3 Titles of works that appear in the original language followed by a translation in brackets indicate works that have yet to be translated into English. In these cases, the translations are usually literal. The bracketed translation will appear following the first occurrence only.—Trans.
4 Translated by James E. Irby.
5 From “El libro” [The Book], one of five lectures delivered by Borges at the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires on June 24 and 25, 1978. The lectures were later published as Borges, oral.—Trans.
6 Translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
7 Both the original Italian and Rosenthal’s English translation include the adjective “horizontal.”
8 Pitol lists the spelling as “Rousell.”—Trans.
9 Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary.
10 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v.
11 This is the most common English translation of the title. As you will read later, Pitol takes the title from a line in Hamlet.—Trans.
12 The Spanish title is a play on the idiom creerse la divina garza, literally “to believe oneself the divine heron,” which is roughly equivalent to the English “think oneself the queen bee” or “the queen of Sheba.”
13 Translated by George Henson. The Art of Flight.
14 The title, of course, is a reference to Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. The Spanish fuga, however, means both “fugue” and “flight.” As the translator, I was faced with resolving the polysemy. The ambiguity, moreover, is intentional; in fact, Pitol makes various references within the text to “fleeing.”—Trans.
15 Pitol lists this entry as “December 16.” According to Sieburth’s translation, the date of the entry is the “14th (written on the 15th).”—Trans.
16 Translated by Richard Sieburth. Moscow Diary. Harvard University Press.
17 I was unable to find a source for this name. Given the context in which it appears, I suspected that Pitol might have intended the name to be Hitler, but the name Haier appears in every version of the text I have found. It is also possible that Pitol is referring to Jörg Haider, a former leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria. –Trans
18 Translated by Susan Bassnett.
19 Pitol lists the chapter as 39.—Trans.
20 Pitol lists her name as “Otta.”
21 Bashevis Singer wrote exclusively in Yiddish. His works were co-translated into English by the author and a team of (always female) translators. The role of the translators in the production of his work has been the subject of much debate. This quote was taken from “The Shadow of the Crib,” which appeared in the collection Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The co-translator is not credited.—Trans.
22 Because Pitol combines sentences from different parts of Glantz’s novel, Bassnett’s translation does not mirror the effect that Pitol is attempting to create. I have, therefore, translated this sentence.—Trans.
23 The title of the American edition is The Problem of the Green Capsule.
24 Pitol spells the name of the village Bellvedere.—Trans.
25 Jorge Luis Borges. The Craft of Verse.
26 Jan Kott. The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Northwestern University Press, 1992.
27 I am at a loss to find Pitol’s number of twenty four thousand. The actual number, in the original and in the Spanish translation, is three thousand. It is impossible to know if Pitol is being intentionally hyperbolic or if he has remembered incorrectly.—Trans.
28 Although a very capable English translation of Monsiváis’ text exists, I have opted to translate these short passages to reflect the Biblical language to which Pitol refers.—Trans.
29 The author’s footnote reads: “One of the prisons where some of the most dangerous delinquents of Mexico City are housed.”—Trans.
30 A prolific translator, Pitol translated six Henry James novels, including The Aspern Papers; he is also the translator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an essay on which appears below, as well as works by, among others, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, Witold Gombrowicz, and Jerzy Andrzejewski.—Trans.
31 Henry James. Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others.
32 Pitol lists the spelling as Sillsbee.
33 It is unclear what Pitol is quoting here. I have been unable to find this phrase in any translation of the novel, nor does anything similar appear in the original.—Trans.
34 The names of the conference and the associations it produced vary. Indeed, Pitol seems to suggest that these organizations preceded the conference. In fact, the opposite is true.—Trans.
35 This is my own translation of the original French text.—Trans.
36 This sentence appears in French, a language in which Conrad was fluent and often recurred to in his personal correspondence. The translation is mine.—Trans.
37 This sentence also appears in French. The translation is mine.—Trans.
38 I have worked assiduously to find this portion of the text. Conrad’s letters include nine volumes. Unfortunately, there is no searchable database. The translation is mine.
39 Pitol refers to this as the African Geographical Congress.—Trans.
40 Translated by Edith Grossman.
41 Translated by Esther Allen.
42 The supreme charm one finds on reading a page of de Selby is that it inexorably leads you to the happy certainty that among fools you are not the greatest. (This footnote appears in the novel.—Trans.)
43 May (?) 1922, to Tom Driberg.
44 31 May 1922, to Dudley Carew.
