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| Part of the Bcon panel: Wishnia, Lopresti, and Jason Starr, photographed by Peter Rozovsky |
We have a special guest today. I first met Ken Wishnia at a Prohibition-themed nightclub in Chicago named Tommy Gunn's. It was Bouchercon weekend and the Private Eye Writers of America was having its annual Shamus banquet. Years later Ken edited Jewish Noir for PM Press and found a place in it for one of my stories. This led to me being on a panel about the book, one of my favorite Bouchercon experiences.
His novels include 23 Shades of Black, an Edgar Allan Poe Award and Anthony Award finalist; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year; and The Fifth Servant, an Indy Notable selection, winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, and a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award.
His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, and elsewhere. He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island. He appeared briefly at SleuthSayers once before, but this is his first guest star appearance.
— Robert Lopresti
CRIME IN TRANSLATION
by Kenneth Wishnia
I was thrilled when my publisher
announced their plan to bring out Blood
Lake, the last novel in my series featuring Ecuadorian-American female
investigator, Filomena Buscarsela, in Spanish translation. Latin American
readers would finally get to read this
novel based on my experiences living in Ecuador for three years, during which
time so much crazy crap happened to me that I couldn’t even fit it all into one
book. And I would actually get to work closely with the translator.
Good thing, too. Aside from some
simple misreadings--a “flaming sword” somehow became a “famous sword,” and a
beat-up old car described as a “rattletrap” was translated as un ratonero, a “mousetrap,” which is
definitely not the same thing--you might never realize just how many
culturally-bound idioms you use in a story, much less a full-length novel, and
just how hard they might be for a native of another culture to understand. Let’s
just say that most native Ecuadorians have no idea what “Super Bowl Sunday” is.
We also had quite a bit of trouble finding the Spanish equivalent of
“thick-bladed front-opening lock-back stilettos with good balance and throw
weight.”
Can’t imagine why.
I learned some fun stuff, too,
like the fact that a police APB (All Points Bulletin) is called a “descubrir y
aprehender” in Spanish. Remember that: Someday it may save your life.
I learned the Spanish for
“freaking” is freaking.
And you’ll be happy to learn
that the Spanish title of the classic 1950s sci-fi movie, It Conquered the World is El
conquistador del espacio. You’re welcome.
I also had fun working in some
of my own experiences with language during the writing of this novel. For
several months, I was a civilian employee teaching English to members of the
Ecuadorian Army, and at one point during classroom conversation, I used the
word “fear,” and they gave me nothing but blank looks. When I pressed them on
it, none of them knew what the word meant. I praised them for their bravery, citing
this as proof that “The Ecuadorian army does not know the meaning of the word ‘fear.’”
But it wasn’t all fun and games,
alas. Ecuador is a beautiful country continually wracked by natural and
man-made disasters—landslides, floods, food shortages, protests, crackdowns—and
one corrupt government after another. Although these circumstances are not as
life-threatening as the dangerous and destabilizing conditions that have led to
so much migration by Central American refugees to the United States, such distinctions
don’t matter much when these desperate people reach Long Island, where I live
and work.
But it wasn’t all fun and games,
alas. Ecuador is a beautiful country continually wracked by natural and
man-made disasters—landslides, floods, food shortages, protests, crackdowns—and
one corrupt government after another. Although these circumstances are not as
life-threatening as the dangerous and destabilizing conditions that have led to
so much migration by Central American refugees to the United States, such distinctions
don’t matter much when these desperate people reach Long Island, where I live
and work.
Several years ago, Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was murdered
by some “nice” kids from stable, middle-class suburban homes who hopped into an
SUV one night and drove to the town of Patchogue looking for a “Mexican” to
jump. Another Ecuadorian immigrant in the news recently is Pablo Villavicencio,
an immigrant who came to the US illegally in 2008, but who never committed a
crime, who is married to a US citizen, has two children who are US citizens,
and who applied for a green card in
February: he’s the guy who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officials and held for deportation after delivering a pizza to Fort Hamilton in
Brooklyn.
That’s one of the things that
attracts me to crime literature in the first place: it puts us in someone else’s
shoes, so we can experience the shared humanity of the “strangers” among us. It
poses basic questions about crime and punishment, about justice and injustice,
about who gets caught and who gets away with murder. Studies have shown that
reading any kind of well-written fiction, no matter what genre, increases the
reader’s empathy toward others.
And we all need a little empathy
now and then, don’t we?
