Caminar is finally out in Spanish! (I’ve gotten so many inquiries about this over the past few years. It’s nice to know I can now say, Yes. It’s in Spanish!) To buy a copy, you should fly to Guatemala of course, where it’s available for sale, and where you can FLY TO GUATEMALA. Which would be wonderful and amazing for you. And you will be deliriously happy you went.
But if you can’t do that, you can inquire at Sophos to see if they can ship it to you.
If you’re a Spanish speaker and would like to read an interview with me about the book, go here. I’m often asked if I speak Spanish. I speak a bit. But not well enough to translate those interview questions. Thank you to my sweet husband for taking care of that for me.
Readers, I can honestly say that nothing I do in the future as a writer will ever be as rewarding as seeing this book translated in Spanish by the wonderful and talented Philippe Hunziker. This translation exists because he was determined to see the book in the hands of Guatemalan readers. Many authors are lucky enough to sell foreign rights to their stories. Some distant publisher hires some translator and the story is re-written in another language and almost always the author isn’t really involved in any of it. Maybe s/he gets a copy of her book in that other language in the mail and stares at it. Amazed and confused.
This wasn’t that.
Philippe was kind enough to share with me his translation in various drafts. He was open to hearing what I had to say about it. (Which was largely that it was gorgeous and that he’d worked so hard on it.) Translating a story from one language to another is always tricky. Translating poems – even tougher. There were many things that just didn’t “translate”. The owl, in English, makes the sound “who”, for example, which I used as a play on who is making that sound in one poem. That doesn’t work at all in Spanish. So what should he do with that poem?
Fascinating questions.
But truly I’m overjoyed that friends and strangers in Guatemala can now access this book in Spanish. A big thank you to Philippe for making it happen.
I got my copies in the mail last month. It was very exciting.
Incidentally, if you find the topic of translation as interesting as I do, you might like this podcast episode. The Memory Palace is my favorite podcast. And this one is all about the challenges a person faced trying to translate these well-written tales.