#24: A Conversation with Elena Barcia

"I approach each poem like a giant puzzle and enjoy the process of focusing on each word, each line and ultimately, the poem as a whole."

Welcome to Archipel, an ongoing dialogue between me (Cara Waterfall) and other poets and creatives of all kinds, celebrating the ways we connect through mentorship, community and transitions.If you are interested in participating, please send me an email by replying to this newsletter or click here.

Archipel was also inspired by my very first poetry mentor, my father. When you purchase a subscription to this newsletter, you are paying into a scholarship fund in his name, which will support emerging poets.

I’m proud to tell you that the fund currently has $2,000 USD! And we will be raising funds until September 1, 2025. Applications are now closed and the winner will be announced in September 2025!

To learn more about The Donald E. Waterfall Scholarship Fund, click here.

Thank you for reading!

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It is my pleasure to introduce you to my Unsolicited Pressmate, Elena Barcia, an accomplished film and literary translator, who stands at the intersection of language and art. Born to a Spanish Civil War refugee father and a mother of Spanish-Mexican heritage, Elena was raised in a Spanish-speaking household in Los Angeles, inhabiting parallel linguistic and cultural spaces from a young age. This bicultural upbringing, influenced by her father's profession as a writer and professor of Spanish literature, laid the foundation for her future career in translation.

Although she began her professional journey in the film industry, translating hundreds of movies and collaborating with renowned directors like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, Elena’s passion eventually led her to literary translation. She has translated one of her favourite works of literature, Miguel de Unamuno's classic novel Niebla (Fog) (Northwestern University Press, August 2017).

Elena has also translated poetry collections by contemporary Latin American poets, and her translations have appeared in prestigious publications including The Harvard Review and Poetry International.

Elena describes her approach to poetry translation as solving "a giant puzzle," a process that fully engages her mind and creativity through the multitude of decisions she must make with regard to intention, meaning, register, tone and musicality. Her collaborative method involves working directly with living poets, discussing the nuances of their work and explaining the differences between English and Spanish to create translations that resonate as powerfully in English as they do in their original language. This meticulous attention to detail has culminated in significant works like her translation of Chilean poet Malú Urriola's Exquisite Corpse (Unsolicited Press, July 15, 2025).

Through Elena’s masterful translation of Exquisite Corpse, English-speaking readers can now fully experience Malú Urriola's pathbreaking poetic vision. Her careful attention to language conveys Urriola's balance of intimate observations with dream-like surrealism, ensuring his Dadaist influences remain vivid and accessible. Her translation skills shine when she renders the collection's formal diversity — from visual elements and concrete poetry to philosophical fragments — maintaining the improvisational, jazz-like quality of Urriola's original text. Elena’s intimate understanding of both cultures allows her to convey Urriola's perspectives on city living, feminine desire and the consolations found in nature and art. As a result, Elena makes this significant Chilean voice resonate powerfully with English-language readers.

Here is a sample poem from Exquisite Corpse:

I’m writing a book that seems to be.

That begins to flow like a river,

like a new branch of a plant growing imperceptibly in your house,

a leaf falling from a tree,

a cadaver on a slab in the morgue,

a bag floating in emptiness.

I say emptiness to name a town of buildings,

of cables, of windows,

of desolate antennas,

of clothing and fences,

where no one knows anybody.

I say emptiness as one says infinite,

like the end of the world.

I say I would do anything to be able to read this book

and to know what it means to be.

I say this to you like a cactus

on the road of the soul,

covered in long spines.

I say this to you with a flower,

red and wild, for a crown,

that you could only take without touching me.

For you to exist, there must be an outside

and I am all inside.

Buy Exquisite Corpse, available July 15th!

And follow Elena’s journey on Instagram.

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Who are you and how do you express your creativity?

My father was a refugee of the Spanish Civil War who fled the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and eventually settled in Los Angeles where he met my mother, whose parents were Spanish and Mexican. I was raised in a Spanish home and spoke only Spanish until I started kindergarten.

I grew up navigating between two linguistic and cultural worlds aware from an early age that this made life infinitely richer and more interesting. My father was a writer and university professor of Spanish literature at UCLA and our home was a meeting ground for writers and artists from both Spain and Latin American.

Both of my parents were avid readers, and I still remember how excited I was to learn to read and write in elementary school, and how thrilling it was to receive one of those little diaries with a key for me to jot down my thoughts when I was eleven or twelve years old.

I thought I would follow in my Dad’s footsteps and teach literature, but after three years of graduate studies in comparative literature and translation, a friend who was working as a translator at Warner Bros. studio asked if I would be interested in taking over her job temporarily while she sorted out a messy divorce and decided whether she wanted to move back to Spain. I took a gap year, she decided to move back to Spain, and I never looked back.

The job combined both my interests in cinema and translation and was immensely creative and fun. Over the years, I provided the Spanish subtitles for Latin American distribution of three versions of ¨Hamlet,” almost all of the ¨Star Wars¨ films, ¨Harry Potter,” “Spiderman, “Lord of the Rings,” “Alien,” a lot of Woody Allen comedies and animated features like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Lion King” which introduced me to the challenges of songwriting and the existence of rhyming dictionaries. Not only did the job keep me in touch with the Spanish language, but no matter how bad the script was, every film presented different translation issues and decisions which challenged my linguistic and creative skills.

When I got pregnant with my first child, I decided to work on a freelance basis at home and I started a small translation agency specializing in Spanish subtitling, subcontracting to recent arrivals from Latin America to make sure the language was current and that we could work on several projects at once. I remained in charge of “quality control,” proofreading and editing all the translations as well as translating many myself.

About ten years ago, the quality of Hollywood films began to decline with more corporate/studio mergers focused on the bottom line and more franchise films, and my work also began to change radically with the introduction of A.I. Increasingly we were being asked by the studios to use a rough translation produced by A.I. and either accept it, reject it or revise it. Then, on top of everything else Covid hit, and all the work disappeared for two and a half years.

I had already begun to dip my toes back into literature and literary translation and in 2017 Northwestern University press published my translation of my favorite Spanish novel, Niebla (Fog) by Miguel de Unamuno. A few years later, during the Covid confinement, I also happened upon a virtual poetry reading from Mexico City of contemporary female poets and was astounded by the range and quality of their poems.

I decided to research contemporary Latin American poets who had won prizes and were not yet published in English and began to work with Rosabetty Muñoz, a Chilean poet, author of 14 books and recipient of the Pablo Neruda prize for her body of work. An anthology of poems from nine of her books that I selected and translated, will be published with the title Nothing Like Paradise by Northwestern University Press in 2026.

I have had my poetry translations published in literary journals like Asymptote, Poetry International and The Harvard Review, a bilingual edition of Chilean poet Malú Urriola’s sixth book titled Exquisite Corpse published in 2023, and an English-only edition of the same book will appear from Unsolicited Press in July of this year.

There are certain moments in life when it seems that many experiences and events from the past converge and lead to something in the present, and that is what happened with my poetry translations. Everything I’ve learned as a bilingual and bicultural person, as a literature student and film translator, has come into play. I’ve discovered a whole new outlet for my creativity and love of languages, with the bonus of forging exciting new relationships with the poets I have the privilege to work with.

How would you describe your art?

Translation has been described in many ways throughout the years, and there have been innumerable debates about fidelity to the original text and how far one should stray from it. One of the United States’ most famous translators, Edith Grossman, believed that fidelity had little to do with literal meaning. “A translation can be faithful to tone and intention,” she wrote. “It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.”

Lately, the description of translation that has most resonated with me is what Robin Myers, a translator living in Mexico City, has written: “I approach translation as a cover artist: as a musician who studies and performs an existing text with devoted attention to the original score and, simultaneously, with curiosity and excitement about how the music will change–because it must change–by the sheer fact of being reinterpreted.” Translation has been described as both a craft and an art, challenging one to inventiveness, “to freedom within constraints.”

Why poetry?

I began to focus on literary translation with one of my favorite novels, Niebla (Fog) a groundbreaking, witty, thought-provoking early twentieth-century Spanish novel by Miguel de Unamuno whose translation took me more than two years to complete.

When I switched to poetry, I found that I preferred translating it because of its compactness and emotional intensity. I approach each poem like a giant puzzle and enjoy the process of focusing on each word, each line and ultimately, the poem as a whole. I love how the number of decisions I have to make regarding intention, meaning, register, tone and musicality engages my mind and challenges my creativity.

What is your creative process?

I begin by reading those poets who have published multiple books and won recognition in their home countries and whose poetry moves me. I translate a few poems to see if their poems resonate as much in English as in Spanish, and if they do, I contact them through social media to see if they would be interested in collaborating with me on the translations. I then prepare a preliminary draft of 5-10 poems with questions regarding the inspiration for poems and specific questions about certain choices the poet has made regarding structure, images and metaphors. Some prefer to do this in writing, others on Zoom.

So far, none of the poets I´ve worked with have read or spoken English. I often have to explain the differences between English and Spanish and why a more literal translation will not work in English.

English has approximately six times as many words than Spanish because of its complicated history of settlements and invasions by Anglo Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Romans and Greeks, so I will describe possible synonyms and ask if there are any preference.

I am grateful to be working with living poets to whom I can address these questions, though sometimes the explanation for an image is so personal that it will not have the same meaning or emotional impact for an American reader. Once I am happy with the translation of ten or so poems, I begin to submit them to literary journals. Finally, if there has been considerable interest in a poet’s work, I will translate a whole book or prepare an anthology of their work to submit to a literary press.

Unfortunately, unlike in other countries, only three percent of the books published in the U.S. are translations, and only a small percentage of those are poetry books, so it’s an uphill climb.

As always, thank you for reading!

With love and intention,

Cara

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(Interview answers received via email July 9, 2025.)