Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  “I suppose it was foreordained I would go to college there,” he says. He majored in Romance languages, joined the armed services in 1943, and, through an O.S.S. recruiter, was sent to Europe, where he became a translator and “paraphraser”—confusing the enemy by translating the English coded message into different English. A remnant of the war years, a well-worn red military beret given to him by a British intelligence group, is still a sartorial trademark.

  After the war he earned a master’s degree in Spanish literature at Columbia, then a doctorate in Portuguese literature, and taught there until 1968, when Queens College made him an offer Columbia failed to match. He began his translation work in 1960 when he, along with Saul Galin and some colleagues at Columbia, started a short-lived magazine called Odyssey Review, which translated little-known foreign authors into English (Jorge Luis Borges and Nobel Prize—winner Miguel Ángel Asturias were early choices, before they became well known here). Rabassa took on minor translation chores as the magazine’s work load mounted, and in 1964 Sara Blackburn, then an editor at Pantheon Books, asked Rabassa to try a translation of Hopscotch. He worked on a sample; everyone, including Cortázar, liked it. That was the beginning of a new career.

  His translations—although abundant, lauded, and in great demand—do not earn him a living. When he began, the going rate was around fifteen dollars for a thousand words; now it’s up to forty dollars, although he commands fifty dollars plus sometimes a small percentage of the royalties. “Even if I worked my tail off I still wouldn’t make twenty thousand dollars a year,” he says.

  Translating technical nonfiction bores him, and not all fiction by fine writers sustains him. He regrets choosing The Green Pope and The Eyes of the Interred by Asturias. “After I got into them I said, ‘I should never have taken this on.’ I didn’t realize how imperfect they were. You could eliminate a lot of scenes that didn’t serve much purpose. It was a good example of how a writer shouldn’t be too hasty.”

  His translation of Demetrio Aguilera-Malta’s Seven Serpents and Seven Moons was a labor of love. He knew the author, and his wife, Clementine, now a professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, was writing her dissertation on him. Rabassa saw a manuscript copy of Seven Serpents, read it, decided “it was time Demetrio got some recognition,” and began the translation, which was eventually published by the University of Texas Press.

  He has translated works by Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Brazilian novelists Osman Lins and Clarice Lispector (“She looks like Marlene Dietrich and writes like Virginia Woolf”), and Spaniards Juan Goytisolo and Juan Benet, whose novel A Meditation is forthcoming.

  The translation that gave him the most trouble was Paradiso by the late Cuban writer José Lezama Lima. In its original version the novel was vast and sprawling. Rabassa valued it highly, yet the publisher cut it and pruned it “much too strongly,” he feels. “They simplified it. It had a complicated syntax, and it gave me a lot of wonderful problems. With some writers you have to be inventive, but with Lezama Lima you had to be reconstructive. You knew what he was saying but damned if you could say it in English. You had to rewrite the sentence to make it fall into place.”

  But he insists there is a limit to how far a translator should rewrite: “The translator is not in the silk-purse business; when the novel is inadequate, how can the translation redeem it? Yet, there are exceptions: Poe is a better poet in French than in English because of Baudelaire.”

  To illuminate the problem a translator faces, Rabassa cites the language of a rooster. English-speaking roosters say “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” but in Spanish they say “Ki-ki-ri-ki.”

  “There is a difference between a substitution and a replacement,” he has written. “Nabokov would speak of translation as a kind of eclipse: the two words are represented by circles, but the new word almost never covers the old one completely. Each word has a portion that it doesn’t share with the other. These parts that lap over are what make substitution impossible. This is the stuff that puns are made of. What can we do with George S. Kaufman’s masterpiece, ‘One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian’?”

  Rabassa is working slowly on a book on translation that Yale University Press wants to publish. It will not be a theoretical work, for he feels George Steiner’s After Babel is the last word on that matter. His will be a memoir about his life and work with his remarkable authors.

