Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  This was a concern of Edmundo’s, particularly that the narrative flow not be interrupted by footnotes or explanations or lampooned accents, with the one exception being Jesús, and again, mostly in the writing, not the dialogue. And I wanted to preserve that feel of a novel that was narrated from the outside of the US looking in, which meant devoid of couch-comfy jargons or used-car border vernaculars that an English-speaking writer might capture in prose but that is not really true to the original tradition in which the novel was written, which preserves a certain narrative distance in that respect.

  Edmundo once said that he can’t imagine any family in Latin America that doesn’t have some connection with the US, some family member who is here or has been here or wants to be here. Though Norte is written in Spanish, it is largely set in the United States, and much of the dialogue is in fact a Spanish interpretation of what the English original might sound like to a Spanish speaker’s ear. We never really know if Sam is speaking in Spanish or English to Michelle, only that from time to time his Argentine accent comes out. Or if Fabián and Michelle always speak in Spanish to each other, or if some of the other characters do, like Fernandez and his call-girl love interest, Debbie. We know Fernandez’s English is bad enough that his daughters would tease him about it, yet that’s the only reference we have. The author chose not to write Fernandez’s voice in broken English, for example, when he talks to the families of Jesús’s victims or to FBI agents.

  So how to recuperate the original English from the written Spanish, without falling into caricature? At first I tried peppering Spanglish terms here and there, slangy border English or Spanish, but the result was tiring, if not directly irritating, to read and felt like a cosmetic solution, a linguistic nip and tuck whose stitches were showing. Going down that slippery slope would have delivered a gum-chomping translation, dated before it was even in print. I also had to take into account the fact that the regions in which the stories take place are both real and fictionalized.

  This novel represents a foreigner’s view of the US. It’s the case with Fabián’s disgruntled opinions of American academia and with both Jesús and Martín’s third-person storylines: Martín’s story opens in the 1930s and largely takes place in California, Jesús’s in the 1980s in the north of Mexico, in Juárez, El Paso, and other cities along the US border and Florida. Jesús speaks a lower-caste, urban, coarser type of Mexican Spanish, while Martín’s speech is more naive and peasantlike, but in both cases their language is quick and flowing. Martín’s sentences are peculiarly melodic, the result of a sensitive if disturbed mind.

  The tension between these two stories is that they represent two different ways of being; Jesús is all motion and exploit, where Martín is stasis and introspection. The language has to reflect that. Jesús never stops wandering; he just acts out his compulsions, cravings, and desires. He restrains himself when he is able, and manipulates, but then explodes. In Spanish the pronoun is understood in the conjugation of the verb (“he jumped” becomes “saltó”), so in Jesús’s sections I had to find creative solutions to avoid beginning every sentence with “he.” At first I translated the sentences word for word; they are short and very easy to render. But the effect was almost like a litany, or some sort of a recitation with the repeating pronoun, which added an interesting and even eerie quality but wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of the author’s intention.

  Martín can’t communicate with the world outside himself in any language. There are some elements in Martín’s story that I had to change completely, like the names he makes up for the orderlies in the hospital. Edmundo agreed that the original names, which play on Spanish categories of creole racial combinations, would have gotten lost in translation. We wanted to maintain Martín’s candid sense of humor, however, and mimic the way he might hear people calling out to him.

  The third storyline that braids through the novel is that of the young, very talented Michelle and her profligate professor and lover Fabián. It’s the only story that’s told in the first person. Here the conflict, the narrative tension, is found in the counterpoint between the creative act and destruction, authenticity and mendacity, truth and pure fiction versus imitation. It can be read as an analogy of the creative process, and it was important to clinch her voice as a renegade academic and budding artist and not just some star-struck ingenue. She is infatuated with strung-out professor Fabián, and though she seems to passively allow herself to be sucked into the vortex of his self-destruction, in fact she exerts a subtle resistance the whole time. She’s observing something that fascinates her as a cat would observe a scorpion. And slowly but surely her voice grows stronger and more decided until she finally finds her way to the poetic act.

  Here I incorporated George D. Schade’s translation of Juan Rulfo’s Luvina, one of the stories in his classic collection The Burning Plain. Michelle uses Rulfo’s story as the base of her wobbly-kneed zombie mash-up novel, a genre that combines classic texts with another popular genre into a single narrative, often including zombies and vampires. Since Michelle is copying Juan Rulfo in a mash-up, I thought it was only fit to use the canonical translation of the classic story in a translation mash-up mirror. The effect is the same, especially since she hasn’t yet made the jump to creating her own style, so at first the change in tone seems strange, creating a sort of translational mise-en-abyme.

  A novel represents the very peculiar mechanisms of a single writer’s imagination and how that has been shaped by his or her cultural context, tradition, language, and way of seeing and of hearing. So when it comes to translating a work of prose, and despite all the aforementioned reflections, I do believe the best a translator can do is to just sit down in a quiet place and get on with it. Approaches are as varied as the novels themselves, and usually as you move forward, either the problems grow to a point where you have to stop what you are doing and solve them with the author, or else they work themselves out as you get a feel for the novel’s interior intelligence, its music, its structure. I think it’s best not to throw a theoretical suitcase at a book but instead think of it as pulling a partner onto the dance floor and moving. At times you have to approximate, at other times you must stick tight as glue on to the original because the prose is measured down to the very last syllable, or because the signifiers are blinking at you from beneath their camouflage, like a figure in the carpet.

  With Norte, given all the issues of being a Spanish-language novel written by a Bolivian author about Mexicans and Argentineans lost in the US, over several decades and with myriad characters speaking and writing in native or broken English, I needed this ongoing conversation with the author to capture the “spirit” of the words, thinking of Gregory Rabassa’s ideas on technique. I have tried to remain faithful to its life-force, the voices of the characters, all the creatures real and invented that have come from Edmundo Paz Soldán’s imagination. Some would say that being faithful means changing everything. Some wouldn’t. As Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”