“Art is an artifact, you know? Once you assume that every single language in literature is a created language, is an artificial language, you feel free to just include whatever is there around you.”

Translation is a double form of correspondence between me and Lisa. First, there is the near-daily—or, sometimes, multiple-times-a-day—correspondence we’ve maintained during projects since 2014. We exchange emails for months at a time, paying attention to the apparently smallest details, not because Lisa is trying to replicate the Spanish text exactly in the English, but because she strives to recreate its effect, to produce an analogue. And that is the result of every letter, accent, and silence present in the page. Sometimes she’ll ask about the same phrase two or three times, come back at it days later with another question from a different angle, maybe about connotation, or etymology, or my choice of tense. And our letters back and forth are woven into the letters that make the translation.