In Aira’s first public appearances—even as an Aira whose own work was as-yet unpublished, and would remain so for several years—translation is present. In 1968, newly arrived in Buenos Aires from his hometown of Coronel Pringles, he joined poet Arturo Carrera in editing the magazine El Cielo, whose first issue included, alongside short stories he had written, his translation of a text by Lewis Carroll. The first interview with Aira that I have been able to locate, this one closer to the publication date of his first book, presents him as a translator, and its subject is the same as ours: “one of the oldest matters of literature and its commercialization” (Ulla, 1981). Translation has persevered in Aira’s life, in both his career and his reflections as a writer and a reader.
Below, we share a selection of excerpts in which Aira writes on translation. Of his many meditations on the subject, we have chosen texts published in different decades, from 1980 to 2020, and from different genres. These texts appeared in interviews, novels, short stories, essays, speeches, and press articles; we have only excluded prologues, since this dossier also includes the complete prologue of Aira’s translation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
Each quote includes a detailed reference to its source, not only out of bibliographical due diligence, but also as an invitation to continue reading.
“I translate cheap novels, usually fiction. What all translators of novels do, judging from conversations I’ve had, is not read even a single page ahead. Translation, in this case, becomes ultra-attentive reading, in which you don’t skip a single word or comma. The translator would be a novelist’s ideal reader. Barthes says the reader of novels which—he believes—give pleasure is a reader who’s always skipping. The translator is not only reading, but also reconstructing the mechanisms the novelist followed to create suspense, intrigue, atmosphere. Even the worst novelists trust, wisely, that the reader’s imagination will fill in the transitions and create atmosphere, even when the text lacks a particularly schematic mechanism.” (p. 16)
In Ulla, No. 6, August 1981. “Aira: son más rentables las malas y largas novelas.” Convicción: Cultura: 16.
“In the application of the concept of literary translation to the general idea of translation lies the foundation of State sovereignty. Sense, which is endorsed and guaranteed by translation, makes us docile before the law. Order must be obeyed to the extent that it is understood. Hence the liberating value of literature, which operates against sense. Benjamin’s famous essay on translation points vaguely in this direction. But there is an Argentine book that develops the subject in full, and which I’ll take the liberty of recommending to this survey’s readers: El evangelio apócrifo de Hadattah by Nicolás Peyceré.” (p. 8)
1982. “Encuesta: la traducción poética.” Xul: Signo viejo y nuevo: Revista de poesía 4: 7-8.
“The step from one note to another has an element of translation, as I said before. Translation should never be reconstruction. Things being as they are, nonetheless, this is hard to avoid.
Any given language is understood through analogies. This is a fact that linguists have not yet come to accept, compelled by their understandable psychological need to treat their object literally, as what it is. The use of analogy might seem an uncomfortable and disqualifying detour, but this is not the case due to the nature of the object that language is.
One analogy for the mechanism of translation is the passage from verse to prose. This passage is demonstrated in many very beautiful texts by Russian poets from the first decades of this century.” (p. 47)
1991. Nouvelles impressions du Petit Maroc. Saint-Nazaire: Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs de Saint-Nazaire.
“That was another sore point for the ovenbird. Although it wasn’t an important part of life for him (it is for us humans, but not for him; which shows that one shouldn’t rush to translate back the other way: the equivalences, although complete, are not symmetrical), he found it especially galling. What came out of human throats was effective, simple, and practical; the ovenbird’s songs and chirps were a dreamlike tangle in which function and frill, sense and nonsense, truth and beauty were chaotically mixed. Humans didn’t have problems like that; Nature had made it easy for them: from birth, or shortly afterward (from the moment, in their first year of life, when the ‘blind’ of instinct came down), they deposited all meaning in language, and whatever didn’t fit was considered marginal or insignificant. But for the ovenbird, meaning was dispersed in a thousand different telepathies, while song was an aesthetic without precise limits, which could be used for just about anything, or be of no use at all. He sang for love, or because he had the hiccups, or felt like it, or just because of the time of day… And his song, like everything he did, was subject to the unpredictable fluctuations of consciousness, to excess freedom…”
From “The Ovenbird,” in The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (New Directions, Kindle Edition, 2015), translated by Chris Andrews.
Originally published in Spanish as “El hornero” in La muela del juicio IX (5): 2-4, 1994/1995.
“In the end, it was a question of ‘translation.’ The translation that gave sense to things and events was always imperfect, incomplete. But it was always overseen by perfect translation, as a guarantee of the deposits of sense.
All that was wondrous and fantastic, brilliance and heroism, extravagance and miracles, had to be translated (and they did so under no duress) to the quotidian and commonplace, such that it would make sense; in fact, this was the proof that it had originally made sense. Because this, and nothing else, was sense: its translation. The more sense there was, and the more the translation was consummated, the more ridiculous and comical everything seemed; although, in the end, it was melancholic, since it was, after all, life hopelessly slipping away; but not even the comfort of flaunting its melancholy remained, because the process created a mad euphoria and resolved into an almost idiotic cackle. Everything was nullified in the same reality as ever. ‘Everything’ if the translation was perfect, if nothing was left behind, to which end a great expenditure of thought seemed necessary, and action did not always leave enough time.” (p. 186)
