When we analyze César Aira’s dimension as a translator, we find that what he says about translation in public settings differs from what he does with translation in his essays, his fiction writing, and his translation work itself.
César Aira has a long career as a literary translator behind him, as is evidenced by his publication of a great many works in translation since 1975. He made a living translating for the publishing industry before attaining renown as a writer.
In public settings, when habitually asked about his work as a translator, he tends to respond that he always saw translation as a way to make money, from a place of absolute pragmatism, to such an extent that he specialized in “bad literature”—U.S. bestsellers, first and foremost—because it is “easier to translate” and thus more lucrative, and that he only translated “good literature” a handful of times, at some friend’s request or “by chance.”
The kind of translator that César Aira projects in interviews is an autodidact with a knack for learning languages and a “gift” that allows him to work just a couple of hours a day to get by, who is interested in neither translation for literature’s sake nor translation as a problem to solve nor translation theory.
When it comes to the relationship between his work as a translator and his fiction writing, the former’s influence on the latter—the way he tells it—seems to be limited primarily to the use of plain, legible prose, and to the knowledge gleaned from the “dissection” of texts that need translating. He has also indicated he “never liked translation for literature’s sake”; people should “learn languages and read books in their original languages,” and he was never “that interested in the whole theoretical question of translation.”
Aira claims he stopped translating when his novels started providing enough money and he no longer needed it for financial reasons (around 2004), since he had always seen it as a “job to put food on the table.” He explains the fact that he has carried on translating, even when he doesn’t need it financially, as a result of the fondness he feels for a craft he has practiced for so many years and of his personal friendships.
Nonetheless, when we analyze a representative quantity of the literary works Aira has translated, we see that his translation work is not limited to commercial literature; rather, he has translated canonical authors like Shakespeare and Kafka, among others. We see something similar when we consider the references to translation in Aira’s non-literary texts, where we find reflections that contradict, for example, his supposed disinterest in the theoretical question of translation. Only with these facts in mind can we begin to formulate a hypothesis: the translatorly figure that Aira has configured is contradictory; there are substantial differences between his statements in interviews, his reflections on translation in texts that bear his signature, and his own published translation work. Nevertheless, we are missing a critical element: the analysis grows all the more complex if we add his fiction work to the mix, since we find translator characters or translation as a theme in many of his novels. We can thus affirm that César Aira cuts a paradoxical figure as a translator, one that varies depending on whether we focus on what he says about translation in public settings or what he does with translation in his essays, his fiction, and his own translation work.
When we contrast César Aira’s statements on his translation work with the books he has indeed translated (more than 120, published between 1975 and 2019, mostly from English but also several from French, and a few from Italian, Portuguese, and German), we notice that many of them don’t fit the mold of “bad literature.” He has translated key authors of the Western canon, such as William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Oscar Wilde, and Jane Austen. The “good literature” that Aira claims to have translated a handful of times, at some friend’s request or by chance, is represented by at least thirty books. Alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cymbeline, The Metamorphosis, “The Canterville Ghost,” and Northanger Abbey by the aforementioned authors, we find works by Joseph Conrad, Washington Irvin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Dino Buzzati, Giorgio de Chirico, Saul Bellow, André Brink, Michel Lafon, Sérgio Sant’Anna, Sylvain Tesson, and Akira Yoshimura. Commercial literature, for its part, represents approximately one half of his translations.
While Aira is on the record as saying he stopped translating once and for all in 2004, between 2000 and 2009 we find no major decline in the number of translations he has published: the most noteworthy change in these years is not quantitative but qualitative, with a marked decrease in bestsellers, giving way to classics and other “quality” works. This change grows all the starker from 2010 on, when commercial literature disappears altogether. As far as the number of titles is concerned, it’s odd that someone who has stopped translating professionally should publish fifteen books in ten years. Aira has also published around thirty translations of nonfiction books of various sorts (essays, travel literature, popular science, biographies, correspondence, and some curiosities, such as esoteric texts, a spiritual guide, and a book on Argentine country estates), but he does not mention these non-literary texts in interviews.
The changes that have come over time in the types of work he translates, besides being explained by his newfound ability to live off his fiction writing, very likely have to do also with the fact of his changing position in the literary field. Since César Aira has become a “brand” and occupies a central space in this field, when he translates a book, he is no longer an ordinary mediator; he is, rather, a renowned giver of renown, lending legitimacy and prestige to the authors he translates—or, in the case of classics published by small or independent presses, to the press itself.
Analyzing César Aira’s work as a translator, we can see there is no exact correspondence between his statements and the works he has in fact translated: the proportion of works that don’t fit within the category of “commercial literature” is pronounced for a translator who claims to have focused on translating bestsellers just to put food on the table and to have only translated real literature on rare occasions; the proportion of works translated after no longer needing the job for a living is pronounced for a translator who claims to be uninterested in translation for literature’s sake.
