I. Endings
Two interviews punctuate my relationship with Marcelo Cohen. The first sparked in me admiration, attentive surprise, gratitude. The second, far from ending our friendship, renewed it. I remember that conversation well. It was 2013. The troops of the journal El ansia, commanded by the writer José María Brindisi, had amicably assailed the creator of the fictitious Delta Panorámico.1 That collective siege was and is the journal’s policy, which the editor, in his introduction to the first issue, decreed in these terms:
To stalk them, I thought, ambush them, infiltrate their lives not in any attempt to reveal their secrets but to share in their silence. To draw them out without ever penetrating their true core, to run up against that impossibility. There’s a nucleus, I thought, a nucleus we’ll never access, and that perhaps they themselves, the writers, are unaware of, or are prohibited from translating into words. […] For this intimate portrait to take shape, we can only have a few authors per issue and three seemed like enough to us. Three authors per year, three authors we can talk to, eat and drink with, and from there, from listening to them, determine how to build the web with them at the center. The first choice for this inaugural edition was Marcelo Cohen.
Cohen accepted enthusiastically, bearing the parade of interviews, a veritable literary plague, with the patience of a father or older brother. Brindisi was generous enough to invite me to join the ranks as something like a sniper: I could choose the topic, the mode of approach, which of Cohen’s flanks to target, and try to get close to the silent marrow of his humanity, that “untranslatable” nucleus of his life and literature. Before we met, I told Marcelo what I wanted to talk about: a topic that I summed up—clumsily and incorrectly—with the word religion. I arrived at the meeting mentally berating myself for being so explicit and convinced that the interview was condemned to failure. Surely, I thought, Marcelo, as he traveled the two kilometers to the café, was thinking the same thing. But I would soon learn that my suggestion had inspired, as he walked to meet me, a long reflection. All I had to do was turn on the recorder, because, with an exemplary equanimity, total dedication, and imperturbable courage, he threw himself fully into the subject matter before he’d even ordered his coffee. He was so sincere, in fact, in his attempt to give me access to that implicit nucleus of his thoughts, trying to translate it, to translate himself, that at first I didn’t realize he was even talking about the same subject, transforming my topic of conversation into something much more interesting and worthwhile. He talked about finalities and finales, endings, which he did not believe in, and literature’s attempts to find new themes, expand its limits, discover fresh plotlines and arguments that would not lead deliberately, like in classical rhetoric, to a premeditated conclusion—political, religious, and literary manipulations—but that aimed to move toward a horizon in perpetual expansion. Today I tell myself that that afternoon Cohen practiced with me, masterfully, something I aspire to inculcate in the students of my literary workshops. “You have to disappoint the reader. You can be gentle about it or you can be brutal, but you have to dash their expectations,” I tell them, “and offer them something even better in return.” That’s what Marcelo Cohen did, not only in that interview, but with the entirety of his literary work—his fiction as well as his essays and translations—and, I’d venture to say, a consistent interest in that exploration guided his everyday life.
That would explain Cohen’s self-proclaimed addiction to translation: the puzzle of naming the unnamable, of being unable to give up trying, despite the difficulty, to find that name. It was, in him, a kind of ethical commitment, a godless devotion.
II. Cats
It wasn’t intentional. I’m reading a book that M.C. translated almost twenty years ago but I wasn’t thinking about writing this essay when I chose it from my small travel library this morning, put it in my backpack, and brought it to the beach along with my folding chair and my Panama hat. That’s a lie, it was intentional. I knew that at some point in my stay beside the sea I’d write this essay, and maybe that’s why the M. John Harrison book ended up in my suitcase, moved later to the bookshelf I reserved for myself at the home of my mother—who’s no longer with us—and invited me to read it, in the little free time I have between translating and giving online classes. I read sometimes out in the garden, a few times, like today, at the beach, where up to now I’ve almost never read more than a page at a time, too “letter tired” to read for pleasure. (Like the paradoxical advice to “be spontaneous,” sometimes I have to force myself to read for pleasure.)
