Seven Ways to Kill a Cat

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

ONE OF THE challenges in any translation is preserving a sense of place, affording the reader a glimpse of the foreign, of another life, another culture.

The Buenos Aires of Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is not simply a place, it is a patchwork of smells and tastes and especially sounds since Matías Néspolo does not describe this world but conjures it through dialogue, idiom and slang. Slang varies from country to country, from city to city, even from town to town. More than meaning, it has a music and an attitude; translating it, taming it can risk making what is alien too familiar.

In trying to capture the crackling energy of these voices, the vernacular of drugs and guns and sex, I felt there was a danger that these street kids from Buenos Aires might sound as though they were from south London (or east Baltimore), so I have chosen to keep elements of the original which I hope can be easily understood in context. Since I could not imagine Gringo addressing his friends as ‘mate’, ‘buddy’, ‘bro’ or ‘brah’, I borrowed from Spanish the many words for friend — socio (partner), loco (madman), viejo (old friend), compañero (comrade), pibe (kid) and the ubiquitous Argentinian interjection che (which can translate as ‘man’ or simply as ‘hey!’) which famously gave Ernesto Guevara his nickname.

Many characters in the book are also only ever referred to by their nicknames and these, too, I left unchanged, deciding that, on balance, more would be lost than gained by having characters called Bandy-legs (El Chueco), Blondie (Gringo), Babyface (El Jetita) and The Jellyfish (El Medusa).

Lastly, there are the cultural trappings that have no equivalents — foodstuffs like morcilla (a blood sausage utterly unlike black pudding), alfajores (chocolate-covered sandwich biscuits filled with quince jelly or caramel), to say nothing of the complex ritual of making and drinking mate (carefully prepared from bitter yerba buena leaves in a hollow gourd, often ornately carved and with a silver rim, and drunk through a bombilla — a long metal straw). Mate is not simply a drink like coffee or tea, but a crucial ritual of friendship and bonding.

The Buenos Aires where Gringo and his friends live is not the city of broad avenues, baroque cemeteries, the Casa Rosada and Tango, but one that visitors and indeed most porteños never see: neighbourhoods like Zavaleta to the south of the city, between shantytowns 21 and 24, where families live in makeshift shacks without water or electricity surrounded by crumbling buildings and new apartment blocks, areas blighted by poverty, petty crime and paco (a cheap cocaine paste like crack). But these are also places that crackle with extraordinary energy, with danger, with cumbia music and with hope. Welcome to the barrio.

Frank Wynne