Jenny Burton on Translating an Excerpt from Ansilta Grizas’s Un temporal

An excerpt of the Ansilta Grizas’s 103-page memoir Un temporal, originally published in Spanish by Ed. Entropía, was included in the anthology titled Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, recently published by Sundial House, a distribution partner of Columbia University Press. Within it, Grizas recounts her personal experience grieving the loss of her still-living father as he succumbs to dementia. Written in short first- and second-person vignettes compiled from Grizas’s personal journals, the narrative conveys the uncomfortable and often ugly day-to-day realities of losing a loved one—the phone calls that stumble in and out of lucidity, the smell of the care facilities, and the existential questions that seep into the most mundane activities.

Translation of this text builds on a movement of memoir-writing about grief by female authors in the Americas. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion helped establish this genre; more recent additions to the literary landscape include Notes on Grief (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2021) and Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, 2021); and works translated into English such as Elena Knows (Claudia Piñeiro, 2021) and Dislocations (Sylvia Molloy, 2022).

Where Un temporal diverges and adds to this movement is in its focus on and honest portrayal of anticipatory grief, or the grief one feels while in the process of losing a loved one. It centers on our narrator, a young caregiver, navigating this disorienting and sustained grief as time moves forward and her own children are born and grow up.

The author’s stark narrative style also separates this from other works that came before, employing frank language on the experience of grief rather than clichés and positive spins that sanitize and romanticize death and illness.

Translation of this text builds on a movement of memoir-writing about grief by female authors in the Americas.

Her observations convey powerful imagery, and her first-person descriptions and second-person narratives to her father are visceral and haunting. When describing her father’s decline and his altered state, she writes to him, “I find it hard to see you, to look at you. I look away. I erase the pictures they send me of you. You’re you, but you’re also a stranger. Your stiffness, your skin, not yours. You’re all of you, but not you at all, an imposter, a distortion, a withering.”

Grizas’s prose weaves in and out of poetry without a formal start or stop, revealing the blurred line between life and death as well as quotidian experience, nature, and art. The arc of the narrative in the present is punctuated with childhood memories that reveal Grizas’s attempts to reconcile past with present.

According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, over 55 million people worldwide are living with a form of dementia. The number of those impacted is expected to be far greater. Additionally, with deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic, those grappling with grief and loss have reached overwhelming figures. Given the sustained crisis and its ripples, as well as an aging population, there is a growing community of readers in search of literature that reflect these issues – I am one of them.

Having lost my own father in March 2022 to a years-long terminal illness, I have a strong connection to this text and that’s why I sought to translate it. I felt out of place in my own experience of anticipatory grief—inept, clumsy, and exhausted in my new reality of caregiving a parent while in my twenties, all while grappling with loss looming over the course of several years. Death and dying were not beautiful, graceful, nor hopeful as I had been taught by popular media, but rather quiet, isolating, and full of logistics. I went looking for literature that featured voices that resonated with my own and felt the gap in contemporary literature dealing with anticipatory grief as well as caregiving from young voices like my own.

While dark, Un temporal made me feel connected and seen in my own grief. Rather than looking at Grizas through a window, she invites the reader to sit alongside her. We invite you to sit with us, too.

Jenny Burton is a literary translator and urban planner based in Boston. She translated an excerpt from Ansilta Grizas’s memoir, Un temporal (2021) for the anthology Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, edited by Elvira Blanco.