Spanish Translation Slam, Languages 250: Translating Enrique Vila-Matas

What happens when two translators work on the same text into the same language? How different can their translations be?

We have selected an excerpt from a short story never before translated into English and commissioned our two guests to translate it. Working from the two resulting versions, Isabel Adey and Michael McCaffrey will be in conversation with James Hadley, director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation (TCLCT), to discuss the challenges and anecdotes they encountered while translating one of the most singular voices in contemporary literature: Enrique Vila-Matas.

Isabel Adey is a literary translator and editor working with Spanish, German and English. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in Edinburgh, where she also works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her translation of Giovanna Rivero’s Fresh Dirt from the Grave was longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute translation prize in 2024, following a shortlisting for her co-translation of Marvel Moreno’s December Breeze in 2023. Her translations span multiple disciplines, from literary fiction to nonfiction and academia. She holds an MSc in Translation from Heriot-Watt university and a MA in Modern European Languages from the University of Edinburgh.

Michael McCaffrey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His doctoral research examines the multilingual translation of Mar Paraguayo by Wilson Bueno as an act of queer resistance. He also holds an M. Phil in Literary Translation from the Trinity Center for Literary and Cultural Translation where he focused on the translation of Spanish and Portuguese-language texts. His broader research interests include the translation of queer and postcolonial identities in Latin American contexts.