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By Daniela Jimenez Ochoa

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Mona, a novel by Argentine author Paola Caracciolo (b. 1977), who is better known by her pseudonym Pola Oloixarac, was first published in 2019 by Penguin Random House and translated into English by American writer Adam Morris in 2021. It follows the journey of the eponymous character, a Peruvian Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who has been nominated for the Basske-Wortz, a fictional Swedish prize of international importance. This award is given at the culmination of a literary festival where each nominee must deliver a lecture and all participate in varied events before discovering the winner.

An immigrant herself, Mona is aware of the tokenization of minoritized identities under which she exists. Morris’ translation reads: “American universities shared certain essential values with historic zoos, where diversity was a mark of attraction and distinction” (9). It is this system of categorization and reduction of foreignness into stereotypes that Oloixarac’s satire sets out to criticize, turning every person at the conference into a caricature of their culture of origin. Julia Kornberg (b. 1996), an Argentine writer and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, explains this “zoo of identity fetishes” in her 2021 article for The Drift:

It soon becomes clear that, in order to be considered for the prize, the writers are expected to enact their differences as pre-determined by the European committee. Half-drunk and always on Xanax, Mona attends lectures in which the Russian writer comments on Nabokov, the Israeli woman talks about Auschwitz, the Iranian refugee recalls his experience immigrating to Copenhagen, and an overweight Spanish woman professes her right to be what she calls a “monster.”

Mona belongs to a self-referential literary trend known as literature of infrastructure that examines the material, institutional, and social conditions underpinning the creation and reception of literature, highlighting its dependence on external systems rather than its autonomy (Bret Leraul, 502-505). Similar critiques have been made on the nature of the literary/publishing world in the current political climate where diverse identities are to be collected like baseball cards. Another work of this kind, released five years after Mona–and perhaps inspired by it–is The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft (b. 1981), in which the tokenization of minoritarian identities is taken to the extreme–and to the absurd–when famous author Irena Rey’s translators are known by the name of the language into which they translate. Both novels reflect a desire for change within the translation and publishing world, a desire that sprouted as translators’ fight for visibility and has become more visible in itself. Over the last decade, the battle has yielded fruits such as the redefinition of the Booker International Prize in 2016 to award translated literature, splitting the cash prize evenly between author and translator.

The satirical character of Oloixarac’s novel morphs into mystery when the forgotten pieces of Mona’s recent past come back to haunt her. In the form of intermittent, off-putting messages, we learn about Antonio, a fellow Ph.D. candidate, the thought of whom makes her uneasy. The first chapter reveals to the reader that the titular character’s skin is bruised “like a figure from one of Schiele’s paintings who’d just crawled out of a car wreck” (12). Throughout the novel, we watch her try to escape her own body, using alcohol, drugs, and sex to try to achieve an unconscious type of pleasure. At the end of the book, we understand why: Antonio raped her and attacked her violently after she resisted his advances, pushing a bookshelf over her, kicking her unconscious body on the ground as punishment for screaming in self-defense, and bashing her head against the shower walls. When Mona wakes up, she lies on a train station bench, the day before the Basske-Wortz Meeting would begin. When she finally remembers, during the award ceremony, the lake rises into a wall of water and crashes upon them, a tsunami ending the misery of a group of writers who chose the possibility of winning over that of their own survival.

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Bringing Mona into English posed an interesting challenge for the translator. Having never worked with humor, Morris’ task was to find a way to carry over the often-cruel satirical content of the novel. In an interview for the podcast Burned by Books, Oloixarac tells the listener the following regarding the process of translating this novel:

We did work a lot in it because what he [Morris] mentioned is that he hadn’t really worked with humor before, so he really had to get her tone right because there is something kind of naughty about this woman dealing with ideas and philosophical ideas and etc., but in order to make that lovable and at the same time, fun, which is definitely the spirit of the book in Spanish, Adam really found his Mona.

Effectively, the naughtiness of the character in question resides in her ability to think critically about issues like race, gender, identity, and politics. This becomes an obstacle when translating for the American reader, from whom we expect revenues and not critical thinking. In this situation, Morris had to round the sharpest edges of Mona’s ideas “in order to make that lovable and at the same time, fun.”

