BETH BOSWORTH FOR TSAR : Tameme began as a print journal of English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English translations. How did you come to start this journal?

C.M. MAYO : I wanted to encourage more original translation, both from English into Spanish and from Spanish into English, of contemporary writers. As a U.S. citizen living in Mexico City, I also wanted to encourage more intercultural communication—or, a less fancy way to put it: look, there’s so much more to U.S. literature than Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allen Poe, and more to Mexican literature than Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. I had a lot of support from many people, and especially my father, who had some twenty-five years of experience in the printing business, and did the administrative work of setting up the nonprofit foundation. Many writers poets and translators gave their support in myriad ways. Certainly, the journal would not have possible without donations and the important grant we received from the Foundation for U.S.-Mexico Culture.

TSAR: How did you come to choose the name Tameme for your venture? It’s interesting that you chose a non-Spanish word.

CM: If had to do it over again, I’d come up with something else, though— still!—I don’t know what. Tameme (pronounced tah-meh-meh), is a Nahuatl (Aztec) word. It means porter, and sometimes also messenger. Certainly, the meaning is apt.

TSAR: Tameme, the journal, includes a section of translator’s commentary. Why did you include this?

CM:  Literary translation tends to be controversial. Take one poem, in, say Spanish, and take five accomplished literary Spanish to English translators, and you may well get five very different English language poems. So it’s important to give a translator the opportunity to defend, explain, and discuss whatever he or she considers relevant to the work at hand. Many times translations are tricky—to a fluent, but non-native, speaker some things may appear to be mistakes, that are not. Also, literary translation is a generally very under-rated art. When Beethoven is played in a concert, it matters who the pianist is—no? So, why shouldn’t we also care who the translator is, and what he or she has to say about the translation?

TSAR:  What problems are specific to the translation of poetry a
distinct from prose translations, or vice versa?

CM:  It’s all poetry. The best translators are poets—whether ther
identify themselves as such or not.

TSAR:  Who are some translators you admire? 

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