Back in 1961, around 50,000 teenage girls volunteered to participate in Cuba’s Literacy Campaign for up to one year–one of the most extraordinary endeavors of the revolution in the early years. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to “skype down” with Catherine Murphy, director of Maestra, the 33-minute documentary about this campaign, and chat about the process of translating this historical experience across time and space.
Catherine grew up in the United States, but her grandmother, born and raised in Cuba to US parents who had lived in Cuba for many years, departing with the onslaught of the revolution, largely influenced Catherine’s initial relationship to the island. Rather than take for granted the narrative about those who stayed that she had been fed, Catherine sought to comprehend the lives of those who stayed not out of necessity, but out of something else—whether that be excitement, commitment or even inertia. She told me that she “wanted to be true to the enthusiasm and excitement on the island at the time.” Catherine went to Cuba in the early 1990s, and realized “that there was this whole other side.” That individuals’ experiences in the early revolutionary years had sustained their loyalty to the regime for many decades after. Building the revolution was an intense life experience, and their stories certainly have been a fascinating starting point for Catherine as a translator between worlds.
Having taught Maestra myself to hundreds of general education undergraduate students with diverse “interests” in the subject matter, I wanted to figure out how Catherine Murphy was able to so successfully translate that immense enthusiasm of the campaign across time and space. I was interested in how she conveyed the emotional environment of the literacy campaign—a term removed from the here and now, certainly of the United States–on the screen.
JL: I couldn’t help but get to the subtitles—a terrain that, as I know from being on all different sides of it over the years, entails lots of sweat and tears.
CM: Joseph Mutti did much of the subtitle translation and I worked with him. I tweaked the subtitles a lot. I would sit in the audience for the first six months to a year of screening the film in public and scrutinize the subtitles, and a lot of things I was not happy with. Sometimes I’d go “bing” and go “there’s a better way to say that,” and I’d go back to the editing table and tweak it myself and burn another master copy. Translation is an art and subtitling is an art of its own because you have to translate the language but you also must reduce the text. There are conventions, standards, protocols–you should never have more than two lines of text on the screen–and I ended up thinking that it’s better to have just one line of text on the screen. The subtitles have their own rhythm. They should come in right when the person starts to talk. It’s easier going from Spanish to English because English uses fewer words. We tend to economize more. So the better job of translation I do to English, the fewer words there are.
JL: I had recalled some aspects of the subtitles that convinced spectators that what they were viewing was comparable to a war against illiteracy. One crucial word in that equation was “brigadista.” What happened to it?
CM: “Brigadista” is not translatable. Maybe some subcultures would use the term “brigade worker” – perhaps referencing the Venceremos Brigade or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. For people who have been connected to those kinds of social movements, that word means something, but “brigade worker” is not popularly used in English. I chose to stay with original Spanish word “brigadista” and explain it directly in the moment if possible, or in context, which is the case with this film. The other term that we struggled with was the term “alzados.” I struggled to tell a human story and try to navigate this very polarized political language that has existed around Cuba for decades. Translating is a minefield. It is not even mistranslating, but you have a range of options, sometimes there is no translation for a word like “brigadista,” but there is a range of options that mean very different things.
So with the term “alzados,” I chose to use the word “insurgents,” I didn’t want to use the term “counterrevolutionaries” because it sounds like a propaganda pamphlet. It was loaded in one particular way. I didn’t want to use the term “rebels.” I chose the word “insurgents.“ “Alzados” implies that they’re armed, I wanted to be clear that they were armed, that they were somewhat organized and opposing the Cuban government that that had just taken power. I struggled with that for a long time. It’s hard to do work on that time period and avoid the pamphlet element, and the word “counter-revolutionary” seemed as if it was part of that. And who’s to say that the “alzados” were counter-revolutionary? Maybe they felt they were the real revolutionaries.
JL: (But subtitles, as Catherine put it – the semantic translation of Spanish original dialogues into English- was just one piece of the translation experience. Music was another.)
When I think of translating that experience, I wanted to explore it as in the “now,” as a contemporary and current experience, not as something in the past. I wanted the film to feel like “now” for many reasons, one of which is that the women talk of their experience as if it’s indeed now. That is, as an active part of their lives now. I wanted it to feel immediate and not far away in time and space to young people in the United States or around the world.
There seem to be multiple levels of translating the experience. The main push is the immediacy with which the women talk about that experience as if it was yesterday, rather than fifty years ago. I was totally fascinated by how detailed and immediate their memories, recollections and stories were. Music was the other main element that I could bring into the film to convey immediacy: the soundtrack. We really broke out of the kind of stereotypical, common or cliché soundtracks that are used in documentaries about Cuba by non-Cuban filmmakers. I have gotten a lot of criticism for that, but I still think it’s one of the greatest strengths of the film, and why it resonates with young people in the United States and beyond. The film opens with an original piece by Duo Obsesión, of which Alexey Rodriguez is the composer. His artistic name is “El Tipo Este.” I found an open license track that I gave him as a reference, and asked him for an opening track that kind of startles you, something kind of jarring or startling, because people come to this film, we go to film, always a little behind schedule and everyone is sitting in a seat and not really there yet.
So I wanted some music that would bring people in immediately, and surprise them and jar them. Because the assumption is that it’s a sweet story about literacy. “Oh these women from Cuba, that are in the “tercera edad,” that are in their retirement.” I don’t want to call them older ladies because they don’t feel like older ladies, but they are older women, talking about literacy, and it seemed it could be too syrupy. People assume the soundtrack will be heavy on the violins, syrupy or in this very common collection of genres that is in the body of documentary work by non-Cuban filmmakers like traditional son, which I love, I love guajira, I love boleros, but I wanted to take a very different road with the musical concept, for this film that would go totally contrary to whatever our assumptions of an expected soundtrack might be. It couldn’t be that expected soundtrack, so I went to a number of independent young songwriters I knew on and off island, mostly on the island, including pianist/composer Aldo Lopez-Gavilán, tresero Maikel Elizarde and vocalist Heyleen Williams. The opening track is really important for setting the tone, then it unfolds and includes multiple genre.
We have screened the film dozens at film festivals, universities and with grassroots community organizations since 2012. I made a priority of bringing Cuban women to present the film – sometimes together with me, and sometimes on their own. The main person who has presented it is Professor Norma Guillard, a social psychologist and race, gender and LGBT justice activist in the Cuba of today. Her dialogues with diverse audiences have been very lively, bridging the historic work of the Literacy Campaign with the ongoing work around race and gender equality in the Cuba of today.