analogy to Ema’s accident, which is the result of parental negligence rather than explicit malice. While not fatal, Ema’s fall from the roof of her family’s summer home while putting up Christmas decorations, leaves her in a full body cast for most of her eleventh year, and breaks the bond between her and her mother. Yet despite all the insights Ema has gained as a parent herself, she is unable to empathize with her mother’s sense of overwhelm at the moment of her fall, and fails to recognize all the moments her mother acts in what she assumes to be her daughter’s best interests. “The first two nights I spent in the hospital, Mom stayed with me, sleeping on a chair I couldn’t see because I couldn’t move my neck,” Ema remembers (21). As readers, we appreciate Elena’s vigil by her daughter’s side, but Ema remembers only her absence from view caused by her own failures as a parent.
In these early days in the hospital, Elena asks a caretaker to take her time while washing Ema, so as to make the morning go by faster, but Ema hates it, unused to so much physical contact—”We were like a family of bowling pins” (22). Even the family road trip Ema was nearly excluded from, but only because her mother thoughtfully assumes that she would have too much going on in her life with the pregnancy, house renovations, and her career, to want to participate. We observe how attuned Elena is to Ema’s physical discomfort during the trip, when she recognizes that Ema is in pain after falling asleep in the car, and immediately comes to sit beside her. With minimal dialogue and instead through body language, Riva allows us to witness Elena’s sense of guilt and her own discomfort with the vestiges of Ema’s accident, as she looks down and strokes her hands, unsure of how to help.
The challenge of not replicating the mistakes of one’s parents and the unavoidable transmission of genetics and personality traits is another topic Riva explores in Salt. “Mom tried to stay as far as possible from me. She didn’t want to influence me. Children, she once told me, should raise themselves,” Ema reminisces about her upbringing (128). Elsewhere, Ema muses, “I would like something made solely by me, without any inherited genes”—an impossibility (124). Despite consciously striving to be a different kind of mother and to build a different kind of family, Ema admits to creating distance in her relationships, as when she avoids the intimacy of baby talk, following the model she learned from her parents. At other times, language becomes a crutch for avoiding physical intimacy: “Then I told her I had to go, that I had only stopped by to give her a kiss. But I didn’t kiss her,” Ema says after a visit to her mother, as if it were enough to verbalize the intention of affection without delivering it (49).
It can be useful to think of a work of translation as being a sort of progeny of the original text, its spitting image, yet one that, if successful, must become a creative work in its own right. Kripper has lived and worked in the US as an academic for many years, and translates in both directions between Spanish and English. “Spanish is my mother tongue. English, the language I became a mother in. I speak to my daughter in Spanish. I have an accent when I speak English. I hope readers can hear it in my translation,” Kripper writes in her translator’s note (13). It isn’t easy to identify Kripper’s “accent” because her English translation is so fluid, from perfectly chosen idiomatic phrases (“I got myself worked up wondering if my life didn’t also revolve around unfulfilled desires and coulda, shoulda, wouldas” [94]) to convincingly rendered speech from a face swollen by plastic surgery (“Hello…I cwan’t twalk. Cwall Sawita” [43]).
But I locate its traces in Kripper’s intimacy with the source culture, through which the Spanish can be heard for those who are similarly familiar: “Before hanging up, I ask Lucas to give Antonio a kiss for me. I send another one just for him. They’re interchangeable,” Ema says of a phone check-in with her husband Lucas and son Antonio (78). In English, kisses are given; in Spanish, they’re often “sent.” In another poignant scene, Kripper glosses Spanish grammar for us: “Mom misses Dad but doesn’t say so. It’s a verb she has sequestered…Instead of conjugating the verb ‘to miss,’ Mom asks to listen to Rigoletto. She closes her eyes, rests her head back, and falls asleep” (54). By incorporating Spanish syntax and grammar structures into the English, Kripper lends an immersive authenticity to the translation. Unlike Ema and Elena, Kripper uses language to create intimacy, not distance, and embraces the influence of the original on her creation.
In choosing to translate Salt, Kripper enacts the journey to empathy at the heart of the novel. Like most of us, Ema readily observes the faults of others—especially those of her family members—while nurturing blind spots for her own. “Having Sara as an older sister allowed my mother to get away with never fully becoming an adult. She is still an irresponsible child. Family roles are indestructible,” Ema reflects (51). Ema criticizes her mother for her childlike relationship to her sister Sarita, yet is equally unable to reverse the power dynamic in her relationship with her mother, preferring to remain the wounded child rather than the forgiving adult. But as Ema learns more about her mother’s past and her identity outside of the indestructible roles of wife and mother, she finally begins to accept some responsibility for her dissatisfaction with the relationship: “I thought closeness and bonding should run separately and unilaterally from a mother to a daughter, from Mom to me. Now I’m not so sure” (123). Ultimately, the two bond over the fallibility and idiosyncrasy of mothers: “‘Mothers are weird,'” I tell her. “‘So weird!'” Elena agrees (109). Riva’s novel brims with deep wisdom and complex insights that belie its brevity—essential reading for daughters, mothers, would-be mothers, and anyone wrestling with the fault lines of love.
Riva, Adriana. Salt. Translated by Denise Kripper. Veliz Books, 2024.
Lucina Schell (Founder and Contributing Editor) created Reading in Translation in 2013 to promote the critical analysis of the translator’s task in book reviews. She is the international rights manager at the University of Chicago Press, and a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. Published translations include Daiana Henderson’s So That Something Remains Lit (Cardboard House Press, 2018) and Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos (co•im•press, 2018), as well as selections from poets including Graciela Cros, Erika Martínez, María Ángeles Pérez López, Mercedes Roffé, and Ada Salas.