Editor’s Note: This contribution to the dossier is the fruit of a collaboration between dossier coordinator María Belén Riveiro (Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires/Conicet, Argentina) and students and staff at Newcastle University’s Humanities Research Institute, United Kingdom: Jennifer Arnold, Daisy Costello, Asia Earlam, Rosie Eaton, Francis Jones, Lara Kelland, Claire Kimmance, Adam Little, Alicia McEvoy, Eleanor McVay, Em Morris, Fatima Mouflih, Philippa Page, Cassia Plain, Emily Pocock, Jennifer Richards, and Saskia Robbins.

How do the “classics” change over time? How do they migrate across space? Do they remain the same? How are they read in different locations and at different historical conjunctures? Are there as many interpretations as there are readers? If so, in what ways do the acts of writing, reading, and translation coalesce? Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004) refutes the belief that the literary canon is ahistorical and defined intrinsically. Indeed, the very idea of the “universal” is both relational and contingent, established by the cultural (geo)politics of a transnational cartography according to which recognition and value are unequally attributed. When writer and translator Carlos Gamerro presented his recent translation of Macbeth, he stated that “we are living in a very Macbethian era, and not only in Argentina.” Reimagining the treacherous Thane of Cawdor from Buenos Aires, Gamerro clearly feels the contemporary resonance of Shakespeare’s infamous villain at a moment of institutionalized libertarianism in Argentina. He likewise reminds us that translation holds the potential to unlock a wider comparative conversation, in this case one that evokes the threat of a resurgent global right wing as recounted through paradigms of evil, of old. The dramatic reduction in funding to support the translation of Argentine authors into languages other than Spanish via the government’s Programa Sur (active and prolific since 2010) is part of this political scenario, one in which the cultural life nourished by the arts and humanities is undervalued. 

As a praxis, translation is a powerful tool and one, therefore, to be considered with care. It has the capacity to reproduce those power relations that have long maintained the hierarchies of the literary world. The oft-cited figure of 3% of all works originally in languages other than English being published in English translation is a testament to this imbalance. But translation also carries the creative potential to defy the rules of the system. It is in the spirit of this latter perspective that we have approached the task—the art, the act and the game, perhaps—of translation. We understand translation as a defiant practice in two main ways: first, as a collective and interdisciplinary endeavor that socializes translation by embedding playful exploration through intercultural dialogue and knowledge exchange into the process itself; second, as an opportunity to reimagine and resituate a classic work from multiple perspectives.

Here, we reflect on our collective experience translating César Aira’s prologue to his own translation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (Norma, 1998). In June 2023, over two intense and nourishing days, we experimented with an interdisciplinary and collaborative way of working that brought together scholars (students and colleagues alike) of Translation Studies, contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, the Sociology of Literature, and Early Modern English Literature, hosted by Newcastle University’s Humanities Research Institute and the University of Buenos Aires’ Gino Germani Institute, to produce a shared translation of Aira’s prologue to his translation of Cymbeline. The translation into English of the prologue to the translator’s own translation of the Shakespearean play into Spanish offered the perfect linguistic, temporal, and intercultural entanglement to challenge the unidirectionality, anonymity, and monology not only of traditional approaches to translation practice but also of the rapidly developing panoply of machine translators. The latter are already reproducing the linguistic disparities outlined above. 

César Aira (Coronel Pringles, Argentina, 1949) is one of Argentina’s most prominent contemporary writers. Since 1981, he has published over one hundred works, most of which have been novels, but they also include essays and plays. Aira has been translated in just under forty countries and into nearly thirty languages, amounting to more than one hundred editions in languages other than Spanish. English is the language into which he has most frequently been translated. The novel The Hare (translated by Nick Caistor) was the first of Aira’s works to be made available in an English-language version, published in 1998 by the UK-based publishing house Serpent’s Tail. Subsequently, his novels have been translated and published in the United States by New Directions, editions that have been republished in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton and And Other Stories. Over twenty of Aira’s works are currently available in English-language editions.

Before Aira began publishing his own works and devoting his life to literature, he already worked as a translator. He has translated books mainly from English, but also from French and Portuguese, into Spanish. The topics vary from nonfiction publications in linguistics, the social sciences and biography, to wide-ranging literary authors, such as Stephen King, Jane Austen, and Franz Kafka, along with graphic works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Aira explains that he only did translations because he needed to earn a living. He tended to avoid challenging texts, such as Shakespeare’s plays, because they entailed too much work. But by the early 2000s, he had started pacing his engagements as a translator, because he was able to start living off the translation rights generated by his own works (of note is the fact that he waives the rights to those original works that are published in Argentina by small publishing houses). Hence, Aira began to embark upon other types of translation projects. In Shakespeare’s literature, he found a richness that was also concise, because each verse condenses at once poetry, metaphor, the plot that advances, and a character who is being described.

