Republic of Consciousness Class of 2020: El Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo, tr. Stephen Beechinor (Structo Press)
Between now and 26th February when we announce our shortlist, we’ll be featuring each of the longlisted titles on our new blog page in some way. We are running Q+A’s with the five Republic of Consciousness debutants: publishers who haven’t appeared on our longlists until 2020. Today we’ve got an interview with Euan Monaghan, founder and editor of Structo Magazine, and the newly formed Structo Press, who have published El Llano in Flames by Juan Rulfo, tr. Stephen Beechinor.
What was your relationship with books, reading and writing growing up?
I was lucky enough to grow up in a home full of books and for the last few years of school I worked weekends at my local bookshop in Kendal. It was an Ottakar’s. Remember them? On quiet Sundays, in-between selling the occasional copy of the Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, I learned how to read books without them appearing to have been read. Later, in 2008, I started a literary magazine called Structo. Now a team of ten or so, we are working on Issue 20, which will be released in a couple of months.
Juan Rulfo's El Llano in flames is your first book. These stories were first published in 1953; how did they arrive in your inbox?
The project was brought to us by its translator, Stephen Beechinor. We published one of Stephen’s original stories in Structo 9, after which he joined the magazine staff for a couple of years. Structo Press was in its early stages back then, and so when Stephen left the team to focus on his own writing, I asked him to let me know if he ever came across anything particularly interesting in Spanish or Catalan which might be a good match for us. A little while later he told me about El Llano en llamas.
Despite having only published two books in his lifetime—this story collection and the novel Pedro Páramo—Juan Rulfo is very well known in the Americas. Márquez was a big fan. We struggled to figure out why, for almost 70 years, the English language rights were never picked up outside of the US and Canada. I still have no idea. In any case, we were delighted to have the opportunity to bring these stories to a new audience.
Given this context, what was the editorial process like?
We have published hundreds of stories in Structo over the years, including many works in translation, so I was quite familiar with the process of guiding stories to a high level of editorial quality, but books are another thing entirely. It took a while. But, then, one of the advantages of working on a book originally released in the 50s is that there was no-one waiting impatiently for it to come out. We could take our time, learn and get it right.
After Stephen delivered the initial version of the manuscript, I worked with him to catch anything that broke the flow of the translation; not suggesting solutions for the most part, but rather saying this line or this word choice tripped me up. The key aim of this translation was to keep tight to the rhythm and register of the original. Rulfo's prose is very sparse and he had a poet’s eye for repetition. One of the reasons Stephen suggested we keep the em-dash dialogue markers in the stories was that it didn’t disrupt the flow. Once we’d gone back-and-forth a bunch, I brought on Jeremy Butterfield to copy-edit the work. Jeremy has worked a lot with Spanish translations and was already familiar with Rulfo, so it was a good fit.
Once we had a final manuscript, the poet and writer Dylan Brennan gave Rulfo and the stories some context in his excellent foreword and Petra Bryce tidied up after all of us with a very perceptive proofread. Since Structo Press has no employees, having access to these talented freelancers was absolutely key to getting the thing out of the door. The extra production time on this first project also helped spread the cost of paying them properly for their work.
You're a book designer in your day job, working with publishers large and small. There's a lot of talk about how small press titles need to be ‘collector items’ – what are your thoughts on how important design is, and where is it heading?
Design is an aspect of publishing in which small presses can produce work of equal quality to the largest publishers. I’m not sure about collector’s items, but if you’re going to print a book, it really needs to look and feel good in the hands of the reader. I spent a while working with our printers on paper stock, cover finishes and the tightness of the binding. The body typeface needed an italic which was not distracting, even when set for multiple lines. To design a book is to make a bunch of tiny decisions which—hopefully—combine to make the book feel good to read.
There are many approaches to design for books: Dostoyevsky Wannabe shows what can be done when a strong design sense is combined with the flexibility of print-on-demand, for example, but it’s all about paying attention to details and not thinking of design as something you do quickly at the end. I began making the first cover concepts for El Llano in flames while Stephen was working on the initial translation. The final imagery used on the cover is a topographic map of El Llano Grande which I generated from satellite data of the region. Fine lines of spot UV trace the contours. It’s an incredibly tactile object. It’s been a joy to see it pop up in some of my favourite bookshops.
If you could be a big publisher, would you be?
No. Successful would be good, but I’ve spent over a decade running a literary magazine with many moving parts, and Structo Press as a project is an attempt to get closer to the words again. It’s the same reason you can’t order the book directly from the press: I wanted to keep it all simple, at least at the beginning.
What does 2020 (and beyond) hold for Structo Press?
The idea was to take a single title through the entire publishing process, from commissioning to release, before taking on anything else. Partly this was to take the time to learn how to publish a book properly, but also because I didn't know if I'd enjoy doing it. As it turns out it’s incredibly rewarding and so the plan is to slowly develop a list, roughly half of which will be in translation.
Right now we have an open call for novel submissions.