The Art of Flight

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Translating an author of Sergio Pitol’s stature is a humbling task. Translating his first major work into English is both humbling and terrifying. The feelings of humility and terror are compounded by the fact that Pitol, in his own right, is a celebrated translator of, among others, James, Conrad, Woolf, Austen, Graves, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, and Andrzejewski.

I discovered Pitol in graduate school, where his “Carnival” triptych (the novels El desfile del amor, Domar la divina garza, and La vida conyugal) were required reading. Between 1996 and 2005, Pitol penned three literary memoirs, of which El arte de la fuga, translated here as The Art of Flight, was the first. Known collectively as the “Trilogy of Memory,” these three autobiographical volumes, comprised of diary entries, personal musings, travel writing, and literary essays, are reminiscent of Elias Canetti’s Memoirs.

About two years ago, Michelle Johnson of World Literature Today sent me an article written by Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli for Granta that named Pitol a “best untranslated writer.” The article was somewhat of a misnomer as Pitol had in fact been translated into over a dozen major languages — but notably not into English. How, I wondered, was it possible that a writer of Pitol’s stature — one of four Mexican authors at the time to have won the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious prize given to an author writing in the Spanish language — had not been translated into English? This translation is an attempt to right that wrong.

Already in the title I have failed. Failure is something that every translator must live with. But how does one fail before really starting? Like many words, the Spanish word fuga is ambiguous, meaning both fugue and flight. Ever the careful wordsmith and ironist, Pitol’s use of ambiguity in the title is intentional. Not only does the title refer to a life spent in constant flight, it is also meant to invoke, as in music, the use of the interwoven repetitive elements in his writing. Also intentional is the allusion to Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, known in English as The Art of the Fugue. Unfortunately, it was not possible maintain either the semantic ambiguity or the musical allusion. To the extent that I have failed, here or anywhere else in the translation, I offer a heartfelt apology.

In The Art of Flight, Pitol writes, “Translating allows one to enter fully into a work, to know its bones, its structure, its silences.” Pitol alludes here to translation as an act of reading. First and foremost, the translator is a critical reader. Through this act of critical reading, he becomes a mediator of meaning for readers in another language. While reading/translating the text, the translator discovers meaning at every level — lexical, semantic, and syntactic. And, as Pitol states, in the text’s silences. In other words, the translator must not only listen to what the writer says, but also to what he doesn’t.

Some of the features of The Art of Flight include Pitol’s at times labyrinthine prose (the opening sentence is sixty-two words long), interspersed with short parenthetical phrases that create a staccato-like rhythm, as in the following sentence: “In my case, plain and naked exposition, without flourishes, without detours, without echoes or shadows, fatally diminishes the efficiency of the story, converts it into a mere anecdote; a vulgarity, when all is said and done.”

Throughout the translation, I have striven to be faithful to Pitol’s style. To that end, and because of its potential to enrich the receptor language and culture, I have adopted a foreignizing strategy. Foreignization goes beyond leaving occasional words in the target language, especially those words that are already familiar to the reader. Doing so would render the translation a parody or, to borrow one of Pitol’s favorite words, a vulgarity. The translator, then, must listen for the words that call out to remain untranslated, words that express concepts that are either foreign to, or by their use will enrich, the receptor language and culture, words like capillas (Mexico’s literary coteries), coletos (white elites), (paramilitary) guardias blancas, and tertulia (the uniquely Spanish version of the salon). As noted, these loanwords appear in italics and have been explicated as naturally as possible and to the extent necessary to give them meaning.

Foreignization may also occur at the syntactic level, that is, so that the syntactic features present in the source language remain intact in the translation. To that end, I have attempted to intervene as little as possible in Pitol’s syntax. At the lexical level, in most cases, I have chosen Latinate and Greek cognates rather than Anglo-Germanic synonyms. In doing so, I endeavored to honor Pitol’s style and vocabulary, both of which tend toward the baroque, an effect I strove to retain or, at least, echo in the translation At times, however, it was necessary to change Pitol’s punctuation, especially colons and semicolons, which he uses generously, and at times completely contrary to American usage. In some cases, but few, laboriously long and subordinated sentences either had to be broken up or the clauses reordered lest the reader become lost in a maze of subordination.

Because The Art of Flight is a multigeneric text, written in multiple voices, styles, and literary forms, over a period of three decades, it was important to not resort to a single, unifying voice. In the case of the numerous quotations, translated from a variety of languages into Spanish, I chose to incorporate, where available, existing English translations. For the sake of consistency, I have also used extant English translations for quotations of Spanish texts, many of which are considered canonical and will be familiar to English readers.

