 Thank you for joining us for this online program. Writers Lunch is a casual and virtual brown bag lunch activity on the third Friday of each month. Look forward to craft discussion and formal presentations on all forms of writing and excellent conversation. I'm Nico Chen and I am the program manager here at Mechanics Institute. I'm unmuted now. I'm Lesley Ann Wifter and I'm the Public Programs Director at the Center for the Art of Translation. This special session of Writers Lunch on the topic of crossing languages in writing is co-presented with the Center for the Art of Translation and celebrates the intersection of International Women's Day, which happened last week on March 8th, and the International Day of Multilingualism, which will happen on the last Wednesday of this month on March 27th. Lesley, can you quickly give us the introduction to the Center for the Art of Translation? Yeah, the Center for the Art of Translation is a San Francisco-based, nonprofit organization founded in 2000 that champions literary translation. You're dedicated to finding dazzling new and overlooked voices brought into English by the best translators and to celebrating the art of translation. Our publications, events, and educational programming enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture and promote the work of translators, build audiences for literature and translation, connect with local communities, and honor the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and our world. You can find out more about our publications and upcoming events at catranslation.org. Thank you, Lesley. And to introduce Mechanics Institutes, we were founded in 1854 and we are one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the hearts of the city. We feature a full-service general interest library and internationally renowned chess club, ongoing author in literary programs, and the Cinema Lit Film Series. Writers Lunch is a sustained free programming for our writerly community from our local members to our national and global guests and audiences. In addition to our recurring programming for writers, we also offer programming in the literary arts and many of these events are free for our members. Tomorrow at 1 p.m. Pacific time, we will be hosting an inquiry filled session with Professor and author Maurice Hamilton for his book, Revolutionary Care, Commitments, and Ethos. If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, we also welcome you to join us for one of our onsite events in our historical building in the heart of downtown San Francisco. On Thursday April 4th, we have a National Poetry Month celebration with California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, San Francisco Poet Laureate Tonga Isen Martin, and Oakland's inaugural Poet Laureate Ayodele Mazinga. Look in the chat box for the link to register now for these online and in-person events. We are also pleased to announce our contemporary translated works book group on Wednesday May 1st from noon to 12.45 Pacific time. Join us for an introductory discussion online with Deremi Tiang, who translated Beijing sprawl from Chinese into English. Dive into the rich tapestry of global literature with this inaugural meeting for our contemporary translated works book group, presented in partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation and Mechanics Institute Library. This literary journey begins with Beijing sprawl by Zhu Zhe Chen, a narrative that invites you to explore the vibrant heart of contemporary Chinese fiction. As a special deal for our writer's lunch attendees, we are providing coupon codes for you in our chat box now for you to use to obtain the books. Thank you very much, Leslie. And I will also share with you that we are also going to have a follow-up book group meeting on Wednesday June 5th for readers who want to discuss this book and have the option to meet also in our fourth floor boardroom at Mechanics Institutes. Together on June 5th, we will delve deeper into the book and continue this literary journey. Leslie, would you like to introduce today's topic? Yes, today's discussion is on the topic Crossing Languages in the Writing. It's a formal discussion that will include a Q&A with the audience. Please add your questions as they emerge into the chat, and Nico and I will read them aloud during the latter half of today's writer's lunch. Nico will now introduce you to the first of our special guests. The first of our special guests is Christina Garcia. Christina, would you like to wave to the crowd? Thank you. Christina Garcia is the author of eight novels, including Dreaming in Cuban, and most recently, Vanishing Maps. Additional publications include Two Latin X anthologies, Books for Young Readers, A Collection of Poetry. Garcia's work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into 15 languages. She's the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Widing Writers Award, a Hotter Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant among others. Garcia has taught at universities nationwide. Recently, she was a visiting professor at University of San Francisco and was resident playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley. Leslie Yan, would you like to share the bio of our next special guests? Sure. Grace Lopezad. Grace, would you like to wave? Thank you. Is the author of The Translator's Daughter. She writes frequently on the topics of diaspora and belonging for publications such as The New York Times, Long Reads, The Offering, Hyperalagenic, Catapult, Cora, and others. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI Writers Collective, Seventeen Syllables. Prasad lives in the Bay Area. Thank you for sharing that. And I will now read Saskia's bio. Saskia, would you like to make a little wave? Thank you very much. And Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission, a novel on grief, desire, and coastal Los Angeles that was published in five languages and long listed for the Believer Book Award. She is also the deputy editor of The Erotic Review, a 30-year-old UK arts and lifestyle journal which relaunched in March 2024. Her writing focuses on desire, landscape, subculture, and care, and has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for non-German literature. A translator of over two dozen Swedish-language books, her work has won the Bernard Shaw Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and has been shortlisted for the Penn Translation Prize, as well as having been supported by grants from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Authors Fund, and English Penn. She was Princeton University's translator in residence in fall 2022, where she completed her translation of Linnea Axelsen's Swami Epic Ednan. Correct me if I'm wrong. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in Berlin. And last but not least, Leslie-Ann, would you like to introduce our wonderful moderator? Yes. Award-winning author and Pushkart Prize nominee Cheryl J. Bisebutte is an Oakland multidisciplinary writer whose autobiographical and fictional short story collections, along with her lyrical and stunning poetry, artfully succeed in getting across deeper meanings about the politics of race and economics without breaking out of the narrative. An inaugural Oakland poet Laureate runner-up, she is also a popular teacher, literary reader, presenter, storyteller, curator, and emcee and host for literary and poetry events. And Cheryl, we'll let you take it away for this wonderful writer's lunch today. Thank you both and thank you panelists for joining us today. I'm going to launch with my first question. How has your exposure to languages influenced or informed your writing? Saskia, would you like to take that on verse, please? Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Cheryl. Sorry, everybody. I am in London at the moment. There was a book fair and I've been talking for three days. I lost my voice. So sorry, I make it creaky. I remember having this reckoning at some point when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the career part of my life. And I realized that as long as I'm sort of touching language, I'm really happy. And kind of at any level. And I'd grown up multilingual with a German speaking mom and Mexican stepmother and in Los Angeles. So like, you know, you kind of have to turn off your ears if you don't want to participate in the Spanish speaking side of the region. But I think when something that was really transformative for me was Swedish is a a family language by way of migration and my family. And I went to high school there. When I started working as a translator, something, one of the things I love the most is like pushing the boundaries of English, seeing what English can hold. Because of course, all languages have sort of different conventions and different sort of capacities to hold and express emotion and human experience. So what I really love to bring to my writing from my translation practice and a general awareness of how other languages work and feel is this sense of like, can I push English further? Can I push it to a further limit? Like how far can I push English and still allow it to hold and maybe break it open so that it can maybe describe the human experience in a new and interesting way. Interesting. Very expensive view of language. How about you, Grace? How has your exposure to languages influenced or informed your writing? Thank you, Cheryl. So my memoir has just come out. It's called The Translator's Daughter. And so in my case, I actually do not consider myself bilingual. I know a little bit of a few languages. But my father was a Bible translator. And so that was his lifelong career and passion. And I've written about this in the book. So he knew four languages, actually both he and my mother knew four languages before I was even born. So my parents and I are from Taiwan. And that's where I was born. And so their first language, their mother tongue was Taiwanese Hokkien. And then their second language that they used at school and out in the world was Japanese because Taiwan was under Japanese colonization during the early part of their lives. The third language they learned was Mandarin Chinese, which became prevalent after Chiang Kai-shek and his armies and the nationalists retreated from China to Taiwan and took over. And then they both learned English as graduate students in Princeton. And so this was all before I was born. So I guess I've lived in a household that was infused with lots of different languages. My mother also actually has a PhD in Japanese literature. But my upbringing, we moved from Taiwan to New Jersey when I was two years old. And so then I was educated in English and I stopped speaking Taiwanese. And then when I was nine years old, my dad's job transferred us to Hong Kong. And I attended an international school. So this is another part of my identity that I write about, which is being a third culture kid. And so the irony is that I was constantly, I was always living in a very international environment surrounded by people from many countries. And it felt very natural to me. But at the same time, I was never actually called on to use any language other than English. And I could kind of get by in Hong Kong because it was at the time still a British Crown colony. And so there have been all different experiences and migrations that have contributed to my experience and my identity. But I would say I am primarily an English speaking person. And my memoir really deals with the, you know, the repercussions of language loss and kind of understanding how special and unique my parents were and my childhood was. And I've somehow ended up in a situation where living in California, living in the US is the only place I feel comfortable because I'm not fluent in the other languages they knew that would have allowed me more mobility. Great answer. How about you, Christina? Well, I want to circle back to something Saskia mentioned, which is this idea of expanding the terrain of the English language. And I feel that's something that I have been very conscious of from day one, from my very first novel. A lot of what I write would be normally taking place in Spanish or more recently in German and even Russian. And so I feel like I'm the primary translator. How can I accommodate the song, the Spanish song in English and