As part of this dossier on Latin American translation in Spain, renowned Argentine translator Andrés Ehrenhaus looks back on his translation beginnings in Barcelona thanks to Marcelo Cohen and reflects on various publishing practices, diverse linguistic variants, and a certain little word.1
I never hid, as time declassified my past, that my rocky beginnings as a translator were more on the side of the shadows than on that of the light. First, because as a lad I destroyed a Lacan Seminar in the dreary kitchen of the office of the psychoanalyst who’d hired me, for a few bucks, for the task, and then because I was a shadow translator for my great friend Marcelo Cohen (in fact, and as if putting the finishing touch on our pedagogical relationship, I did it again recently, but I won’t say how or for whom or where), who committed the recent misdeed of leaving us alone with his absence. From the massacre of the Seminar (I don’t even remember which one it was!) I gained that kind of experience often considered intangible: a certain boldness, the suspicion that sometimes the mask translates more than you, and a vague worker’s consciousness. From shadow translating for Marcelo I extracted, or rather, I received the tools of the noble trade.
But that’s easy to say. How was I given those tools? Because shadow work among translators, which is more frequent and more common than anyone admits, is usually very instrumental and not very dialectic. Moreover, there are two types, of which my first stage as a shadow writer and that most recent episode I mentioned could—except for a not-so minor detail to which I will return later—be illustrative: either the shadow translator is a novice who agrees to enjoy a certain work space in exchange for an equity slice stripped of moral rights, or he is a mature colleague who has no qualms about helping a friend in trouble and accepts, just like the novice but absent his need, the same conditions: a fair payment without the corresponding symbolic achievement. What would these rewards be? Basically, that of being recognized as the authors of that work—derivative, but a work nonetheless. In the case of the mature colleague, to renounce them is almost a gesture of nobility. In the case of the novice, it’s a collateral loss, in that not signing the work is the same as being invisible to the contracting publishers (or to the reading public or reviewers, although the name of the translator is usually less important to them than the jacket cover).
So, did Marcelo take advantage of my inexperience? I’ve often asked myself this question. Before answering it, I’d like to clarify that, throughout my career, I’ve also availed myself, albeit little and reluctantly, of both sides of shadow work. Little and reluctantly, not out of ethical concerns but because it was never clear to me whether it was more of a problem than a solution, that is, in monetary terms, more work for less pay. Hence, part of the answer to the above question is spurred on by this fact: did I really get Marcelo out of a tight spot (I am referring above all to my first shadow translation, because in the second case I’m certain I did) by putting my sweat at the service of his pen? I’m tempted to say no. I’m tempted to say, although he didn’t plan it that way, that he was doing me more of a favor than himself. A relative favor, of course, because helping someone to become a translator isn’t exactly fixing their life. Who can live, let alone feed a family, from translation alone in Argentina or Spain? Eppur si traduce.
My feeling, which is now almost a certainty, is that Marcelo considered me a peer. I’m not saying that I was or wasn’t, I’m saying that he saw me that way. We met personally, as is now public and well known, in Barcelona, at the legendary tapped telephone in Plaça Universitat, back in January or February of 1977. Marcelo was the guy who managed the phone’s sign-up list from a table in the Estudiantil, a bar that still exists. We became friends soon after, thanks to soccer in particular, in addition to teaching English at the same academy. Marcelo had acquired a certain literary fame and was beginning to publish articles in cultural magazines as well as his first important translations; by then I’d begun to translate technical, erotic, commercial, and medical texts. We had no training other than that of reading, a hard chair, and a portable typewriter. It was in that context that Marcelo pushed me into the stormy waters of editorial translation: it’s easy, he told me, you’re more than halfway there, I’ll give you things to do, and when you’re ready I’ll introduce you at the publishing house. So I jumped into the waves; I knew how to swim, more or less, but I couldn’t get my footing anywhere. From there it was either sink or swim.
Sometime later, much later, I discovered that Marcelo had practiced an intensely drastic method of practical initiation with me. I discovered it because I remembered what I myself had done one afternoon at the beach with a female friend whom, with the recklessness of summer, I encouraged to follow me beyond the surf, where, in spite of the rough sea, you can swim more freely. I shouldn’t have done it. She was perhaps a little less skilled and much less daring than me, and although we weren’t far from shore, where people were splashing around oblivious and happy, we soon realized that it was really hard to return and my friend, understandably, first hesitated and then panicked. The ocean was choppy, the underwater current was strong and a crosswind was blowing. On top of that, as if in an act of symbolic expressionism, the sky turned cloudy. My perception of the water changed: it was now cold. All that in how long? A matter of minutes. We were both floating, yes, but she was starting to get tired, and I wasn’t Mark Spitz; there were no lifeguards or bathers or attendants (what an inopportune time to shuffle synonyms!) in sigh and shouting for someone seemed totally unfeasible. So I did what Marcelo had done to me without my knowledge (and probably without his either).
