Carlos Fuentes: The Writer and his Translators, by Tony Beckwith

America Reads Spanish is pleased to be able to share the following article about Carlos Fuentes with its readers. The author Tony Beckwith is not only a writer, but a translator, interpreter, voice talent and cartoonist.

Carlos Fuentes: The Writer and his Translators

By Tony Beckwith

“Nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed.” -Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden).

Carlos Fuentes died on May 15, 2012 in Mexico City. He was 83. He had lived the fullest of lives, and was widely regarded as one of the grand old men of Latin American letters. With his passing, a major chapter in the literature of the Spanish-speaking world comes to an end.

Fuentes once told NPR (National Public Radio) that when he was a boy living in the United States, his father, a career diplomat, taught him “…the history, geography, the values of Mexico. Then I went and saw the real country and this created a conflict in me … In the tension between my imagination and reality, my literary possibilities as a novelist were born…. I see criticism as our way of being optimistic in a growing nation such as Mexico. To abstain from criticism is, I think, a way of being pessimistic; to engage in criticism is to be concerned with the matters at hand and with the country.”

I met Fuentes briefly in 1977, when he came to address the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference and the Texas Book Fair. He was that quintessential Latin American figure—the public intellectual. He was an articulate force in social, political, and academic circles, well-endowed with the courage of his convictions which he expressed with a natural urbanity and sparkle that made him a welcome guest on interview shows all over the world. As a journalist he was provocative and known to wield “a fearsome pen.” During his visit I wondered what it might be like to translate his books, and mused on the many ways there might be to prepare for an opportunity of that kind.

News of his death made me think of his legacy of words and ideas, and of his penchant for promoting his fellow writers. As I looked at the long list of his works, my eyes hovered over the names of the translators who have introduced him to the English-speaking world over the last fifty years. I began to think of Fuentes in terms of those who knew him and his work rather better than most, and what they remembered about translating his stories and essays and novels. Three of them graciously agreed to be interviewed for this article: Alfred Mac Adam[i], Suzanne Jill Levine[ii], and Margaret Sayers Peden[iii].

Mac Adam first collaborated with Fuentes in 1984 on the book Christopher Unborn, and remembered accepting the assignment “with tremendous misgivings. After all, the novel is long, unimaginably complex and contains a huge range of styles, including long passages in the local slang of Mexico City. My Spanish, my English and my sanity would all be put to the test. This was unlike anything I’d ever translated in my life, but the honor of translating the author of The Death of Artemio Cruz was an opportunity I would never turn down.”[iv]

Indeed, what a magnet! And not without immediate rewards. The project included a trip to Mexico with Fuentes and the editor from the publishing house for a one-week marathon editing session in a secluded country house. Mac Adam recalled that “this collaboration was a shock for Carlos. Our daily reading exercise was actually the first time he’d ever gone over his Spanish original with an editor. The editor—as we know that person in U.S. publishing—had only recently come into existence in the Spanish-speaking world. In the past, it was simply assumed that the author would watch over his own work. Because of the editor’s suggestions, Carlos found himself making changes in the English text he wished he could have made to the original, paring and deleting to make the narrative more fluid. Producing the translation actually changed the author’s perception of the original.” For most translators, such a close working relationship with the author is the exception rather than the rule, but it was not unusual when working with Carlos Fuentes.

Suzanne Jill Levine translated Fuentes’s Holy Place in 1972. She was not quite 25 years old at the time, and the writer must have recognized a familiar precocity in the young translator. They became friends as they collaborated on the translation, and the correspondence between them is a fertile source of insights into their process. In a letter from Mexico City in November, 1971, Fuentes says that Levine makes him “read like Henry James.” He goes on to say: “…I have only one basic desire: that the Claudia-Mito dialogs should be a lot harder, rougher, biting, more vulgar. As long as he narrates in the 1st person, the Jamesian tone with baroque overtones is just perfect; when the mother and son engage in verbal battle, there should be (as in the Spanish original) a marked difference; Claudia, particularly, should be much more bitchy and almost gangster-like in her speech: like something out of Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald.” When I asked Levine how it felt to have the author coaching from the sidelines, she said: “I loved Carlos's guidance when translating Holy Place. He told me to make Claudia's quips more Raymond Chandler-esque, which was excellent advice, as he was doing a takeoff, in those sections, on the hardboiled American roman noir; indeed one of the books that most influenced him in its style and treatment of social and political corruption was Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.”

Levine, a life-long academic and prolific translator of Latin American writers, met Fuentes in 1969 through her partner and mentor Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the Uruguayan scholar and literary critic. Monegal founded the literary magazine Mundo Nuevo that was published in Spanish in Paris and contributed to the "Boom" in Latin American literature that spanned the 1960s and 70s. Monegal and Fuentes were close friends, and thanks to their efforts Mundo Nuevo introduced unknown writers to a wider audience. In 1966, for example, the magazine published a chapter of Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude], the now-legendary novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Fuentes and Monegal were key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature because they facilitated a literary dialogue between North and South America at a very difficult time. Literature and politics were uneasy partners in a complicated relationship, and initiatives such as Mundo Nuevo provided a channel for dialogue. It was always about the dialogue.