thereby expand the parameters of the English? And so that's something I think about a lot. Sometimes it means stitching in Spanish or German or Russian. My last novel has all of those languages. And sometimes, and most often, it's about what is the rhythm of a sentence sound like? What is it doing that's different than other sentences in English? How is it accommodating Spanish? My ideal experience would be that someone is reading my book in English, the language I wrote it in, but somehow experiencing it in Spanish. Sometimes feeling like there's something else happening here that they may not be able to point their finger at, but they're experiencing something. It's like getting English to mumbo a little. No, no, I just wanted to zero in on that part of it, since it's so much of my daily preoccupation writing. You bring up a point though. We talked about this before we started the program today. How in your writing does your use of language accommodate the culture that language is immersed in? Because I think I said to you all, I can't separate the language from the culture when I'm writing. How does that work for you, Christina? Well, if anyone has ever seen a book that has gone from English into Spanish, you might note immediately how much longer the Spanish is. It weighs more. When I'm writing in English, accommodating Spanish, I'm conscious of that a certain amount of excess. Of course, it depends on the character and what you're describing and so on, but there's a bit of excess. Maybe something is described two or three different ways, and arguments are a bit more baroque. It's funny. I remember my daughter and I, who is actually way more fluent in Spanish than I am, we went back to Cuba when she was in college, and it was the first time we'd stayed. My grandmother had died and we'd stayed in a hotel, and we kept getting targeted as tourists speaking English. I said, the only way we're going to get out of this is if we start fighting in Spanish. We would leave the hotel and we'd get into this fake brawl in Spanish that sounded like something out of a telenovela. It was all we could do not to totally crack up, but we were fighting back and forth. Everybody left us alone. It's not just the words you say, how you say them, with what intonation, with the music, with the linguistic music of the culture, all of those things come to play in every sentence. Exactly. How about you, Grace? I would say that for me, I'm often, because I'm writing about language loss, I'm actually writing a lot about substitutions and other things that stand in, and so I'm often relying on different symbols. Writing includes a lot of references to art. There are often references to music. There's even an essay where I write about Majang, and the fact that it's the only activity that I can participate in entirely in Taiwanese, because I know just enough, and just that small kind of gathering gives me a sense of belonging that I wouldn't otherwise have without language. Exactly. I feel that too. Saskia. I was just thinking about how, in my novel Permission, one of the things that I felt like I really wanted to kind of find a new language for or find a home in language, or I don't really know how to phrase that, but let's just put a placeholder there in that idea. Find a home for language in the expression of desire. I really wanted to find a new, or a kind of a mode of language that would hold this experience that is somatic, that is nonverbal or barely verbal. I was really inspired by the Swedish modernist poet Kaldry Tillarp, who I guess is kind of in a surrealist lyrical tradition. But also, I guess working with her, there are a lot of features of the Swedish language that are standard, pro-style in Swedish, but super annoying to American editors, and then the assumption is super annoying to American readers, such as extremely short, fragmented sentences. Weirdly, even though the verb structure doesn't really support it in the same way as Spanish, Swedish will often leave off the pronoun at the beginning of a sentence, walked to the store, and so I took liberty from this, I guess, via this modernist poet and, I guess, grammar to try to create this space where I could maybe create a sensory experience in the reader through the structure and music of language to kind of, you know, to kind of try to invoke experience of desire in a different way. So I think this is kind of, this is what this question has reminded me of. So talk a little bit more, Saskia, about how poetry is a base for you in terms of expression and conveying meaning. And I want Grace and Christina, both of you, to also think about that. So I'm going to answer that one as well. Saskia. That's a really nice question. I mean, one of my first writing teachers when I was at USC, Janet Fitch, she was like, set yourself up by writing by sitting down and reading some poetry, like get yourself into this like, into like a different rhythm of language, like get your brain kind of recalibrate, recalibrate from the everyday. And I think like, sure, you can say poetry, but also like poetry can have that function, I think music can have that function, something that interrupts the rather regular rhythm of speech. But actually, I have been reading Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man for the first time. And when I think about all the reported speech and the voices in the book, I also think about his listening and how, yes, that could be poetry, that could be music, but it could also just be the mindful practice of like walking through the world and tuning yourself into the to the poetry and the music that kind of exists all around us, just kind of shifting out of your own, your own rhythm, your own, um, yeah, your own kind of quirks. That those snatches of experience that you turn into words. So Grace, how does poetry work for you as a base? I would say I own a lot of poetry books. And I find it does kind of change my approach to language. It's a good way to redirect myself and to, you know, enter that more lyrical space, as Saskia was saying. I also, as I mentioned, for me, the kind of inputs that helped me when I'm writing, in addition to obviously reading, you know, poetry