Day-off links

• Our lovely little city was founded on this day in 1525, and so we all get to stay home on a Tuesday.
• Darby climbs aboard the Inconvenience and inevitably, irrevocably gets it.
• Marcelo explains why literature "no longer exists in its own sphere, self-referential, imbued with a sense of mission and exceptionalism"--and tosses Sebald and Aira into the mix.
• ReadySteadyBook hosts a gratifying essay on Cortázar by Kit Maude.
• The Quarterly Conversation is beautifully redesigned.

Unexplainable stories

Last winter's issue of The Quarterly Conversation contains Marcelo Ballvé's wonderfully insightful essay on the work of César Aira, providing several keys to understanding the Argentine's complex yet playful work:

Aira has staked out a very cogent and immensely influential (in Latin America) artistic position that basically says "storytelling at its finest avoids explanations, information, interpretation, etc." In a series of 1988 lectures delivered at the University of Buenos Aires, Aira was clear on this point: "The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation. . . . The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added." [...]

Aira's novels tend to begin straightforwardly, immediately immersing the reader in the climate of the story. These beginnings are done with a natural self-confidence, the entrancing self-possession of the best oral storytellers. Aira understands that to begin a story, no fancy words or purple prose are necessary. Nor are complex situations meant to be presented as such at first. The job at hand is to begin. The story must be allowed to unfold first, before it can be refolded by the author into something strange, with infinite folds—an origami monster.

All of this accurately describes Aira's novel, El mago (not yet translated into English). A lonely magician has a curious problem—he can actually perform real magic. He doesn't know how or why, but he can. One would think that this would ensure him a lifetime of fame and fortune, but the truth is quite the opposite...

He can fly, but suffers from vertigo. He can't pull money out of thin air because bills are numbered and he isn't sure what problems would result. He can't create factories or houses because property is always already owned by someone else and he wouldn't be able to give a satisfactory reason for having them in the first place. But what about simply making gold? He'd have to sell it, sign papers, and it would be too dangerous to make a living out of doing this continually. He tried using the winning numbers in roulette, but it made him nervous, and the worry and paranoia that came from going from casino to casino was just not worth it. (He'd never tried using a winning lottery number because he feared public exposure.)

But what prevents him from becoming a better magician? The sad truth is that it simply isn't his vocation. He chose the job as the best way to hide his abilities and lacks the talent and imagination to be truly great. He rents videos of different magicians worldwide, selects his favorite tricks, and uses them as his own. He always plans on improving them, but is too lazy to make the effort and so the tricks are exactly the same as the originals. He believes himself a failure for not using his talents adequately, condemned to a life of mediocrity. He has a modest apartment, but his wife and teenage children are demanding more. After twenty years in the business, he's determined to change his circumstances.

He resolves to make himself known as the Best Magician in the World at the upcoming convention for professional magicians in Panama. The rest of the story concerns itself with what Hans Chans (whose real name is Pedro María Gregorini) does once he arrives at the hotel hosting the convention and all of the things that do (and don't) happen as a result.

[Aira's] versatility is possible only because at the heart of each Aira novel there is a marvelously ingenious storytelling device—a premise, central anecdote, or plot mechanism—which Aira exploits to the nth potential. He has a vertigo-inducing capacity to suggest a cornucopia of stories even while telling just one.

The magician's basic dilemma of how to find his place among his peers and make a name for himself branches off into other smaller, yet more immediate complications (for example, how to locate the convention's program so he can know when he's scheduled to perform? Is he really the invited "star" of the show? How can he get rid of the obsessive hotel employee that won't leave him alone? And, most importantly, how can he even be sure he hasn't conjured the entire scenario?).

The answer to the magician's problems appears in the most unlikely of places. While searching for the elusive program, the magician meets three publishers who remind him of the three wise men (or "magi"—lots of potential symbolism here, especially the parallel of being at the "cradle" of a new venture). The revelation our sad magician finally experiences at the end made me laugh aloud at its sheer brilliance. Aira takes us through existential dilemmas, angst, and the ennui of infinite possibilities to the beauty of a finite, everyday solution.

At the end of this lecture, citing Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, Aira compared the writer to a magician: "The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world."

This comparison is the key to the novel—a fable on the miraculous potential of fiction.

Aira has a genius for taking something many would wish for, turning it into a surreal nightmare, and revealing how the solution has existed all along—and is even superior to the dream. I look forward to reading more of his work.

Translation goodness

Issue 8 of The Quarterly Conversation is up and I very happily read great interviews with three Spanish-to-English translators: C.M. Mayo, Natasha Wimmer, and Chris Andrews. Also, there's Javier Moreno's excellent essay on his Bolaño diagram (which I spent some time with earlier), Derik Badman's review of The Last Novel by David Markson, and many more good things. I've quoted some highlights below, but all of these interviews should be read thoroughly. Fascinating stuff.

C.M. Mayo:

The whole idea of Tameme is to make the literature accessible to someone who reads only English, and at the same time, accessible to someone who reads only Spanish. So writers are together whom, normally, would not be. For example, the first issue of Tameme featured Margaret Atwood and Jaimes Sabines. These are great names--yet many even very well read Mexicans have never heard of Margaret Atwood, while few English speaking readers have heard of Jaime Sabines. At the same time, having the text side-by-side makes the reading experience that much richer. Many people have told me they read Tameme to help them improve their Spanish. It's also an exercise for literary translators. Literary translation is an art; five literary translators would translate a given piece in five different ways. So, as a translator, one can engage with the text critically. I find the translator's notes the most interesting.

(Thanks to this piece, I've added a couple items to my wishlist and have discovered the wonder that is Tameme. I look forward to the day when something similar exists for Colombia.)

Natasha Wimmer:

There are lots of things I try to avoid, but I mostly try not to slavishly adhere to general rules--translation is all about exceptions. Often, though, I try to avoid automatically using cognates when there might be a better translation of a particular word. I'm not generally too worried about putting too much of my own voice into the translation--I don't think there's really much space for that, except possibly in dialogue, which tends to require a freer translation than expository prose. When it comes to words and phrases in the original language, I certainly try to avoid the Spanglish effect, but I think a few carefully chosen expressions left in Spanish (and most place names, too) are inevitable and even desirable. [...]

One of the main challenges of the translation was getting the rhythm of Bolaño's sentences right. He is never predictable and can be intentionally awkward, and sometimes it was hard to strike the right balance in English--I often felt an urge to smooth over ungainly constructions, but restrained myself, then realized in reading them over that they were perfectly calibrated. Ultimately, this was probably one of the most satisfying parts of working on the translation, too. Otherwise, I loved the humor. It's always more fun to translate something funny.

Chris Andrews (on the translator "getting in the way"):

I mean producing a translation that is unduly distracting, which I guess can happen if it isn't quite complete, so that the syntactic patterns of the source language creep into the target language a bit too much and make the translation more syntactically odd than the original, or if the translation goes over the top and becomes showy. But I don't much like pronouncing on this sort of thing because I'm no doubt guilty of under- and over-translating myself, and the whole business of translation studies can be a distraction from the works themselves, which are way more interesting in the end.

I loved his recommendations. More authors to pick up... Now that I've finished reading novels by Laura Restrepo and Mario Mendoza, I'll keep an eye out for the writers he mentioned: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Juan Villoro, Antonio José Ponte, and others. It helps me hope that it's only a matter of time before the advantages of being able to find and read these works in the original Spanish will outweigh the disadvantages of having limited access to English-language titles.