My first pragmatic intuition/proof was to make sure that the surface pull of the waves was strong enough to take advantage of it and not fight against the undertow, which was or seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. By swimming as horizontally as possible we’d be able to gain more distance than we lost after the wave passed, and so I tried to explain this to my friend, but she was in no position to accept theoretical speculations or any solution other than clinging to me and praying that I would save her. At that point, the situation was as follows: she was begging me, already quite exhausted, to come closer to save her, and I was a couple of meters closer to the shore, aware that if I approached her we would both sink. Then, with the little bit of spark I had left, it occurred to me to tell her that yes, I would pull her out, but if she came towards me, I’d get close enough, more or less at arm’s length, and when she grabbed me, I’d take advantage of the wave’s inertia and move a bit towards the shore. So, little by little, and dancing to the rhythm of the waves, we moved out of the danger zone to where the undertow wasn’t as strong. And suddenly we were standing up, surrounded by grandmothers and children with duck or dinosaur floaties. All in the same sequence shot. When we returned to our little square of towels and looked, panting, at the aquatic inferno that almost swallowed us, there lay ahead of us a totally innocent and neutral strip of ocean, the same ocean as always, the ocean of all beaches.
And so, thanks to Marcelo and his reckless insistence, I believe I learned to translate and take responsibility for the authorship of my translations. And just like at the beginning, it’s still hard as hell for me to get out of the water.
The Apostil
Once I’d cut my teeth in aquatic combat, my friend suggested that I get a new pair of swimming trunks (swimsuit, bathing suit, Speedo?), a pair of swimming goggles (glasses, specs, whatever) and some sandals (flip-flops, who knows what else) and introduce myself to a couple of editors whom he’d already arranged to accept me as a quasi-senior translator. In fact, two successive assignments fell in my lap, perhaps because at that time there weren’t a lot of us swimmers who could avoid sinking in mid-course, and the industry was beginning to realize that professionalizing the translator didn’t imply a loss, as many publishers feared, rather a gain, especially in terms of time but also money. I’m talking about a time in Spain when there was not the slightest hint of a translation contract, something that was resolved by almost ornamental touches on the invoice; the invariable response, which was also ornamental, if anyone demanded something a little more in keeping with the law, which was also ornament: “Well, you see, it’s not house policy.”
Of those two, then three, then more publishers who trusted in my rhythmic stroke, one was the great Paco Porrúa, who’d carried Editorial Minotauro on his shoulders to Barcelona and continued to open the way here (where I was then and am now) to science fiction of the highest quality. Almost all of his books were translations, and Paco had a very clear, unwavering, and singular vade mecum as far as the Spanish model of translation was concerned: since he published mainly in and for Spain, he allowed the second person plural [vosotros] to be conjugated as it was in Spain, although he recommended avoiding the eventuality and looking for ways and shortcuts so as not to abuse it, but as for the naturalization of the colloquial he was unsparing and strictly prohibited, for example, the use of the verb coger (in the Spanish sense of “to seize”) where the verb agarrar [to grab], tomar [to take] or any other paraphrase could be used without a problem (to avoid the uncomfortable Latin American reading of coger as “to fuck”). In Minotauro’s books, no one ever got caught [or fucked]. Not even when making love. Paco disliked vulgarity; he was most interested, above all else, in caring for his transatlantic readers, who remained faithful to his editions from afar. His symbolic market was clearly to speakers of the Rioplatense, that is from Argentina and Uruguay.
I must say that disposing of the verb coger wasn’t a big deal for me; on the one hand, I’d already cut my teeth on translating soft porn stories for magazines like Penthouse or Playboy, a venture that was splendidly managed by another great cultural boilermaker, the Uruguayan Homero Alsina Thevenet, who, while able, generously distributed (he paid well and fast) these translations among South American swimmers. I believe it was also Marcelo who connected me with him, although at that time the pool of odd jobs was extremely socialized. Homero Alsina didn’t like us using coger for tomar or agarrar either, although he was less prescriptive than Paco and, besides, he didn’t handle such, shall we say, delicate material. But those clear idiosyncratic traits, perhaps generational, resonated naturally in our incipient swimming poetics. The schizoid question having been resolved for obvious chrematistic reasons—already contemplated during the Argentine childhood of several school generations—along with the coexistence of the specter of vosotros, most of us were left with the flag of whether to coger [to catch] or not (the bus, the subway, the umbrella). No doubt it will sound philologically daring (among other reasons, because that’s not my field) but perhaps, thanks to a survey that is still needed, we can read the decision to use or not use the verb coger as one of the political axes of the Rioplatense translations done in or for Spain; to understand us/ourselves (or confuse us even more), it would be our waterline.
