INTRODUCTION
Two of my favourite words are Balance and Connection. Balance so that all life’s moods and states exist in some sort of harmony – the physical, the emotional/psychological, the cerebral for starters. Connection so that not only does one keep in touch with those who enrich life, loved ones and other friends, but learn to see how things are dependent on one another or inhabit common ground. No area of knowledge is an island any more than people are.
Connection is in my mind as I draft this. In fact as I grow older it is rarely far away. David has very kindly, though perhaps rashly, (I’ll come back to that) asked me to contribute to his Found In Translation project. I’ll go back some years to a visit to one of my favourite cities, Dublin. I was with my wife and mother-in-law. We had taken breakfast in a café that had served me one of the very best scrambled eggs I have ever tasted. So I was in a good mood and was pleased to find an interesting looking bookshop just down the road. The books were all over the floor, but the proprietor knew exactly where everything was.
We purchased a slimmer companion piece to Joyce’s Ulysses, basically for Bina, and a critique of the plays of the man I regard as perhaps the greatest Irish playwright of my generation- Brian Friel. Fast forward to much more recent times and I was working on a Irish book-to-be about the economic fortunes of the country, from bog to cloud as the authors put it- and I learned how very important the peat bogs are to Ireland’s eco-system. (I index books for publishers so I was drafting the final touches before publication).
The depictions of rural Ireland put me in mind again of my Brian Friel book so I found it in my bookshelves (which bear some resemblance I fear to the shop in Dublin) and started re-reading it. And there I was with David’s email fresh in my mind considering one of Friel’s major works. It’s called Translations.
DISCLAIMER
I suggested above that David’s actions in contacting me may have been rash. You see I combine an interest in what one might call historical linguistics with a general inability actually to speak ‘foreign’ languages.
The former largely centres round, in increasing specificity, the origins of the Indo-European language family, the mystery of North-West India four thousand years ago when the same area of the Five Rivers (i.e. the Punjab) was the home of both the Vedics and the Indus Civilization, and the historicity of the long-believed mythical Sarasvati River from geographically rooted mentions in the Rig Veda to contemporary aerial photography of deep water channels in precisely the same places.
The latter consists of a declining grasp of English as I increasingly struggle to find the right word, a smattering of French which needs a few glasses of wine to manifest itself, an odd expression or two from my wife’s native language (German) and nothing at all of the language of the country I actually live in (Wales). Fortunately my wife can fill all of these gaps save for the French.
I have however over my lifetime enjoyed reading a wide range of novels, and not surprisingly quite a few of them were not originally written in English. But I also have to say rather shame-facedly that I spent little time actually considering the art of the translator. I took the translation for granted and enjoyed the experience of reading the novel just as I did with those written in English. My lack of interest in that area is I feel shown by the fact that I have never bothered to read any novel in different translations. None of this bodes well I fear.
DISCLAIMER TO DISCLAIMER
I have read some wonderful novels originally written in other tongues. The usual suspects of the French literary canon (and a special mention for Alain Mabanckou, a wonderfully Rabelaisian writer from Brazzaville Congo), literature from Germany, various parts of the old Yugoslavia, and Russia. Tales from further afield, Persia and the Arab world, and from further back in time, Greece and Rome – Ovid’s Metamorphoses is to me one of the cleverest books ever written. So let’s leave the dark valleys of self-deprecation and move on.
A CHILD’S HINTERLAND (Getting Closer to the Point)
But to find one book to look at in more detail I’ve whittled the candidates down to two languages, Spanish and Czech. I could easily have chosen the latter for one dramatic moment. I was in Prague, along with the Russians, in August 1968. I and some student friends had already evinced some interest in the then Czechoslovakia as a result of the policies of Alexander Dubcek who was pressing ahead (briefly) with his version of socialism. It did not find favour with Leonid Brezhnev. I went on to absorb some wonderful Czech literature- Kafka of course, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, Bohumil Hrabal’s contemporary stories two or three of which were turned into films by noted Czech director Jiri Menzel.
But I’ve settled on Spanish. I am not writing of novels written for the most part in Spain (with one huge, glorious exception, Don Quixote) but of something that sprang into life in my youth and pulled me gleefully away from what I saw as drab English literature penned by the likes of C.P. Snow. I write of Magic Realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ spellbinding One Hundred Years of Solitude was I think the first work I read in that genre. But Garcia Marquez, through no fault of his own, did not tick as many boxes for me as his comrade and close friend, Carlos Fuentes.
It is often interesting tracing back themes and interests through one’s life. Everything comes out of something, and one tends to find that some seemingly exotic taste actually has its origins much closer to home. So before looking at Fuentes in more detail let’s establish one salient fact about him from the outset. He was not, unlike most of the Magic Realists, from South America. Carlos Fuentes was Mexican.
