Archive for the ‘In Translation’ Category

Prologue to Woes of the True Policeman

by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas
Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until the writer’s death. What the reader has in his hands is the faithful and definitive version, collated from typescripts and computer documents, and bearing evidence of Roberto Bolaño’s clear intention to include the novel in a body of work in a perpetual state of gestation. There are also a number of epistolary references to the project. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño writes: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporates material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though we meet some familiar characters—particularly Amalfitano, Amalfitano’s daughter, Rosa, and Arcimboldi—the differences are notable. These characters belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel.

This brings us to one of the book’s most striking and unsettling qualities: the fragile, provisional nature of the narrative (desarrollo narrativo). If in the contemporary novel the barrier between fiction and reality, between invention and essay, has been toppled, Bolaño’s contribution takes a different path that perhaps finds its model in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. Woes of the True Policeman, like 2666, is an unfinished novel, but not an incomplete one, because what mattered to its author was working on it, not completing it. And this brings us to a series of reconsiderations. By now we’ve accepted the rupture of linearity (digression, counterpoint, the blending of genres). Reality as it was understood until the nineteenth century has been replaced as reference point by a visionary, oneiric, fevered, fragmentary, and even provisional form of writing. In this provisionality lies the key to Bolaño’s contribution. We may ask ourselves when a novel begins to be unfinished, or when it hasn’t yet begun to be unfinished. When the author is in the middle of writing it, the end can’t be the most important thing, and many times it hasn’t even been determined. What matters is the active participation of the reader, concurrent with the act of writing. Bolaño makes this very clear in his explanation of the title: “The policeman is the reader, who tries in vain to decipher this wretched novel.” And in the body of the book itself there is an insistence on this conception of the novel as a life: we exist—we write, we read—so long as we’re alive, and the only conclusion is death. This consciousness of death, of writing as an act of life, is part of Bolaño’s biography, since the Chilean writer was condemned to write his limitless fiction against the clock. In Woes of the True Policeman there are a number of concrete references to this fractioning and provisionality: “a crucial feature of the French writer’s work: even if all his stories, no matter their style (and in this regard Arcimboldi was eclectic and seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is a fraud), were mysteries, they were only solved through flight, or sometimes through bloodshed (real or imaginary) followed by endless flight, as if Arcimboldi’s characters, once the book had come to an end, literally leapt from the last page and kept fleeing.” This is faithful to the itinerancy, to the frequently fruitless searching and the fleeing, that mark Bolaño’s writing. This is why Amalfitano’s students understood “that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing.” This provisionality gives the writer great freedom, since he permits himself the same risks as his most daring contemporaries with whom he explicitly identifies himself; but at the same time his texts maintain traditional suspense, full as they are of nonstop adventure. That is, his novels never stop being novels as we’ve always understood them. And the fracturing is what obliges the editor of his unpublished works to respect the legacy of a writer for whom all novels are part of one great novel always in progress and always in utopian search of an ending.

So far as the title is concerned, it also lends itself to a series of reflections. Woes of the True Policeman is certainly the least characteristic of Bolaño’s titles, and nevertheless it is clear, from typescripts and computer texts, that it is the definitive title. We are presented with a descriptive phrase, long, lacking the rhythm to which Bolaño has accustomed us, and not provocative or surprising at all (what can savage detectives or killer whores mean?). And yet it hides a clue in a text full of clues, a metaphor that transports us not only to The Savage Detectives but most particularly to another scarcely characteristic title, that of Padilla’s unfinished novel, The God of Homosexuals. Each contains a clue: as previously stated, the true policeman is none other than the reader, relegated from the start to the woe of constantly uncovering false clues, in the same way that the king of homosexuals is none other than AIDS, a metaphor for the fatal disease that prevents Padilla from finishing his novel.

