Barcelona, part 2
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Before we get into the continued adventures of an autistic author in spain, here’s a quick reminder: the official launch event for RESURRECTIONS is this Friday! It’ll be a virtual event, streaming on YouTube.
And now, back to Barcelona!
Friday, November 10
Today I have the morning & early afternoon free for tourist stuff. People have been telling me I need to see all this culture and art and so on. But I am overwhelmed nerd with very particular tastes and I am craving something familiar.
Back in graduate school, I used to have a little tradition: any time I went to a city for a conference, I would treat myself to either the dinosaur museum or the aquarium. (Although in Paris, I once misread the French signs and accidentally went to the taxidermied animal museum instead.) And wouldn't you know it, Barcelona has an aquarium right by the sea. So I hop on over there and spend forty-five minutes indulging my inner child, looking at fish.
Afterwards, I wander. I have a crepe and some raspberry gelato in the sea air, by the harbor. (My Catalan is at the level where I can confidently say "Crep de formatge, si us plau!" to the server, but can't understand a word she says in response, at which point I sheepishly shift back to English.)
This part of the harbor is quite touristy, to the point where it puts me off a little. There are a couple of dinky fairground rides and a big mall with enormous signs for McDonalds and Taco Bell, which look like they are made to catch the eye of weary Americans with small picky-eating children. I wander through the mall long enough to use their bathroom and then head down along the waterfront.
For reasons I cannot explain, it has been very important to me, ever since I learned I was going on this trip, to actually touch the water of the Mediterranean Sea. I just feel like to go right to the brink of the sea, and not do that, would be an awful waste. So I sit quietly by the water for a few minutes, and then - although I am not dressed appropriately for wading - I stick my hand in.
The water is perfectly lukewarm. Honestly, in Canada, people would be swimming in it still. It washes over my shoes and soaks my socks but it's worth it.
I think about going on the cable car or to the history museum, which is like, right there; but I'm getting anxious about making it to my scheduled event in the evening. It's still many hours until then, but I've belatedly realized something, which is that even though I downloaded a map of Barcelona to work offline on my phone, it somehow didn't come with bus schedules. So although I competently took the bus down here and felt very proud of myself, I'm not certain I know the way back. There's a sort of city wi-fi service but its bars are so low that it won't load anything, so I end up pacing around anxiously until I find myself in the shadow of a big hotel and manage to hop onto its wi-fi for long enough to figure out the bus route back. Lesson learned - next time I'm writing out more directions in advance.
Anyway after bopping around at the hotel for a bit, it's time to go back to Gigamesh!
We're in the conference room again and I'm a lot more comfortable here; it's a lot more like the kind of talk I might give to a small room of people at a Canadian con. No fancy business with earpieces. Instead, there's an interpreter who introduces herself to me as we're waiting for the event to begin. She explains the low-tech way she's going to interpret for me: the interviewer will ask questions in Catalan, and the interpeter will lean over and whisper the English version to me. Then I'll answer, and she'll take notes. When I'm done answering, she'll say the Catalan version of the answer to the audience.
I ask if I should keep my answers short so she can remember them. She tells me I don't have to do that.
The event proceeds very pleasantly, with more of the book and AI-type questions I can talk about for as long as anyone wants. I talk about my literary influences, and about religions of the future. The interpreter is as good as her word. (Having to lean over to her to get English translations of things whispered to me makes me feel a little like a statesman, getting important whispered updates about world events.) I get excited and go on LOOOOONNG tangents and she doesn't stop me at all. She just takes furious notes and then recites the whole thing in an animated voice, to the assembled people, in Catalan.
Afterwards, while I'm signing people's books, I tell her how impressed I am with her verbal memory. She says sometimes it surprises her too; she thinks it's because she's translating something she's interested in. It's like reciting the plot of a movie she likes to her friends. This at least sort of makes sense to me.
Almost everyone who came to the event is getting something signed, but there are two people who bring me up short. One is a young woman who works at the bookshop, and who tells me that she's a big fan because she's autistic herself; in fact, her therapist recommended my books to her.*
(*This is extra-funny because I used to have an autistic friend, here in Canada, whose therapist warned him NOT to read my books - mostly because he had paranoia / doomer tendencies, and she didn't think his habit of reading super grimdark books was good for him. Apparently autistic adults' therapists throughout the world are Aware Of Me, regardless of their opinion, which is a little intimidating but also very funny.)
Another young man tells me earnestly that he related so strongly to Yasira, when he first read The Outside, that he went "wait a minute, why do I find this character so relatable?" and now he is pursuing an autism diagnosis. I genuinely don't know what to do with an admission like that. I think I just stammer out something about how I'm really glad the book was helpful for him.
On the way out, the woman who works here presents me with an unexpected gift. Gigamesh sells tote bags with a little tentacle pattern on them, and I was admiring them as they came in. So now it's mine. I thank her profusely and walk out feeling more like a celebrity than ever.
