And Not Towards Peace
I admire the exquisite ease and the lucid prose with which EA moves between different genres in the compressed space of this afterword. Political history, literary history, biography, prophecy, literary criticism, even her personal report of the text by E.B. White she stumbled upon in Havana—I find myself almost overlooking the scope of her material because of the seamlessness and deceptive ease with which she transitions between these multiple inputs.
I’d suggest, moreover, that by beginning the essay with the reflections of a fictionalized Don Diego and ending it with the dream of a nameless narrator, EA invites the reader to circle back and to juxtapose these moments. That is, the man who sees merely his one impulses reflected in the vastness and diversity of America in turn mirrors the speaker who trips over and is finally incarcerated by the inability to express his own words. What is louder than perfect silence, a “desolate paradise”? Or what experience is more vexingly raucous than being unable to say what’s on the tip of the tongue?
“The Crazed Euphoria”
Is it against the rules to use the word admire twice in three paragraphs or does panegyric impose a quota? In any case, reading this review on the heels of the afterword, I’m impressed by facility with which EA recalibrates her prose voice. Here we have more commas and hence a different rhythm, a tactile figurative expressions such “stabbing madly,” a more colloquial but equally adept voice.
On translating Zama into English: inasmuch as Di Benedetto is interested in the meanings which resound in silence, we could note how English, in its nouns and adjectives, silences the gender Spanish necessarily articulates. We could also mention the risk of articulating in translation what the author has purposefully left unsaid. More words, as occurs in Hemingway, could signify not more meaning but less.
On translating Zama into film: speaking from the prodigious ignorance of someone who’s neither read the book nor seen the film, I think an obvious challenge of moving from the novel to the screen is the non-negotiable forfeiture of interiority—of, that is, the absolute necessity of externalizing a character’s head space via images, gestures, and words. From what I gather, Martel’s technique calls for, paradoxically, articulating silence via sound.
“Ace”
EA’s thesis that silence is an integral element to Di Benedetto’s language could equally be a description of this story’s structure. That is, Di Benedetto, by displacing the narrative toward Rosa Esther’s immediate family and away from that of the shopkeeper, creates and subsequently undercuts the expectation that the two threads will factually unite, beyond the symmetry of repeated images and thematic coherence. His is a story sans denouement, by authorial design.
Call it a footnote: Leyes, translated literally into English, would mean Laws. One interpretation would be that Di Benedetto’s character violates the natural law, the civil law, and, making his demands upon Rosa Esther’s family, espouses his word and his wish as a law in itself. Di Benedetto exposes an arbitrariness which debases the equity of the law until it is no law at all.
An afternoon with Gabriella Page-Forte
Although calling the translator at once the “beating heart” and the “turning wheel” of the literary translation world first struck me as a dubiously mixed metaphor, GPF aptly highlighted the complex, multifaceted space the translator inhabits. If on the one hand the translator is the amongst the closest readers of a text, enabling an exchange of stores and ideas which wouldn’t otherwise have taken place, the translator can be, on the other, a book’s most fervent advocate before an agent, an editor, or a publisher. I recall the consummate translator Michael Henry Heim who, despite his critique of the excesses of capitalism, saw the marketplace as a mechanism able to facilitate his deep-seated wish for languages and literatures to enrich one another via translation.
So at the risk of being presumptive, the translator is both the blood-pumping organ of an organic process and a cog turning a mechanical one. Indispensable in either case. Who else if not the translator has the lingual skill, the cultural awareness, and the practical acumen to reduce the woeful inequity revealed by that graphic of north/south publishing? Given GBF’s hypothesis that young American readers are increasingly interested in world literature, our humble contribution could allow these new voices to take center stage.
-Josh
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