When I began writing Dual Memory, I knew I wanted it to take place on an island in the north Atlantic Ocean. Then I had to figure out the particulars. Luckily, I discovered a real island that had some of the necessary characteristics: Grímsey, the northernmost inhabited location of Iceland.

It’s about the right size, on the Arctic Circle, and has lots of puffins. Unlike the island in my story, its population is only about 70 people, but I imagined it could hold 20,000 with enough apartment buildings. I got a map from an Iceland tourist site and from Google and used them to help me keep the details right: the docks were here, a park was there, and the hospital was in the middle.

The novel Immunity Index takes place in real places, and maps of those places, as well as visits, let me try to recreate a setting that felt “real.”

For the novel Semiosis, I made my own maps. Again, they helped keep me oriented. As characters moved around, if they looked in a certain direction, what would they see? If they went from point A to point B, what would they pass along the way? (Readers will notice if you’re inconsistent.)

These are just some of the things maps can do for an author. They don’t have to be good enough to include in the final publication. They can be incomplete, simply showing the relative locations of important things in the story.

If the characters are going to make a journey, the author might benefit from a map, but it might not be the same map that the characters use. If the story involves a treasure map, having an accurate map to refer to, however crudely drawn, will help the author guide the characters through the countryside — and allow the characters to complain about how misleading their map is. Only the author knows how cruelly lost they are.

Much like maps, another tool for the author can be the plan of a building, space ship, or other physical setting, such as the circles of hell, if the characters have the ill fortune to find themselves there.

The act of drawing a map can be a prompt for the author, discovering details and relationships that inspire new depth to the storytelling. What has to exist in that kind of location? What cool things might be there? Where is a character’s favorite place? Where are things that a character would avoid, and why? Is there a good spot for birdwatching, and what does that say about the local ecology?

Two poets, one from Cuba, one from Spain, wrote at different times and in different styles, yet they are linked by history and the Spanish language. José Martí fought and died in the war for Cuban independence from Spain. Spain’s defeat in that war led to soul-searching among writers in Spain, and Antonio Machado emerged as one of its leading voices; he died during the Spanish Civil War.

Here are my translations of some of their works.

***

José Martí (Cuba, 1853 -1895) may be best-known, if unrecognized, for the words to the song “Guantanamera.” They come from Versos sencillos (Simple Verses), his last book of poetry, published in 1891. The first of the thirty-eight sets of verses begins: “Yo soy un hombre sincero…” (I am a sincere man…) The song was popularized by folk singers in the United States in the 1960s.

In the prologue of that book, he speaks of the “horror” of the domination of the Spanish Empire over Cuba. He had long been active in the nationalist cause. In 1882 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party while in exile in New York. The war of Cuban independence began on February 24, 1895, and Martí returned to Cuba in April. He was killed in the Battle of Dos Rios on May 19, 1895, and is now honored in Cuba as a hero.

He said: “Poetry must be rooted in the land and based on real events.” His Versos sencillos echo the style of popular songs and foresee the struggle of his beloved homeland. I have tried to translate them into lyrics that could be set to music.

José Martí, from Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses), 1891

XXIII

Yo quiero salir del mundo

Por la puerta natural:

En un carro de hojas verdes

A morir me han de llevar.

.

No me pongan en lo oscuro

A morir como un traidor;

Yo soy bueno, y como bueno

Moriré de cara al Sol!

.

I want to leave this world

By the gate into nature:

In a cart of green leaves

They must carry me home.

.

May they not let me die

As a traitor in darkness;

I am good, I am right

To die facing the Sun!

.

XXVII

El enemigo brutal

Nos pone fuego a la casa;

El sable la calle arrasa,

A la luna tropical.

.

The enemy brutes

Set our home ablaze;

In the street their swords raze,

Under tropical moon.

.

Pocos salieron ileso

Del sable del español;

La calle, al salir el sol,

Era un reguero de sesos.

.

