Abstract
Of all the varieties of translation, perhaps none is more faithless than self-translation. Although the technical challenges are the same, it adds a dimension of personal and creative reassessment missing from second-party translations. The author who translates his or her own work knows it too well, rather than well enough. Unlike the typical translator, the autologous translator works not only with the finished product; present at the creation, he remembers the gestation of the work—the false starts, the dead ends, the changes of direction, all of the decisions and accidents that shaped the finished product. Equally important, biscriptive writers have a unique, untranslatable relation with each of their languages. Calvert Casey was able to recast “The Walk” as “El paseo,” but what he could not do was translate into one language his relation with the other, which is why the two versions of the story differ in small but meaningful ways. In a truly multilingual writer, the translation of a tongue tie gets caught up in another tongue tie. Were Casey to have delved into “his” Spanish in “his” English, the tone and content of the remarks about Spanish would have been skewed by his relation to English. To examine his tongue ties without distortion, he would have had to resort to a “neutral” language, one divested of affect, one that—in Santayana’s terms—would be no more than an instrument.
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El estudio propio de la literatura no es la obra sino el escritor.
[The proper object of literary study is not the work but the writer.]
—Guillermo Cabrera Infante
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Notes
Jason Wilson, “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: An Interview in a Summer Manner,” in Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey, ed. John King (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 309.
Steven Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000 ), 12. Kellman does not include Cabrera Infante in his extensive “roster” of translingual writers (117–118).
Rita Guibert, Seven Voices, trans. Frances Partridge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 397–398.
Suzanne Jill Levine, “Wit and Wile with Guillermo Cabrera Infante,” Americas 47, no. 4 (July–August 1995): 29.
When Levine was translating Vista, he asked her: “Do you think that the vignettes (or whatever they’re called) are coming out too Hemingwayan in English? I’m worried about that with some of them, particularly the older ones (like those you are translating now, the one with the two generals), that were written around 1963 or even before. It worries me because of the possible American reader (and especially critic).” As quoted in Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1991), 106.
On Cabrera Infante and Hemingway, see Terry J. Peavler, “Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Debt to Ernest Hemingway,” Hispania 62 (1979): 289–296.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vista del amanecer en el trópico (New York: Penguin, 1997), 194. Other page references to the Spanish edition will be included in the text.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1967), 9.
Raymond Souza, Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 118.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “Cronología a la manera de Laurence Sterne … o no,” in Infantería, ed. Nivia Montenegro and Enrico Mario Santí (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 42. Virginia Press, 1998), 28–38
Nivia Montenegro, “¿Qué dise/mi/nrxción?: Island Vision in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Vista del amanecer en el trópico,” Cuban Studies 28 (1999): 125–53.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, View of Dawn in the Tropics (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 86. Other page references to this edition will be included in the text.
See Peavler, “Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Debt to Ernest Hemingway”; also Terry J. Peavler, “Cabrera Infante’s Undertow,” in Structures of Power: Essays on Twentieth-Century Spanish-American Fiction, ed. Terry J. Peavler and Peter Standish (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 125–143.
There is also an orthodox, not to say faithful, translation of this story by Suzanne Jill Levine: “A Nest of Sparrows on the Awning,” in The Eye of the Heart, ed. Barbara Howes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 357–363.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Writes of Passage (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), x.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers (New York: Harper & Row, 1871), 55. The title page states that the novel was “translated from the Cuban by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine in collaboration with the author.”
Regina Janes, “Up in Smoke,” in Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Assays, Essays, and Other Arts, ed. Ardis L. Nelson (NewYork: Twayne, 1999), 186.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “The Phantom of the Essoldo,” in London Tales, ed. Julian Evans (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 108.
Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 98.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Remembering Things Past in Translation. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_6
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