and other writers, are art, music, film, and so forth. And I think there's less of a direct relationship, maybe, between my experience of poetry and what I'm writing in terms of the language, but I guess often what I'm trying to do in my writing is put on the page, how much I don't understand, or what are some of the feelings that are that are in my body or that are instinctive that I don't have the words for, you know, in in Taiwanese or Mandarin or another language, but that the I'm trying to portray. So so I feel like there's different kinds of translations going on. And I think all of those, hopefully, are are taking from poetry as inspiration. I definitely have a lot of poet friends that I read. And it helps me put me in a different state of mind to go back to the page and to not be afraid as much of what I don't know. Right. At my core, I am a poet. So so I embrace all of that. How about you, Christina? Yeah, I'm with Janet Fitch on this. I taught creative writing and MFA programs for 30 years. And that's the first thing I tell my students is to is to leave this class and go by a poetry anthology for a starter. I think there's nothing that derails the same old same old as much as poetry. And in non progressive, not in the political sense, but you know, the the one step follows the other sense. I also think one should read widely globally in poetry, because I also think poets are the they distill culture, their cultures, better than anyone. And I feel like they are the best emissaries of culture around the world. And so I'm I don't go a day without reading without reading poetry that that absolutely. And I think it's also it's also an interesting invitation to a kind of linguistic chaos that could end up being extremely fruitful in your own work by inviting the unknown, what you dimly perceive what's as as Grace Pialli once said, what you know, poetry will find what you don't know about what you think you know. Exactly. And you know, there is this thing about how much you learn when you're writing something. I mean, what you learn about yourself and about the cultures that you're writing about as well. So I want to ask a practical question. And I want to start by a brief little story. In my books, the trail on the bayou and back to the bayou, I am writing about people in Louisiana who speak French. Now, I don't I don't write in French and I don't speak French, but I have a cousin in France that I kind of use to tell me what the right words are. And not only what the right French words are to use in the passages that I'm writing, but also the type of French. I mean, you know, I think we need to appreciate there are different dialects and manners of speaking all over the world, just like there are in the United States. But my problem has been with American editors who don't quite get that. How has your experience been using other languages with American editors and how have you resolved those issues? Sasha? Well, let's see. I mean, gosh, I think there might have been one or two lines in a different in maybe in German and my novel, but it really isn't a feature of my own writing. But as a, I feel like via the spirit of translation and constantly navigating the spirit of the Swedish language, it gets really interesting, you know, like I was I'm working on this book called Cesaria by Hannah Nordenhoek. She's Fernanda Melkor's translator in Sweden. And this book, we're trying to find a sort of like diminutive sort of pet name for one of the like farm hands at this farm, where the young girl where the main character is a young girl lives. And she suggested like to add to something that used the word last. And I was struck, I was like, well, if we use last suddenly, this is like, I need a Scottish inflection, whenever I'm working with dialect or whatever. And the sort of difficulty of transferring of like being like, okay, this is a rural Southern Swedish dialect. You can't just kind of point to a dialect in the in the English sphere and go, I'm just going to use this one. Sometimes you can. And they say this with the greatest delicacy and biggest caveats. But like, I think because of the migration, for example, to Minnesota, the, and from Sweden, I do sometimes lean on like my, my, my half of my family is Midwestern. So I kind of lean on their sort of the kind of, you know, like a Minnesota dialect, or most not necessarily, I'll avoid words, specific words, but I'll rely on like a a rhythm of speech. And I think it's a really difficult thing, because when we talk about what's untranslatable, or what doesn't fly, what does it mean when I point to Minnesota in a rhythm of speech, that's like first, there's a there's a history there that makes some sense. But like, could I do the same thing with like, I don't know, patterns of speech from Birmingham or I don't think you can like a big ethical quandary opens up. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Writers have to write what they want to write. That's the bottom line. How about you, Grace? I would say in working with editors, and I thought my editors were fantastic and very flexible, for the most part. In my book, like I have some foreign words. So there are some words in Taiwanese, there are some words in Mandarin, I think there's a little bit of Chinese text, in some places where I had to get some help with that. And I also I worked with, I happened to take a class actually from a translator and writer who you know, is fluent in English, Taiwanese, Spanish, and I think even other languages. But she's fluent in Taiwanese and Mandarin. And so she helped me with those aspects of my book, I felt like it was very important for me to have someone check that. Of course, the irony there is, you know, throughout my life, the source of that kind of knowledge and confidence would have been my father. But he passed away a number of years ago, and so did my mom. So the people that I would have gone to that had that authority and knowledge were not available to me anymore. And so I had to seek some external advice and just checking. And there are some real interesting issues, I guess, in transcribing place names, for example, in Taiwan. So there's a system of