Samantha Schnee
Photo by Anita Staff
Bio
Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Goddesses of Water was published by World Poetry Editions in September and selected for the Academy of American Poets’ 2022 Featured Fall Books. She recently translated a bilingual poetry anthology, Grandes en Casa, which was published by Vaso Roto and launched at Rice University in November. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa's Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize in 2015 and her translation of Boullosa’s El libro de Eva, which was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize, will be published by Deep Vellum in March 2023. She won the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for an excerpt from Boullosa’s Conspiracy of Romantics.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of the novel Conspiracy of Romantics by Mexican author Carmen Boullosa. Boullosa (b. 1954) is the author of nine volumes of poetry, 20 novels, two books of essays, and ten plays, making her one of the most prolific and respected living Mexican writers. Published in 2009, Conspiracy of Romantics is her 16th novel and the 11th to be translated into English. It is a post-modernist, inventive, humorous story that follows a motley group of young, writerly protagonists through New York, all over Mexico, and Madrid, with occasional appearances from real-life writers and artists.
I have worked with Carmen Boullosa since 2006 and I am intimately familiar with her oeuvre; I have spent hundreds of hours translating her challenging prose for the English language editions of Texas: The Great Theft, The Book of Anna, and The Book of Eve. In addition, I have translated and published/circulated samples from several of Boullosa’s other mid-career novels in hopes of finding English language homes for them, including a sample from El complot de los Románticos that won the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. Unfortunately, this novel was published during the period when Boullosa did not have an English language publisher, so it has been overlooked by the Anglophone publishing establishment, as is the case with so many works of literature written in languages other than English.
Each of Boullosa’s works requires me to start afresh as a translator, so greatly do the registers and contents of her novels differ. The only thing they have in common is that they are all wildly imaginative and draw on historical and/or literary characters and events, employing playful and inventive use of language. Each translation is both an adventure and an education, which, not incidentally, is my hope for the readers of her work in English, too.
I’m deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for the opportunity to translate Boullosa’s gem of a novel, and am excited to read the work of all this year’s NEA Translation Fellows.
About Carmen Boullosa
El complot de los Románticos won the Café Gijon prize in 2008 and is Carmen Boullosa’s 16th novel. In Mexico, Boullosa is recognized as one of the country’s greatest living authors (“Mexico’s greatest woman writer,” according to Roberto Bolaño). In the announcement for the 2008 Café Gijon prize the judges said, “The jury recognizes the ambitiousness of the work, its brilliant use of literary culture, as well as its breaking with traditional narrative structure. It is a playful meta-literary game featuring the author, and an underlying criticism of both the world of letters and contemporary society, especially in Mexico.”