Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott: On Female Revenge, Giving Voice to a House, and Co-Translating Layla Martinez’s Novel ‘Woodworm’
Annie McDermott and I have worked in the same small pond of British literary translators from Spanish for just over a decade, overlapping at plenty of events, and reading and admiring each other’s translations. But we hadn’t worked together until now. It feels somehow symbolic that it took a novel about two women living cheek-by-jowl in a house visited by troublesome ghosts, angels, and saints to bring us together as co-translators, and now friends. A haunted house is a great metaphor for a book in the process of being translated. The translator, or translators, must inhabit this fictional space, alert to shadowy presences and unspoken suggestions, to what might be lurking in the wardrobe or under the bed. The house in Layla Martinez’s Woodworm, in the finest gothic tradition, is alive, and “pounces” on anyone brave or foolish enough to enter—its walls are steeped in the bitterness and wrath of the grandmother and granddaughter who live there now, and all the women unfortunate enough to have lived there in the past. The house holds dark secrets, which are revealed to us through two unreliable and irresistible narrators. Two voices, two translators, and one old saying: ‘traduttore, traditore.’ Over email, Annie and I discussed the process of co-translation, our responses to supernatural elements in realist literature, and why fairytale endings don’t cut it when it comes to stories of repression.
Annie McDermott: It’s funny—when I look at our translation of Woodworm now, for the most part I can’t remember which of us is responsible for which particular words or phrases. Should we begin, then, by talking about what our process was like, and what made it feel so thoroughly collaborative?
Sophie Hughes: Because the novel is told in two voices, it felt like an obvious choice to divvy up the word count as if it were a play. In other words, by allocating parts. But by the time we had finished editing each other’s chapters and reworking the voices so that the women sounded like they are of the same place and family, but not the same time or generation (something we did alone, in notes, to start with, and later on over video calls, to create between five and ten drafts of each section of the novel), I think it would be fair to say we shared the responsibility for every single word. The great appeal for me with this novel is the two women’s shared talent for storytelling. The prose can be almost garbled at times, which I think was purposeful on the part of the author—a brave and vivid way to write. What was it that appealed to you about the book?
AM: The book pounced on me from the very first page, the way the women’s house pounces on its visitors. I was immediately hooked by the granddaughter’s voice, by her biting wit and clear-eyed rage and impeccable sense of timing. You say the prose can be ‘almost garbled’ at times, and I think that ‘almost’ is key—it’s powered by this propulsive anger that means it breaks the bounds of ordinary syntax, but in a way that only adds to its rhetorical force. I loved the way it’s class warfare stripped of any high-mindedness—there’s absolutely no going high while your enemies go low here; this is a book that runs on revenge. And I loved the world that’s created right from those early pages—a world in which angels look like praying mantises and slide their antennae down the chimney, or where you might leave a glass of wine out in the kitchen for a saint who’s ‘not feeling herself.’ You’re so right about these two women’s shared talent for storytelling—could you talk a bit more about that, and about our role in it as translators?
SH: Theirs is a shared history (in Spanish the same word means ‘story,’ too), set in the same village and house, with many of the same protagonists, but seen and felt from very different perspectives. The generation gap is written into the two women’s testimonies and speech, and they have ostensibly opposing views on lots of things, but they are also clearly of a piece, cut from the same cloth. I guess one of the things this translation process showed me, or reminded me, is how important it is to look out or listen for shared figures of speech, syntax, sayings, grammar when you’re translating a novel with multiple narrators from the same family. In this novel it means that the women can be talking at cross-purposes or contradicting each other on the facts, but their conflicting narratives belie a poignant togetherness and, ultimately, solidarity (picked up on subtly in the language they use). It’s a novel about many different kinds of inheritance, in that sense.
