The following is my translator’s note to Diana Garza Islas’ forthcoming Black Box Named Like to Me, the English translation of Garza Islas’ first book. Black Box is set to release from Ugly Duckling Presse in November 2024. It was tricky to figure out how to format an introduction to a book as ambitious and out there as this one. I landed on this interview format as a way to address the specific questions readers often raise about the book, and because I think it helps model the playful mode the book lives in. Hopefully, it warms the reader up to read with humor in mind.
Black Box Named Like to Me challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in my translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will. Vocal momentum drives these poems onward and outward with a force that is just as funny as it is poignant. It is Garza Islas’ first book to be translated into English, and the first poems I ever translated.
Cal Paule
Box of FAQs (Translator’s Note)
By Cal Paule
Q: What even is this book?
A: This is a full translation of Diana Garza Islas’ first book, Caja negra que se llame como a mí. It was published originally by Bonobos in 2015 in Nuevo León, México. It’s the first published translation of the book as a whole into English, though some of my translations of individual poems have appeared before in various publications. These are the first poems I’ve ever translated.
Q: Who is Diana Garza Islas?
A: Diana Garza Islas is a poet from Nuevo León, México, with four other books since this first one. She is a multidisciplinary artist as well as a poet. She has received various awards and grants for her work.
Q: Are some of these words made up?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you try to translate them?
A: Yes.
Q: Does this book mean anything?
A: Yes.
Q: What does it mean?
A: Lots of things probably. It asks you to help make the meaning more than many books do. It’s about language acquisition and motherhood.
Q: What is core about this book, that you tried to translate into English as faithfully as possible?
A: Sound, image, and voice are key—then, syntax, pacing, lexical stability/integrity, sense. Voice matters more than almost anything. It’s a strong juxtaposition between the familiar or colloquial sense of language and the hyperspecific language of description. I’ve tried very hard to keep the placement of strange moments and familiar moments in the translations as close to the original placements as possible because they feel so important.
Q: What got lost in between the Spanish and English versions? Or, another way to say it, what did you choose not to translate?
A: I’ve let myself change the placement and type of sound patterning and puns to suit the building blocks of English better, finding that alliteration, slant rhyme, parallel syntax, brief metrical repetitions, assonance/consonance, and other prosody tools of English work well to compensate for the very different music and sound that the Spanish poems carry. I left spell and grammar check at the door. I’ve had to abandon the richness of multiple connotations that many of the words in Spanish carry, though I’ve tried to find ways to compensate for that throughout. Some of those words that carry multiple meanings include: cáscara, ataúd, calcar, armario, aluminiar, abolir, polvo, cabeza, hélice, and others. “Meaning” wasn’t a part of the process until very late in the game.
Q: Why is some of it still in Spanish?
A: For one of two reasons: 1) Because, in those spots in the original Spanish, those lines were in English! So I translated them in the opposite direction (mostly, with a couple of exceptions). 2) Because it’s a song or a line from something in Spanish that Diana and I believe should be experienced in Spanish, whether or not it’s understood word for word.
Q: This all sounds like nonsense.
A: This book will teach you how to read it the further in you go. The poems operate in a mode that has to be acquired (like any language!) It’s closer to allsense, Diana would say.
Q: How should I try to read this book? What happens if I don’t get something or if I don’t feel like looking things up or if I don’t feel like thinking so hard about it?
A: That’s a totally reasonable question. On a first pass, I think this book is actually really fascinating to read just by looking for the musicality in the language—there’s all these moments of almost rhyme, of rhythmic patterning, that are really lovely, even or especially if you’re not thinking about what the words themselves mean. Or, if that’s not your vibe, there’s stacks and stacks of images that are interesting and fun to consider, outside of anything about what they mean! “Lycanthropic helix fluid” feels so good on the mouth, even though I have no idea what it means. “Back alleys to your eyes” makes me feel feelings, despite not really having a firm sense of what that image is trying to tell me. Also, I’m a big proponent of just reading without trying to remember everything you’ve already read. If you’re enjoying something about the spot you’re in the middle of reading right this second, then I’ve done something right. Also, forget the idea that there are right answers. There are only new rabbit holes to go down, new connections to make.