Mexico had long signified. This seemed to have its origins in Westerns which like many of my generation I had devoured as a child – movies, TV series, paperback books obtained from a dubious store in Chester Market full of softcore porn. But that cannot really tell the whole story. Westerns are basically tales of white American men riding across the US in search of new land and new ‘opportunities’, never mind who else had been there for thousands of years. These were not natural heroes to me even as a child. There was something else going on.
My father ran his own pharmacy in Northgate Street, Chester. It closed every Wednesday afternoon for the half day. He took this opportunity to take his wife and child on various journeys by car to places close to Chester. I liked them all and one (Parkgate) became one of the loves of my life. But it is not Parkgate that is germane to this tale. South of Chester lay a charming village called Farndon, full of Victorian version half timbered houses. The road nodded down towards a bridge and under the bridge flowed the Dee, the same river on which Chester itself stands.
But though Chester is on the same national boundary the river there is not the marker. In Farndon it is, and one drives over the bridge into Holt, where once stood the local Roman tile factory, and which is very definitely in Wales. As a child I felt Holt was drabber than Farndon, full of businesslike but unadorned Welsh houses. A very different sort of place- ‘the other’. So I was a child of the border. And it was the Rio Grande and what lay across from it that had fascinated me; I sought Westerns that featured Mexico as well as Texas, my favourite Western to this day included.
Unlike Holt’s Wales (sorry Wales) Mexico, also standing in as the other, seemed flamboyant and inviting and its backdrop was old Catholic missions and the plaintive sound of mariachi trumpets. And here was this world-renowned author, Carlos Fuentes, to put my childhood dreams into words. And he did; you only have to read the shortish tale The Old Gringo, subsequently made into an American film, to see that. It did not occur to me at first to wonder why a Mexican native should sometimes at least write a novel that looked at Mexico in the way a star-crossed British child did. Carlos Fuentes in fact grew up in embassies, his father being a career diplomat. He had lived in Washington; he later lived in Paris. In some ways at least he too was an outsider or he had at least absorbed some outsider’s images of his own country. So in short he was accessible.
I read several of his novels as well as his essays on world literature. He was widely read and particularly taken by Jacques Le Fataliste the strange novel of that great figure of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot, a book rarely remarked upon in British literary circles. This enthusiasm, interestingly, was shared by his Czech contemporaries, and I recall that Fuentes and Garcia Marquez once went on a visit to meet Milan Kundera for a little summit on the state of world literature (Vanessa Redgrave on the other hand had disappointed me by her support for Brezhnev’s behaviour in 1968).
THE BOOK (Finally Getting to the Point)
Carlos Fuentes’ magnum opus has to be Terra Nostra set, initially at least and so far as such an extraordinary work can be set anywhere, in the Mediterranean of Philip II of Spain, making it in my mind at least a sort of weird companion piece to Fernand Braudel’s magisterial work of history, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. I might argue, if in the mood, that that is one of the greatest histories ever written. Braudel had left me spellbound at university where I read history, the single most important person or concept that came out of those times. And thanks owed to the lecturer who introduced us, one Menna Prestwich, a scatty dark-haired charmer from of course (forget the married surname) Wales. My country of domicile fully redeemed! (And I said I was getting to the point. Oh, dear)
Carlos Fuentes in Terra Nostra wrote a sort of surreal encyclopaedia of colonialism. It’s a book in three parts. In the first part he is on the face of it concerned with the construction of the Escorial, Philip II’s ascetic yet magnificent palace, his homage to Christianity and the Christ figure. The second part (recurrent, strange, symbolic characters appear everywhere within this book) deals with America, specifically what is now Mexico which Cortes it is said conquered with sixteen horses, smallpox and the help of a young indigenous woman, Malinche, She mediated between the Spanish and the Nahautl tribes. Of course what she would have done principally, in practical terms, was to translate.
The third part attempts some sort of fusion. It backtracks a long way. It traces how Spain and therefore post-Columbian America were made. This is a history of most of Europe in the sense that our continent has always been an uneasy mix of Indo-European (in linguistic terms) peoples and Semitic religions. All and everything appear in these latter pages from the Zohar to the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance (where would Spain and Latin America be without him?) to Aureliano Buendia, the protagonist of One Hundred Years of Solitude)..
This is an extraordinary work, surely one of the greatest works of fiction written in the post-Second World War world. From its opening line ‘Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal’. (Is there possibly some hint there that this was not first written in English? I don’t know; I don’t feel qualified to judge.)
But let me end this piece by raising my glass to Margaret Sayers Peden. Many of us who have read Isabel Allende or Octavia Paz and many others as well as Carlos Fuentes will have cause to be grateful to Margaret. For she is (of course) his translator. Of all 891 closely typed pages. What an achievement.
No, sorry, there is someone else I want to mention. When I first met her she too was making a hard and difficult living translating. She took a miscellany of Greek papers, official documents often, and turned them into German for poor returns with insufficient time for the job – ‘tomorrow’ not uncommonly the stated requirement. I speak now (of course again) of my dear, lovely wife Bina who these days prefers to work as my partner in our indexing business.
Translators and Translations of our days.
By David Selzer