1998. El sueño. Buenos Aires: Emecé.
“[Aldo] Pellegrini fought to apply the word ‘surrealism’ instead of the one the critics had adopted since the twenties, ‘superrealism’; this is, indeed, an ultratranslation, and perhaps Pellegrini was right to claim that those who used the term ‘superrealism’ did so with derogatory prejudice. Pellegrini had something of that typically discipular posture of being ‘more Catholic than the Pope,’ and it showed in the zeal with which he compiled and ordered information; he may have known more about the school than anyone else in the world. When, in 1961, he published his Antología de la poesía surrealista, Breton himself had to concede that it was the most complete book of its kind in existence.” (p. 21)
2001. Alejandra Pizarnik. Barcelona: Ediciones Omega.
“The limerick, which was given this name once its cycle through the English literature of the nineteenth century had already come to an end, is a five-line poem with anapestic rhythm, with an AABBA rhyme scheme, that presents some characteristic or deed of a character, almost always a resident of a city or place mentioned in the first line. The simplest way to examine this curious format is to ask oneself how it might be translated. Let us take, for example, the limerick most often cited as the original model:
There was an Old Man of Tobago,
Lived long on rice gruel and sago;
But at last, to his bliss,
The physician said this:
To a roast leg of mutton you may go.
Evidently, it is rhyme itself that determines the plot of this little story: the man eats a diet of ‘sago’ because he lives in ‘Tobago’; had he lived elsewhere, he would have eaten something else. ‘Sago’ is a starch, surely quite nutritious and insipid; in Spanish it is called ‘sagú.’ To keep the same diet in Spanish, the man would have to live in ‘Moscú.’ The translator into Spanish must choose between ‘sagú’ and ‘Tobago’; if he chooses one, he must sacrifice the other, unless he sacrifices the rhymes entirely. In the latter case, he will translate the poem as the story it contains: ‘Había un anciano de Tobago que durante mucho tiempo se alimentó exclusivamente de arroz hervido y sagú; al fin, para su dicha, el médico le dijo que podía comer cordero asado.’ It is hard, but not impossible, to imagine a translator learning towards this option: the piece not only loses its humor; it also seems to lose its sense. Paradoxically, just as the poem gets its sense back, it loses it. The fact is that originally, in the language in which the poem was conceived, its sense consisted precisely of losing it. A translation was already taking place in its original language, so the move to a different language is manifested only as solipsism or aporia.
If the translator chooses to keep the rhymes, however, he must still translate the story, such that we know what it’s about. The tale can be told in many ways. The most practical way to start searching for rhymes in the second language is to clear out all of those that appear in the first: there is a person who lives somewhere and whom, for health reasons, is obliged to live for years or decades on some insipid food, until the doctor gives him permission to eat something appetizing. All circumstantial information falls within this scheme of meaning, and all can be replaced. A series of triangulations is established, from the specific (Tobago) to the general (place of residence), to then return to another specific. This specific might be Moscú, if you want to maintain the ‘sagú,’ but there is no need to do so because the foodstuff will be triangulated too. Through translation, ‘Tobago’ and ‘sago’ recover the complete indeterminacy they had just a moment before the poem was written, when the poet himself was seeking the right words along with the plot… Anything could come out of this pursuit. Once it has come out—something, a single element—all the others more or less fall into place, establishing a continuum of need between form and content.” (pp. 7-9)
2004. Edward Lear. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora.
“The method serves only to generate the plot. Then, once the story is written, the method disappears, is hidden, becomes as much a part of the story as the fact that the author used blue or black ink to write it, or any other factoid without the slightest importance when it comes to understanding or judging the text, or enjoying it. Foucault is mistaken on this point, in his book on Roussel, when he says those who don’t speak French, and therefore cannot grasp the wordplay that underlies his stories, will lose something when reading Roussel. I see this as a grave error on his part. The method is a tool of the author (of Roussel, for there was no other), and is of no concern to the reader. A tool that allowed him to find the strangest stories, the most surprising and uncommon inventions, ones that would never have come to him if he had trusted in his own inventiveness. So translating Roussel is not only possible but also appropriate, and reading him in translation to another language (at least his prose works, which is to say, the ones made according to the method) is the only way to fully appreciate him, since separating him from the French consummates the concealment of their genesis.” (p. 47)
2011. “Raymond Roussel: La Clave Unificada.” Carta: Revista de pensamiento y debate del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía 2: 46-49.
“Commercial novels, being commercial and adapted to the commercial evolution of culture, are constructed with the greatest care. Since they will be put up for sale, it is assumed that someone will pay for them, and will thus have the right to complain about them. These precautions, as meticulous as those taken by God in the creation of the cosmos, come vividly to light; they make visible the gaps that have been avoided. Translating such novels tirelessly, for the better part of my adult life, I returned to infancy, to the moment when I might have discovered something that escaped me and left my education in a state of chronic imperfection, but not incompleteness. I returned to the past, but without leaving behind the inescapable present.” (pp. 24-25)
2022. Una educación defectuosa: Discurso de recepción del Premio Formentor. Buenos Aires: Urania.
“Translation is one of those things that, the better they are, the worse they get. For utilitarian translation, which gets me through a book written in a language I don’t know, I am grateful, and the most we can ask is that the translator be well paid for his work. If he has pretensions of quality, it’s a misappropriation of the writing. It operates on the basis of the Meddler’s logic.
That’s all I’ll say. Translation is one of those things it’s best not to talk about. Let them happen, there they are, and there you have it.
(Why read writers from languages we don’t know? Out of curiosity. Again, it’s the Meddler who’s going to stick his nose in where he’s not wanted.)” (pp. 59-60)
2024. Ideas diversas. Buenos Aires: Blatt & Ríos.
Translated (unless otherwise noted) by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
