Executive Overview
The architecture of literary translation is often conceived as a solitary, monastic endeavor—a translator bent over a desk, bridging the chasm between two languages with a lexicon and a dictionary. Yet, the genesis of acclaimed Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue’s latest masterpiece, You Dreamed of Empires—a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year—tells a vastly different story. It is a tale of a high-stakes, cross-continental creative partnership between Enrigue and his award-winning translator, Natasha Wimmer.
In a recent, exclusive retrospective on their collaborative process, Wimmer and Enrigue pulled back the curtain on the linguistic and cultural alchemy required to bring the novel into English. From a dramatic, deadline-driven baptism under fire in the backseat of a car to unexpected cultural interventions involving The Flintstones, their partnership illuminates the hidden complexities of contemporary global literature.
This article explores the anatomy of that translation process: the deliberate shifts in tone that transformed a historical narrative into a biblical epic, the nuanced navigation of nonstandard regional dialects, the active and collaborative role of the author, and the striking metaphor of a "spaghetti western at the Metropolitan Opera" that defines the novel’s unique aesthetic footprint.
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Detailed Chronology: From Spanish Genesis to English Iteration
The Dramatic Birth of a Translation
Every translation has its crucible, but Wimmer’s introduction to You Dreamed of Empires was defined by immediate, high-pressure urgency. Working against a tight editorial deadline to produce a compelling sample translation, Wimmer submitted her initial pass to Enrigue, a writer who actively embraces involvement in the translation of his work.
The response was not an immediate green light. Enrigue, sensing that the prose had not yet found its true register, pushed back. His doubts catalyzed a fundamental revelation regarding the book’s atmospheric tone: the Spanish manuscript, still winding its way through the final stages of the publishing ecosystem, demanded a more resonant, elevated, biblical cadence.
What followed was a masterclass in collaborative editing across languages. While Enrigue revised the source text, Wimmer was tasked with reimagining the English prose. The turning point of the entire translation crystallized around a single, deceptively simple sentence.
Originally drafted by Wimmer as:
“In the middle of the plain, add some Spanish missionaries and a church.”
Enrigue balked at the verb "add," challenging Wimmer with a prompt that would unlock the book’s stylistic DNA: "What verb would the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. use?"
Working under extraordinary conditions—hunched over a laptop in the front seat of a car during a long family road trip, with two young children murmuring in the backseat—Wimmer experienced the flash of inspiration that defined the project. The answer was immediate and transformative: "Let there be."
This single phrase adjustment provided the rhythmic and theological key for the entire sequence, elevating the prose from a straightforward historical depiction into mythic territory. For Wimmer, despite the vehicular confinement and deadline anxiety, the exchange remains one of the most intellectually and artistically satisfying moments of her career.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Mechanics of Voice and Dialect
Navigating the Linguistic Borderlands
Beyond the broader tonal shifts, Wimmer faced distinct micro-level translation challenges that demanded surgical precision. Among the most formidable obstacles were two Yaqui twins who appear as major characters in the narrative. Released from prison to join a desperate search party for a captured woman, the twins serve a dual function in the text: they are relentless, subversive jesters, yet simultaneously dangerous men.
Crucially, their dialogue does not adhere to standard Spanish. Translating nonstandard regional speech always carries a professional hazard—the risk of inadvertently rendering sophisticated characters as simple-minded or uneducated through clumsy dialect markers. Because the twins are the sharpest minds within the search party, their speech had to maintain a quick-witted, folksy rhythm without compromising their intellectual stature.
To achieve this delicate balance, Wimmer executed a calculated strategy. She avoided leaning heavily onto any single, hyper-specific geographic dialect in English, which could easily alienate readers or pull them out of the narrative immersion. Instead, she anchored their voices with standard, universally understood markers of rural speech—such as "ain’t" and "’cause"—before introducing an abundance of unusual, rhythmically driven contractions.
