The Book That Infected Its Translator’s Body

Fátima Vélez’s Galápagos is a plague novel unlike any other. Lorenzo’s body is disintegrating, his nails are falling off one by one. He takes this as an opportunity for one final journey, charting a course for the Galápagos Islands. His friends and lovers join him on the voyage, drinking wine and eating manchego cheese aboard the Bumfuck as their bodies decompose. Yet their creativity persists even as death presses in, and they swap stories on deck that challenge each others’ sense of love, loyalty, and mortality. In Vélez’s hands, illness is not just an affliction of the body but a force that reshapes language, desire, and art itself. 

Hannah Kauders’s English translation captures the strangeness and poetry of Vélez’s prose, which bends syntax and genre, and blurs the line between the grotesque and the sublime. Translating Galápagos required both precision and irreverence: willingness to break linguistic rules, as Vélez does, and dedication to honor the unique style of the original rather than smooth it away.

I spoke with Kauders about how she navigated the book’s queered language, the grotesque humor in her translation, and the story’s haunting themes of art making, contagion, and survival.

Shoshana Akabas: How did you first encounter this book, and what made you want to translate it?

Hannah Kauders: I first found Galápagos through the book’s agent. I was having a coffee with Maria, and she asked me what kind of book I would be interested in translating, which is not a question that anyone had ever asked me before!

I told her I really wanted a project that would be creatively challenging. At that moment in my life, I was longing for something really absorbing to translate, something that would push me to my limits. And I was also interested in working on a book that had queer narratives, or engaged with queered language. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that book actually existed. And in fact, it did!

SA: You mention queered language, which I know can be a translation challenge. How did you navigate translating a gendered language like Spanish to a non-gendered language like English?

HK: What’s really helpful about the book is how interested its narrative is in the subversion of that genderedness in language. For example, Paz María, the best friend of the narrator, has boy-girl twins, and she’s very averse to labeling them in the gendered “hijos” [children] (which is gendered male in Spanish), because she has one boy and one girl. She says it’s unfair. And Lorenzo responds, “language is unfair.”

Galápagos is very interested in the inequity that’s built into the fabric of language and how language creates limits in what can be expressed. And so, thankfully, because Fátima is interested in that subversion, I felt license to break the rules in the same way she did.

But because we have more gender-neutral language in English when it comes to words like “children,” it created a new challenge, which was to use the gender-neutral language while drawing attention to the fact that the language was gendered in the original Spanish.

SA: I noticed you left “hijos” untranslated. How did you decide to do that?

HK: Oftentimes when a word gets left in the original language, it’s because, either consciously or not, there’s some desire on the part of a translator (or even an editor) to inject moments of local flair into a text. And I don’t always think that’s a responsible choice. But because Fátima was problematizing the language, I felt like I had permission to keep it that way.

SA: What were some of the other challenges that you encountered in translating this book?

HK: The elements that made this book so exciting were precisely what made it difficult to translate.

SA: You said you wanted a challenge!

HK: I got what I wanted, and it was more difficult than I ever expected. This is a book that defies traditional elements of narrative at every level—at a level of plot, narrative arc, but also at the sentence level. Fátima is a poet, and it’s so clear reading her work that she has a passion for the line. For me, one of the big challenges is that Spanish is so much more syntactically flexible than English. And Fátima took every opportunity to do the kind of gymnastics that Spanish allows for—and that English absolutely does not allow for, because of our subject-verb-object structure. That structure is really hard to play with in English while also keeping things relatively intelligible.

Register was also a challenge, because the work really plays with this tension between literary and colloquial language. And as “fluent” as a translator is, sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint just how colloquial something is. I found myself having to ask a lot of questions, both of the author, but also my friend—just constantly bombarding him with questions: Is this something you read in a book? Is this something that you would hear aloud? If so, who would say this, and in what context? Just to get a sense of how colloquial, then, my translation needed to be.

I realized pretty quickly that I had to just jettison all hope that I would be able to replicate the order of things, but then I realized that it was a book that doesn’t seem particularly interested in the order of things.

SA: You mentioned asking the author questions. Some translators remain totally separate from the author or aren’t able to ask questions because the author is no longer alive. How did you decide when to consult the author? What was that relationship like? 

HK: I involved Fátima at the beginning when I was trying to get a vision of the book. I asked her a lot of questions about what inspired her to write it, who her references were from a literary perspective that inspired this style, but I did not ask her specific questions about my translation. I worried that I would lose my nerve if I asked her too many questions, so I saved all of my questions for the bitter end. Then I sent her a copy of the manuscript, and she went through this thing meticulously.