romanization, so rendering Taiwanese place names into English words. There was a system called Wade Giles that was very prevalent at the time, you know, that my parents lived there and from my childhood, and so that's what gives us names like Taipei, the city. If we did that in classic Mandarin, it would be Taipei. And so like the name Peking used to be used for the Chinese capital, but it's now known as Beijing. So there are ways to write the text. And so I had to make some decisions about what to do because the Wade Giles way of romanization and also the romanizing, that's for Mandarin. For Taiwanese, there's even more decisions to be made. And so I use a particular kind of romanization that was intrinsic to my family. It's called Beiwei Ji, and it stands for church romanization. So there were a lot of different issues in terms of representing, you know, some words in my book. And so I had to do my own research. And then I had to, you know, discuss my point of view with an editor as well as a copy editor and say, this is what I'm trying to do. And this is, you know, like here are my reasons. I want to use certain terms the way that my parents use them and spell the names of like a city where they lived in the way that they have always used it with me within our family, even though that spelling is no longer prevalent because it has evolved. And because Wade Giles is no longer the favorite system of romanization for Mandarin, it is now what's called pinion, which is what is used in the mainland is considered more standard. And so you, you know, like just traveling places in Taiwan and Taipei, you will see street signs and place names that are spelled three or four different ways. So, so it's confusing. And I think I just had to decide like what was my point of view and what was my intention. And so I actually include an author's letter at the beginning of my book to explain some of the choices I made, because I'm thinking about who might be reading it and what is their position. And they might use different spellings or different forms of romanization, depending on where they are. And just as an aside, but really more to the point, Mandarin is the number one language in the world. So, you know, good for you for pushing those points. You know, second is Spanish and English is third. Christina, what about you? Yeah, no. It's so interesting. I've seen my first novel came out in 1992. And, and that feels like it was a generation ago. And at that point, I was I was using Spanish in the English text. And, and I was told you have to italicize it, we should have a glossary in the back to explain everything. I mean, it was it was those days. And so I fought against the glossary. I fought against the italics and lost at that point. But from the second book on, I no longer used italics. And I, and in my penultimate book, well, my last book in my penultimate book with with which contain German and Russian and other, and as well as Spanish, no, no italics, either. So I think is, I think it's important to make the tent as big as possible. Welcome. Welcome readers in, but not over accommodate. You know, we all read Russian novels where we were looking up words or had an academic work, you know. And so I think that's okay. And I think there are, I always find that terms of endearment, for example, can be very awkward when you translate them, like in Spanish, when you say me, you're not going to say my daughter, that's a different has a whole different formality that that is not intended in Spanish. And that's just a tiny example. So I use Spanish or German or Russian, when I think it's the rhythm, the context, what a lot of things have to happen for for it to be there. And, and I don't shy away from that. I think it's important. And I think it reminds readers that what you're reading is multilingual or it's happening in Spanish or it's happening, you know, the arguments happening in German. And they're just little reminders. And I think that's important. I don't, I don't presume, and don't want to presume the kind of arrogance of language, you know, like English Ubras. Right. That is that is an arrogant thought that that English rules. And as we just have learned, there are a lot of other languages and a lot of other cultures in the world that we write about that are just as interesting and just as valuable. Do we have any questions from the audience? Yes, Cheryl, there is a question that is specific for Grace, but I think it can also expand to the other panelists as well. For Grace, I'm struck by how much of your family's history and language was affected by historical events, the occupation of Taiwan by Japan, the influence of mainland China on Taiwan and the English colonization of Hong Kong. How do you feel that politics are parts and parcel of your experience of language and your parents' experience of it? I think Grace should answer that first, but I think it can also expand to the other panelists about the intersection between politics and language use. Thank you for that question. Language is absolutely political. And so, you know, just and thank you for encapsulating that so well in the question. Yeah, there were, you know, different languages came to become more prevalent due to politics. So under Japanese occupation in Taiwan that people were forbidden from speaking Taiwanese, you know, so they could speak it at home to each other, but out in the world at school, at work, at the market, you know, they had to speak Japanese and sort of, you know, try as much as they could to blend in and appear to be, you know, like colonized Japanese citizens. And then when the nationalists took over and they established Mandarin and did the same thing, they effectively banned Taiwanese for a number of years. And Taiwan actually had until recently the longest period of martial law. They were under martial law for 38 years. And I think they were only recently exceeded, I think, by Syria. So I think a lot of people forget that that Taiwan now is like this thriving, vibrant democracy. But, you know, in our lifetimes, not that long ago, it wasn't. And so it was very political to speak Taiwanese, or even to have like a Taiwanese name. So for