Today, finally, I fall under the spell of this strange object, built from a language I don’t recognize but which nonetheless is intimately familiar. It could be said the other way around: I recognize this voice that nonetheless with loving meticulousness, with spontaneous effort (which sounds like an oxymoron), breaks down the rituals of the language of the tribe. It could also be said: even though the arrangement of the words is foreign to me, even though they are made new by the translator’s strict, precise palate, I recognize, underneath them, the professional code of ethics and personal taste that have guided their selection. I weigh his choices in pectore: why did Marcelo Cohen opt for this word and not that one; I tell myself to remember some of them because they could help me solve future translation problems; he’s managed, I think, to transmit a sense of naturalness and singularity at the same time—something I also seek to do in translation. It has the singularity that one expects from an original work, given that—according to the first principle of the literary ethics I think we shared—the last thing you want a writer to do, in whatever language, is to glide smoothly over the soothing and familiar—sterile—prairies of conventional language without any surprises along the way.
(And what was, I wonder, the English phrase that he chose to translate as “paseando cavilosamente de un coche a otro” [ambling ruminantly from car to car?]—referring to a cat!)
III. A New Country
I’m distracted from my reading by my own thoughts (as if it wasn’t complicated enough shielding the book from the glare of the sun; the flashes of half-naked bodies titillating my almost-dormant instincts; the children diving at my feet in pursuit of stray balls; the incessant drone of other people’s music that has me constantly fleeing, moving my chair first over here, then over there as new brigades of acoustic suicide bombers holding munitions of stereophonic destruction invade every free space and detonate their sonic weapons until I end up with my feet in the water as the aluminum U of my chair, listing dangerously to the left, sinks further and further into the wet sand and I lose all hope that the sound of the waves will drown out the insistent rumble of idiocy and obvious rhyme). I think: this book was published in 2000, and a few years later, quickly, translated to Spanish, in 2004, which is when I brought this copy home, when V. took it from my library and read it and said to me “it’s extraordinary”—since then it’s been sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for a no less extraordinary moment for me to read it; and in the meantime V. has left my life (leaving behind some little slips of paper to mark her favorite passages in some of the stories) and M.C., the translator and friend who persuaded me to take this book home in the first place, died, weeks ago. At that time, I ask myself, now, on this beach, distracted from the book by my own thoughts, did the internet exist? Of course it did: it was somewhat more rudimentary than it is today but it existed. And why did I wonder this, I now wonder. I try to retrace the thread of thoughts that led me away from the book: in one of Harrison’s stories, translated by Marcelo Cohen, a woman traveling by train writes a letter, a letter on paper, to the friend she’s going to visit. Was that woman aware, I ask myself, that her letter would probably arrive well after she herself got there? Or that it might never arrive? From there, I suppose, the translation-related curiosity: how did M.C. solve certain issues as he translated this book, so skillfully. For example, geographical markers, the order and location of the train stations on the outskirts of London, that kind of thing can cause annoying problems for the translator: because they’re not matters of expression or artistic quandaries, but questions with factual answers. Did the internet exist at that time to help him translate? Of course that’s how I came to that question, which proves that, against my hopes, I was reading this extraordinary book in a completely ordinary time. Let me explain. In reality it’s like V. said: extraordinary, the book. But I have not been able to take time out of my ordinary life to read it, to free up all my mental energy and let myself become absorbed by it, taking a moment to practice a true art: the art of reading. And so, an ordinary reader in an ordinary situation, I am distracted by my own translation-related reflections.
In fact, the internet has been around since 1969, “when the Department of Defense developed ARPANET,” et. cetera, et. cetera, as I will read later, when I sit at my computer to transcribe my notes from this morning at the beach (notes in which I wisely left blank space for this paragraph). Of course, it would be several decades before the aforementioned development would become accessible to us mere mortals—translators included—not until so-and-so invented that thing and such-and-such implemented the other. I myself, in the late nineties, translated my first book, Alexandre Dumas’s travel log of his journey through Spain, the savage Spain of the nineteenth century, tracing the writer and his friends’ itinerary—as they traveled by horseback—on a gigantic atlas purchased to that end, since the internet was still an incipient and inaccessible luxury for a broke, novice translator. I remember that Dumas altered the names of all the towns, and when they said the word “pesetas” he thought they were saying piecèttes: little coins… In sum, we’ve had internet since such-and-such a year, it doesn’t really matter. And then I go back to what I wrote at the beach, in the notebook I tried to keep from getting sandy or wet or messed up by the wind, as, under the notebook, with the same hand, I held the book by Harrison, trying to protect it from the same dangers with my index finger tucked between the pages like a makeshift bookmark.
