Hungry for What by María Bastarós

A meditation on dread with sentences crafted to diamond precision.

Literature in translation feels like something that can take a long time to truly understand. Something that entails drawn-out intimacy with the reading experience to truly appreciate. Or at least it did for me, a person who, despite spending five years studying literature, can still often read something so astounding that it makes me feel like a teenager being shown sections of Catcher in the Rye for the first time. It was only after studying, when attempting to transform my ‘close reading’ into an infinitely more mature and cool ‘critical eye’, that I really started to consider translation as literary collaboration. Translation seemed bedfellows with transliteration in my mind before that; direct transposition that was alien to the point of alchemy. 

Then, I saw Jen Calleja in Dead Ink Bookshop discussing her role as a translator and how it informed her debut novel, Vehicle, which discusses, amongst many other things, gathering an archive and sustaining a language under threat. This was one of the most poignant examples of translation as a work of literary prowess and, like many exciting realisations as a reader, something magically clicked into place watching her speak, like a knee finally popping after days of being stiff.

After that, much like critical reading, a mode hard to shake and shelve once you’re in the habit, it’s difficult to read anything in translation without doing a dual-reading, considering it both at the level of plot, content, drive, emotion and at the sentence level, at the level of translation. Of course, everybody has been doing this the whole time. Far more impressive readers and writers than me, not to mention those with dual heritage or who are multilingual, have engaged extensively with exactly what translation is. How a text is birthed anew when it’s translated. Like the stiffened knee, it took some time to click for me.

I did this with Vehicle and this is what I did with Hungry for What, the first work of María Bastarós’s to be translated into English, published by Daunt Books and translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn.

There are times in this collection of stories where the sheer brilliance of the translation becomes a palimpsest, a layer inseparable from the original words, where I had to stop, in awe at just how deftly it had been done. There are moments where you can’t believe that it’s in translation, so intimate is the acquaintance with each individual word, treating them like objects of curiosity being rolled around in a hand without ever over-indulging in description or risking being linguistically navel-gazing. 

In the first story of the collection, ‘A Grown-Up Dinner’, where a young girl prepares a meal for her parents to force a reconciliation between them, language itself is momentarily the subject:

‘Her mother, who used to be so voluble, has become an expert in the art of listening. The new boyfriend drones on and on about things the girl doesn’t understand, things like neoliberalism and perestroika and a post-Franco Spain. Even when he talks about things the girl thinks she ought to comprehend, he does it in a way that doesn’t make any sense to her. His language is cryptic, convoluted, inaccessible. And it gives a sense that he’s hiding something.’

These sentences become a translation of a translation, discussing the myriad ways we struggle to interpret each other, this then translated once more from one language to another giving the story a metatextual flare. And all with a supremely rare gift for phrasing. These sentences are gorgeous.

Another element of Bastarós’s abundant craft is similar to that of authors like Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and Miranda July, where a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of contextual storytelling is how the characters themselves observe. How things are described from their unique perspective, what they notice in particular, dominates the collage of each character’s personality, punctuated as they all are with idiosyncrasies and foibles. These reveal so much about each person and their own view of the world simply through where their attention is focused.

In ‘That Time with a Shotgun’, a story detailing a woman’s disappointing relationship with both her husband and father living under one roof, there’s five lines which feel like a concentrated summary of the story’s emotional weight, revealing an entire lifetime of abuse in one smack:

‘One time, the husband fired a bullet into the ground so close to her toes that dirt exploded up and into her nose, causing her to sneeze. She’d wondered how many people’s last act was sneezing, before they felt blood gush from the wound like waste from a sewage pipe.’

There’s a real wealth of characterisation in tiny snapshots like these, the narrator’s hardness and resilience revealed in where her mind immediately goes. Rather than focusing on the visceral reality and peril of being shot at, she instead meets it with a banal curiosity, focusing on a small and seemingly insignificant bodily expression of a sneeze over the dramatic violence of a gunshot wound.

There are moments where this felt a little clunkier, where the simile didn’t quite land, or the language had a bluntness which felt cold. But these were few and far between and, given the deftness of the translation as a whole, felt like clumsiness in the original.

There are a few overly literal or lazy metaphors, like ‘And other times she’s a sharp blade that can cut you’ from ‘A Grown-Up Dinner’. These moments, however, are jarring as a result of its rarity. Even with the occasional , the vast majority of Bastaros’s writing does so much with so little, expressing a utility of language that appreciates and illuminates the potential depth of each word.

These stories are crafty, unnerving, uncanny, doing that thing that I love most about some contemporary horror in which there is no monster and there is not often an external, physical threat, just a looming sense of existential dread in the stark reality of the everyday. Horror is told in these small punches of daily life. In ‘Notre-Dame Gone to Ashes’, a pre-doctoral fellow has an affair with a professor and flees her damaged reputation to a village on the border between France and Spain. Her unravelling is told, again, so succinctly in a way that combines that rare skill of being decorative with language whilst each sentence feeling like it’s been compressed within a fist:

‘When she wakes, it's a full hour before the last traces of the dream dissipate; they cling to the undersides of her eyelids and fingernails and she's unable to think clearly, or remember what day it is, or retrieve the toast from the toaster before it starts to smoke.’

The absence of a usual familiarity with household appliances, the drone of a fly in the house, a sudden uncanniness where there was once a sense of comfort - this all makes up the worlds within Hungry for What where dread is ever present and, often, unbroken. Like Dino Buzatti the phenomenal skill here is in what's unspoken just as much as what is said, the unfurling sense of unease playing out in the pauses, the gaps within the plot and the way in which you're invited to piece it together as a reader.

‘Hungry for What’ is available now from Daunt Books. Considering buying from your local independent either here or here.