SA: Did you receive pushback on anything?

HK: There were some moments where my own need to try to make things seem logical was exposed. It was humbling. She had hundreds and hundreds of comments. We spent hours on Zoom, just going over every single thing. It was a team effort at the end.

EL: It’s a remarkable translation, and I found the sort of grotesque descriptions of physical deterioration quite striking. Can you talk about what role those passages play? 

HK: What’s so beautiful about what Fátima does is that she replicates the feeling of being disfigured on the level of language. And at the same time, Lorenzo as a character has to contend with the fragility of his own body that is disintegrating.

This is part of the book’s claim: that art making is an embodied practice. It’s hard to make art if your body is in pain or ailing or uncomfortable. Lorenzo is fighting against his own embodiedness, and he has this inability to reckon with what’s actually happening to his body.

SA: Let’s talk about what’s actually happening to his body. AIDS is never explicitly mentioned, but there’s so much about illness in this book.

HK: Yeah, it’s definitely a plague novel. Fátima’s playing with this motif of storytelling in the time of plague, and she’s drawing that from a lot of things like The Decameron. She is very interested in what it means to tell stories in a time of plague or illness. So in some ways, it fits perfectly into what we might expect from a pandemic novel. What’s so interesting, though, is the way that desire is portrayed in relation to contagion. As long as desire exists, a person will be vulnerable to contagion.

SA: On the theme of storytelling and illness, I was really curious about the Galapagos as the backdrop. What sort of symbolic role does that play as the voyage destination in a book about storytelling and survival?

HK: The Galapagos is a landscape that is desolate if we look at it from the perspective of human habitation, but when we look at it from the perspective of a natural world that is so rich, as an environment, it puts these characters in their place and makes them feel their vulnerability. I can imagine it also felt rich to Fátima as the Galapagos has come to stand for extinction, the fragility of our ecosystem, and the fragility of human life.

SA: Aside from the setting, what else about this book feels specific to the South American landscape in which it was written?

HK: Right now in Latin America—Colombia has been my focus for the last few years—there’s been a rich wave of writers who are interested in how deeply the health of humanity and the health of the environment are intertwined. I think that this book in some ways exists in that tradition.

And I have to say, one thing I’ve noticed about the contemporary writers I’ve been reading—especially from Colombia—is a kind of openness to defying boundaries when it comes to genre, which I don’t think I’ve seen as much in contemporary literature in the US. It’s not because of a dearth of people writing that sort of work, but because of how risky it can feel to publish, and how difficult it might feel to market. So, I’m really excited that a book like this had an opportunity to find an audience in the US. Because frankly, I don’t think a lot of books like this in the US, written by writers in English, are finding a home.

SA: Situated in the tradition of the plague novel, what was it like to translate this novel during the COVID pandemic? 

HK: It’s precisely in the darkest times that we long to engage with weighty subjects in a way that feels irreverent. That irreverence was especially welcome to me. My father had just died when I translated this book. Approaching this as someone who had just lost a parent during the pandemic, not to COVID but to cancer, I came to the book in great need of that irreverence, because death was looming over my whole existence.

People who haven’t experienced that loss don’t really understand just how absurd everything feels when you’re grieving, how the texture of life itself feels like it’s been totally destabilized. So this book was a really welcome opportunity to just exist in that space of absurdity where I already found myself at that moment in time. So, in some ways, the timing made it especially difficult because of the subject matter, but the tone and Fátima’s approach stylistically to writing about death and dying felt very fresh and very free.

SA: What is something about the translation process, either for this book, or in general, that might surprise people?

HK: People think of art-making as something that we do in the mind. Translating this book was disconcerting a lot of the time because of the way that I would feel its effect in my body—and not just from hours slumped over with a red pen, but also because I had to be in this kind of consciousness where there is so much detail about how the body is breaking down, often portrayed in very unapologetic language that could not be less interested in propriety, that really embraces the scatological and grotesque. So, I felt my own embodiment all the time when I was translating. On the first page, Lorenzo gets a hangnail, and I swear to you I got a hangnail after, and I was like, “Oh my god, my body is unraveling, my skin is falling off, my body is breaking down.” And I think that’s actually what trained me to understand where Fátima’s interest lies in this book, which is precisely in the idea of contagion. I felt it in my body as a translator of the work. And more clearly than ever, I understood how fundamentally physical the activity of a book passing through the translator can be.