Afterwards, Gonzalo and the interpreter take me out for casual drinks and dinner at a pub. I have a little bit of tapas, which I'm starting to realize is just Spanish pub food. The interpreter is also a screenwriter and we chat about the Spanish film industry. There is a family with small children at the table next to us, which does NOT happen in North American pubs but is quite usual here.
I ask why I haven't seen much of Wu Ming-Yi, who is also Gonzalo and Toni's guest. Apparently, he had trouble getting along in English and so he has understandably been less sociable, and has mostly hung out on his own or with some Chinese-speaking friends of theirs. I tell them I feel a little guilty for getting all the attention.
"We love our authors the way we love our children," says Gonzalo, spreading his arms. "We give them all what they need, even if it's not the same."
I quietly marvel at myself for hanging out in a pub and doing all these things that normally I feel like I'm not neurotypical enough to stomach doing. I go home happy.
Saturday
Today is going to be a big one! I head out right around lunchtime to a bookstore called La Carbonera, which is in another part of town - less SFnally focused than Gigamesh and more a general bookstore of every genre, focused on Catalan. The event is about the same size as the one at Gigamesh but there's a different atmosphere, a little goofier, like everyone here is in on a joke.
"Thank you for coming to our awful bookstore in our horrible city," says the proprietor, letting me in.
"No!" I insist. "El ciutat mes bonic!"
Here at La Carbonera I meet Anna Llisteri, the translator who actually wrote the translation of the Outside series. She's a middle-aged woman with a shy and pleasant demeanor, and we're happy to meet each other.
From talking to Anna, I find out something I didn't know at all before: at the time she started translating The Fallen, there was no widely accepted convention for writing non-binary characters in Catalan. Like other Romance languages, Catalan genders many words and not just pronouns: words that are the equivalent of "the" and "my," for instance, are different depending on the gender of the noun they're referring to. (This is as far as my baby Catalan lessons have gotten me. El meu professor vs La meva professora, and that kind of thing.)
Akavi and Irimiru, in The Outside, are genderfluid in a way where you can basically just switch between binary pronouns depending on what they look like at that moment. But in The Fallen and The Infinite, there are suddenly a bunch of minor characters that use they/them pronouns exclusively. So Anna had to make up her own way of dealing with that. Later, someone did make an official guide to nonbinary language in Catalan, but it wasn't around when Anna started working - in fact, she was invited to contribute to the guide because of her work with The Fallen.
How cool is that?? I'm a part of the history of the Catalan language, and I didn't even know it!
Anyway, the talk at La Carbonera is fun. The interpreter here is a young woman named Julia, who apologizes to me and says she's still a student - unlike the other interpreter, she will need me to take pauses! I tell her that's fine but to please remind me when she needs one because I may get over-excited while talking and forget. She does this, and we manage to get it all working. As one might expect at a bookstore where they've been talking about translating nonbinary characters, they get my pronouns right.
I learn something else fun, which is that one of the regulars at La Carbonera got on the news for a second, while holding a copy of The Outside in Catalan translation, at a football* game between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, the biggest rival football teams in Spain.
(*Soccer, to North Americans)
There's also a break halfway through the interview in which everyone mills around and has vermouth. I try a couple of cautious sips of the vermouth; it's very strong and has a weird, sickly-sweet flavor, like ice wine. I am certain I only had a tiny bit but it hits me quite intensely and I head home in a sort of pleasant haze.
On my way out, after I've signed another pile of things, they hand me a gift package which is so beautifully wrapped, I almost don't want to open it:
When I do prise it open back at the hotel, it turns out to be another tote bag, wrapped around some very fine chocolate.
Maybe it's because of the vermouth, or maybe their service is just really slow - Europeans tend to eat later, and lunch does not officially open at this hotel until 1pm, - but somehow it takes me the entire block of time between returning to the hotel and heading back out to the festival just to eat my stupid lunch. Or, I shouldn't call it a "stupid" lunch because this hotel food is still very fancy and delicious, and I'm working my way slowly through it while reading through the later parts of the Lonely Planet Guide to Barcelona. There's a little section on Barcelona's history, and even though it's very summarized and potted for a foreign tourist's casual consumption, I'm struck by how complicated and bloody it all is. Early modern Europe: not a nice place to be! Europe in the early and middle parts of the 20th century: also famously not great! The tension between Catalan and Castilian speakers is one element that keeps recurring but there's also a lot more to it than that. I really should have gone to the history museum.
I'm still buzzing a little as Gonzalo herds me back onto the subway for the festival, but the subway is very very crowded and I'm starting to feel some faint warning bells in the depths of my brain. It's not that I haven't noticed being tired before, but I've also spent the past three days rocketing through the events from sheer enthusiasm and then resting afterwards in amounts that felt sufficient to my needs. It's only on the subway that I remember the energy I've been drawing on with my enthusiasm is not infinite, and when it runs out I'm not going to be in a good way.
