THE BLOWING UP OF THE DEVIL'S DROOL

The short story 'Blow up' that we read didn't sit all that well with me nor leave me particularly impressed, and the problems I had with it can conveniently be illustrated antecdotally by the very fact we were reading a story called 'Blow Up' and not 'The Devil's Drool' -- Cortazar's work strikes me as one profoundly effected by Spanish-English translation.

The short story is littered with simple grammatical errors which seem to allude to the laziest of translators. When this was pointed out in class there was a response from some students that this was intentional and apparent in the original as well. I'm willing to accept that, but can't necessarily understand the merit of laying out a sentence like this:

"If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blond woman was the clouds.."

nor what intention it could serve stylistically or conceptually to the story when written the same way in the Spanish language.

One could, perhaps, chalk that section up to an attempt at loose stylistic poetic writing, however, so let me offer a simpler, less poetic sentence as an example, one which seems to make no claim at experimental poetry but rather a simple idea tripped up & over by awkward translation:

"Seated ready to tell it, if one might go to drink a bock over there, and the typewriter continue [sic] by itself (because I use the machine), that would be perfection."

There is no doubt what he is saying in this sentence - that the ideal situation would be that one would leave his typewriter behind & have a drink or something with the machine continuing on to write, divinely, without the bridge of the man - the translator throughout the story never fails completely to get the gist of what Cortazar is saying out, but it is rather the degree to how unappealingly it is written which bothers me. The job of a translator is not just tugging along the
vague idea of a previous text but actually crafting something as readable as we are led to believe the original must have been.

The English clunks awkwardly along through what feels like is meant to be a sort of streaming prose. The result is what comes off as amateur stream-of-consciousness writing. The meta-textual writing-about-writing aspect of the piece is so inelegantly handled so as to make it feel like a young writer's first attempt at the genre.

There are elements to the story that seem interesting to me, and when this type of writing is done well it is of my favorite sort -- I'll assume that the source text is profoundly better, and if indeed it is, it surely deserves an updated translation.

Matthew Winn