  There is so much more he wants to translate, such as the work of the Brazilian writer Dalton Trevisan, for example, whose collection, The Vampire of Curitiba, he translated in 1972. “He’s a mystery man,” Rabassa says, “not quite as extreme as J. D. Salinger. He was a devil to work with. He would make changes that had nothing to do with the translations. He keeps sending me his books. What I’ve got to do is translate some short stories and get them published individually. His last book didn’t do too well and yet it’s a good book.”

  Rabassa is solicitous not only of his own authors but also of the translator’s survival problems. He talks of the need for a clearinghouse, an idea pushed by the American Literary Translators Association in Dallas, which would match publishers with competent translators of valued foreign works; not an easy task, as the abundance of unreadable translations obviously proves.

  It stands, then, as a marvelous gift to English readers that Rabassa flourishes. One is grateful not only for the masterworks that have filtered so magically through his remarkable mind, but also for the little-known works that he has been instrumental in bringing to light—including his most recent revelation, the wild and frenetic Macho Camacho’s Beat by the Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sánchez. The response to all this work at first encounter is enormous surprise and pleasure, and then gratitude for its accessibility. And in an age when consciousness of Latin America is exploding in this country, one looks hopefully to the other extraordinary writers standing outside our literary gates, waiting for more benefactors like Rabassa to come along with the golden key and let them in.

  1981

  Carlos Fuentes:

  Distant Relations

  Carlos Fuentes creates two families, both named Heredia, in his Byzantine new novel: a ghost story, a gothic trompe l’oeil, a perplexing but fascinating plunge into historical and literary allusions he calls Distant Relations.

  The title (it was Una Familia Lejana when published in Mexico in 1980) reflects the link between the Heredia families, the ties of the past to the present, the old world to the new, France to Mexico, Alexandre Dumas to Carlos Fuentes, and much more, of which we will add another matched pair not equated in the text: José María Heredia, Cuban journalist and poet, born in 1803, exiled in 1823 for his role in a failed revolution, and who died in Mexico in 1839—and José Maria de Heredia, born in Cuba in 1842, but who became a French poet, a member of the Parnassian poets and whose fame rests on a single collection of sonnets and poems, Les Trophées.

  The latter Heredias were cousins and stand as a near-perfect inspiration for Fuentes’s novel: existing resolutely in separate worlds, on separate continents, products of separate cultures, linked by common birthplace, common blood, a common name, and by poetry that is perfectly polarized for Fuentes’s use—one the product of a passionate revolutionary mind, the other classical in origin, method, intent and achievement.

  Fuentes doesn’t need these Heredias, and whether they actually did inspire him is only relevant as a literary footnote. His own life really inspired this book, which he says is the novel of his for which he cares most. “It says the most about me as a writer and my interests in literature,” he told Alfred MacAdam and Charles Ruas in a Paris Review (Fall 1981) interview. “It is about writing, the only novel I have ever written about writing.”

  He adds: “It also deals with the influence of France on the Caribbean nations, the ghosts of French writers who came from Latin America, like Lautréamont or Heredia. The novel deals with the origins of fiction, how no story can ever be fully told, how no text can ever be fully exhausted.”

  To this en
d he has written a novel which can never be fully understood, his meaning not only deliberately incomplete at novel’s end, but leading perhaps into a novel yet to be written.

  It begins reasonably enough in a Jamesean sort of situation and setting, the Automobile Club de France overlooking the Place de la Concorde, where two men sit, one talking, the other listening. Talking is the Comte de Branly, eighty-three, a French aristocrat. Listening is a younger man, who is not identified until the novel’s late pages and who proves to be the narrator of the novel we are reading, a man named Fuentes.

  “You are afraid to be the narrator of this novel about the Heredias,” Branly tells Fuentes, “because you fear the vile devil who may take revenge against the last man to know the story. But you are forgetting something I have tried to tell you more than once. Every novel is in a way incomplete, but as well, contiguous with another story. Take your own life. In 1945, Fuentes, you decided to live in Buenos Aires; you became a citizen of the River Plate region, and then in 1955 you came to live in France. You became less of a River Plate man, and more French than anything else. Isn’t that so?”