example, our the incoming vice president of Taiwan, her name is Shao Be Kim. And that is Be Kim is actually a Taiwanese name. And so she has chosen to use that as her English name instead of the Mandarin version of how you would pronounce it. And so that is because of, you know, her family's history in Taiwan and that they were you know, descended from Taiwanese that had been there for much longer, you know, so for generations before Chiang Kai-shek came over. And so they were very proud of their Taiwanese identity. But that was a political choice. And so, so yeah, I could go on and on. I don't want to take time away from my fellow panelists, but absolutely, it is a political choice. You know, what language you choose to speak, how you choose to represent yourself and, you know, what becomes dominant, I guess. Yeah. How about you, Sasuke? I was just thinking about one of my translations that came out this in this January called The Singularity by Balsam Karam. It's out with feminist press in the U.S. And in it, I really love the way the politics of language come into play, notably, so it's a story about a family Balsam didn't want to give readers kind of an easy out by being able to appoint to a specific country or war or, so she, you know, like, oh, I've been to Beirut. It's like that, but not really, you know. So it's she somehow manages to find kind of anesthetics of grief and migration and displacement in her prose. And one of the things that really strikes me is the last section of the book is kind of about the sort of the losses in assimilation or kind of facing your host culture and kind of everyday microaggressions, everyday racism that just kind of slowly wears you down. And at one point, the mom in the book says the daughter's correcting her Swedish. And the mom in the book says, what does it matter if I make myself understood? And Balsam kind of pointed to that and said, that's my approach to this whole book. And the language sits there kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown, like there's, there's in inverted grammatical structures, etc. And my challenge as a translator, as a stylist, it was really to try to figure out how to hold the sense of fracture without making it sound like it's not written in by a native speaker, which was absolutely not the case. It was just supposed to hold this sense of what does it matter if I can make myself understood inside a very lyrical framework where language is always kind of about to crumble, which is, which holds kind of the entire sensibility of the novel, the like sustained, like a minor chord of grief that vibrates through the whole thing. So you're trying trying to convey the true core meaning of your words? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Christina. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lovely description. Well, I am, you know, I come having come from Cuba and having had a family that was bitterly divided over the revolution. For me, language has always been political from, you know, the propaganda on both sides. In fact, I felt like I grew up under this shouting, propagandistic battle that trickled down on me, you know, and when I was in Cuba, it was compañero de compañero that in the in the 80s and that default. And anyway, and then to complicate matters, Cuba has this huge diaspora. I mean, I had studied in Moscow and Czechoslovakia there are half Cuban part Cuban Russians, Germans, you know, the whole, the whole relationship with the Eastern Bloc. I mean, this is, I just turned my thing off just to say this is what this book is about. It's just this huge swirling diaspora centered in Berlin, which becomes a centrifugal force for all of these cousins for these, these generations that are scattered around the world whose roots are Cuban, but, you know, who grew up elsewhere. And, and, and they're managing not only linguistic differences, but the, but the attendant cultures that come with those linguistic differences. And they're trying to figure out, well, given all of this, we're, where do I belong? Because in a sense, language is a kind of identity. It's, it's belonging. And, and that's something that is in continual navigation in my work, especially my most recent work. That sense of belonging is, is just key. I mean, you know, you have to speak the language of the group, right? Then then, you know, you belong. But on the other hand, we want to always be able to convey as writers differences that people should be able to embrace through what we say to them in our writing. And to get people to have more empathy, because that's what writing is about really understanding and empathy. Any more questions from the audience? Yes, we have another question from chat. Does the meaning or intention of what you want to write in one language have to change when shifting to another language? They're thinking here about idioms that have deep meaning and understanding in one language, but that are meaningless or nutty in another. And then second part of that question is how do you handle that and maintain your intention? So Christina, let's start with you. Yeah, I think that's maybe the challenge is finding equivalencies, equivalence, whatever the noun is there. One odd, there's a very funny expression in Cuban Spanish that my mother used to say when she was being disparaging of someone's intelligence, and she would say, O ese tipo no tiene dos dedos de frente, which translates ridiculously into that guy doesn't have two fingers of forehead. I mean, that doesn't fly. But basically means the guy's a dumbass, you know. Yeah, but I got it. So that's just an in Cuban Spanish in particular is picturesque with very, very off the charts kinds of descriptions. So it's about finding equivalence. It's about finding, you know, kind of maintaining some of the absurdity and rhythm, but having it makes sense having it truly translate unless you just want to use that in and of itself and everyone who doesn't speak Spanish grabs a dictionary and they'll still be mystified because what does that mean someone doesn't have two fingers of forehead, right? Equivalencies, I think. Wonderful answer. Grace. I would say I don't encounter that as much in