Oloixarac’s interviewer, Chris Holmes, Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College, describes Morris’ translation as seamless. This is the kind of translation evaluation that Venuti charges against in The Translator’s Invisibility, for its practitioners are “amazingly consistent in praising fluent discourse while damning deviations from it” (2). He adds: A fluent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, “familiarised,” domesticated, not “disconcerting[ly]” foreign, capable of giving the reader unobstructed “access to great thoughts,” to what is “present in the original” (5).

The fact that fluent translation is more accessible to the 46% of Americans who can read above the sixth-grade level has created a literary economy where domestication is favored. To the bilingual reader, Morris’ translation is not seamless–though perhaps no translation can ever really be–but it adds a second, intermediary narrator that chimes in to “mansplain” what the reader already knows from the text itself. Therefore, his Mona is more redundant and self-explanatory; a version of the Spanish text that steps down to the American reader, not to be trusted with complex characters and materials. I propose that the translator mansplains Mona, or, in the words of Antoine Berman, that his translation deforms the textual body of this novel through extensive clarification.

Antoine Berman gives clarification two meanings, the first more positive than the second:

1. The explicitation can be the manifestation of something that is not apparent, but concealed or repressed, in the original.
2. Explicitation aims to render “clear” what does not wish to be clear in the original. (Berman, 289)

Both are true in Morris’ rendition of Mona, a novel that did not originally explain itself, but teaches the reader to understand it. By beginning with an explanation of the problem of identity in the USA in a culture that Oloixarac repeatedly refers to as “benevolent racism” (last seen in an interview for infobae.com, my translation) where minorities allegedly benefit from performing as expected based on racial stereotypes associated with their places of origin, the Latin American reader is expected to understand that every racial and stereotypical remark is meant as a critique.

Morris’ inclusion of explanatory phrases and softening of the novel’s satirical blows shows that much less is expected of the American reader.

A clear example occurs in Chapter 5, in the translation of a conversation between Mona and Lena, a white, French writer who has appropriated Spanish culture and has no other claim to a minority than her obesity, after which the narrator explains Mona’s thoughts on the matters discussed:

Oloixarac’s Spanish  Original

Morris’ English Translation

La admiraba por su desapego frío, ese estilo de iceberg racional al hablar de sí misma. Qué diferente sería el mundo si tuviera que organizarse en torno a ella. Se la imaginó zamarreando a la especie, Medusa en bikini, empujando al homo sapiens que tenía de rehén a un calabozo del que solo podría salir si se entregaba a sus deseos, como la perversa jefa nazi de Pasqualino Settebellezze, el film de Lina Wertmüller que la fascinaba. Lena estaba logrando hacerla sentir un poco mal, en lo que consistía el objetivo íntimo de toda gorda, pero la verdad es que Mona no tenía problema en recibir esa bala. (77-78)

Mona admired Lena’s lack of self-regard, the blunt rationalism she exercised in speaking about herself, cold and powerful as an iceberg. How different the world would be if Lena were allowed to reorganize it. Mona imagined her giving the species a real shake-up: Medusa in a bikini, thrusting Homo sapiens into a dungeon it could only escape by surrendering to her desires, like the perverse head Nazi from Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, a film that had always fascinated her. On the other hand, this fat power trip, Lena’s exultant obesity–it was the only sensible minority position within reach of the white Frenchwoman. And Lena had managed to make her feel a bit bad about herself, which Mona always figured was every fat woman’s secret objective. (83)

The bolded section in italics in English exemplifies the mansplaining voice Morris has incorporated onto the text. While here it takes the edge of Oloixiarac’s fatphobic rampage–which I appreciate–, it only does so because it assumes that the reader could not have understood exactly what was added from the information provided by the author. That is, the translator does not believe that the text alone is capable of transmitting a message that he, somehow, derived from it. In rendering clear what does not wish to be clear in the original, this clarification (Berman’s “explicitation”) dumbs down the text based on the audience’s expected limited reading comprehension. It also goes against the nature of the character: Mona is supposed to be brilliant, she would never stop to explain herself; and certainly not among other brilliant writers who express themselves under the same assumption of intelligence. And the narrator, in free indirect speech, wouldn’t do so either.