Translating in general is an agonizing process. It is acknowledging defeat in the face of unavoidable cultural loss. Consider the word campechano, which can be a gentilic that refers to inhabitants of the Mexican state of Campeche as well as an adjective meaning “good-natured” with a hint of indifference. For Mexicans, it is impossible to separate one meaning from the other. To describe someone as campechano is to say he possesses the same carefree bonhomie as the inhabitants of Campeche. This kind of cultural loss is inevitable, but the careful translator, especially the one who sees himself as a custodian of culture, will strive to minimize it. Such is translating every writer, but especially translating Pitol.

Translating Pitol means catching a parodic reference to The Communist Manifesto; it means reading The Sound and the Fury in order to translate Caddy’s calzoncitos as “drawers.” It is knowing that “in the beginning was the Word,” and that inmundicia, in order to maintain the biblical reference, is best translated as “uncleanness” not “dirt” or “filth.” It is tracking down un-cited quotes by Galdós and Paz and Cortázar and Bobbio and Gide and James and Woolf and Duras and Beckmann. It is studying Beckmann’s tryptic The Departure to be able to translate Pitol’s painstaking description. It is reading not only the diaries of Mann but also those of his son Klaus and those of Lezama Lima. It is reading Berenson’s The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance.

Translating Pitol is learning that “will of reason” comes from Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and that “people of reason” is a reference to the culturally Hispanized. It is tracing idioms back to the Quixote and to The Celestina, and deciding if or how they can be retained. It is discovering titles to novels embedded in sentences. One example is “la princesita negra de los brezos” (“the little black princess of the heaths”), an arcane reference to a nineteenth-century novel, Das Heideprinzeβchen, by Eugenie Marlitt, translated into English as The Princess of the Moor, and Spanish as La princesita de los brezos. Pitol, however, modifies the title by adding the adjective negra (black) in order to describe an effeminate young black man of high rank whom he observes in a two-bit dive in Barcelona’s gothic quarter. Although Pitol employs the metaphor to great effect, it demands much of the reader and poses a herculean challenge for the translator. Ultimately, I had to determine to what end Pitol was employing such an esoteric literary reference. Was Pitol, as he is wont to be, simply in conversation with himself? In other words, was it nothing more than a recondite inside joke? Or was he providing an insight into the infinite ways literature lives inside all of us at all times?

Translating Pitol, then, requires being — or becoming — familiar not only with such arcane literary references but also the breadth of Mexican and Spanish culture, as well as American, British, Polish, German, and Russian literatures. Translating Pitol requires reading philosophy, theology, drama theory, and the Italian Renaissance.

Translating — and reading — Pitol provides an incomparable humanistic education.

In the end, translation is about making choices and having trust. A reader must accept that a translator has made good-faith decisions about how to render a word, a pair of words, an idiom, or a metaphor. Once that is done, the translation should stand on its own weight.

No translation happens in a vacuum, nor is it a solitary endeavor. Ideally, a translator enjoys the opportunity of collaborating or, at the very least, consulting with the author during the translation process. But in recent years Pitol has suffered from a cognitive disorder that has resulted in a progressive loss of language, making it impossible to consult with him on this translation. I cannot express to you how distressing this news was. Not only because of the effect that my inability to consult with Pitol would have on the translation but also knowing that he had lost the one thing that had meant the most to him in life, as he expresses throughout The Art of Flight, where we also learn how much Pitol valued the collaborative process, both as translator and translated writer. Finally, I recall with fondness the email he sent almost two years ago: “Your interest in my work fills me with happiness and gratitude. I would love nothing more than to see my Trilogy of Memory translated into English, a language that I adore and in which none of my books exists.”

Absent, then, the opportunity to consult with Pitol, I relied heavily on those secondary resources to which translators routinely recur: writers, other translators, and editors, all of whom are intimately familiar with Pitol’s work, and who graciously made themselves available throughout the process. My eternal thanks go out to Elena Poniatowska, Alberto Chimal, Raquel Castro, Beatriz Meyer, María Rosa Suárez, Luis Jorge Boone, Omar Villasana, Rodrigo Figueroa, Rodolfo Mendoza, Gregorio Doval, and Miguel Kimball-Santana.

I am also indebted to Charles Hatfield and Rainer Schulte at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas for their mentorship, to Michelle Johnson and Daniel Simon at World Literature Today for their unfailing support, and to Scott Esposito, whose thoughtful reading of the text and many suggestions made this translation better. A special thanks to my publisher, Will Evans, for his unwavering patience and commitment to publishing not only this translation, but also The Journey and The Magician of Vienna, which along with The Art of Flight make up Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory.”

More than anyone, however, I am indebted to maestro Sergio Pitol, for serving as my guide and tutor through the literary and linguistic worlds that were formerly unknown to me, for his erudition, for his boundless imagination, and, finally, for his infinite and inextinguishable spirit.

George Henson

Dallas, Texas, 2015