I say this having scant idea of how my colleagues chose to coger (to seize, not to fuck) this phenomenological bull. Not only have I not completed a study, I’ve scarcely dared to ask them about it. Marcelo, for example, I suppose had adopted the warnings of Paco and Homero to the letter, and perhaps also of Muchnik, for whom he translated quite a bit (I only participated in a dictionary resolved in unison), but I can’t be sure that in other cases, with peninsular editors, coger was a no-no. I can, however, speak for myself with some authority. I know that I never fucked around with my translations (uhm, rather, I mean I never used the verb coger) except on a single occasion; allow me to clarify or punctuate: I never wrote coger, but I’m not totally sure that a proofreader (forced or not by the editor) never fucked (that is, used coger) with my translations behind my back because, let’s be honest, nobody checked all the galleys or proofs of their work life—assuming they were even sent—and damn the fun I’d have now retracing (or should I say re-swimming?) that waterfront. Nor am I an absolute guarantor against possible distractions. But we’re not talking about precise casuistry, rather phenomenology, and what matters here is the intention behind the phenomenon, its political willingness, which is none other than to avoid having to coger while swimming. In all cases except, as I said, in one.
When I undertook translating all of Shakespeare’s poetry (another of the oceans Cohen got me into) except for one poem (the relatively short “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” which Andreu Jaume, the brilliant editor of tutto chéspir for Penguin, kept for himself), I discovered a few things I’d never noticed before. One, that Shakespeare matters much less to people than they claim; another, that one can swim so many nautical miles of rhymed hendecasyllables in a few days and not succumb or drown in the attempt; and yet another, that William was, I won’t say a feminist avant la lettre, but indeed a very fine critical observer of the power dynamic between the different sexes, genders, and libidos of the Elizabethan era, which is not so alien to us, really. I discovered this, above all, in “The Rape of Lucrece.” I’m not going to give a spoiler and recount here the story and the poet’s approach (and I say spoiler with absolute right: who of you has read that tremendous poem from beginning to end, huh?) but the title itself already does: yes, there is a Lucretia and someone rapes her. The Chespirian [that uniquely Spanish way of pronouncing Shakespeare] work of psychological introspection is brutal; the proximity to all the elements of an act as execrable as it is universal is such that one wonders if William himself had not suffered or made someone to suffer something like this at some point in his life. The emotional to-and-fro and the naturalness of the details never verge on the commonplace, and there’s not an ounce of histrionics or moral justification. “The Rape of Lucrece” should be read, perhaps, before some of his plays. Especially today, now! Shakespeare wanted to be a poet, not a playwright. That was the passport to fame he believed he’d bought. And it is in poetry that he revisits time and again the question of power in erotic relationships. It is true that in those long pseudo-love poems William put his hopes for commercial success when the theaters had to close due to the plague, but it is no less true that the deep problems of one genre and the other differed, just as his treatment of the universals differed. In short, it is not my intention to make an apologia of the Bard as a bard rather than as an employee and impresario of the theater; nevertheless, I recommend a slow, attentive, unprejudiced, even irreverent reading of “Chespirian” poetry, which after all is not that much.
The point is that my revenge as a distance swimmer for having to navigate waters full of linguistic jellyfish was to use (in both senses!), for the only time in my career, the verb in question in verse 677 of Lucrece, just when the rapist commits the act:
This said, he sets his foot upon the light,
For light and lust are deadly enemies:
Shame folded up in blind concealing night,
When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize.
The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries;
Till with her own white fleece her voice controll’d
Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold
Shakespeare uses “seize,” which is both to catch or trap or clutch, and a euphemism for “take” in the sexual sense; I use coger, which is both things but on different shores. So what now? Do I force myself not to use the verb again for the sake of symmetry? Or has my revenge swum its final lap? In any case, the line between coger and no coger in South American translations in Spain has already been drawn, and not by me, heaven, or earth, forbid. To prove my point, I offer: not long ago, an Argentine publisher wanted to release to the Hispanic market a trans text of high erotic voltage, for which the translation was revised and, with a certain criterion, all the occurrences of coger were replaced by follar, the Spanish verb for “to fuck.” The result was that every five minutes, the characters refucked here and there, overfucked, infucked, exfucked, and I don’t know how many other things. In other words, as I said: the study must be done once and for all.