Contradicting his supposed disinterest in translation as a theoretical problem, which he has made public in interviews, César Aira refers to various aspects of translation in several of his nonfiction texts published between 1991 and 2018.
In his essay Nouvelles Impressions du Petit Maroc (1991), he develops theories on literature and, among them, finds room for translation: besides being dreadful and denigrating, translation is useless, since the mere possibility of any given literature existing in a language foreign to itself is absurd. On the other hand, Edward Lear (2004), where he collects his ideas on the titular English author and his work, is rich in reflections on translation, and here his posture is quite different; he starts from the assumption that every message can be translated into any other language and claims that, in order to translate literature, the translator must be able to straightforwardly capture the work of art, and that, in this process, said translator is also making art. We also find reflections on translation in his Continuación de ideas diversas (2017) and Evasión y otros ensayos (2018).
The movement of Aira’s ideas in these essays seems to form a sort of continuum; it starts with rejection in Nouvelles Impressions du Petit Maroc, passes through possibility in Edward Lear and Continuación de ideas diversas, where he notes specific strategies with which to address translation problems, and culminates in positive appreciation in Evasión y otros ensayos, where he describes translation as a practice capable of shedding light on the original text.
As far as his fiction work goes, in a considerable number of his over one hundred novels published to date, we find characters who are translators, scenes of translation, multilingual contexts, and translation taken up as a thematic issue, used as a method, or mentioned in passing; this is the case, for example, in La liebre (1991), La fuente (1995), El congreso de literatura (1997), El sueño (1998), Cumpleaños (2001), Varamo (2002), La Princesa Primavera (2003), El pequeño monje budista (2005), and Fulgentius (2020).
In these novels, we find translation addressed in a variety of ways, from abstract, general matters—such as a broad conception of translation’s being inherent to every communicative act—to very particular matters surrounding the everyday practice of the profession, such as the great importance of meeting deadlines. Between these two extremes, we find translation as a method of literary creation, which, in some novels, is configured as a constructive principle; interlinguistic communication as a problem; the notion of equivalence in multiple dimensions; notions of domestication and foreignization as global and local translation strategies; the workings of the book market; the material conditions of the translator’s labor; the habitus of the literary translator; the practice of translation as a job to put food on the table; and translation as a trade one comes to practice by sheer chance or out of necessity.
In César Aira’s fiction work, we see a more exhaustive development of ideas on translation and translators in multiple dimensions, including the use of translation as a method for literary creation, as a mode of making comprehensible to the reader experiences that lack a name in said reader’s own language. In his novels, we also find theoretical concepts, like that of equivalence, and ideas that can be linked to theoretical concepts from translation studies, which demonstrates that, as Rosemary Arrojo observes in Fictional Translators (2018), it is possible to learn a great deal about translation from studying works of fiction. Lastly, in Aira’s characterization of his translator characters, we find numerous references to the material conditions of the translator’s labor and the habitus of the literary translator, in tune with Jean Anderson’s (2005) hypothesis on the fact that author-translators can express affective elements in their literary texts that lack an official place in the translation process.
As as writer who has assembled his authorial figure very carefully over the course of many years, and who sees the construction of a personal mythos as central to his literary activity, is is understandable why César Aira should downplay the importance of his work as a translator in interviews, presenting it as merely a secondary activity.
The evidence suggesting that translation is, in fact, much more than this for Aira can be sought in his oeuvre. As we anticipated at the start, the combination of all these elements allows us to perceive the figure of a paradoxical translator, which varies depending on whether we concentrate on what Aira says about translation in public settings or on what he does with it in the texts he publishes. In his interviews, he constructs the figure of a writer who translates “bad literature” just to put food on the table, who is uninterested in translation as a problem or translation for literature’s sake, and who, once his finances are in order, is happy to leave it behind. In his translation work, his novels, and his essays, we find the figure of a professional translator, who translates to live, but who also responds to a certain drive to translate, who reflects on his practice and the material conditions of his trade, who outlines theories on translation and who, once his finances are in order, can stop translating “bad literature” to instead translate “good literature.”
On the other hand, we can affirm that César Aira projects the figure of the weak translator and constructs the mythos of the strong author because, even when he is translating, he projects himself as an author—an author who translates because he has to make a living one way or another, and thus suffers the misfortune of translating out of necessity. This description may sound convincing; however, we must not forget that Aira may complain about his profession, but has not succeeded in leaving it behind altogether, even when he no longer needs it to get by. He has translated too many literary works for a writer with no interest in translation for literature’s sake, and, for a writer with no interest in the theoretical elements of translation, he has referred to it too many times in his nonfiction texts, besides using it as a subject, a profession or intermittent occupation of his characters, and a literary method in his fiction work. So, we might run the risk of thinking César Aira is not merely a writer who translates but also a translator who writes novels and essays. The translator is eclipsed by the author, not only because the literary field has traditionally relegated him to the background, but also because, in the Airean universe, the construction of the writer’s personal mythos obnubilates everything else.
