Making the Unseen Visible: A Conversation With Kelsi Vanada
Kelsi Vanada’s book-length translations include The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela (Restless Books, 2022) and Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg (Terra Nova Press, 2021), longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; as well as Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa (Veliz Books, 2020) and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet (Song Bridge Press, 2018). Kelsi published Rare Earth, a chapbook of original poems, in 2020 (Finishing Line Press). She holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers Workshop, 2016) and Literary Translation (University of Iowa, 2017) and works as the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, Arizona. She teaches occasional classes on literary translation and is an active reviewer of poetry in translation.
Nancy Naomi Carlson: I was so excited to be part of the Tupelo Quarterly team that brought out your translation of the first essay in this wonderfully quirky collection of essays. I think it was three years ago. And now? The completed book is finally here! As an accomplished poet, you’ve been translating poetry until The Visible Unseen. Can you share with me what drew you to this new — for you — genre of writing?
Kelsi Vanada: The publication of that essay gave this project its start — before the book had even been published in Mexico. What drew me to translating nonfiction is that Andrea and I are friends from our graduate school days – I had translated some of her other work, primarily poems, and loved this first essay when she shared it with me. So it was through our friendship that I was following Andrea’s work and ended up joining her in this project somewhat by chance.
Translating Andrea’s nonfiction has been a new kind of writing challenge, but one that feels related to poetry. I’m interested in what we really mean when we use the description “beautiful prose” — do we mean poetic in some way? Much of this collection is incredibly poetic, it’s just that its rhythm is different. And in fact, one of the questions The Visible Unseen asks is — what makes language either “poetic” or “scientific”? Andrea writes about how both use metaphor, for example:
“We understand and create [metaphor] intuitively, almost automatically. It clashes with the idea of scientific thinking as logical and rational. But science is not independent from the human. Just like everything that’s human, science is suspended in language and in its own ambiguity. The challenge lies in accepting its uncertainty.”
I’m also interested in how nonfiction does just what poetry often aims to do, which is to defamiliarize something ordinary to help us see it anew. I encounter glass, mirrors, and light — the three subjects of the three essays in the book — every day, but Andrea’s descriptions of them refresh how I think about vision, perception, and self-understanding.
NNC: How interesting that you mention that the three subjects of the essays make you think differently about vision, perception, and particularly self-understanding. As a clinical mental health/school counselor educator, I’m very interested in the concept of self-understanding and how that may have played out in Andrea, writing the book, and in you, Andrea’s friend, gaining more insight into her. Also, in you, as translator, gaining more insight into yourself. Can you elaborate?
KV: Andrea wrote this book during a time of transition after graduate school. In the first essay, she describes being back in Mexico City in her parents’ house where science is inescapable since her mother is “the Mathematician” and her father “the Physicist” — that’s what they’re called in the book. Andrea studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). In the first essay, she’s back in her childhood home, waiting for her Spanish visa to come through so she can travel to Madrid for a writing residency. In the second essay, she’s adjusting to her new life in Madrid — learning to be comfortable on her own in a new environment and to accept her own reflection in the mirror. In the final essay, she considers the history of humanity’s understanding of light, and how the language of science is insufficient to fully express our experience. So, her process of self-understanding is realizing that she can “start a conversation” with all the parts of herself — the scientist and the artist/creative writer. She might end up with more questions than answers, but as she explains, our limitations in language and scientific understanding are what push us to innovate.
I was lucky to be in Madrid during part of the time Andrea was writing this book, which was helpful when envisioning the physical location in which she finds herself, as well as understanding how the book came together. She’s a very organized writer — perhaps that’s her scientific researcher brain! And I can still visualize the notecards stuck to her wall in La Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid — where Dali, Lorca, Bunuel, and some of the other 20th-century greats also lived and worked. It certainly helped when I was translating, because she had kept track of all the sources she references in the book.
Andrea often says now that I know her writing better than she does, and even that she learns something about her writing from reading my translations. I would say that while I love lineated poems, I gained more insight into my own love of good sentences, and how to create them in English — which sometimes meant that in translation I made choices about where to combine Andrea’s sentences or use punctuation to link elements and help the English-language reader follow a more complicated series of thoughts.
I also learned so much about my own capacity to write things that aren’t my own forte or area of study — a lot of research went into translating this book, because I had to be sure I had the right English words for complex concepts like quantum mechanics. Luckily, Andrea was open to answering my many questions, and she also sent me a lot of helpful web links and YouTube videos so I could visualize what she was describing.
