My journey into the Spanish-speaking world began when I was four years old. Vaguely aware that my family’s ancestral language, Yiddish, had been all but lost between the arrival of my grandparents to New York from Russia and Poland at the turn of the last century and my growing up in ‘exile’ in Acton, a white suburb of Boston, Spanish caught my attention. First contact was a combination of the Puerto Rican families my father worked with in nearby Maynard and the Spanish of early Sesame Street.

In college, I set foot on the path to literary translation when I read the spectacular and deeply disturbing short stories of the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera in the mid-1980s. Upon learning that almost none of his fiction had been translated into English, I dedicated myself to remedying this situation. In 1985, I moved to New York City, where I worked as a bilingual textbook writer and studied literary translation with Magda Bogin and Gregory Rabassa. Two years later, I moved to Mexico to fully live in Spanish and to become fluent. While there, my translated collection of forty-three of Piñera’s short stories, Cold Tales, was published. That volume was quickly followed by my translation of Piñera’s novel, René’s Flesh. I was hooked!

I lived in the town of Tepoztlán for three years, translating fiction and learning Spanish—that is, attending birthdays, weddings, and funerals, planting and harvesting corn, opening and closing the neighborhood church (me, a Jew!), and learning the fine Mexican craft of the albur, the double and triple entendre that is the staple of any street corner hangout in a provincial Mexican town. There I also started to read Mexican literature, the classic authors as well as the youngsters, including the novelist Alberto Ruy Sánchez, the short story writer Jesús Gardea, and the poet Gloria Gervitz, all whom I would eventually translate.