To escape was in vain

From Spaniard and sword;

At sunrise the street poured

With shed blood and slashed brains

.

Pasa, entre balas, un coche:

Entran, llorando, a una muerta;

Llama una mano a la puerta

En lo negro de la noche.

.

A car evades bullets:

They strike as death wails;

A hand knocks at the doorway

In dark night as a threat.

.

No hay bala que no taladre

El portón; y la mujer

Que llama, me ha dado el ser;

Me viene a buscar mi madre.

.

Every bullet hits home;

The woman at that door

Gave me my life and more;

My mother to me comes.

.

A la boca de la muerte,

Los valientes habaneros

Se quitaron los sombreros

Ante la matrona fuerte.

.

At the call of the grave,

Havana’s valiant men

Remove their hats and bend

Before the matron most brave.

.

Y después que nos besamos

Como dos locos, me dijo:

“Vamos pronto, vamos, hijo;

La luna está sola: vamos.”

.

And after we greet

Both mad with love, she said:

“Let us go, son, ahead,

And the lonely moon meet.”

***

Antonio Machado (Spain, 1875 -1939) is the great poet of Spain’s “Generation of ’98.” Spain was defeated and humiliated in the Spanish-American War in 1898. A disparate group of writers rebelled against the moral, political, and social crisis by creating an intellectual regeneration and a modernization in literature.

Machado synthesized popular wisdom, essential questions of life, and philosophic contemplation in his poetry. His life was often marked with personal tragedy and frustration. He enthusiastically supported the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, but he was forced into exile when its government fell to Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As he fled, his health deteriorated. He died just over the border in France in 1939. He is still an oft-quoted poet in Spain.

Antonio Machado, from Proverbios y cantares (Proverbs and Songs), 1917

Hoy es siempre todavía.

Today is ever forever.

–

A new century? Does

the same forge still burn?

Does the water still churn

through its old riverbed?

–

¿Sabes, cuando el agua suena,

si es agua de cumbre o valle,

de plaza, jardín o huerta?

.

When you hear rain fall, do you know,

is it water from summit or valley,

plaza, garden or orchard?

–

Buena es el agua y la sed;

buena es la sombra y el sol;

la miel de flor de romero,

la miel de campo sin flor.

.

Good is water and thirst;

good is shade and sun;

honey from rosemary flower,

honey from flowerless fields.

–

¿Para qué llamar caminos

a los surcos del azar?…

Todo el camina anda

como Jesús, sobre el mar.

.

Why call roads

the paths made by destiny?…

All travelers go

like Jesus, over the sea.

You can adopt dogs, but what if you could adopt dragons? This was the inspiration for the story “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” — and I’ll read it at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 14, at Volumes Bookcafé, 1373 N. Milwaukee Ave., in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. There’s no charge to attend.

It’s part of September’s Speculative Literature Foundation’s Deep Dish Reading Series. The other readers on September 14 are Mary Anne Mohanraj, Tina Jens, Reina Hardy, Brendan Detzner, Rory Leahy, John Weagly, and Kitty Lin. You can learn more about them here.

Come and enjoy what audiobooks would be like if they were read to you in person by the author with the electric enthusiasm of a live performance. Mine is a funny story, and it’s always better to laugh together.

“The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” will be published this fall inThe Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse. More details about that as I have them to pass along.

Andrion by Alex Penland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I met Alex Penland at a conference of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. She talked about her forthcoming novella, and I offered to read it, and if I liked it, to give it a blurb. (Blurbs are short promotional descriptions of a work, usually a paragraph on the back or on the website.)

Alex had done her research into ancient Greece and the people who lived there, and I hoped she could bring the possibilities of that historic time to life.

I read ‘Andrion’ and I think she did just that. In particular, I was impressed by the emotion packed into the story, echoing the intensity of ancient Greek drama, where characters embody their emotions and express them with raw energy.