  Fuentes says it’s so, but he ultimately identifies with both branches of the Heredia family of the story, overcoming any free-floating fear of the devil which may be hovering about, telling us his story, and seeking—in and also outside this novel, it would seem—to heal the ambivalence he feels within his psyche: a man pressured by the influences of Parnassian France as well as the mestizo life of Mexico.

  Branly tells Fuentes that his Mexican friend, Hugo Heredia, an archaeologist more enamored of Toltec stones than of men, was characteristic of the polycultural Latin American intellectual. He had, says Branly, “the passion to know everything, to read everything, to give no quarter, no pretext to the European, but also to know well what the European does not know and what he considers his own … above all, to demonstrate to the European that there is no excuse not to know other cultures.”

  This looks very like a mirror image of Carlos Fuentes as we have come to know him, an omnicultural figure who interprets for his readers and listeners not only the life, literature, politics and history of Mexico, but of Latin America, France, Spain and the United States. He is clearly a literary hybrid: a manically acquisitive intellectual, compulsively analytical, yeasty victim of the temptation to elaborate, and a manic storyteller as well, creator of a tale so convoluted and contradictory that it requires the novel’s full length just to state its mystery. Resolution of the mystery Fuentes leaves to the soothsaying literary critics among his readers.

  Let me add that in spite of this, Distant Relations is not difficult to enter, and it is translated with very readable fervor by Margaret Sayers Peden, Fuentes’s regular translator. Once within the story, though you barely hold on to the plot as you acquire it, you cannot help but listen, for Fuentes holds you with his formidably surreal imagination.

  He dedicates his novel to the great surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and adds a quotation: “What is frightful is what one cannot imagine.” Fuentes has also said: “Nothing astonishes me, because the world has bewitched me.”

  His story is so bewitched that it is unsummarizable. But in part it goes like this: the archaeologist Hugo Heredia has lost his wife and his son, Antonio, in a plane crash (they were en route to Europe). A second son, Victor, did not take the trip, and Victor and Hugo develop an unusual closeness.

  Victor and Hugo become Branly’s house guests in Paris, and as is usual with them when they visit a new city, they play their name game and look up other Heredias in the phone book to make connections. They call another Victor Heredia, then visit him (taking Branly along) at his chateau, a literary creation Fuentes says was somewhat inspired by a chateau once owned by Gustave Doré, and which Fuentes rented.

  “The house,” he told MacAdam and Ruas, “brought back all my yearnings for form and terror. Doré’s illustrations for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ for example: they’re so incredibly erotic! The little girl in bed with the wolf! Those were the signs under which … Distant Relations was born.”

  At the chateau Branly and the Mexican Heredias encounter the Parisian Heredias—father Victor, son André. The son is equal in age to the Mexican boy, Victor, and an affinity is struck which peaks in one of the book’s most bizarre scenes: when Branly comes upon the two boys in the back seat of his Citroën, which, three days after he’d been in an accident in it, had become a “foul smelling cave … a depository for rotted vegetation, swirling temperatures, and detritus.…”

  In this cave of a car the boys, Victor and André, are copulating. But this is far more than what it seems, though Branly will be a while discovering that.

  Branly tries and fails to break up this union, unaware it exists on a plane of mystery he will never really understand. What this generates in him is a series of memories of two of his own lost playmates, one a boy who will turn out to be the French Victor Heredia, the other a girl who will be the wife of Hugo Heredia, and also be a girl perceived by Branly’s specter in a park 180 years ago. Branly encounters these phantoms in the chateau, where he remains inexplicably bedridden while the ghosts are incarnated.

  Branly reports on his response to all this as the book winds down: “I did, it is true, finally see the relationships among certain objects. What I still do not know is why those relationships exist […] Perhaps one of my ancestors in the fourteenth century, with no difficulty, understood the homologous relationship among God, a hart with burgeoning antlers, and the hunter’s moon. By the sixteenth century, another ancestor would not have known this; he could not see the correspondence among these things. Art, you see, and especially the art of narration, is a desperate attempt to reestablish analogy without sacrificing differentiation. This is what Cervantes, Balzac, Dostoevsky accomplished. Proust was no different. Surely no novel can escape that terrible urgency.”

