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| REDONDA COAT OF ARMS |
The ghastly conclusion is that a government might claim the right to silence an individual, much as Deza claims his right to silence himself. This safe, static silence is abhorrent to Marías. To him conversation is as natural as air; it is an essential, egalitarian activity. In the words of Wheeler, it is “what most defines and unites us ... the wheel that moves the world.” It is the one pleasure we all may enjoy in equal measure, a commonality that binds us in our shared humanity as creators of our world. As Marías writes at the beginning of his autobiographical novel Dark Back of Time, “I believe I’ve never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everybody does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell.” In effect, Marías is arguing for the conversation’s immense importance to civilization — that we collectively breathe the fabric of reality into reality through fictions we tell as truths. Talk is fragile, can be misinterpreted, can be put to malign uses; it is subject to our moods and whims. But if we do not speak, our thoughts die with us.
There is no such thing as the indispensable book or author, and the world would be exactly the same if Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Nabokov and Borges had never existed. It might not be quite the same if none of them had existed, but the non-existence of just one of them would certainly not have affected the whole. That is why it is so tempting – an easy temptation if you like – to think that the representative twentieth-century novel must be the one that very nearly didn’t exist, the one that nobody would have missed ...
What is one to make of ‘a solidão de esparguete da girafa’ on page one? Should I have translated that as ‘the spaghetti solitude of the giraffe’ rather than ‘the lofty, long-drawn-out solitude of the giraffe’, which was my final version? Does ‘spaghetti solitude’ mean anything in English? But then does ‘solidão de esparguete’ mean anything in Portuguese? Am I committing the translator’s cardinal sin of domesticating and explaining? Possibly, but those are the kinds of decisions I had to make all the time. Sometimes, the images slipped satisfyingly into English, for example, ’as cobras enrolavam-se em espirais moles de cagalhão’ became ‘cobras lay coiled in soft, dungy spirals’; sometimes I simply went with what was there: ‘no tanque dos hipopótamos inchava a lenta tranquilidade dos gordos’ became ‘the hippopotamus pool exuded the languid sloth of the obese’.
As a translator, you have to be endlessly alert and adaptable and also (one hopes) as endlessly inventive as the author, and in this book [The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes], you need to capture, if you can, the hypnotic quality of the prose.
An evening of stories by the late Chilean master (The Savage Detectives, 2666) and writers who inspired him, including pieces by Javier Marías, Nicanor Parra, and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño is known for a particular noirish, atmospheric, dangerous, edgy, cool, engrossing style that immediately draws you in to a world of writers, policemen, prostitutes, politicians, militants, lovers and dreamers. Bolaño won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2666. Performers include Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire and A Serious Man), Felix Solis, Ivan Hernandez (the Public Theater's concert staging of Paul Simon's The Capeman) and Charles Keating.
It is possible to see the imprint of Bolaño most beloved writers on his novels and stories. The elements of his influence were certainly put to best display on Wednesday. Both Bolaño’s elements of mystery and comedy were visible in the poem and two stories that were chosen for the evening. In Marías’ “On the Honeymoon,” the narrator describes watching a woman walking down the street “adjusting the elastic on a recalcitrant pair of panties.” When later, she gestures up toward the balcony where he is sitting and screams, “You’re mine, or I’ll kill you!” it is easy to recall scenes from his oeuvre. I thought of the three academics in the first section of 2666, who, at first trivially arguing in a taxicab, end up assaulting their driver. We get a sense that, at any moment, the comic banal can descend into violence. In his story, Marías has created a world that is chilling and mesmerizing. The reader is made squirmishly uncomfortable, and yet feels completely at ease. Bolaño’s humorous meditations on writers and literature within his novels was also evidenced in the Parra’s poem “Something Like That,” when the speaker muses: “The true problem of philosophy is who does the dishes.” And in Borges’s “The Shape of the Sword,” a story of an Irishman’s betrayal by a friend who turns out to be the narrator himself, we see where Bolaño found his playfulness with form.
I was already at the twentieth section of the book [Levantado do chão] and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.
In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. [...]
One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. [...]
