In the middle of last month, the Reina Sofía Institute in New York invited me to do, for a few minutes, something that I would gladly do for hours: talk about translation and translators. The occasion was the award ceremony that the institute organizes with the complicity of other entities, and that recognizes the best translation made from Spanish to English in the United States. This time it was deserved—and it is very deserved—by the translator Charlotte Whittle, who put into English words Infinity in a reed, the beautiful book by Irene Vallejo that talks, among a thousand different things (and all interesting), about the historical importance of translation. Well, I have always believed in the relevance and even the necessity of any manifestation that occurs to us to publicly declare our gratitude to translators, and it does not seem like an exaggeration to say that all of them—and all of them: since women are the majority in this job—are the authors of much of what we say when we say: I am human.
Let me start from a declaration of principles: if we read and write literature, I believe, it is because of a feeling of dissatisfaction. The life we have been given is not enough; We rebel against the fact that life is only one, in the sense that we have no other after this, but also against the confinement to a single identity, a single place in the world, a single point of view from which We will watch the world until death. This is frustrating because we always want to live and know more: we want to have other lives. Literature is a remedy (imperfect, but we have no other at the moment) for these shortcomings; Well, translation takes that privilege one step further, and gives us access to lives that are even more different, even more distant, or bridges the abyss that separates us from those distant lives. That is why I can say that my vision of the world, my morals, my understanding of who we are as human beings, has been shaped by Homer and Tolstoy, by Aristotle and Chekhov, even though I do not speak a single word of Greek or Russian. I have often said that without translation I could not talk about my Colombian reality, because to do so I need two words that were once translated from Greek: political and moron. You see: translation enriches our understanding of life.
For several years I made my living as a translator, and I have always thought that there is no better school for an apprentice writer than literary translation. The equation is very simple: we learn to write by reading, and translators are the best readers in the world. A good translator understands all the effects; like a good imitator, he can do all the voices. A good translator also recognizes all the shortcuts, all the traps, all the cheap tricks, and this, for the translated writer, is an invaluable incentive. (More than once I have worked on a sentence with his translators in mind: so that it is better or clearer, or so that it is not lazy or self-indulgent: so that it lives up to her craft and his talent.) Finally, translators are the best error detectives. Your emails cause me real panic, as they are tangible proof that, no matter how many times a manuscript is corrected, there is always some defect that will only become visible—to the author's enormous despair—with the book already published and in the process of being written. translation. But Borges used to say that his first reading of the Quixote It had been in English, and then, when he read the original in Spanish, he thought it was a mediocre translation. I don't know why, but this anecdote comforts me.
The Queen Sofia award, which is what it is called in the country where it is given, distinguishes, as I already said, a translation from Spanish to English. No one can be more aware of the importance of translation than a Latin American novelist, since our novel came of age, at least in part, thanks to certain translated discoveries. García Márquez would not have written his work if he had not discovered The metamorphosisby Kafka, or that strange announcement of magical realism that is orlando, by Virginia Woolf, or Faulkner and Hemingway and Albert Camus: all books that she read in translation (and many published by the great Victoria Ocampo, about whom more should be said in another article). The same can be said in the opposite sense: without the translation of One hundred years of loneliness by Gregory Rabassa, or without Norman Di Giovanni's work of Borges, an entire generation of American novelists would be harder to imagine: Toni Morrison and John Barth come to mind. But also many others: The virgin suicidesby Jeffrey Eugenides, is an admirable novel that would be inconceivable without A Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
I want to say that translation is, among many other things, a possible antidote against closed-mindedness and xenophobia of the spirit. Translation expands our sense of what human beings are, of what they say and think and feel; also, of what language does to the world. Gregory Rabassa says that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to translation: “Every time we call pierre to a stone,” he writes, “we have somehow turned it into something other than a stone or one Stein”. And I don't know about you, but to me the fact seems downright magical. Many years ago I spoke about it with Javier Marías, one of the great novelists-translators of our language—responsible for Tristram Shandy when I was in my early twenties, and after works by Conrad and Isak Dinesen—and Marías told me that the most mysterious thing about translation is the simple circumstance that we accept it. How can a text remain the same after losing what has made it possible, which is language? How can those of us who do not know German feel that we have read WG Sebald or Thomas Bernhard, when not a single word found in the translated text is the author's decision? We read with the awareness that the words are by Miguel Sáenz, and yet we continue thinking: I read Bernhard, I read Sebald, I read Joseph Roth.
This has a corollary: good translations make the translator disappear; The bad ones make it visible. Perhaps the commonplace that we repeat without examining it is true, and good translators are invisible in the work. But on the other hand, I believe, and with all conviction, that they should be very visible, as much as possible, in our society of readers. Or citizens, yes, because that is also what translations indirectly create, their presence in our societies or our sustained contact with them. So it's true: the names of the translators should be on the covers of the books. And it's true: they should be paid better. And it is true: the industry, this publishing industry that depends on them, should begin now to protect them from the uncontrolled attacks of what we call artificial intelligence, which may very well be the biggest step backwards that human beings have taken. And we, readers of literature, would have to thank those invisible figures, telling them from time to time that we see them, that we recognize them, that we appreciate them.
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