  Branly tells Fuentes that they too are “bound together by a shared rejection of the death of the past” and that by some incomprehensible juxtapositioning of time and event, they all came together, all of the Heredias, Branly, now Fuentes, to create, to perceive, an angel. That angel turns up on the iron catwalk which spans the swimming pool in the Automobile Club.

  The angel is a waiter with an empty tray, and he is singing the last lines of a madrigal, “So beautiful were its waters that in them I did drown.” He has a face like a wildcat, curly bronze hair, golden skin, and parts of his head and body appear to belong to different creatures. He is, of course, the fused being created through that copulation in the Citroën. Isn’t he?

  Branly is swimming in the pool’s tranquillity and then, as the angel-waiter hovers, the pool erupts in violent waves, almost drowning Branly, who is saved by Fuentes. The waiter vanishes. Branly is weakened and returns to his bed.

  Later, Fuentes returns to the pool and as he approaches he smells freshly cut pineapple, ripe plantains, “the butter red flesh of the mamey.” He hears a Mexican woman singing a melancholy ballad, finds the pool obscured in a tangle of lush plants, ivy-covered trees. He startles parrots into flight, dislodges the nests of tiny hummingbirds, finds himself facing a monkey with the face of Fuentes. His feet sink into the moist earth, the yellow mud of the swimming pool’s edge.

  He climbs to the catwalk, looks below into the now-scummy pool to see two bodies, embraced, floating, “two fetuses curled upon themselves like Siamese twins, joined by their umbilicus, floating with a placidity that repudiates all past, all history, all repentance.… These are preternaturally old fetuses, as if they had swum nine centuries in their mother’s womb … the faces of two boys become old men.…”

  “Heavy of heart,” says Fuentes, “I retreat, never turning my back, as if bidding a last farewell to an imprisoned hero, to a god interred in life, to drowned angels.…”

  With five more lines the book ends, the puzzle begins.

  1982

  Osman Lins:

  Avalovara*

  What we have here is a nonesuch, a great
curiosity of the age, an eloquent, maddening puzzle for literary cryptographers and cabalists, a novel of dazzling intellect, sublime and ridiculous poetry, surreal explosions, brilliant excess, and vast stretches of magniloquent boredom. It is a work of almost scientific precision, geometric in design, arithmetical in growth, mythical, mystical, humorless, and high camp to the thirty-second degree.

  The novel, first published in 1973, is one of the major works of a Brazilian writer, Osman Lins, who died in 1978 at age fifty-four, and it introduces Lins to American readers. The translation from the Portuguese is a tour de force and reconfirms the preeminence of Gregory Rabassa in bringing a canon of modern Latin American masterpieces to the English language.

  Avalovara is masterful not because of what it reveals about human behavior, which is questionable and minimal, but because of how that minimality is grandiosely imagined and structured.

  “Prose is architecture,” said Hemingway, “and the baroque is over.” Lins gives half of that dictum the old heave-ho and creates an architecture of a most baroque order, structuring the kind of novel Jorge Luis Borges might have written, if he’d only had the inclination to write a novel, and if he’d had a sexier mind.

  Sex, lubriciously poetical sex, is central to the book. It’s not an arousing sort of sex, never pornographic, content (with one small exception) with talk of vulva and glans. Whenever it threatens to go over the edge into down-home salacity, Lins switches to images of chariots, lanterns, birds, and rugs. The sex, an assignation in a Brazilian hotel between the two principals, begins on page 1 and climaxes spectacularly on page 332. In between may well be the longest case of coitus interruptus on record.

  The principals are Abel, son of a whore, now a writer (with a life itinerary that seems similar to Lins’s), and a married woman named only by an ideogram, which looks like this: