In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata Translated by Robin Myers | Coffee House Press | 160 pages | May 2023 | ISBN: 978-1566896757
“A baby, which then seemed to me like an origin, now feels more like an end”
–Isabel Zapata, trans. Robin Myers; In Vitro
Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro, translated by Robin Myers, captures one woman’s journey toward motherhood. With glimpses into her grief, childhood, hopes for the future, and all their associated uncertainties, this book shares some of Zapata’s story with linguistic exactitude and narratorial authority.
Though not solely about the process of fertilization, In Vitro does not shy away from describing its associated medical procedures, nor does it obscure the misogyny the speaker encounters in healthcare settings. In the text, “gun-shaped speculum” implies violence, and, in our interview, Myers emphasized the speaker’s disappointment with her longtime gynecologist. This male doctor betrayed the speaker’s trust and used, in Myers’s words, “incredibly abusive language and behavior,” which “belittles [her] experience or exerts a form of violence,” especially considering his position of authority in her life. However, Zapata and Myers were both careful not to equate in vitro fertilization with abuse. It’s a process to which we women subject ourselves voluntarily, Zapata wrote me in our Spanish-language email interview. But there are certainly challenging, painful, and often traumatic moments along the way.
Of the invasive and vulnerable procedures the speaker undergoes, the act of birth is the most thematically fraught. Zapata called birth a type of portal between life and death. Mentions of the speaker’s mother often challenge linear time, emphasizing the cyclicality of death/birth; the speaker expresses a desire to give birth to the reincarnation of her mother and nurse her, to become her mother’s mother, perhaps as a response to grief: “some women catch the scent of their dead mothers as they nurse their children,” reads a passage. Moments of temporal collapse have the speaker envisioning her mother’s life and death in relation to her pregnancy, which to Myers established an unsettling tone that she was determined to capture in the translation: “The pregnant body, the sense of being inhabited in a way that’s both extraordinary and kind of creepy and unsettling.” She references the following passage, in which the speaker compares her daughter to the cause of her mother’s death: ”In order to grow, my daughter consumes my allotment of breath. In this sense, she resembles the tumor that lodged in my mother’s pancreas.”
“I want to have a child so I can be made invisible,” writes the speaker. And yet, she also says of her dog, “maybe love is always selfish in the end: I need her because she protects me from disintegration.” These lines define motherhood as an act of both creation and destruction, not unlike the task of writing a book meant to serve as an archive of sorts. “I thread together . . . the story I want my jellyfish to remember,” reads one passage. “I also decide what I hope we’ll both forget.” In Vitro, then, captures a larger truth about the speaker’s journeys without strictly adhering to Zapata’s lived experiences. It’s not about testimony, but rather about literature, Zapata wrote me. At the end of the day, one must leave open spaces, mirrors where readers see themselves reflected.
In the process of translating the book, Myers wanted to capture Zapata’s narrative and linguistic restraint. Pregnancy literature, Myers told me, “searches for conclusiveness and dot-connecting.” But In Vitro refuses that, which Myers found “both inviting and defiant.” The speaker emerges as an authority of her story, especially as she openly leaves things out of her narrative. “It’s not withholding in a coy way,” Myers said. “There’s a sense of . . . ‘This is how I am choosing to share it, this is where I'm going to stop.’” Such restraint and authority extends to the language Zapata (and Myers) use to describe the speaker’s visceral experiences. Careful not to overindulge certain emotional registers, Myers ensured she wasn’t “inflating” or “darkening” certain passages. As a reader, I found this line-level control effective; sections of almost unsettling disembodiment exist in high relief against the rarer, more emotional sections in ways that avoid melodrama and make the story feel lucid and real. This also means that, though I don’t have firsthand knowledge of the speaker’s experiences, I identify with her yearning, with the way her past creeps into her present, with her love and with her fear. I sought the greatest possible precision, the greatest care, to successfully transmit the sensations, fears, desires that I wanted to inhabit the book, Zapata told me. Language is more than a primary concern in this book: it is everything.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.