My blurb:
Ancient Greece had an open secret: its vaunted ideas of democracy and freedom never applied to women. Alex Penland captures the sights, sounds, beauty, and jostling politics of Ancient Athens. A love for that city — and other kinds of love — emboldens a young woman to do what no woman has done before: rebel, using the latest technology of Athens in this imaginative steampunk tale. Righteous anger shines in this story like a beacon.

View all my reviews

Copyright law is clear and simple: A translator owns the copyright to their translation. Whoever writes words in a fixed format owns the copyright to those words. It is intellectual property.

Now, translation is a subsidiary right, which is also simple but much misunderstood. Subsidiary rights involve adapting a literary work into another format. It must be done with the permission of the owner of the original work. You can’t produce a film based on a story without the express written permission of the author. You can’t publish a translation of a story without express written permission of the author.

However, the creator of the adaptation owns the rights to their own work. The author does not own the rights to the film unless that right is expressly granted to the author in writing. Similarly, the author does not own the rights to the translation unless that right is expressly granted by the translator in writing. Just because the author grants permission to the translator, even if the translator is paid for it, that does not automatically grant transfer of the copyright.

Authors can be very confused about this. Publishers and editors should not trust authors’ assertions and should practice due diligence.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of my translations is included in the anthology European Science Fiction #1: Knowing the Neighbours, published in 2021 by Associazione Future Fiction of Rome, Italy, edited by Francesco Verso. The story is “Team Memory” by Carme Torras of Spain. It’s one of fifteen short stories in the anthology.

“Team Memory” is a good story. I’m glad it has the chance to reach new readers. I hope you buy the book.

However … I feel more than surprise. This is a violation of copyright. I’ve dealt with Francesco Verso before. He asked for me for permission to publish “Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” by María Antònia Martí Escayol for World Science Fiction #1: Visions to Preserve the Biodiversity of the Future, published in 2019. He later used it without asking in Apex Magazine. I complained to the publisher about that. It’s a great story, and I hope you read it. Buy the book! Buy the magazine!

These are not my only disappointing surprises, though, and I’m not the only translator.

A particularly egregious example of copyright infringement involves Yilin Wang, a Chinese-to-English translator, whose translations of historically important Chinese poetry were used by the British Museum (!) without permission, attribution, or compensation. When she complained, they erased her work. She crowdfunded the money to get a lawyer and reached a settlement.

This is rare, though. Translators don’t like to complain in public. They don’t want to get a bad reputation.

I care about world literature. It would not exist without translators. And yet, we can be ignored or treated as a nuisance rather than as an irreplaceable partner — even by the very people who celebrate the world literature. Francesco Verso says it very well in the introduction to European Science Fiction #1. There should be a “fair distribution of futures across the world.”

Yes, we should see the whole world reflected in literature. However, there’s not much financial reward for the translator in literary translation (sometimes not even a free copy as a thank-you). The work requires training and considerable effort, and if we’re treated like nobodies, why bother?

Beyond intellectual property law and respect for creative work, it’s simply not good business sense to leave out the translator because selling is very hard. I can’t help publicize a new book or magazine and tell people to buy it if I don’t know it exists.

We have allies, of course. PEN America has a model book contract for translations that deserves to be followed for short fiction as well. I particularly want to call attention to Paragraph 11.

11. The Translator’s name shall appear on the front of the jacket/cover and on the title page of all editions of the Translation, and in all publicity and advertising copy released by the Publisher, wherever the Author’s name appears. The Publisher agrees to print the Translator’s approved biography on the back flap of the hardcover edition, on the back cover of and/or within any trade paperback edition of the Translation, and within any electronic edition.

The Author’s Guild has a similar model contract for translation.

Yet an editor of a poetry magazine told me just last week, “A bio as a translator is certainly not standard practice anywhere.”

Publishers, editors, and authors who want to break down language barriers ought to be the first to respect, protect, and promote the value of translators’ work. World literature would not exist without translators, but somehow we seem expected to subsidize world literature with unrewarded, unacknowledged labor. And we shouldn’t complain, either.