Q: How did you even start translating something like this?
A: Initially, as a brand-new translator, I focused on keeping the syntax structures of the translations pretty similar to those in the source and finding words in English to stand in for the ones in Spanish. Then I started noticing words that can mean several things. Those were difficult to translate, especially when they were reused in new contexts. So I had to choose how to incorporate the image systems into the English poems, how to preserve the extra connotations she was writing into the lexicon. I was convinced the tone of these poems wasn’t formal, but it was a struggle to communicate that while translating only word for word. I learned to translate phrasing like that! Whole phrases and lines, rather than individual words. The difference between “you should stop talking” and “shut the hell up!” Deciding to do that helped lower the register closer to the feel of it in Spanish.
Q: Why did you keep going?
A: Because I was having soooooo much fun! Puzzles and playfulness and challenging questions with no easy right answers are exciting and beautiful to me, and often funny. I could spend all day translating these poems and not be done, and not be bored. There’s so little work that’s like that.
Q: What made you think this book wasn’t just a pile of words chosen at random?
A: In reading and rereading, connections started to appear and clarify. The references to motherhood, language acquisition, kids, and play came back again and again. The abstraction in the poems never disappeared, but it became a language I could see patterns in. I assumed these patterns would show up naturally in my translations, once I could see them. I learned from very generous readers that this wasn’t the case, that what I thought was obvious was only obvious to me. So, I started looking for ways, all kinds of ways, to make these poems make sense to other people. That was super fun too! Research is a joy for me, and even better, readers were loving the results. People love feeling smart. And in poetry these days, readers love language that’s both natural and surprising, smooth and inventive, clear and colloquial and casual and somehow also highbrow.
Q: So then why is this book not that.
A: Well, it was a lovely six months, but I was reminded by Diana that these poems are, in her words, semi-illegible in Spanish. That is an essential part of what they are and how they mean things. To make any ‘sense’ of the fragmented way that we use language, the way that we are in the world, in our particular social location in it. These poems needed to embody that by being broken in certain ways. Smoothing that language was a disservice to it. It was a really uncomfortable realization, that I’d been listening too much to what other people wanted from the book.
Q: Okay, I’m trying here, but… if you didn’t translate this book to make these poems make sense to other people, isn’t that just like, not translating it? What was that process like?
A: There’s a middle ground. I do all the in-depth reading and discovery and annotation and research beforehand. Later, I can hold all that in the back of my mind, not the front, as I translate. Which seems to give the poems enough room to assert their grammar and voice but still weave in the patterns of sound, image, and abstracted meaning I dug up earlier. I think. So much of my practice and way of thinking is intuitive. And, like, I don’t mean that to imply that I’ve always known what I’m doing, not at all! But that I have to prime my brain ahead of time to behave in this very specific way. There’s a sweet spot. Trying to muscle my way through all the decision-making in the moment leaves me and the work distracted and unfocused, struggling to find any foothold. Translating from a strictly improvisational stance just replicates whatever is in my head at the time, not the poems in the source text at all. I’m at my best when I let my brain ruminate on what I want to imbue the work with ahead of time, give all of that a few days to stew, and then come to the translation process with it on the back burner. At that early stage, I avoid connecting the dots. Instead, I try to take each phrase and line break and image as it comes and fit it into the researched schema where it seems right. Let it not make sense where it doesn’t make sense. I also don’t want to imply that I always manage this balance gracefully!
Q: Why should I even read it?
A: I can only hope it drives you to think hard about it, like the book in Spanish does to me. I hope you can open yourself to it like a kid might: looking for joy, expecting everything, no matter what that could mean.
Garzas Islas, Diana. Black Box Named Like to Me. Translated by Cal Paule. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024.
Cal Paule is a translator, poet, and teacher from Saint Paul, MN. Their work has appeared in Waxwing, Reading in Translation, Asymptote, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where they are the comics editor at The Arkansas International. They teach gender studies.