Examples of this delicate linguistic tightrope include:
- “And nobody yet’s offered us tobacco”
- “Half the horse’ll have died on us”
This approach successfully injected a layer of dry, subversive humor into their dialogue, sharpening the underlying sarcasm that colors nearly every interaction the twins initiate.
The Author as Co-Navigator and Cultural Annotator
While many authors prefer a hands-off approach once the foreign rights to a manuscript are sold, Enrigue embraces the translation trenches. His deep involvement manifested not merely through critique, but through rich, contextual annotations.
When Mexican cultural references threatened to derail Wimmer’s pacing, Enrigue stepped in with extensive marginal notes. Rather than offering dry academic glosses, these notes functioned as brilliant, standalone literary riffs.
In one notable instance, Enrigue provided a masterclass in cross-cultural translation regarding the mysterious phrase:
“Logia de los Bufalos Mojados”
The phrase initially meant nothing to Wimmer. Upon closer inspection, Enrigue revealed that this enigmatic "Lodge of Wet Buffalos" was none other than the Water Buffalo Lodge—the fictional secret society famously patronized by animated stone-age icons Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. By bridging Mexican history, pop culture, and American television nostalgia, Enrigue’s notes consistently recalibrated Wimmer’s cultural compass.
Official Statements and Artistic Visions
The Aesthetic Metaphor: Spaghetti Westerns Meet the Opera
Asked to encapsulate the essence of You Dreamed of Empires through an image, metaphor, or song, Enrigue provided a vivid and arresting description of the novel’s stylistic duality.
"I wanted to write a spaghetti western, but it ended up becoming something more lyrical. And somehow it’s both things at the same time," Enrigue explained. "Like Clint Eastwood with his serape, his cigarette, and his gun, but in the Met Opera proscenium."
This striking juxtaposition captures the heartbeat of the novel. It marries the gritty, sun-baked violence and kinetic energy of the classic Italian western genre with the high-art theatricality, sweeping emotional resonance, and architectural grandeur of grand opera. It is a aesthetic tension that required both author and translator to maintain absolute control over the register of the text—ensuring that the vernacular punch never overwhelmed the lyrical gravity, and vice versa.
Future Outlook: The Enduring Legacy of Collaborative Translation
The success of You Dreamed of Empires—cemented by its status as a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year—serves as a testament to the vitality of modern translation. It highlights a growing literary recognition that exceptional translation is not merely a mechanical substitution of words from column A to column B, but an act of creative co-authorship.
For Natasha Wimmer, whose distinguished translation catalog includes eight books by Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives, 2666), Gabriela Ybarra (The Dinner Guest), and Álvaro Enrigue (Sudden Death), the project represents another milestone in a storied career dedicated to bringing vital Latin American voices to the English-speaking world.
For Álvaro Enrigue—whose academic pedigree includes fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and Princeton University, alongside teaching posts at Columbia, NYU, and beyond—the novel’s critical reception validates a career spent pushing the boundaries of historical fiction and narrative form.
As readers continue to discover the world of You Dreamed of Empires, the book stands as an enduring monument to what can be achieved when a brilliant author and an intuitive translator sit down—even across digital spaces, frantic car rides, and cultural divides—to ask the definitive question: What verb would the Reverend MLK use? In answering that call, they did not merely translate a book; they let a new literary world be.
Biographical Profiles
Álvaro Enrigue is a celebrated Mexican writer whose most recent novel, You Dreamed of Empires, was named a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year. A former Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and Princeton University’s Program in Latin American Studies, he has shared his expertise in creative writing and literature across institutions including New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, Columbia University, and Hofstra University. His critical essays and fiction have appeared in premier publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and El País. He currently resides in New York City.
Natasha Wimmer is one of the preeminent literary translators working today. She is widely recognized for translating eight major works by Roberto Bolaño, including the landmark novels The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translation projects include Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner Guest and Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children.
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