It's not time for my talk at the festival yet, though; it's time for Ann Leckie and Cat Rambo's talk, which I told Gonzalo I wanted to see. He gets me an English language earpiece, which I didn't realize was allowed when you're just in the audience. The talk is very nice. They're obviously good friends and they go back and forth about the publishing industry, what they're working on lately, and the ins and outs of having your work translated. Ancillary Justice is the poster child for weird tricks with pronouns, of course, with its society where gender differences aren't recognized and where everyone is "she." In some languages it's harder to get that effect across than in English, since there are more words that have to get consistently stuck in their feminine forms. In other languages, the words for people aren't gendered in the first place, so the effect disappears entirely - which is okay, says Anne, since you still get a fun science fiction book in that language. She talks about how she worried that the book would never sell because of the pronouns, and how it was actually very easy in the end.
I'm glad to have seen the talk, but I've miscalculated a little, because now I have two hours to do... something? It's a little too short to go back to the hotel and a little too long for much else, and I'm feeling a little too overloaded to take in more panels. (At North American cons, this is why I always stay in the con hotel; here that was not an option because the festival is not being held in a hotel in the first place.) I end up camping out on the top floor where there's a quiet little exhibit about the life and work of Michael Ende.
I don't really speak enough Catalan to get a ton out of it, but I sit for a while and occupy myself with a long email to my agent about [exciting things unrelated to Barcelona, redacted]. I grab a sandwich at the big open-air refreshment area just outside the festival building. There's also a big book-selling table and a nook near it with a few couches, so I hover around long enough to verify that my books are on the book-selling table, and then I squish myself onto one of the couches and read the ending of Essa Hansen's Ethera Grave.
The event that I've got coming up this evening is the biggest and scariest event of all, and I'm trying not to freak out about it. It's a tradition at Festival 42 that they get all the international guests to be on one big roundtable. The festival program says we'll be debating a big question about utopias vs dystopias. I'm very intimidated to be debating anything with Ann Leckie, Cat Rambo, Steven Erickson, Tim Pratt, and Wu Ming-Yi. (Malka Older was supposed to be here too, which might have been the most intimidating one of all, but she got sick.) I am visibly the least experienced person at this thing.
Gonzalo told me to meet him in a certain spot, but I stand there awkwardly for a while and don't see him. Eventually a festival employee herds me over to a spot where the other international guests are staying. I say hello to them and tell Ann and Cat that I really liked their panel. This feels like possibly the wrong move - too fannish, not enough like a colleague? - but they're polite about it.
"I think it's great that you got published in Catalan!" says Ann.
At first my heart sinks because I think she is being condescending - like, oh, isn't it nice that the baby author got translated, too. But as everyone keeps chatting I realize I am mistaken. Ann Leckie thinks it's great that I got published in Catalan... because she hasn't ever been, and neither have any of the other illustrious authors here, just me and Wu Ming-Yi. The others are all here because their books were translated into Castilian Spanish.
"I want to get published in every language!" Cat enthuses. We start listing different dream languages to get translated into. (Everybody agrees about Basque.)
When we all get herded onto the big stage and fitted with our microphones, it turns out it's not a big scary debate after all. The interviewer has a bunch of questions that are vaguely related to the ideas of utopia, dystopia, and the responsibility of an author to their readers, but it's pretty much just a normal roundtable, with different questions being fielded to different authors. I get all the AI questions. Tim Pratt gets all the sexuality and gender questions because apparently they got that memo about him and not me. It's, like, fine.
After the roundtable there are even more signings although most of them, oddly, are for Wu Ming-Yi; the rest of us already signed most of our books earlier. (Ann also says she remembers me from when I sold "The Scrape of Tooth and Bone" to GigaNotoSaurus, which startles me, because I didn't even remember that was Ann; there were at least two entire changes of editor between the time when I submitted the story and the time when it came out, and the only one I remembered for sure had been Rashida Smith.) We all make a plan to take a couple of taxis back to the hotel for dinner afterward, and I end up bundled into a car with Tim Pratt and Wu Ming-Yi - which means its mostly me and Tim talking to each other and poor Wu Ming-Yi stoically listening to a language that he doesn't understand. I tell Tim about the thing with The Fallen and non-binary pronouns in Catalan, which he thinks is very cool.
At the dinner, I don't last long; I already had a sandwich around when my North American brain told me it was dinnertime, and when I try to order wine in Catalan ("un got de vin, si us plau!") the waiter gives me a weird look and then makes every excuse not to give me any wine at all. I am totally mortified, and very tired; the company is excellent, but I politely excuse myself to go to sleep.