There is a long interview with and profile of Natasha Wimmer in the Christian Science Monitor.
In the spring of 2006, Natasha Wimmer left her job at a Manhattan trade publication and moved with her husband to Cuauhtemoc, a bustling neighborhood in the northwest of Mexico City. Their flat overlooked Calle Abraham Gonzalez, not far from a cafe called La Habana, and Ms. Wimmer spent many afternoons there, reading and chatting with Mexican friends.
At the time, she was working on the first English translation of “The Savage Detectives,” by the novelist Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003. Bolano was Chilean, but had drifted in and out of Mexico City throughout his life, first as an adolescent, then as a revolutionary and litterateur.
“He was a geographically obsessed writer, especially when it came to Mexico City. He always told you exactly where he was going —down to the street, the intersection, the building,” Wimmer remembers. “Cafe La Habana, for instance, was the basis for Cafe Quito,” an important set piece in “The Savage Detectives.” (The book, which traces the literary and political adventures of two ambitious poets, is partly autobiographical.)
“Being in the middle of that was very clarifying, and very useful,” Wimmer says. “I found I understood the cultural references better, and had a closer sense of the vibrancy of the place. And that’s what I wanted to capture. The book has such a quality of urgency and ease. So many other books I’d read felt willed, and this one didn’t. It seemed essential.”
These days, Wimmer lives on the third floor of a carefully restored brownstone in Harlem, far from the noise and traffic of Mexico City. On a snowy Saturday this month, while her husband watched their young daughter, Wimmer recounted the years—more than three in all—she’d spent translating “Detectives,” and then “2666,” Bolano’s 992-page posthumous masterpiece, released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last December.
Just imagine all the publicity Bolano would be getting were he alive. He would be a true literary superstar, contending for the Nobel, worldwide audience awaiting his next book, etc. Only the good die young.
