Valerie Miles
Bio
Valerie Miles is a writer, editor, translator, and co-founding director of Spanish Granta. She has overseen publishingimprints Emecé and Alfaguara. Her editorial work in Roberto Bolaño’s archive led to the first exhibition of his private papers, Archivo Bolaño, 1977 – 2003, which she curated with Barcelona’s Center for Contemporary Culture. Her first book is A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. She’s translated six books, most recently an expanded edition of Juan Eduardo Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols for New York Review of Books, and edited Azar Nafisi’s Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile for Yale University Press. Her translation of Milena Busquets’ This Too Shall Pass won a PEN Translates Award and was a finalist for the Dublin Literature Prize. She has written for Granta, El País, La Nación,the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Paris Review. She teaches literary translation and creative writing at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of Crematorio by Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes. As a boy, Chirbes (1949-2015) was sent from his Mediterranean village to an orphanage in Castille because his family could not afford to keep him. He went on to become an award-winning author of ten novels and four essay collections. Crematorio, his eighth novel, was adapted into one of Spain's most successful television series. Set in what had been a sleepy fishing village on the Mediterranean but is now experiencing a boom of tourism and real-estate speculation, the drama follows a family that managed to amass a great fortune over several generations. Crematorio has yet to be translated into English.
This grant means the world to me. Literary life obliges a radical practice, a form of aloneness that can become nearly unbearable. Rafael Chirbes—the Spanish writer whose masterpiece, Crematorio, I am translating now—taught me that. “I’m not writing to console readers, but to awaken contradictions and disquiet,” he said. I have long felt this commitment towards literary life, exploring in my own skin the rich and storied American tradition of life abroad. It’s an ongoing examination of the world at large, an extreme experience of estrangement from what I know in order to know it better, sharper by comparison, by contrast. Paul Bowles, an early mentor, taught me that. It’s the tangential glance, the telescopic perspective, and over time, the ability to act as cultural bridge. At first I shared the American intellectual adventure with the Spanish, as an editor of American writers, as a writer on American literature. I worked with Susan Sontag, whose The Volcano Lover taught me to understand life as art, as spectacle, as the perpetual swing between beauty and sadness. So as an American literary explorer who has taken it upon herself to live this radical practice, I feel I am now in a place to share with my English-speaking coevals some of the treasures I’ve come upon in my travels. Margaret Fuller once wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose Nature I teach every year to translation students in Spain), “I knew I should be a pilgrim and a sojourner on earth.” So to be given this grant from the National Endowment for the Arts is a tremendous and humbling vote of confidence. It allows me to continue my lifelong engagement with literature, and bring something in that I feel will deeply enrich the American literary conversation. And maybe, in fact, I’m not so alone after all.