my writing, but I think about, you know, my dad being the translator. So of course, I grew up in a house full of books, and he had many, many books on language, linguistics, translation and Bibles. But he also in particular love to collect books of idioms. Because idioms are so different by language and by culture. And they, you know, they, so every culture has their own like very colorful and sometimes like very funny, you know, expressions. And so that's a, it's useful, I guess, in the practice of translation. And so my dad's mentor was someone named Dr. Eugene Nida, who advanced a theory called functional equivalence, which was essentially saying what I think we all like, you know, can understand easily now. But this was decades ago is that you can't just translate word for word, you know, that's how you end up with wooden stilted translations. And you have to understand and appreciate local and regional idioms to kind of understand like the soul of a people or a community. And so, and so my dad would, you know, kind of study these things for different communities that he was working on translations for. And I think also it just, they also contain idioms expressed what is important to a culture. And sometimes the concepts themselves don't translate. So I remember there was a movie like many years ago called A Great Wall by Wayne Wang, I think. And it was about a Chinese American who goes back to China to visit his relatives. And so I saw this a very long time ago. But one scene that stayed with me was that, you know, so he's kind of sort of got this interesting relationship with his female cousin. And so they're kind of flirting and, you know, they're developing this friendship over their time that he is staying with them. And so he passes her a note. And she tries to open it. And like immediately like her mother and father are there going like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And so and her, what she says back to them is she kind of parrots this idea that he has taught her, which is, you know, privacy, privacy, like this is my note just for me. And the family doesn't understand that because it's like anything that's your business is our business too. You know, and so that was just kind of like a funny point of the movie showing that like, you know, this idea of privacy just did not change in that other culture. Right, exactly. The marriage of language and culture. And understanding what that all means when you unpack it. Saskia. I mean, that question is like the question that I wake up every day and deal with in my day job as a literary translator. And I have no, thank you so much for everything you already said. I don't really, Christina and Grace, I don't know if I have much to add, except maybe particular examples from my own work. But one of the things that I'm thinking about is, so this is the erotic review, the magazine issue one that we just launched. And in the second issue, I've commissioned an essay from two translators who are married, Curious of Son, who just got on the Man Booker long list for a translation of Ia Yain Badi's, The Details and her wife, Jackie Cornetta. And we've we're working on this essay about love and language learning. And what I love about that essay is it's basically about how they learned to talk to each other and bridging to language, like bridging their cultures and their languages. And I, you know, unsurprisingly, they use this bridge metaphor. But also, and what I love about the bridge metaphor that they're using is they see the space between as generative and productive, like the fact that we can't necessarily bridge all the time, that it is actually that in the tension in not being able to necessarily find perfect equivalence or find perfect resonance. It's actually that's how we find intimacy and encounter. And I love this idea that like, you know, that space is actually like, if everything's collapsed onto itself, it's just one big soup. But the fact that we're always reaching for each other through language or through our bodies, and we can't make a we can't do a perfect union, my can't my hands can't meld together, they interweave. That's how we connect. That's where intimacy is. That's where love grows. And I yeah, I can't wait to work on the next round of edits, actually, it's going to be great. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Any more questions from the audience? Sure. So a question that actually emerges for me is, what kind of works that sort of transcends the linguistic boundaries that we usually impose inspire you, like I'm thinking about like Gloria Anzaldua's work, where a sentence will start in Spanish and, you know, go into English and then back into Spanish within one sentence, are recently watching, you know, everything everywhere all at once where people are speaking in both Chinese and English within one sentence. Do you do you want to share any works that transcends those linguistic boundaries that can inspire us all to cross languages and writing? How about you, Grace? I always go back to Dictae by Teresa Hakyung Cha, a Korean American, who sadly was murdered like not long after her book came out. I think this was like around 1980 or so. And so her book is written in English. It includes some fairly lengthy passages in French. So she's writing in English and French. And because I also studied French, and I'm also a person of Asian descent living in America, I feel this kinship with her. I also love kind of her her interesting structure and some of the choices she made with that work. So, you know, that's something that inspires me, just the fact that her chapters are very different, her style changes in different places. She has dictations. And so she's reflecting also on, you know, a homeland that she has left behind and a feeling of loss and, you know, sadness, being in diaspora and sort of missing that experience. And yet there's this third language that comes into play. And in some ways it mimics for the reader that sense of displacement. And so I just find that really artful in moving. Right. Christina. You know, I recently posted something on my subject letter, which I've now retired from three, three, after