FICTION IN TRANSLATION
NORTHERN BIBLIOPHILE
INTERVIEW: FERNANDA MELCHOR, AUTHOR OF HURRICANE SEASON
Please note this article contains affiliate links. The novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, has been making waves in literary spheres. In February, it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and then shortlisted in April. The judges will be announcing the winning book at the end of August, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Melchor’s brutal yet brilliant novel was crowned the winner.
HURRICANE SEASON’S BEGINNINGS
Set in a small village in Mexico, Hurricane Season explores the events surrounding the murder of The Witch, a notorious figure in the village. Although Melchor tells me she finds it difficult to pinpoint exactly why she chooses to write what she does, she has related Hurricane Season to an article she read in her local newspaper. ‘It talked about the murder of a person who was a witch,’ explains Melchor. ‘It just amazed me that it was 2012 and we were still talking about witchcraft, and people killed someone for practising it.’
That article planted the seed for Hurricane Season, and Melchor began to wonder what constituted a crime of passion. It took her a couple of years to ‘build up the courage’ to writing this book. Then when femicides in Mexico began garnering more attention in local and international press, she bit the bullet. ‘It’s not that femicides didn’t exist before, but we began to hear more about these crimes,’ Melchor clarifies. ‘Women and activists started talking about it more and I had this subject in mind while writing Hurricane Season.’
Melchor’s process for writing a novel stems first around a singular image, anecdote or character, rather than a subject itself. The character here is the Witch, the mysterious figure who gradually becomes more real as the novel progresses. This is something Melchor was deliberate about, as well as her choice to keep the Witch silent.
MAINTAINING THE ENIGMA – AND RESPECT
‘I thought from the very beginning that the Witch character must be silent,’ says Melchor. ‘When I was building the structure and characters, I wanted the character to have a fairy-tale feeling at first. Then as your knowledge of her deepens, you change the way you think of her and she becomes more real.’
When asked if she ever considered writing from the perspective of the Witch, she replies: ‘If I wrote from the point of view of the Witch, I could ruin the mystery that she represents. I also don’t know what it’s like to kill someone or to be murdered, obviously, so I wanted to keep that silence out of respect, as well as leave some enigma in the novel.’
THE CHARACTERS
Although we never hear from the Witch herself, we hear plenty from the other characters in the novel. There are four main POVs in the book: Yesenia, Norma, Munra and Brando. All are battling their own demons and tackling their own issues, so I wondered whether Melchor had a ‘favourite’ character to write.
‘I had to live in the minds of these characters for a long time while writing them,’ Melchor says. ‘I will say Norma was the most endearing, as she’s the most innocent, you can’t blame her for everything that’s happening to her. But Brando was one of the most difficult characters I’ve ever had to write in my life.
‘At first he was only going to be a secondary character, but then he ended up being this destructive force in the novel. It was really hard to be with that pain all the time.’
Throughout the novel, Brando is struggling with his own sexuality and homophobic feelings. Such feelings are still ingrained in Mexican society, Melchor tells me. ‘Homophobia is really naturalised there, I grew up hearing things like that and misogynistic things,’ she says. ‘I remember being a young girl and thinking how much it sucked to be born a girl. Everything I read, the main characters were always boys and they got to do fun stuff, while I had to wash the dishes. It’s been a struggle for me to get away from that culture.’
STYLISTIC CHOICES
If you’ve read Hurricane Season, you’ll know that the language is very raw, visceral, bold, dark, and a myriad of other adjectives of that ilk. While Melchor has received some criticism for the heavy use of curse words in the novel, she was very deliberate with her language.
‘I sometimes wonder how we can make people understand in a culture like Mexico’s that women are not second-class citizens’, she explains. ‘I thought that writing a novel like this, showing these ideas in the crudest way possible, that people would react somehow. And there has been lots of reaction!
‘But the language for me has this function, it was a necessity,’ Melchor continues. ‘The characters speak and think in their own terms and language. I had to use the words that make up their world’.
THE TRANSLATION
Swearing is unique to any particular language, so translating the colourful terms used throughout Hurricane Season must have been challenging. Thankfully, Spanish translator Sophie Hughes was more than up to the job. I was thrilled to learn that Hughes and Melchor enjoy a great relationship, both being translators (Melchor translates novels from English to Spanish).
‘We would have conversations about how to say a particular word in English, but there is a point where she has to choose herself. I believe no books are untranslatable. Sophie did a great job of keeping not only the meaning of the words, but also this rough poetry you get when you emulate popular speech.’
Another challenge for Hughes must have been Melchor’s fondness for chapters consisting of one long paragraph. ‘I do a lot of work on the order of words, I really try to make an effort to put each word where I think it belongs,’ she explains.
Before commencing a final draft, Melchor writes tonnes of pages, recording the voices of the characters. ‘I hear their voices, whether it’s Luismi’s cousin [Yesenia] or Munra, and I will write a lot – I’m like the secretary on a trial who’s listening and taking notes! I also read out loud because I want to know how it sounds outside my head. I’m really grateful for Sophie’s work because it has another rhythm, another music. When I read Hurricane Season out loud, I can feel what I intended for it and that’s priceless.’
Indeed, Sophie Hughes has done an incredible job capturing the rhythms and intensity of the novel. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that she’ll also be undertaking the translation of Melchor’s latest novel. She finished it during lockdown, but it doesn’t have an official English release date or title yet.
FERNANDA MELCHOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS
When I posted a question box on my Instagram Stories, a few people wanted to hear some of Fernanda Melchor’s recommendations for Mexican and Latin American authors. Here they are, I’ve made a note of the books by these authors I personally want to read, but do check them out in their entirety!
- Juan Rulfo (Mexican) – I want to read Pedro Páramo.
- Jorge Ibargüengoitia (Mexican) – I’d like to try The Dead Girls.
- Rosario Castellanos (Mexican) – The Book of Lamentations sounds great!
- Emiliano Monge (Mexican) – Among the Lost is his latest to be translated and it sounds excellent.
- Guadalupe Nettel (Mexican) – I’m obsessed with the cover for Bezoar & Other Unsettling Stories, and unsettling stories are right up my street too.
- Ariana Harwicz (Argentinian) – I second this recommendation. If you like your fiction dark then you must check out Die, My Love and Feebleminded, both from the excellent Charco Press.
- Mariana Enríquez (Argentinian) – Another excellent rec, although I’m jealous Fernanda has read her latest novel which hasn’t been translated yet. However, you can read Things We Lost In the Fire, a fantastically disturbing short story collection.
- Nona Fernández (Chilean) – Fernández’s latest novel, The Twilight Zone, isn’t out until next year in English, but in the meantime we can all read Space Invadersinstead.
- Liliana Blum (Mexican) – I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a copy of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories.
- Pilar Quintana (Colombian) – World Editions have just published Quintana’s The Bitch in English and it sounds SO good.
Thank you so much to Fernanda Melchor for speaking with me for this article, and Clare at Fitzcarraldo Editions for setting it up! And if you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of Hurricane Season here!
You can also watch an excerpt from the interview on the Fitzcarraldo blog!
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