{"id":1704,"date":"2021-05-15T11:16:05","date_gmt":"2021-05-15T16:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1704"},"modified":"2021-08-26T09:38:24","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T14:38:24","slug":"translators-note-by-robin-myers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1704","title":{"rendered":"Translator’s Dispatch: Robin Myers on Tedi L\u00f3pez Mills"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Read \u201cOn the Production of Wisdom\u201d by Tedi L\u00f3pez Mills, translated by Robin Myers.<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn the Production of Wisdom\u201d is the final essay in The Book of Explanations<\/em>, by Tedi L\u00f3pez Mills, forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing in 2022. The Spanish-language original was published in Mexico (Editorial Almad\u00eda) as El libro de las explicaciones <\/em>in 2012, and I must have first read it a year or two after that, around the time we met in Mexico City. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While L\u00f3pez Mills has written several works of prose, she is first and foremost a poet. I cringe to hierarchize writers and genres in this way, and my immediate instinct is to apologize to her for it. I guess I\u2019d only venture to leave the sentence intact because it\u2019s part of what attracted me to her work in the first place: I myself write mostly poetry, and I was translating poetry\u2014only poetry\u2014before I ever got it into my head that I might make a living as a translator of prose. I realize now, years later, that L\u00f3pez Mills\u2019s essays were among the first works of literary prose that I ever tried to translate (I started with one or two pieces in the collection and resumed translation of the entire book last year, when Deep Vellum decided to publish it). There\u2019s something glittery and glancing about her style, prismatic, both precise and uncontainable. It unsettles me in the way that poetry often does: it can change scale, shape, angle, and approach at any time. It observes its own manufacture, and the observation alters it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of the fourteen essays in The Book of Explanations <\/em>responds to an implicit or explicit question. The title is ironic, because the book doesn\u2019t explain much in the end; it explores\u2014which is to say, it asks, again and again\u2014more than it answers in any sort of categorical way. Some of the essays involve her parents, childhood, adolescence. Others engage with books that shaped her thinking as a young person. Still others meditate on the cultivation of habits like skepticism, smoking cigarettes, or coexistence with cats.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with L\u00f3pez Mills I recently re-read, an earnest reporter coaxes her to elaborate on the \u201cpersonal\u201d nature of these essays. You talk about your family, your past, he says (I\u2019m paraphrasing)\u2014so writing the book must have been an exercise of self-knowledge, right? Well, L\u00f3pez Mills more or less responds, the book actually offers the total opposite of self-knowledge; it\u2019s constantly exploring the precariousness of the \u201cself.\u201d When we experience something, who is it\u2014what sort of voice or presence or sentient being inside us\u2014that does the experiencing? What could possibly be less <\/em>reliable than the narrators we all are, trying to make sense of our lives as we live them?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn the Production of Wisdom,\u201d like many other essays in the book, is interested in the struggle to adopt a personal philosophy, a moral code, an interpretation of the world consistent enough to guide us wherever we go. This essay in particular is also interested in the relationship between wisdom and goodness, and it\u2019s predicated on the author\u2019s belief that she is neither wise nor truly good: \u201cWise people don\u2019t like to speak poorly of others, which is a total mystery to me, and also a literary obstacle, because it prevents life from being told as a novel.\u201d Later on: \u201cI\u2019m too morbidly curious about the accidents of thought, mine and other people\u2019s.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accidents of thought: these are the book\u2019s real protagonists. As Daniel Salda\u00f1a Par\u00eds remarked after the publication of the Mexican edition, L\u00f3pez Mills tracks \u201cthe genuine surprise caused by the dislocation between language and the world.\u201d In this way, \u201cevery poetic discovery splits in two: the referent (the situation, the sensitivity required to understand its sign) and the act of referring (the awareness of speaking, the suspicion toward language).\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a suspicion that becomes curiously inclusive in the end. When all is said and done, and as she follows her own accidents of thought, L\u00f3pez Mills proves as skeptical of pessimism as she is of optimism, as genuinely interested in the pursuit of wisdom as she is resigned to the belief that she will never achieve it.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn the Production of Wisdom\u201d draws from Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, and the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, and it reflects repeatedly on the fact that the \u201cprivate\u201d never truly is (\u201cThe mind is a public place, a tiny polis\u201d). Which means I\u2019m never sure whether or not I should be surprised when the moments of purest faith (I know I\u2019m taking a liberty with this word) emerge with no books, no words, no people anywhere in sight.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take this tender, almost offhanded remark: \u201cSometimes, blessedness is like a cat\u2019s sudden entrance into a shadowed space.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then it\u2019s instantly, implicitly gone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based translator and poet. Recent translations include Animals at the End of the World <\/em>by Gloria Susana Esquivel (2020), Cars on Fire <\/em>by M\u00f3nica Ram\u00f3n R\u00edos (2020), and The Restless Dead <\/em>by Cristina Rivera Garza (2020); coming later in 2021 are works by Leonardo Teja, Keila Vall de la Ville, Daniel Lipara, and Adalber Salas Hern\u00e1ndez. She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry<\/em>. Her translation of Tedi L\u00f3pez Mills\u2019 The Book of Explanations<\/em> will be published by Deep Vellum in 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tedi L\u00f3pez Mills (Mexico City, 1959) has published twelve books of poetry: Cinco estaciones<\/em>; Un lugar ajeno<\/em>; Segunda persona <\/em>(Efra\u00edn Huerta Award); Glosas<\/em>; Horas<\/em>; Luz por aire y agua<\/em>; Un jard\u00edn, cinco noches (y otros poemas)<\/em>; Contracorriente <\/em>(Jos\u00e9 Fuentes Mares Award; English translation by Wendy Burke for Phoneme Media); Parafrasear<\/em>; Muerte en la r\u00faa Augusta <\/em>(Xavier Villaurrutia Award; English translation by David Shook for Eyewear Publishing); Amigo del perro cojo <\/em>(Carlos Pellicer Ibero-American Poetry Award); and Lo que hicimos<\/em>. She is also the author of five prose works: La noche en blanco de Mallarm\u00e9<\/em>, El libro de las explicaciones<\/em> (Antonin Artaud Award), La invenci\u00f3n de un diario<\/em>, Mi caso Rimbaud<\/em>, and Cascar\u00f3n roto<\/em>. She is a member of Mexico\u2019s National System of Artists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation Series curated by Jae Kim<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

as genuinely interested in the pursuit of wisdom as she is resigned to the belief that she will never achieve it. . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1729,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}