As I was saying, I just looked up that information about the internet, and I did so—excuse the redundancy—on the internet. And that brings to mind the phrase by Bertrand Russel that Borges cites in his story “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius”: “the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that ‘remembers’ an illusory past…” (and a bunch of idiots who listen to loud music on the beach, I’d add, with a certain postmodern bitterness).
And I think that what just happened—the fact I had to consult the internet to answer my question about the internet itself, as if we were inhabiting some endless tautology, an idiotic self-fulfilling prophecy—is a sad commentary on our current situation; and I wonder what Marcelo Cohen would have to say about it, with his piercing ability to examine the spirit of his time, if I could interview him again right now. And then, after becoming absorbed with that thought for a moment, my eyes lost to the horizon, I return to the book and read: “You can’t even change yourself”—M. John Harrison speaking through the voice of the translator Marcelo Cohen; or Cohen expressing himself through the diary of the suicidal writer created by Harrison—“Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were before! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters, and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else.”2
IV. This Is What We’ve Become
Harrison’s verbal outbursts, with his poetic arbitrariness, that not knowing what he’s trying to say until the words themselves take on the task of figuring it out, marries perfectly with Cohen’s ability to take control of the discourse, getting out ahead of the galloping horses of language, and once there, free rein and let them go where they will: letting the prose’s Cartesian childhood roam free in this chaotic world and get lost and grow up by the force of fractal truths, which is to say, poetry. Harrison is already, with this story alone, one of my favorite authors, as is Cohen, the man who made it possible for me to read Harrison: not only because he translated him (I could, with a little effort, read the original), but, above all, because he “discovered” him for us.
Ever since Marcelo Cohen died, I feel like he’s been with me in a strange way. First I rediscovered one of his stories, “La gran cadena de los panaderos,” which a few months back I’d left half-read on my bedside table (as I’ve said before: “the baker in Cohen’s story experiences one of the most prodigious adventures of awareness that I’ve ever read. I won’t call it a revelation because nothing is revealed, except the tumultuous passage of the world through the eye of a needle in an instant”); then, in a weekend of feverish searching for “signs” from him, I reread Música prosaica, which talks about translation, literature, life, and—why not—religion, and I felt like Cohen was ahead of me in all my concerns and he’d found wiser, healthier, more impartial ways to deal with them; lastly, through one of his translations, I was reminded that perplexity is law and certainties are the misleading exceptions.
Impossible, on almost any beach in the world where there are other humans, to hear the murmur of the sea for what it is: the very pulse of the planet. Everything is inundated with the boom boom boom of enterprising speakers (we no longer need the centrally-controlled loudspeakers of some anesthetizing Big Brother: each of us willingly brainwashing ourselves… and our neighbors). This, among other things, is what makes it impossible to find an extraordinary moment of epiphany: all epiphany is either impossible or exhaustingly difficult to achieve. We have to defend the moment with tooth and nail, because trying to defend an entire afternoon, or even a single hour of silence, is unthinkable. Another present moment. Another sentence from a great book. Another wave breaking. Nothing more, before the sun burns us, or hunger calls us back home. The war ambushes us and defeats us from the inside. Distracted down to the very marrow of time.