45 In the diary, this entry is dated “Friday 19 September,” the remainder of which reads, “My mother is purchasing a dog.”—Trans.
46 Pitol’s description of these events fails to capture the actual “brazenness of the spectacle.” In his diary, dated 29 December 1925, Waugh describes the “tableau” he attempted to arrange, in which “his boy should be enjoyed by a large negro.”—Trans.
47 Pitol lists Stannard’s name as Tomas.—Trans.
48 This quote does not appear as a single paragraph in Powell’s memoirs. It seems that Pitol has taken sentences from various paragraphs and pieced them together. The texts that appear in brackets are my translations of sentences that I was unable to locate.—Trans.
49 I have been able to find where Chatwin refers to The Road to Oxiana as “a work of genius,” but the previous phrase does not appear in that text. It is not uncommon for Pitol to combine parts of sentences from different paragraphs into a single quote.—Trans.
50 Pitol is alluding here to El México profundo, a work by Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, in which the author posits that there are two Mexicos, a “México profundo,” the largely poor and indigenous communities whose customs and worldview are derived from pre-Hispanic cultures, and a “México imaginario,” which has been imposed by the West. Pitol, then, is referring to the pre-Russian Turkmen culture.—Trans.
51 Vladimir Nabokov. Nikolai Gogol.
52 Translated by Margaret Wettlin.
53 While O’Connor gave an interview to the Paris Review (The Art of Fiction No. 19) for the autumn-winter issue of 1957, this quote does not appear there. It appears in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962).—Trans.
54 Translated by Naomi Lindstrom.
55 Translated by Constance Garnett.
56 Pitol spells the name of the ship Morossini.
AFTERWORD
Margo Glantz
1.Sergio Pitol begins this book with an incredibly brief epigraph by E.M. Forster, one of his favorite authors: “Only connect…” And in effect, only a magician can gather with such mastery texts that would store in themselves in an isolated way a perfect unity and which could barely be connected and still make up a plot. In a dialogue with Monsiváis, Pitol explains: “It is a book born beneath the shade of the alchemist’s primordial slogan. ‘Everything is in all things.’” And this spider web that sutures the different tales together is writ
ing itself, contemplated as a reflection of other associated writings and biographies, linked by the eccentricity of the stories or of the characters that construct them. They make up a writerly family, a genealogy, a same verbal continent. In a review of his book Los mejores cuentos [Collected Best Stories], also first published in 2005, the same year as The Magician of Vienna, Edgardo Dobry explains in Babelia: “[For Pitol] literature [is] a territory like that of nationality, a homeland that requires everything without promising anything.”
2.Though of simple appearance, thanks to an ever more transparent and classic language, efficient, opposed to whatever procedure practiced by the avant-gardists, it is not easy to decode the hidden keys to the text. Not because the explanations are unclear or insufficient, to the contrary, at reducing the story to the simple phrases that contain it, it is kept in equilibrium, a precarious, marvelous equilibrium acquired by means of its hidden threads, where what is said is covered by a dark zone that can be the product of parody, of caricature, of self-deprecation, or of structure itself.
3.An author is to a certain extent the sum of his readings, or rather, of his re-readings. An author, before being one, is an imitator, an ape, or simply a child; he learns by copying, like Lope de Vega, Alfonso Reyes, or Borges himself—this writer’s beloved authors—once copied or imitated. One must imitate but know how to stop oneself in time, until finding one’s own language and defining a style. In this book the plot is fundamentally nurtured by reading and re-reading; this includes the revision of that which has been read and observation about oneself situated in time past and now placed by it—by that temporal distance—in another context of language, what is read or re-read now, reworked in first person, what was read or done in the past, corresponds to the kingdom of the impersonal pronoun, it was he, not I, who read and who undertook certain, almost incomprehensible and even ridiculous, feats. In that manner one turns into another or the extravagant sum of two personalities that are both similar and different, a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde absorbed in reading and re-reading, but also in writing and re-writing. If one of them were to re-read or again see a staging of Hamlet, it could be Gustavo Esguerra re-writing it or the delightful Maruja La-noche Harris—making a literary criticism of the light novel called The Magician of Vienna, with which the novel—is it a novel?—bites its tail and turns into the center of that incessant parody in which no one escapes unscathed, including obviously the author himself.