A few pages back, another example of the translator’s clarifying voice appears when both characters first encounter each other in the sauna:

Oloixarac’s Spanish  Original	Morris’ English Translation
—¿Te acuerdas? Ahora soy escritora. Escribo libros para niños.  —Oh. Qué bueno. —Mona la miró sonriendo, pero volvió a bajar la vista, intentando cubrirse—. ¿Están ilustrados? ¿Dibujas también? (74)	—Remember? I’m a writer now. I write children’s books.—Oh, how nice. Mona smiled back at her, but then remembered her own nakedness, her body telling a story she didn’t know how to put into words. She tried to cover herself with her discarded towel. Are the books illustrated? Do you draw, too? (79)

In this case, a subtle realization of her current physical condition, subtly communicated in the original, goes from the abstract to the concrete: a fleeting thought becomes a bruise on the textual body. This clarifying addition situates the character under a bad light. By stating that Mona “didn’t know how to put into words” the story her bruises tell, Morris imposes a trauma response onto her, shifting from denial to an over-explanation of her thoughts. While this portrayal is credible within the context of the novel, it undermines the autonomy of the original character, allowing the reader access to something she is intentionally suppressing.

And yet, throughout the novel, we get to know Mona’s desire for disembodiment and her attempt to separate herself from her physical form through the constant use of marihuana, Valium, and alcohol–every single chapter includes a description of her active intoxicating agents. The negative sentiments the body awakens are suppressed throughout, and the addition of a direct acknowledgment of her situation counters both the character’s and the author’s desire to save the big reveal for the grand finale. The translator’s need to mansplain the text to a presumably inferior reader hinders the novel’s aesthetic agenda.

Another example that corroborates Morris’ need to mansplain based on his assumed ignorance of the American reader takes place in Chapter 7, the added words bolded again: “He reminded Mona more of Lima circa 1991, where teenage hipsters in Miraflores tried to emulate the long-haired lead singer from Poison (…)”(105), where the reader is assumed to not know where Miraflores is; “They saw each other again on Cuban Night, an event in a local salsa bar that the festival had organized as a tribute to José Lezama Lima”, as if the name José was more distinguishable than the anaphoric compound last name; on practicing cunnilingus, “Then he redoubled his attack, using his wide mouth to eat her out like she was a giant marshmallow flower filled with nectar” (108), where the metaphor of a vulva as a juiceful piece of candy becomes one used to describe Mona herself as a giant marshmallow flower. Time after time, the translator chimes in to mansplain what the reader is expected to just not get.

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Adam Morris’ translation reflects the legacy of a tradition where the desire for seamlessness reigns superior over the importance of respecting the aesthetic and political objectives of the original text. Although the prevalence of plain styles and fluent translations is the result of the development of advertisement and entertainment industries to support the economic cycle of commodity production and exchange in postwar America (Venuti, 5), this approach to translation is upheld by an ongoing practice that is willing to compromise beauty and intricacy for the sake of immediacy of comprehension.

In Morris’ translation, the assumption of the American reader’s inferiority distorts the text, undermining Oloixarac’s satire and her critique of systemic stereotyping. His mansplaining blurbs transform a novel written against the stereotyping of immigrants, especially women in the United States, into one that engages in the system it denounces by assuming a patronizing attitude towards the female writer of a text that, read carefully, needs no explanation. 

Instead of decreeing that translating for an American audience yields translated works that do not accurately reflect the full range of creative choices made by the author in the original, I aim to suggest that assuming the American reader is unable to keep up, in turn, does. I believe that the previously listed additions were unnecessary to ensure comprehension. Most people interested in reading a novel like Mona have access to Google and/or other browsing portals–why not trust that they can fend for themselves and procure the necessary data to inform their reading if they wish? Rather than hand-holding the audience, translators should honor readers’ agency and allow them to encounter the text’s complexities on their own terms.

Besides, the world is hard enough on women as it is. Only fifteen years ago, when Pola Oloixarac published her first novel Las teorías salvajes (Savage Theories), her prose and her discourse were so erudite that her pseudonym was thought to pertain to a male writer–accusations she resisted by bruising the title pages of her books with lipstick kisses. The role of translation in such cases should be not to domesticate or dismiss, but to amplify the voices of authors who must already scream to be heard.

Oloixarac, Pola. Mona. Translated by Adam Morris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

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Daniela Jimenez Ochoa is a pianist, music director, writer, and translator with a passion for both performance and literature.

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Works Cited

Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Edited by Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader. Routledge, 2000.

​​Leraul, D. Bret. “Deus Ex Machina: Contemporary Argentina’s Literature of Infrastructure.” MLN, vol. 138, no. 2 (2023), 502-528. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 1995.