Just Write: A solitary dream turns into a team effort

Marisa Estelrich dreamed of being a writer.

She dabbled in poetry. She wrote in journals. But "writer" was still "WRITER," in big lights and letters. It was a daydream.

Then she got some down-to-earth advice. It was 1998. She had just started classes as a student in Wake Forest University's graduate program in liberal studies and was talking to the director, an English professor named Robert Shorter.

"You want to be a writer?" he asked. "Just write."

It was wise advice, she thought. Estelrich, now 47, started to get more serious. "In order to do that you'd have to take the little steps."

She started with some short stories, then moved to a novella, winning a writing award. She started to get published in Argentina and Spain.

But until now little of her fiction has been available in the United States because Estelrich writes in Spanish. This spring, Press 53, a small publisher in Winston-Salem, published Naked Souls/Desnudos del alma, a bilingual book of Estelrich's short stories in Spanish and English. The book's left pages are mostly in Spanish, while the right pages are in English. Naked Souls was translated by Graciela Lucero-Hammer, an Argentine immigrant and a Spanish professor at Salem College who has worked as a translator.

Estelrich and her family -- sons Juan and Sebastian, and husband, Ignacio -- moved to the United States from Argentina in 1997. Ignacio sold leather, one of Argentina's famous exports, for furniture, and the company he was working for at the time wanted to set up an office in the U.S.

Desnudos del alma is her first book. It was published in Argentina by Editorial Nuevo Ser in 2004. A novella, Cuando yo te vuelva a ver, was published in Spain this year by Editorial Agua Clara, after it was a finalist in a short-novel contest. And Estelrich is finishing up a novel that she hopes to find a publisher for.

Estelrich also works as a freelance translator and editor. She currently translates for the ECHO Council's StoryLine project, a local storytelling project. She will translate stories told in Spanish to English so that they can air on area English radio stations, WFDD-FM (88.5), WSJS-AM (600/1200) and WSNC-FM (90.5).

Estelrich attended a bilingual school in Argentina as a child. She studied English as a second language in college and taught it later. She speaks English beautifully, precisely, with a whisper of a British accent.

She writes fiction in Spanish, though. When she moved to the U.S., she missed her first language so much that she received another master's degree in Spanish language and literature from UNC Greensboro in 2005.

And for all her experience, Estelrich doesn't like to translate her own writing. "Too painful," she said.

For that, she had a friend. Estelrich and Lucero-Hammer met in Winston-Salem. Estelrich showed Lucero-Hammer her stories. They went to a translating workshop in Mexico in 2005. After that, they worked on translating Estelrich's stories for about three years.

There's nothing simple about Estelrich's writing, Lucero-Hammer said. "You have to think between the lines a lot. You really translate concepts. That is difficult. I had to ask Marisa many times, ‘What are you saying here?'"

For her part, Lucero-Hammer encouraged Estelrich's writing "at a time when I was shy about it," Estelrich said.

They left out one story. They thought that it was untranslatable. The story is a kaleidoscope of different voices of people waiting in line, the sounds of people from different social classes, educational backgrounds and a blur of Buenos Aires slang.

Press 53 had kicked around the idea of translating some of its authors' short stories into Spanish, Kevin Watson, the publisher and editor, said. "We're becoming a bilingual society in many ways. It just made sense for us to try and test that market. I know there's a lot of interest in people learning new languages and making that a part of their lives."

But Hispanic does not mean a uniform people.

"People tend to say, ‘Oh, Hispanic, OK, one group,'" Lucero-Hammer said. "We need to really clarify that. The countries vary enormously according to population, according to influences. We need to emphasize that Hispanic means many different things."

"Even Graciela and I," Estelrich said. "She was born in Cordoba (a large city in central Argentina), and I was born in Buenos Aires. We have different accents."

Estelrich's stories are tinged with her home country and the European elegance of Buenos Aires. But they are written with a post-modern flair that's light on quotation marks and sometimes even a clear narrative. It's a style that she prefers, a way of writing that she thinks is similar to Jose Saramago, a 1998 Nobel Prize winner for the novel Blindness.

Growing up, Estelrich was fascinated with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, castles and spooky manors, places with creaky floors and ticking grandfather clocks. The character in one her short stories, "The Tearoom," or "La confiteria," is a spooky Miss Havisham-like character (from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), inspired by Estelrich's great aunt, Isolina, who she remembers being picara, or mischievous. "I wanted to live in a house like that. I would play games and pretend I was British."

As a reader and a writer, Estelrich favors stories with intrigue, ones that leave readers with questions. "I always like open endings. I don't like happily ever after."

■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.