NNC: How wonderful that you were able to experience Madrid a bit through Andrea’s eyes, and to see the role research can play in writing. Stanley Plumly used to say that every poem should include at least one fact the reader might not know. What are some of these unusual facts from Andrea’s book that have stuck with you and perhaps changed how you see the world or yourself?
KV: I once took that personality test that tells you your top five strengths, and one of mine was called “input,” meaning I need to collect information, ideas, things. I’m not sure it’s always a strength, but I do love a good fact. One that comes to mind from the book is Andrea’s explanation of how mirrors actually work. What we see in the mirror appears horizontally flipped because WE flip it, turning whatever we hold up to the mirror to face the mirror. Mirrors actually flip things front to back: or as Andrea writes, “the reflection is a negative, a projection through ourselves.” Andrea and I agreed that the more you learn about mirrors, the weirder they are.
Maybe I’m so intrigued because I also write poems, and poets are obsessed with mirrors — you couldn’t even begin to count up all the mirror poems that have been written. As kids, my siblings and I were also very taken with holding mirrors under our chins and walking around the house looking into them — it feels like you’re walking on the ceiling. So, I suppose what I’m noticing is how endlessly mysterious such an everyday object is because of how using it can destabilize our world or feel like a portal into another one. “The world of the mirror is a world of unreal images, images that can never serve as anchors,” Andrea writes.
Another favorite section is when Andrea explains Goethe and Newton’s color theories. Newton discovered that white light contains all the colors, while Goethe believed “color is not a property but a personal, subjective perception.” She tells a great story about how Keats purportedly gave a toast to a group of Romantics at a dinner party: “To Newton’s health and the confusion of mathematics, which have reduced the beauty of the rainbow to the size of a prism.” I’m fascinated by how seemingly anxious the Romantics were that scientific discovery would threaten art. Perhaps it resonates with me because I grew up in a religious community that seemed to feel similarly about science and faith — for most, evolution and the actual age of the earth threatened the truth about God. But to me, as Andrea quotes Richard Feynman — my favorite quote in the book — “It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it.”
NNC: Mirrors have always fascinated me, as well, especially in the context Andrea describes, questioning whether animals can recognize themselves in their own reflections. They say dogs aren’t able to do so, but that doesn’t prevent me from holding up my schnoodle to the mirror every night for one small sign of recognition. Maybe we writers like a good challenge, even though there’s no guarantee of success. Just like the translation process itself. Let’s talk about what it was like to translate Andrea’s nonfiction. How would you describe this process? What are the similarities and differences with the process you use to translate poetry?
KV: That’s another of my favorite sections of the book. After writing about the mirror test for visual self-recognition in animals, Andrea concludes that “Recognizing our own likeness isn’t proof of the awareness of self.” Or not the only proof, anyway.
Translating Andrea’s nonfiction was a good challenge, to use your words. It was also a hard challenge at times. The first draft stage is similar for me when translating either prose or poetry — a very messy first draft that’s all about just getting the language over, followed by many refining drafts. Working with prose that conveys information or an argument was different, though. On a syntactic level, Andrea links complicated concepts to equally complicated reflections, sometimes using quite short sentences. In the translation I sometimes used longer sentences — as well as em dashes, which aren’t so common in Spanish — to link concepts that for a Spanish reader might be easier to hold in mind and link over multiple sentences, if that makes sense. English just relies on such clarity of pronoun-antecedent agreement. But I’m happy with how the prose turned out in English and feel that it’s a close sibling of Andrea’s.
I heard Geetanjali Shree give a virtual keynote recently for English PEN’s International Translation Day, and she put into words what I’ve felt when translating Andrea’s nonfiction. She said — I’m paraphrasing — that whereas creative writers often compose intuitively, translators must know things in a conscious way in order to write the book again. Sometimes this means we have to do a lot of research or ask the writer questions they’re not sure how to answer about what they “meant.” But that’s how I felt, that I couldn’t always, or only, rely on my poetic ear in composing this translation — instead, I had to be very self-aware and methodical, understanding each scientific aspect and exactly how Andrea relates it to her own experience.
That said, there are many sections where I was also able to be “equally inventive,” to use another phrase of Shree’s. For example, in section 43 of the first essay, which describes the aftermath of the 2017 Puebla earthquake, Andrea writes about everything that “breaks” — some physical things, but many that are abstract or metaphorical. She encouraged me to translate this section creatively, thinking of phrases that go with the verb “to break” in English, such as “habits,” a word that’s not in the Spanish.