Levine was at Columbia University writing her MA thesis on Gabriel García Márquez and remembers having lunch with him and Fuentes and Monegal in Barcelona during a trip to Europe in the summer of 1970. She recalled how generous Fuentes was in his support of “Gabo” (Gabriel) and other writers, a quality that is always mentioned when people talk about Carlos Fuentes. She said that his generosity of spirit was “an expression of the grass roots of politics in the world of literature; he understood that writers need defenders, they need champions.” I asked Levine what had interested her most about this book from a translator’s perspective and she said it was the shrill dialogue, the conversations with unspoken tensions beneath.

A translator must obviously be skilled in working with dialogue, especially when it includes a lot of slang. Fuentes was prone to put slang expressions into his characters’ mouths. Alfred Mac Adam translated six of his books, so I asked him about that aspect of the work: “The major challenge was his vast vocabulary in Spanish and his ability to make puns in several languages. Keeping up with that was hard. Translating slang is also difficult, especially if the slang in question is from another era. What do you do—try to replicate 1960s Mexico City slang in some kind of New York 1960s slang? Impossible.”

When Fuentes came to Texas I interviewed him for the Austin newspaper and asked which of his own books satisfied him most. With no hesitation he said: “Terra Nostra. It is the hardest to read. Many readers shy away from it, but my best readers are the readers of Terra Nostra.” One reason people shy away from it is that it is a long book, and I wondered what steps a translator would take to keep track of things when working on a book of that size. Margaret Sayers Peden translated it in 1976, and was subsequently asked if she “made a special effort, for the sake of consistency, to keep track of the way you’ve translated particular words that reappear throughout the work?” Peden said she did, and added: “I also believe that the same word, given the fact that words are slippery and treacherous, needs to be translated differently within different contexts.”

Sayers Peden went back to school in 1962 to get her master’s degree, but claims to have done nothing literary or academic before then. She was “drawn to translating by forces I … still don’t understand. But once started I wasn’t going to be stopped…. It never dawned on me that I couldn’t translate anything I wanted.” As she evolved as a literary translator she realized that she had “a very persistent flaw. I wanted to stay too close to the Spanish. That was something very difficult for me to unlearn.” That process of “unlearning” sounds like an excellent way to develop the flexibility a translator requires to handle the endless subtleties of language and meaning. “Problems are essentially the same among the genres. There’s music in prose, information to be communicated in poetry.” Sayers Peden went on to translate six Fuentes books, including The Old Gringo, which was made into a movie.

So, what was it like working with him? Alfred Mac Adam said: “After working on Christopher Unborn, I became Carlos’s regular translator. Meaning that when he had one of his manuscripts (he usually wrote in longhand) transcribed—by his daughter from his first marriage (to the actress Rita Macedo)—he would have a copy sent to me. I would then get right to work on it so the translation would be out in a timely fashion.” I asked him about being Carlos’s regular translator: “It was like having a second job. For a couple of decades he was a part of my life, so his words were constantly ringing in my ears.”

Levine’s correspondence with Fuentes tells many stories. There are so many enticing side tracks in their letters that it is a challenge to keep the focus on the matter at hand. A relevant item, however, that gives us some idea of how Fuentes approached the collaboration, is a request for clarification on a word that elicits this answer: “Escuincle is the Mexican equivalent of the Río de la Plata’s pibe or the Chilean cabro. From the Nahuatl itzcuintle, a very small hairless dog. ‘Brat’ will do.” In response to another query, Fuentes writes: “…Actually, Chole is a nickname for women called Soledad.” He then adds, in his trademark tongue-in-cheek style: “Cien años de Chole”.

In discussing the relationship between writer and translator, Levine said: “…the relationship an author establishes with the translator is different from that with scholars and critics; authors may be willing to open up to translators in ways they would be reluctant to do with critics and scholars. There is a more intimate relationship at times, which may have to do with the shared experience of the materiality of writing.”[v]

As translators we are not only doing what Margaret Sayers Peden describes as “bringing something new to people who wouldn’t have it otherwise.” We are also flowing the other way and sojourning in a time and place—created by a writer—as we describe it in another language. In this case the writer was Carlos Fuentes, who will be greatly missed by his readers and his translators.

Tony Beckwith was born into a British family living in Argentina and spent his formative years in Uruguay. He subsequently lived in various countries in Latin America and Europe (spending several years in Great Britain and Spain) before coming to the United States in 1980. Since then, he has lived in Austin, Texas where he works as a writer and literary translator, specializing in the fields of art and literature. His writing and translations have appeared in numerous publications in the Americas and Europe. [tony@tonybeckwith.com]

[I] Alfred Mac Adam, Ph.D, Columbia University.

[ii] Suzanne Jill Levine, Ph.D, professor at University of California in Santa Barbara.

[iii] Margaret Sayers Peden was unexpectedly unavailable at the last minute and unable to participate in the interview. She is quoted here from “The Intimate Presence of the Other: An Interview with Margaret Sayers Peden by James Hoggard” forTranslation Review, Volume 56, 1998.

[iv] “On Becoming a Fuentette” by Alfred Mac Adam [from: AARP VIVA, Spring 2011].

[v] Excerpt from “For Women and Translation. Suzanne Jill Levine interviewed by María Constanza Guzmán.”

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