Writing and reading in ... Spanish

[BlogSpy]

In The Believer Daniel Alarcón engages in a roundtable discussion with Eduardo Halfon and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez. As Alarcón explains, these:

two fluent, native English speakers raised in the United States, have both chosen Spanish as their literary language; something that I'll admit struck me at first as crazy. I mean, isn't writing fiction hard enough already?

(Which, quite honestly, seems to me like an extraordinarily silly thought to entertain.)
Among the interesting discussion-points is that of reading certain authors in Spanish versus in English. Alarcón, for example, notes:

Juan Rulfo. Read him in English and was like, What's the big deal? Read him in Spanish and couldn't write for three weeks, you know what I'm saying?

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez goes even further:

I tried reading Rulfo in English. This was after I read him in Spanish. The short stories of El llano en llamas were OK in translation. Pedro Páramo was not. I don't think I've ever made it past the second page of that translation.

(Which translation ? Both ?)

More...

[Daniel del Real]

This is totally true. Like in many languages, in Spanish there are certain works that I consider as unstranslatable. Pedro Páramo is definitely one of them, since there is no way to translate many regionalisms and the common language of the rural people here in Mexico, and specially in Jalisco, the state where the story takes place.
José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet, who also translates poetry says that there's no way that poetry can be translated, so he calls his translations, Interpretations. I agree with him regarding poetry, however there are some other type of fiction that is hard to really translate, and this is the case of Pedro Páramo.

[Stiffelio]

Translations are always problematic, no matter what languages you translate 'from' and 'to'. All the mores so in poetry. There's a certain betrayl to what the original writer meant to write. In Italian they say "traduttore, traditore", and it's clear that both terms have a common etymological origin.