The first time I read to an audience from The Visible Unseen, I noticed another major difference from translating poetry. Reading sections of the book aloud, especially those parts where Andrea is narrating her own experience — versus the more scientific sections — feels different than inhabiting a poem. Even though these are my words in English, reading them aloud feels like I’m standing in for Andrea in a way that’s a bit unsettling — so I’m glad we will be able to do some readings together soon! When I translate poems — perhaps because I believe in a poem’s speaker as separate from its writer — I feel freer to create—and speak—language that has a life apart from its creator(s).
NNC: How fascinating, Kelsi, that you feel less transgressive taking liberties with the lines of a poem’s speaker vs its author. Can you quote from other places in these essays where you translated creatively?
KV: I suppose what I mean is that I feel more keenly the sense of speaking in someone else’s voice when I’m reading my translation of Andrea’s nonfiction — maybe the difference is that when translating poetry I’m able to speak with someone else’s voice. Todd Portnowitz said on a recent ALTA panel that translating poetry feels like gathering the poet’s voice in a jar and teaching that voice to sing a new song in another language, and I keep thinking about that.
As for other parts of the text that afforded me places to innovate — there are many! The second essay, which centers on mirrors, explores the many words and phrases in English for talking about sight and self-reflection. I worked for a long time trying to get the opening section of the essay — which benefited greatly from the input of a workshop led by Christina MacSweeney, one of my translator heroes — just right. In my translation it’s: “I could begin by saying that mirrors are useless if no one looks in them. / Or: the history of mirrors is the history of (self-) contemplation.”
In Spanish, the last word is “mirar(se).” Andrea intentionally highlights the reflexive pronoun -se. “Mirarse” means “to look at oneself,” but I really wanted to find a way around that clunky “oneself.” Similarly, in the first sentence, Andrea uses “si nadie se contempla in ellos” — which I reordered to create “if no one looks in them” so as to avoid the clunky reflexive “at themselves in them.” You can see also that I did use the cognate “contemplate,” just not in the same position as Andrea. And that principle helped guide me in the rest of this essay — throughout it you’ll find instances of “contemplate,” “gaze,” “regard,” etc, though not always exactly where Andrea uses them. What I’m hoping to do across the book is to help the reader enjoy the poetry of the writing, and not get bogged down by the kind of English syntax that would result from a more “literal” translation.
The Visible Unseen is very much a hybrid text, not only because it pulls together science and creative writing, but also in its form. The first essay uses numbered pieces in the style of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, the second is a series of continual beginnings — each page starts with “I could begin with/by/in.” The third is a chain of lyric paragraphs about light. These forms created constraints for me as the translator that I found productive, and which allowed me to work creatively within them. Translation itself is a creative constraint for me.
We were able to add another creative element to this English version that’s not in the Spanish — photograms by Mexican artist Fabiola Menchelli grace the cover as well as the interior. I think these visual aspects give the reader another way to sound out Andrea’s assertions about the link between science and art:
“Something tells me beauty is not in the difficulty or the novelty, but in the idea behind it, in what the experiment reveals about the world – and in this, it is similar to art. Like a painting or a poem, an experiment is a representation of reality that astonishes us; moreover, it gives conclusive proof of what we already took for truth … Deep down, matter itself faces dualities and interferences.”
NNC: I was just going to ask you about the cover, Kelsi. That must mean we’ve gone full circle, when you know what I’ll be asking next. Before we close, I’d like to ask how translating Andrea’s nonfiction has influenced your non-translated writing.
KV: Great minds! Fabiola’s work is incredible, and I love how the cover image, called Prismatic compass, links to the sections of the book about how prisms were used in experiments with light by Goethe, Newton, and others.
As for how working with Andrea’s book has influenced my non-translated writing, I certainly find myself writing more prose in the last few years than I did before — at any rate, I’m writing more in sentences, though not necessarily complete sentences. I suppose you’d call them prose poems. I enjoy experimenting with music and rhythm in sentences, and with putting long and short sentences in juxtaposition as Andrea does.
But there is much more I’d like to draw from what I’ve learned by translating Andrea’s work. For example, she’s a master at writing from the self, but making the self universal. Also at including facts, as you mentioned before, or at allowing the writing to bring in other realms of knowledge and experience that we might think of as incongruous with creative writing. To close, I’ll share a few sentences from the end of Andrea’s book that I think might somehow point the way for my own future writing. She’s talking about what writing the final essay means for her, and she says:
“I admit that this essay is not exactly about light. Neither is it about scientific language, and even less about metaphor…It’s about pushing boundaries. Starting a conversation with all the parts of myself; embracing my dualities. Studying words until I can inhabit both worlds as they do. Learning, once again, how to write about the sublime, about the familiar, about the origin.”
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You may purchase a copy of Andrea Chapela’s The Visible Unseen, translated by Kelsi Vanada, by clicking here.