In 1999, Aira translated Love’s Labour’s Lost into Spanish; the following year he completed Cymbeline. In Cymbeline, Aira chose one of Shakespeare’s so-called late romances about love, mixed identity, nationalism, and rebirth. Although it was written at the end of his career, the play is a reworking of a topic explored by Shakespeare earlier on in his poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594): the foundational story of the Roman Republic. This translation of Cymbeline was included in the series entitled “Shakespeare by Writers,” produced by the long-established Colombian publishing house Norma; the series was directed by fellow Argentine writer and translator Marcelo Cohen. The premise of the collection was that each generation needs renewed versions of the classics that speak to, about, or from their particular experiences and linguistic repertoire, while also capturing the rich variation of the Spanish language. “Shakespeare by Writers” translated the Bard’s complete works into Spanish, a task that was undertaken by writers from across Spain and Latin America, each penning a brief introduction to their translated version. Aira chose Cymbeline, the reasons for which are set out in the prologue included in this dossier, which looks more broadly at the Argentine writer’s work as a translator. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Norma planned to become a transnational publishing house with branches across Latin America. This was supposed to be a challenge to the powerful European groups, such as Penguin Random House, who were buying up small, national, and family-owned publishing houses. In the end, the large publishing conglomerates have monopolized the market for literature in Spanish. “Shakespeare by Writers” has been praised for the quality of its translations and the boldness of this challenge but, sadly, the distribution of the books was inefficient. The works did not reach many readers and, nowadays, they are extremely hard to come by.

Further exploration of Aira’s work as both a writer and a translator offered a prism through which to appreciate his particular interpretation of the Shakespearean classic in question. In turn, in Aira’s reading of Cymbeline, we also found clues that enabled us to trace the thematic and stylistic signature of his own literature: attention to the speculative nature of any attempt to offer a definitive interpretation of Shakespeare’s play; his attraction to the experimental and interstitial character of the work; recognition of a writer uncorseted in his maturer years, pushing the limits of genre and dramatic form; reference to plots structured by incredible spatio-temporal leaps; the rhizomatic possibilities of multiple threads of seemingly tenuous connection; the incursion of the popular; the familiar that spawns the surreal and the fantastical. We might conclude that Aira’s prologue to Cymbeline holds a mirror up to his own vision of literature as much as it does to Shakespeare’s corpus.

The blurb to the aforementioned The Hare presented Aira as the “Borges of the Pampas.” In all likelihood, the marketing strategy for this paratextual statement sought to tease a thereunto unknown Aira by relating him to both a landscape and a literary figure that the English-language reader would recognize. The comparison between Aira and Borges is, nevertheless, often made with reference to their mutual preference for densely crafted and mind-boggling shorter pieces that transport the reader to the very edges of narrative logic. Although interviews with Aira are relatively few and far between, when he does speak about his work, he invariably mentions Borges. For Aira, Borges is the key figure of reference in Argentine literature. Like Borges, Aira considers himself to be a (voracious) reader who writes. Coincidentally, Borges’ final collection of short stories, published in 1983, was titled Shakespeare’s Memory. Significant for the point of discussion, here, is how Borges centers translation in many of his works, as a theme and a metaphor, revealing it to be, in Efraín Kristal’s words, the “invisible work” of symbolic translation that both reading and writing perform. 

Aira may well have little contact with the translators of his own works, in keeping with his preferred method of fuga hacia adelante (escape—or flight—forwards, depending on the translator), but closer attention to these works inspires a more eccentric approach to translation. The “Textured Translation” Challenge Lab did just this, exploring the intricacies, layers, and multiple disciplines implicated in translation. Aira has suggested that writing disobeys the exclusive disciplinary modes of carving up knowledge. In his words, from an interview with Christian Lund at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, “writers need to know a little bit about a lot of things.” We might, then, make a similar assumption about translators; they also need to know something about a wide range of topics. Collaborative translation makes this exercise of working in breadth and in depth possible. We drew inspiration from the collective “Poettrio Experiment,” which facilitated the migration of poems by bringing into conversation the poet being translated, a poet in the target language, and a language advisor to facilitate the exchange and co-creation of the new iteration. As a process, collaborative translation is deliberately slow, embracing the errancy and pleasure of a digressive and co-creative method. As an interdisciplinary encounter, it might be characterized as a multidirectional fugue, gathering reader-translator-writers of varying experience and expertise. They each bring different strands of knowledge to the table, but at the same time they come together to explore what their situation, experience and disciplinary training teaches them not to notice. 

Working through Aira’s reading of Cymbeline together in this trans-Atlantic multilogue also brought to the fore vital questions of language diversity and linguistic variation. Reading Early Modern English, even for the first-language speaker, already means working somewhat in translation. It involves navigating a curious mix of everyday refrains that are familiar with a use of language that is significantly removed from contemporary English. The Early Modern scholars were able to help situate the play within Shakespeare’s oeuvre, guiding the rest of the group through the play’s topics, characters, and iambic heartbeat, exploring the play as part of a chapter in the history of English literature. Reading Aira meant delving into the particular traits not only of his work, but also of the Rioplatense variant of the Spanish language. For those not used to the task, translation offers an unusually intimate contact with their first language, which is exciting and unsettling at the same time. We might add that working from Newcastle also brought into the fold the regional variations of the English language and a long, intralingual history of unequally distributed esteem. The dialect of English that is spoken in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the surrounding region of Northumberland, commonly known as Geordie, is a live vestige of Old English. It is a far cry from the flattened and untethered style of “mid-Atlantic English” that is often preferred in the publishing industry because of its capacity to glide easily across global markets. It finds its counterpart in “mid-Atlantic Spanish.”

The following prologue-in-translation is the fruit of a collective conversation around thematic and stylistic considerations, the associations that different participants made with regard to individual word choices, the nuances of emphasis conveyed by different word orders. There is something very suggestive and fulfilling about a translation approach (and ethos) that empowers individual expression while combining it with a collective responsibility to come up with a shared creation. The rich and transformative discussion that took place may not be immediately evident in the “final” version of the prologue, but it is (for us at least) there, threaded in between the lines, embedded in the ineffable, or the “shimmers” of the language. 

Photo: Jessica Pamp, Unsplash.