I’m not a great reader of stories involving spirits, saints, angels, and witchcraft. But this novel, as you touched on just now, treats these subjects differently, almost irreverently, such that you can’t help but wonder if you’re being asked to suspend your disbelief or actually believe (I think there’s a slight difference between these two things). How did you respond to these more esoteric aspects of the novel?
AM: Oddly enough, I never really questioned their existence, I think precisely because of that irreverence—or if not quite irreverence, then a kind of matter-of-fact, cheek-by-jowl intimacy. These saints, angels, and ghosts are part of the very fabric of the house, and of the women’s day-to-day life there. When the grandmother describes Santa Gema as ‘not herself,’ for example, it sounds more like she’s describing an out-of-sorts aunt than a heavenly figure, and when the granddaughter says in passing that ‘you don’t disturb what’s under the bed,’ it’s in the same tone she uses to discuss the habits of their pet cats or the behaviour of the neighbours. Where things, for me, become hazier and harder to pin down is in the relationship between these shadowy forces and the women’s actions—who or what is in control here? Who is harnessing whom? So much of the novel comes down to the dark, claustrophobic alliance that forms between these spirits and the women of the house—a kind of bitter solidarity based on shared history, shared grievance, and a shared thirst for revenge.
Speaking of which, I find it so interesting the way each woman’s desire for revenge comes from somewhere slightly different—it’s the granddaughter, for example, who helps her grandmother to see how things in terms of systemic injustice and class oppression, while for the grandmother it’s more about the generations of bad blood between their family and the wealthy Jarabos. How did you respond to the women’s shared project of revenge in the novel?
SH: Revenge always provokes complicated feelings! We’re taught that two wrongs don’t make a right, but I understand revenge as exactly that: a wrong to right a wrong. This might be why it makes for such good literary material—in books and films we see situations play out to their furthest extremes, which is both compelling to witness and helps us rationalise behaviours, imagine ourselves in these moral quandaries. The revenge taken by the grandmother and granddaughter in Woodworm is very ‘wrong’: it’s violent and shocking. Revenge is served, but does that also mean that justice is done? I suppose it does if a just society is one in which people get what they deserve, but as you write in your question, the injustices committed in this novel are examples of something bigger, of systemic class oppression. For me the dramatic ending is tinged with sadness because there’s no reconciliation. But then, something tells me Layla isn’t one for fairy tale endings...
In the same breath, there is something fairy tale-like about the setting of the book. There’s a Hansel and Gretel vibe to the hidden house alive with ghosts and saints on the outskirts of this small farming town. Do you remember all the conversations we had about how to describe a wooden bench, or a curtain, an attic space, the stairs, how a brick wall was built (I seem to remember we sent each other videos using Jenga?!)? It felt very important that the house be clear in the minds of the reader, but it also had to retain a sense of the mysterious, the elusive. The house lives and breathes, but did you see it as a central character? It is a strangely ‘fleshed-out’ space...
AM: Ah yes, the Jenga-brick videos! How could I forget? I remember, too, the emails back and forth with Layla about the curtain, and a lot of talk about the behaviour of a quilt. (I also recall some in-depth research into the question of whether or not toads crawl, which, though not strictly house-related, I think deserves a mention.)
As for the house, you’re right about its fleshiness: the clammy walls that quiver with anticipation or freeze as the building holds its breath. More than another single character, though, I’d say it serves as a kind of chorus—a space alive with shadows all wronged by the same forces and all thirsting for the same revenge. Part-refuge, part-prison, part co-conspirator, the house is a great accumulation of unfinished business, of spirits whose earthly bodies died violent deaths and never saw justice done. And it’s a place the women of the family are forced to live within, as inescapable as their own social status and family history and their country’s blood-stained past. Because, as Layla shows so well in this book, what is history but a haunted house we all have to live inside?
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Annie McDermott’s translations from Spanish and Portuguese include works by Selva Almada, Mario Levrero, Brenda Lozano, Ariana Harwicz and Lídia Jorge. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2022 she was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán.
