9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

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Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Mugre rosa) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues to push against the limits of genre categories, balancing on that delicate edge between science fiction and literary realism.

In dialogue with Cleary—a prolific translator of contemporary Latin American fiction who is also a critic and scholar of translation—Trías unfolds the many different ideas explored in Pink Slime, including the ethical complexities of writing about illness and disability, the difficult intimacies of mothers and daughters (and other potentially toxic relationships), how it is that we experience time and memory, and what it means to live with the looming threat of ecological collapse. Pink Slime, like Trías’s other novels, is also interested in the narrative potential of confined spaces, which constrain the movement of plot and allow for new possibilities in building characters’ psychological depth. The conversation also gets into the question of time and narrative tense when it comes to narrating the experience of disaster—a question that was crucial for the novelist as much as the translator. Together, Trías and Cleary also get into the intricacies of translation, including word choice, sound, rhythm, breath, and how to make jokes work across languages.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction
Prader-Wilis syndrome
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
N. Pino Luna
The other pink slime
Trías, El monte de las furias
Plumsock Endowed Residency, Yaddo Artist’s Community (the residency that Trías briefly names toward the end of the conversation)

Listen and Read:

Audio: “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

Transcript: 9.4 “That In Between Time:” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT) – Novel Dialogue

“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event. As Sinan observes in a discussion of the Arabic term nisyān—“forgetting” or “forgetfulness,” although its nuances in Arabic are not easily rendered in English—even memory itself is not static. And yet, shared histories of empire and imperialism make it possible to draw connections between far-flung locations, as Sinan does in Of Loss and Lavender by drawing together Iraq and Puerto Rico. From here, the conversation turns to the pleasures and challenges of translation, including some of Sinan’s choices when translating his own work into English. This includes the effort to make legible the nuances of race, class, and other forms of difference across contexts; although, as Sinan notes, much of his younger readership in the Arab world today is often well-versed in US culture. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Sinan’s frequent use of poems and songs in the novel, a device that points back to the multi-genre experiments of the premodern Arabic tradition, and a moving portrait of a teacher who transmitted to his students ideas about justice and equality despite the dictatorship under which he worked. Mentioned in this episode: About Baghdad The Baghdad Eucharist Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness” (on nisyān) The Book of Collateral Damage Elias Khoury and the use of dialect in contemporary Arabic fiction Quebecois literature Breaking Bad Um Kulthoum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  1. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  2. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
  3. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
  4. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
  5. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
Listen to more episodes

Tatone, Alicia. Cover design. Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías, Scribner, 2024. Front cover.