Thus we have here a “detective,” who is Amalfitano, the critic, around whom the whole metaliterary dimension of the novel turns. There’s a policeman, who is the reader. And there’s a true protagonist, who is Padilla. Detective, reader/author, herald of death: these are the protagonists of a search that never ends (that has no ending). This obliges us to focus even more intently on the development of the narrative, which suggests that the suspense lies not in the denouement but in the unfolding of events. This is the same way we read Don Quixote, a novel that remains alive despite its ending, since it isn’t the knight errant who dies but the mediocre squire.

And as in Don Quixote—that is, as in the best contemporary fiction—the fragment is as important as the potential unity demanded of the novel, with this addendum: the fragments, the situations, the scenes, are discrete units that nevertheless make up a greater whole that isn’t necessarily visible. It could almost be said that we are returning to the origins of literature, to the story, or rather to a succession of stories that build upon one another. Naturally there is a thread that links Amalfitano, his daughter, Rosa, his lover Padilla, Padilla’s lover Elisa, Arcimboldi, the Carreras, the singular poet Pere Girau; and—elsewhere—Pancho Monje, Pedro and Pablo Negrete, and Gumaro the chauffeur. The same is true of the different geographic spaces we traverse, be they Chile, Mexico— Santa Teresa and Sonora—or Barcelona, all familiar to readers of Bolaño. There is even a very strong link between the beginning and the end of the book, between Padilla’s passion for literature and the final discovery that Elisa is death. But what makes the novel memorable isn’t its unity (facilitated by the growing protagonism of Padilla, a victim, like Don Quixote, of literature and love—in this case the morbid love of our times), but the different situations and what each of them suggests.

We find ourselves, as so frequently in contemporary fiction, in the realm of violence, alienation, estrangement, outrageousness, illness, sublime degradation. The stories follow one after another: about the stewardess and the mango juice, the recruit and the confusion caused by the word kunst, the informal dinner with the Italian patriots, the visit to the numerologist, the communicative striptease, the five generations of María Expósito, the dead man in the servants’ quarters, or the Texan and the Larry Rivers exhibition. There are send-ups of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito, of Rosa’s teachers, and, prophetically, of frustrated writers like Jean Marchand, who decides to give up his literary ambitions to devote himself to the careers of other writers: “He sees himself as a doctor at a leper colony in India, a monk pledged to a higher cause.” And purported saviors aside, literature has—as it always has had in Bolaño, beginning with Nazi Literature in the Americas—an ambiguous and crucial presence, in which homage mingles with criticism, veiled and therefore doubly harsh as well as hilarious. This is the ambiguous light in which Pablo Neruda appears in By Night in Chile or Octavio Paz in The Savage Detectives, in Mexico City’s Parque Hundido. But certain writers, represented here by the poetas bárbaros—today’s poètes maudits, already present in Distant Star—interest him particularly to the extent that they are poets of impurity, an impurity that closely resembles the kind that interests Ricardo Piglia. In fact, all of Bolaño’s characters are impure, victims and privileged witnesses of violence in all its forms, which here reaches its height in the section “Killers of Sonora,” and also in the god of homosexuals, that is “the god of those who have always lost,” “the god of the Comte de Lautréamont and Rimbaud.” And there are Arcimboldi’s brilliantly summarized novels, of course, as well as Padilla’s unfinished novel, and the letters that Amalfitano and Padilla write to each other. More than metaliterary, we might call these texts intraliterary, since everything is part of the plot.

