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
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I agree that the story should be retranslated. But many of the traits you object to are present in the original--the shift for 1st to 3rd person in the same sentence, the incoherent sentence structures, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe translation, however, has its fans. For instance, of 17 comments on the Amazon, 11 give it the maximum 5 stars, 4 4 stars, and only 2, 3 stars.
"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 that race before my your his ours yours their faces."
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly is Cortazar doing here? This paragraph isn't, as it might first appear to be, a random jumble of words, without context, connection, value or meaning. What we have is chaos, but, paradoxically, a very carefully controlled and orchestrated chaos, purposeful and deliberate. First, we have a confusion of tenses and modes, especially chronological. Has this happened already, or is it happening now, or has it yet to happen? This is a question that will resurface at the story's conclusion in a new context. Then there is the pre-echoing of several motifs and images that will recur later in the story (the blond woman, the clouds, etc.) here separated from their proper narrative context and meaning. But again, at the end of the story, we're still not sure of what their proper narrative context and meaning is. Finally, a confusion of perpective: "my your his ours their." The entire story is about a someone who has basically been driven mad by their own subjectivity, their inability to tie down their relationship with reality to a single, fixed, objective viewpoint. Here this crisis is expressed grammatically.
As for the translation, I don't read Spanish, , so I'm not in much of a position to judge; but I do know that Cortazar himself was very fond of Blackburn and his work, dedicating his novel "62: A Model Kit" to the translator and even going so far as to bestow him with his self-invented honorific of "Cronopio", an commendation shared by only a very distinguished few (including, as we saw in Peavler's essay, Michaelangelo Antonioni).