And this phrase appears in the book (once again, Harrison and Cohen, speaking to me jointly): “We shouldn’t have to live our lives unless we can live in them, thoughtlessly, like the animals.” And this other: “‘Years later,’ she read,” [it’s the same woman who was writing a letter on the train, the sister of the famous writer who just died; she’s now at her brother’s house going through his unpublished papers; “years later,” which in the writer’s diary means years after he was a young, slightly cynical but poetic soldier deployed to some part of Europe that would soon be devastated by the Second World War, with a small gypsy prostitute a bit younger than him; and before “kneeling over me thoughtfully to bring me off in the glum light with a quick, limping flick of the pelvis” (p. 27) the girl read his fortune; then, years later] “I could only think that Birkenau had been in the room with us even then. A thug-like burial Kommando drunk on petrol and formalin was already waiting rowdily outside like the relatives at the door of the bridal suite, as she closed the curtain, spread the cards, then knelt over me thoughtfully…” (pp. 27-28). And I, thoughtfully, consider— boom boom boom—what have we become if it is not the depths of the emotional abyss that these lines pull me into, in this moment, here, on this beach where I try to read two sentences in a row without being distracted by the hollow music and my internal rustlings, but the very possibility of reading itself that I have to defend and protect and make an effort to convert into an “ex-tra-or-din-ary” moment.
And I ask myself if that might not be a good homage to the spirit of the translator and friend to whom I owe two fifths of my lucidity. He would know how to deal with these things, I tell myself. He would know.
V. Horizons
We chatted like friends, not only because it was the second time I’d interviewed him—and since that initial interview in the late nineties, we’d met again, not intimate conversations but always with a reciprocal warmth—but, above all, because Cohen perfectly incarnated his own ideal of hospitality. He was in a way the “kind man” from his 1998 book that prompted our first meeting: the protagonist discovers that kindness—like Gandhi’s non-violence or, why not just say it, a Christ-like figure—can revolutionize the world.
Up to just a few days ago I couldn’t remember when that first interview had taken place, or in what media outlet it had been published: all I’d retained of it was the mark made by the various readings of Cohen I’d done to prepare myself during the weeks leading up to our meeting; the deep traces left by the protagonist of that book, an ordinary man, suddenly awakened from misery in a degraded and violent world to the revelation of kindness; the trail of benevolence left in my mood by the generous receptivity of my interviewee who had only recently returned to Argentina after twenty years living in Barcelona. That was in fact the first of his books that he’d written entirely in Buenos Aires.
A few weeks ago, when Marcelo Cohen died and little by little voices began to emerge here and there, in remembrance of him, Argentina’s Historical Archive of Journals (AHIRA) posted on social media a photocopy of that old interview, published Tuesday, December 29, 1998 in the “Grandes Líneas” supplement edited by Martín Prieto for the El ciudadano newspaper of Rosario. “¿Cómo se hace para salir del kitsch verbal argentino?” was the Cohen citation that the editor chose as the title of the article [How to get rid of the Argentine verbal kitsch?]. An article in which, just like the interview published in El ansia in October of 2013 under the title “El mundo es las historias que hacemos,” the vital flow of Marcelo Cohen’s answers saved the narrow focus of my questions from shipwreck [The world is the stories we create].
I realize, as I reread both interviews, that both, in one way or another, became touchstones for me in ways I never imagined when I did them or even when they came out in print and I had them before me with relative distance. As if Marcelo Cohen had influenced my intellectual development with his discreet teachings that neither one of us were conscious of, that I myself, as the beneficiary, had not fully recognized until now. And even though I always had a tacit yet affectionate appreciation for him, with that not-so-solemn respect reserved for people you admire and feel doubly grateful to for offering not only a wise example but also their sincere trust and even friendship, it always feels bittersweet to realize the magnitude of a person’s influence precisely in the moment when this person dies. Marcelo Cohen has died, and his death—even though I was not part of his intimate circle, was not involved in the projects that had him, in recent years, at the center of certain networks of relationships—devastated me. Just as when I’ve lost much closer loved ones, I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t wrap my head around the notion, in the first few days, that Marcelo was no longer with us. His presence, even though we didn’t see each other often, especially since his health required him to limit his social life, was for me a promise of future encounters; that I could always turn to him in search of a lucid mirror, that I would even interview him again, ask him some stupid question floating naïve and ill-informed through my brain, and that he would shape it into a small bright diamond, whose sparkling facets would illuminate, for a long while after, my own ideas about literature and life, my own aspirations for expanded horizons.
Translated by Frances Riddle
