There was a time when I really wanted to be a filmmaker. Movie ideas ran through my head all day long. Some of my short stories from that time read like storyboards for a movie that was never made. This is one of them. The story even contains a film-within-a-film, which is catnip to anyone in a Critical Cinema class.
I was writing this while living in Zacatecas, Mexico, around 2005. When I got wind of a short story contest at the city newspaper, El Sol de Zacatecas, I set about translating my manuscript into Spanish. The problem was, I hadn't quite finished the story yet. No matter, I just plowed ahead with the translation, and ended up writing the ending in Spanish. Later, I had the weird experience of translating my own original ending in Spanish back into English. For any marginally bilingual writers out there, I recommend this experiment. It was bizarre to encounter my own thinking in another language which didn't quite translate into my native tongue. I've never felt more like two distinct people.
The Spanish translation of the story, RIO MUERTO, ended up winning first place in that contest. The English version had never been published until it appeared in the Columbia Journal in the summer of 2018.
No comments:
Post a Comment