4.Transformed successively, at first with a dramatic nature—like in El tañido de la flauta [The Sound of the Flute] and many of his stories—the writing of Sergio Pitol has become parodic and jocular, as he himself defines it, amazed that that vein had not appeared earlier in his writing, most of all “because if something abounds in my list of favorite authors, it is that they are the creators of a parodic, eccentric, sacrilegious literature.” His passion for narration has also changed direction. It is simple to perceive it: The Magician of Vienna and The Art of Flight rework the art of narration—the anecdotes that could become possible novels or stories tangle between the recounting of his readings or biographies of his favorite writers, turning thus into new accounts where the main characters can resemble those who populate his favorite works—or rewrite some of his previous works, making, for example, a beloved friend, Vila-Matas, reappear with his name but as an intrusive double or as a ghost that meddles in one of his most intense stories, “Bukhara Nocturne,” also a chapter of this magnificent novel—which in turn contains perfect stories—Juegos florales [Floral Games].
Translated by David Shook
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin, Walter. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Moscow Diary. Harvard UP, 1986.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “El libro” Borges, oral. Emece Editores, 1995.
---. Trans. Esther Allen. Selected Nonfictions. Penguin, 2000.
---. The Craft of Verse. Harvard UP, 2002.
Chatwin, Bruce. What Am I Doing Here? Penguin, 1990.
Chekhov, Anton. Trans. Constance Garnett. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Kessinger, 2004.
Citati, Pietro. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Tolstoy. Schocken Books, 1986.
Connolly, Cyril. “Three Shelves.” The New Statesman and Nation, January 4, 1936.
Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record. Marlboro Press, 1982.
---. Heart of Darkness. W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.
---. The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” W.W. Norton & Co., 1979.
---. The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge UP, 2016.
---. “Geography and Some Explorers.” Last Essays. J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926.
Cortázar, Julio. Trans. Naomi Lindstrom. “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” Review of Contemporary Fiction. Fall 99, Vol. 19 Issue 3, p. 25-37.
Glantz, Margo. The Family Tree. Serpent’s Tail. 1991.
James, Henry. Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others. The Library of America, 2016.
---. “The Art of Fiction.” Henry James: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. The Library of America, 1984.
---. The Aspern Papers and Other Tales. Penguin Classics, 2015.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. W.W. Norton & Co., 1974.
---. The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Northwestern UP, 1992.
Lope de Vega. Trans. Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig. La Dorotea. Harvard UP, 1985.
Mutis, Álvaro. Trans. Edith Grossman. “The Snow of the Admiral.” The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. New York Review of Books, 1992.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Nikolai Gogol. New Directions, 1961.
O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.
---. The Third Policeman. Dalkey Archive Press, 2002.
O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Melville House, 2011.
Pitol, Sergio. Trans. George Henson. The Art of Flight. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015.
Powell, Anthony. To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. U of Chicago P, 2001.
Rilke, Maria. Trans. Margaret Wettlin. Letters: Summer 1926. New York Review of Books, 2001.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories. FS&G, 1979.
Volkening, Ernesto. Evocación de una sombra. Planeta, 1998.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Little, Brown & Co., 1946.
---. Decline and Fall. Penguin Classics, 2011.
---. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Phoenix, 2010.
---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ticknor & Fields, 1980.
---. Vile Bodies. Penguin Classics, 2011.
SERGIO PITOL DEMENEGHI is one of Mexico’s most influential and well-respected writers, born in the city of Puebla in 1933. He studied law and philosophy in Mexico City, and spent many years as a cultural attaché in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe, including Poland, Hungary, Italy, and China. He is renowned for his intellectual career in both the field of literary creation and translation, with numerous novels, stories, criticisms, and translations to his name. Pitol is an influential contemporary of the most well-known authors of the Latin American “Boom,” and began publishing his works in the 1960s. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of work, Pitol was awarded the two most important prizes in the Spanish language world: the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 he won the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary prize, often called the “Spanish language Nobel.” The Magician of Vienna is the final book in Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory, following The Art of Flight and The Journey.
GEORGE HENSON is a literary translator and lecturer of Spanish at the University of Oklahoma. His translations include Cervantes Prize laureate Sergio Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory, Luis Jorge Boone’s Cannibal Nights, and The Heart of the Artichoke by fellow Cervantes recipient Elena Poniatowska. His translations of essays, poetry, and short fiction, including works by Andrés Neuman, Leonardo Padura, Juan Villoro, Miguel Barnet, and
Alberto Chimal have appeared in The Literary Review, BOMB, The Buenos Aires Review, Flash Fiction International, and Asymptote. In addition, he is a contributing editor for World Literature Today. George holds a PhD in literary and translation studies from the University of Texas at Dallas.
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