Nanna Papanikolaou | Translating *Save the Fire* by Guillermo Arriaga

Nanna Papanikolaou is featured in our "Translation Workshop" column, speaking to us about the epic novel Save the Fire(Salvar el fuego) by Guillermo Arriaga, which she translated and was recently published in Greek. It is a book that depicts the dangerous contradictions of a country as well as the division of human nature between condemnation and redemption.

The book begins with various, supposedly unrelated stories that slowly converge until they meet and intertwine into a central narrative. The protagonists of these individual stories at the beginning of the book belong to different worlds. They are intellectuals, artists, and yuppies; drug smugglers, murderers, and convicts—both in and out of prison; Mexicans from different regions of the country, some from the north, poor and uneducated. All these characters speak a different idiom, depending on the world to which they belong. The educated urbanites speak a refined language with a rich vocabulary; the northerners have incorporated many English words, but Hispanized; the cartel smugglers have their own linguistic codes of communication; the prisoners speak prison slang.

Therefore, this book poses a great challenge for the translator, because all the linguistic differences and nuances of the original Spanish must be perceptible in the Greek text as well. To achieve this, I had to discover the language of the Greek underworld and find the correspondences; I even had to create words in some cases of Hispanized English that did not have corresponding Hellenized ones. I hope I succeeded in rendering these differences in the Greek text, as they are one of the elements that give this book its vitality.

Guillermo Arriaga is one of the leading contemporary Mexican writers, with a very close relationship with cinema. He is the man who showcased Alejandro González Iñárritu's talent with his screenplays for legendary films such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. The stunning film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, is also based on his screenplay—to mention only the most famous ones in Greece, as there are many more, some of which Arriaga has directed himself.

This book has won a very important award for Spanish-language literature, the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2020. Deservedly so. It is a text of nearly a thousand pages, composed of many texts, with a relentless cinematic pace and action that does not let the reader put it down. It is a story about the fire that burns our house, and just when we wonder what to save from it first, we realize and understand that we must save the fire, before it burns everything completely.