Remembrance of Translations Past: SOON to APPEAR in CALQUE

Remembrance of Translations Past: The Selected Stories of Adolfo Bioy Casares
By Suzanne Jill Levine

Green Integer is currently reissuing my edition of Bioy Casares’ stories, first published in English by New Directions in 1991.

It is much easier to talk about translating dense ‘untranslatable’ “baroque” texts, because the problems are visible, material, and one can speak of words as if they were clay. Adolfo Bioy Casares’s words seem transparent, not opaque. However, there is opacity in his “less is more” approach to language, and so one must catch the exact nuance or register of his words and phrasing. His typical style is understated and ironic; he had a perfect ear for colloquial speech, and his narrators and characters tend to invite the reader’s laughter unexpectedly, because no matter how hard they seek dignity, their actions and utterances are buffoonish. Such a style pertains to realism, one might think, but most narratives by Bioy, whether or not they begin on a realist note, slip imperceptibly into a dream.

After completing my first translation of a story by Bioy-- "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice," about a Peronist incident in 1953 in Buenos Aires--, I received a flattering letter, which at the time made not only my day, but my whole week. [This story would first appear in the Knopf Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature.] Bioy wrote from "Rincon Viejo, Pardo," the family ranch "Old Corner" in the town of Pardo where in the late 30s he had written his famous novella The Invention of Morel. Here is an excerpt from that letter:


Rincon Viejo, Pardo, March 8 1972

My Dear Jill:

Thanks for the letter and for the translation. About the latter, great suspense for the moment: to be elaborated on later.
I hadn't answered you until today, because for a time that has seemed immemorial I have spent my season at Mar de Plata lying face up, dedicated to examining, in all its details--which have struck me as sinister--the ceiling. It was nothing, lumbago; but, what a lumbago! That finally ended with a single injection, applied after fifty useless ones upon the advice of the father of my daughter's literature professor. There's nothing like literature.
The lumbago interrupted the progress of a short novel, Los desaparecidos de Villa Urquiza that I had begun with great hopes. But there is always something to be gained, as a Mexican general once said, and if I suffered over not writing (incredible as this seems), I spent who knows how many hours a day thinking about the little novel. As I watched it grow, not without fear of forgetting in the future, the novel and I became more intimate. Now I understand that before the lumbago, like an irresponsible chap, I was going to write about something of which I was completely ignorant.
Back, finally, to your translation. I wouldn't like to be unfair with anybody but I think, Jill, that it's the best that's been done with a text of mine. In general, the task of the translator consists in simplifying a text by weakening it, so that a mystery remains in evidence: Why did someone write (of course for this question there is never any answer) and why did someone else take the trouble to translate? Any author who doesn't want to abandon right there and then his profession should abstain from such depressing readings. With "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" the danger, for me, is one of pride. I assure you that I have caught myself in the mirror, reading your pages with a beatific smile (from ear to ear), which could only correspond to the phrase: "How well I write!" "The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice" does not read like a translation but as an original written with confidence, with intelligence and with grace.
As if I believed that those merits were also my own, your translation stimulated me to confront the continuous difficulties that fetter me in the composition and writing of The Disappeared...."

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