Woes of the True Policeman is of special interest because of its close links to the best of Bolaño—its wealth of invention, its identification with losers—because of an ethic unhampered by ethical principles, because of its lucid reading of authors close to Bolaño, because of its radical independence, because it offers us a modern novel that doesn’t relinquish the satisfactions of plot, because of its fierce loyalty to the places where Bolaño spent his formative years, its loyalty to a cosmopolitanism that is the expression of a way of life, and its loyalty to a joyful and desperate surrender to creation, far from social imperatives. His writing is always extremely clear, and yet it springs from the darkest places (sex, violence, love, exile, loneliness, breakups): “It’s all so simple and so terrible,” because “true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune.” And it’s no coincidence that he’s especially attracted to poets: it’s they who give his prose the capacity to express tenderness, unhappiness, and rootlessness. How can so much humor exist amid such desolation, so much decency amid such violence? Because in each of Bolaño’s books we ultimately find, as we clearly find here, the best Bolaño. An author horrified by our century’s violence, from the Nazis to the crimes of the north of Mexico; an author who identifies with the losers, and who makes of his work an autobiography, which in large part explains the mythification of his persona—because the great absence represented by his death is made into presence over the course of a series of works that culminate in 2666, where he seems to elaborate upon and condense all his experiences as a human being and as a writer. In Woes of the True Policeman we once again encounter a Bolaño who has become as familiar to us as he is indispensable. It remains bone-chilling to discover in this book an extraordinary vitality constantly threatened not only by the consciousness of physical illness but also by the moral sickness of an era. Vitality and desolation are inseparable.

Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas is a Spanish translator, critic, and professor. He teaches in the Masters of Creative Writing program at the University Pompeu Fabra, has translated Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Saviane, Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others, and is a literary critic for La Vanguardia. Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas lives in Barcelona.

Natasha Wimmer has translated many works of fiction and nonfiction by Spanish-language authors, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Restrepo, and Rodrigo Fresán, as well as Roberto Bolaño.

by Iza Wojciechowska and Rosalind Harvey

“Some people say I’m precocious,” begins Juan Pablo Villalobos’ super-slim, super-fast first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole. What follows is a beautiful, heart-breaking story told from the perspective of Tochtli, a precocious kid whose dad is a major Mexican drug lord. Tochtli has seen people murdered and has found his father’s gun room, but those things aren’t as important to him as collecting hats and acquiring a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Slowly, though, he begins to reconcile the world he understands with the world as it really is. Written in Spanish and translated by Rosalind Harvey, the book is an incredible debut—and a wonderful work of translation. This is Rosalind’s first solo translation, having previously worked with Anne McLean to co-translate Oblivion by Hector Abad (FSG, 2012) and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, 2012). I talked with Rosalind about Tochtli’s advanced vocabulary, her advice for young translators, and about the potential for more mainstream Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers, and Bolivian erotica. (more…)

By Andrés Neuman
Translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn
This story first appeared in The Coffin Factory, issue 3

I entered the hospital dying of hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is rage. We might shout, hit, spit at a stranger. The same person to whom – depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are anxious to hear – we might suddenly express our admiration, or hug, or swear an oath of loyalty. And it would be genuine, that love.

I entered without thinking anything, thinking about not thinking. I knew that my mother’s present, my future, depended on the toss of a coin. And that that coin was not in my hands and maybe not in the hands of anyone else either, not even those of the doctor. I have always thought that the absence of god liberated us from an unbearable weight. But more than once, I have missed the idea of divine mercy when entering or leaving a hospital. Filled with seats, corridors, hierarchies and ceremonies of hope, silent on their upper floors, hospitals are the closest thing to a cathedral in which we unbelievers may tread.

I entered trying to avoid this kind of reasoning, because I was afraid that I would end up praying like a cynic. I lent an arm to my mother, who so many times had given me hers when the world was enormous and my legs very short. Is it possible to shrink overnight? Can someone’s body turn into a sponge that has soaked up so many fears that it gains in density, while losing volume? My mother seemed shorter, thinner, but nevertheless more laden down than before, as if earthbound. Her porous hand closed over mine. I imagined a child in a bathtub, naked, expectant, squeezing a sponge. And I wanted to say something to my mother, and I didn’t know how to speak. (more…)

