So do the editors who make a point of working with them. Indeed, translators frequently double - or, really, quadruple - as literary agents, scouts, and tastemakers. Books like Oliver’s often take a long time to appear in English, finding publishers only through intense effort and great patience on their translators’ part. If anything, six years between the publication of the original text and its English translation is rather speedy, especially for a literary work whose author is not a known quantity in the United States. This years-long story is not, in the world of translation, uncommonly slow. Adam Levy, one of the founding editors of the Oakland-based publisher Transit Books, read the essay and reached out to Sanches, and, as she told me, “the rest is history.” Migratory Birds came out from Transit a year later and went on to win the 2022 PEN Translation Prize. She submitted the resulting English-language essay to several journals, but had no luck until Charlotte Whittle, a fellow translator and Oliver fan, included it in her pitch for an issue of the international literary magazine Words Without Borders focusing on women essayists from Mexico - an issue that eventually came out in May 2020. She ordered a copy of Aves migratorias, waited the seeming eternity it can often take for a book to cross national borders, and, after reading the collection, began to translate an excerpt.
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At the time, Sanches, a former literary agent, had just quit her job and moved to Rhode Island, where she was debating her next professional steps. In March 2017, she read a fragment of the book on a podcast, catching the attention of the literary translator Julia Sanches. IN 2016, MEXICAN ESSAYIST Mariana Oliver released her debut collection, Aves migratorias.