three years. But I just put up three, I'm terrible with names and titles, but I'm trying to do it now and I'm not, I can't multitask. But basically, I read three books and recommended three books recently in translation. One is translated from the Spanish into English. It's called Bad Girls. And it's about sex workers in Cordova, Argentina. And it is one of the funniest, most poetic heartbreaking books I've read recently. There's also another book translated from the Spanish into English. And I'm forgetting his first name. But if you go on to my Las Dos Brujas newsletter, Substack, it will be back there maybe like a couple of weeks ago. It's Labutat, a Chilean, a writer of Chilean descent who is writing about mostly European mathematicians and physicists. And so there's a lot of things that are being translated and negotiated throughout. But I thought it was a gorgeous translation, a brilliant book. And then there was also just another book translated from the Japanese, which is sort of a classic crime mystery novel called, I think it's called Tokyo Express. I'm forgetting. Anyway, it's just, I love a good mystery every now and then. And it just captures post-war Japan beautifully. And I was just running to look, see if I can grab the books, but I, you know, my library's a mess. I couldn't find anything. But anyway, those recently are three books recently that I loved and thought were beautifully translated. Thank you, Christina. I love your joy, by the way. Oh, thank you. I guess I immediately thought of Ellen Sissou's work on Lekretu Femenine as like one of the first and Gloria Angelis that also were like some of my first encounters with this as a student. But actually, in like an everyday way, the journalist, I think is an LA Times journalist, Gustavo Arellano, his newsletter, like he writes in a mix of English and Spanish and kind of like a so-called vernacular. And I just, I love getting it. It's my, it's like my favorite thing to read that comes into my inbox. I know it's not a book book, but it brings me a lot of joy. I think because it's, I love these encounters with like bodies of speech, you know, that like aren't necessarily my own and that I can't necessarily access fully. But I just like being there for it, you know, feeling my, feeling my way into it. Wonderful. In our final, in our final. I was just going to say one thing, if it's okay, if I may, Cheryl, or have we run out of time, I was just going to say we're about time, we're out of time. Okay, go ahead. Well, I was going to ask in our final few minutes, if you each would just briefly provide us with anything that you'd like to say that you didn't get to say. And what you're doing next. Christina, go ahead. Well, thanks. That was a great segue. No, I was also just interested and wanted to flag how we're talking about kind of individual cultures as if they are, well, we're not really talking about, but you know, cultures are not static. And there's always new influences, new immigrants coming in. I mean, I can talk about Cuba and the arrival of, you know, Chinese field workers in the 1840s that, that changed the language of, of not only, sadly, the, you know, the Africans who were brought in to work the sugar cane fields, but the Spaniards there, in other words, the Chinese presence, which persisted pretty much until the revolution in 1959, altered language idiomatically and otherwise. And so I just, it's a continually evolving, absorbing process and never static. So I just wanted to. Thank you, Christina. Grace, let me let you get in here. I would just say this has been such an enjoyable conversation and so beautifully facilitated by you. So thank you. Oh, thank you. I think what I'm learning from my panelists and just am reminded of is that we are talking about books that are written in many languages, you know, some are many of which have been translated and we're talking about so many different countries and cultures. And I just think it's so important, you know, and so I want to put a plug in and say I really wish Americans would read more translated literature. And so, you know, I would like to see just more and more of that. It's just so enriching. And of course, as a third culture kid as well, I'm always going to be of the view that having a passport is important and experiencing different cultures and languages and through their literature is important. Thank you. And last word. I'd say, yeah, if I may shamelessly plug in that in the spirit of Grace's read more translated literature, the books that I have coming out this year are books that I have advocated for for a very long time and it's some of the work that I'm the most proud of. So if you catch my name in the newspaper and you see a book that I've translated, pick it up. It really especially Linnea Axelsund's Ednan and Balsam Kauram's The Singularity which are out right now. You think they speak to some of these questions that we've been talking about today, very much so actually. And also, especially with this question of politics language, it's two of my proudest pieces of work and I really want them to find their readers. Thank you all. This has been wonderful. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Cheryl, Nico. And before people leave, I welcome you to turn on your videos to wave lovely goodbye to our wonderful panelists. I also welcome you to join our contemporary translated works book group that is happening at Mechanics Institute in partnership with Center for the Art of Translation. And also please join us for our next writer's lunch. The topic is ecological awareness in writing. It's happening on April 19th at the same time from noon to one and I've also popped that link into the chat. It is a wonderful discussion between the food writer Viola Buittoni and also amazing ecologists such as Obi Kaufman, a California-centric ecologist, and also Kevin Hobbs will be joining us all the way from London. So please join us for that wonderful writer's lunch next month. And thank you to the panelists for all of your beautiful thoughts. We all learned a lot stepping away from this writer's lunch today. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Okay. Thank you. Bye.