This fall FSG will publish Parallel Stories by acclaimed Hungarian author Péter Nádas. Editor Elisabeth Sifton writes, “After his last novel, A Book of Memories, appeared in English in 1997, many critics and readers agreed with Susan Sontag’s assessment that it was the greatest novel written in postwar Europe. But Nádas was already moving past that signal achievement. And now we can see how Parallel Stories—which took eighteen years to write, Nádas has said, and appeared in Budapest in 2005—extends and deepens the scope of his fiction, both in historical terms and in the most intimate, hidden terms of body and soul. The multilevel narrative reaches back to the 1930s, thickens in the crisis seasons of 1944–45, 1956, and 1961, and thrusts forward to 1989; and at every point we experience the intense and daring ways that the men and women he so memorably creates live through or transcend, create or deny the brutalities of their strife-torn times. This is a great novel about the twentieth century and, with its dazzling formal innovations and daring candor, a postmodern novel for the twenty-first.” (more…)

This newly translated piece by Jorge Luis Borges appears in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry. Ilan Stavans, the book’s editor and the translator of “Borges and I,” stopped by the FSG offices to record the piece in Spanish and English for us:

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The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other shares those preferences but with a vanity that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. It doesn’t cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but those pages can’t save me, perhaps because what’s good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and traditions. (more…)

Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in March, takes place in 2028, but it’s deeply indebted to—indeed, deeply enmeshed in—the past. Sorokin, whose knowledge of Russian literature and history is encyclopedic (without any of the stuffiness that such a word might suggest), has written a book haunted by the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Yet Oprichnik (a term for Ivan the Terrible’s most feared courtiers) also suggests that the violence, cruelty, and human degradation that characterized that regime have recurred throughout the country’s dark history. And very little has changed. In a glowing review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Kotkin wrote:

So it is in Putin’s Russia, where a gang of police officials, the siloviki, lord over not just the richest private citizens but also other parts of the state. Sorokin’s imaginative diagnosis of Putinism further grasps that the officials’ looting is driven not by profiteering alone, but by their conviction that they are defending Russian interests. Everything Sorokin’s oprichniks do is a transaction, but their love of country runs deep. They may give in to temptation and tune in to foreign radio (“enemy voices”), but these moments of weakness vitiate neither their pride in their work nor their code of honor. They have ideals.

Day of the Oprichnik is a satire and a polemic and a picaresque and a tragedy, but it’s also, as Kotkin notes, a brilliant analysis of a society in crisis—perhaps perpetually in crisis. Below, in an exclusive essay, Sorokin explores the roots of his remarkable diagnosis.

-Mark Krotov, Assistant Editor

Ideally, prose isn’t written—it simply happens.

Luckily, that’s exactly what occurred in the case of Day of the Oprichnik. The desire to find the literary equivalent of a chemical formula—one that would explain the servants of Russia’s authoritative absolutism—had been brewing for a long time, but any subject is connected, somehow or other, with style and with tone, which plays an important part in this formula. Write Lolita in the language of Goncharov or Faulkner, and it’ll be a rather predictable book. Each regime has its own style. Each hangman has his own unique humor, with which he justifies his actions and cheers himself up. It’s well-known that Ivan the Terrible often laughed hysterically as he gazed upon the suffering of the boyars he was torturing. It’s not hard to guess that out of respect for the tsar, the entourage present at the executions also roared with laughter. And so the people gathered on the square laughed, too. In the history of our country, where the government’s violence against individuality has always carried an inevitable character, laughter has concealed and hidden much. But laughter has also saved many.

I wanted to tell the story of a monstrous government’s servant in the language of the laughing marketplace.
(more…)

In 1949 Theodor Adorno famously said that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How, Adorno seemed to be asking, could existing forms of artistic representation be expected to convey something so aberrant, so distant from normal human behavior? Adorno’s comment thus represents a challenge to artists who seek to present the horror of the Holocaust in general and of Auschwitz in particular: to do so, they must move beyond traditional modes of representation and create new structures and forms. (more…)

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected “improvements” for a future printing.

There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.

(more…)

I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt’s stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard’s home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend.

-Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights

Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man? (more…)