Eartheater is as much about story and character as it is about the language that shapes them—a mix of gritty, turf-bound slang and mysticism. The characters that populate these pages have a whiff of the Lost Boys and of the kids in Lord of the Flies. Either abandoned or let down by the grown-ups who were meant to protect them, they’ve been left to fend for themselves. They’re also at odds with the other authority figures in the barrio, the cops—variously called yokes, cuffs, and pigs in this translation, adapted from the existing Spanish terms yuta, ratis, and cana—who have also let them down.
Out of this neglect rises our slovenly heroine, Eartheater, who will help solve the murders and missing persons cases that plague her community. Eartheater herself is terse and introverted, and there is a staccato rhythm to her no-nonsense worldview. She is hardboiled detective and bruja all rolled into one; tetchy teenager and wise seer wrapped in a single, waifish body. When she isn’t busy reaching through darkness and time for the person she’s seeking, she eats, listens to music, plays video games, drinks beer, hangs out with her brother, and fucks (a term she would use) her yuta boyfriend with relish.
Much like its heroine, Eartheater has also risen out of a particular moment and as a response to a particular neglect. Femicides remain widespread throughout Latin America and women have banded together in protest. (Eartheater is dedicated to two victims of femicide from the barrio where Dolores Reyes works as an activist and teacher.) Women authors continue to be overlooked on a national scale, and have joined forces to demand they be seen. We may have been aware of these things for a long time, but they are finally being addressed; even language is being righteously shaken and molded to make room for those it has long excluded.
In a way, the phrase awante les pibis serves as a snapshot of this groundswell. And though it occurs only once, I spent a good deal of time wrestling with it. In Argentina, pibe and piba mean “boy” and “girl,” respectively; their plural forms are pibes and pibas. As is the case in many Romance languages, the masculine plural in Spanish is always used except when the grouping in question is entirely female (outrageous, we know). What’s interesting about pibis is that it is gendered neither as male nor as female, but other. Meanwhile, awante is a distortion of the word aguantar (“wa” standing in for “gua”), which can mean to “endure” or “put up with” or “withstand,” among other things, and is often used colloquially. A person who has aguante, for example, is someone with stamina. It is a phrase that in essence upends gendered grammar, both colloquially and off-handedly.
As it’s used here—scrawled in Liquid Paper on the cover of a binder—Awante les pibis serves as an all-inclusive cry for solidarity. It’s innocent, after a fashion, and yet illustrative of a deep desire for change on the part of the young people in the narrative. When translating this particular phrase, I tried to reach for something beyond the words that was both form-appropriate—Liquid Paper, binder—and context-appropriate—the kind of phrase you might see scrawled in a bathroom stall with a Sharpie. A phrase that perhaps once stood for something powerful. “Power 2 Youth” fit the bill. As best it could, anyway.
Something has been lost in this translation. Or rather, it was never there to begin with. English is not gendered in the same way as Spanish. On top of which, there is no English-language equivalent of the hyperlocal variant of Spanish in which Eartheater was originally written: early twenty-first-century Argentinian Spanish from the outskirts of Buenos Aires. There is in fact no English-speaking Argentina, much less an English-speaking outskirts of an English-speaking place called Buenos Aires (“Good Airs”?). On the surface of things, this task—convincing you, the reader, that the work you have in your hands could have, in an alternate universe, been written in English by an English-speaking woman named Dolores Reyes (“Pains Kings”?)—may seem impossible. But the aim of literary translation is to convince you to suspend your disbelief, at least just long enough to make the impossible feel eminently plausible.
Julia Sanches