Closing this dossier on Latin American translation in Spain, the author of this essay discusses the politics of languages-of-writing and languages-of-translation within the Spanish publishing world.
At Alfaguara we pubished a book by Rey Rosa.
They had translated it from Guatemalan into Spanish.
Rey Rosa hated me. With time, the publishing house changed.
Statement by Juan Cruz at the 2019 Edita Barcelona Forum
Are translations done from one variety of Spanish into another in the Spanish-speaking publishing industry? This may seem like a condemned practice when dealing with literary texts, as can be seen in the statement made by Juan Cruz, a former editor at Alfaguara, but what happens when we are dealing with translations?
In this essay, two dichotomies present in the doxa of the Spanish language publishing market are discussed: the first is the opposition between the language of literature and the language of translation; the second, in the realm of language of translation, is about the varieties of Spanish used to translate, contrasting translations published in Spain with those published in Latin America.
The Language of Writing and the Language of Translation: Two Antagonistic Representations
The opposition between the language of literary writing and the language of translation is usually defined by editors. One thing is the Spanish employed to create literature and another is the Spanish required for literary translation. The editors at Anagrama, founded in Barcelona in 1969, are experts at dealing with the issue of linguistic variety, since they have earned a good deal of their publishing prestige by “discovering” Latin American authors whom, once they are published in their “Narrativas hispánicas” collection, return with greater prestige to their national spheres. Bolaño is a case in point: he functioned for years as the publishing house’s “brand.” In this sense, Teresa Ariño, the legendary head of Anagrama’s translations, is clear: “In the original, what the author wants to say must remain; the translation is the translation.”
While the Europeanization of Latin American writers is condemned nowadays, the same is not the case with translators. In those cases, the language of the translator is adjusted to the European standard. Marc García, a head editor at Anagrama, explains, “In an original, the author uses his own variety. In the translation, the original author uses his variety, and you have to choose which varieties you adapt it to. We adapt it to the European variety because we are based here [in Barcelona].” Thus, the Spanish of the writer is respected, while the translation is adapted to the language of the publisher in question. In this case, Anagrama’s editorial decisions are made in Barcelona for their Spanish reading public, even though the publisher buys rights for and distributes throughout the entire Spanish-speaking market.
In opposition to this demarcation between language of literature and language of translation, the Mexican translator Arturo Vázquez Barrón, co-founder of the Ibero-American Alliance for the Promotion of Literary Translation, explains what happens in Mexico when one reads translations done in Spain: “The reader is often shocked by Spanish translations because they are full of tíos and gilipollas and the like, but no one demands that a Spanish novel be adapted to Mexican Spanish. If that is not demanded of the originals, why must it be demanded of translations?” (in Santoveña 2010: 245-246).
Despite the fact that, since the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, translation has been described as creative writing, the explanation for this double standard in judging its language—be it the original work or the translation—is due to the fact that the latter has less legitimacy than the former, and therefore is subject to the standardizing restrictions imposed by the publishing industry. Suffice it to say that this lack of legitimacy is not something inherent to the object, but corresponds rather to a social construct. According to the analysis of American critic Lawrence Venuti (1995), the hegemonic representation of translation is governed by the “paradigm of invisibility”: translation is usually considered an invisible practice, or, better said, is rendered invisible by the publishing market and the cultural industry. This invisibility, based on the “strategy of fluency,” is what allows for the maintenance of the “individualistic illusion of authorial presence” for whoever wishes to access the foreign author without mediation.
Applied to the territory of our language, how is this strategy of fluency manifested? Here I am interested in discussing the situation of the different varieties of Spanish vis-à-vis so-called “neutral Spanish” in order to problematize the strategy of the “neutral translation.” Does the neutral variety represent the paradigm of invisibility? Or, on the contrary, does it reject fluency by presenting itself as a construct that is not common to any Spanish speaker?
The (Dis)Repute of Neutral Spanish
Upon reading publishers’ style guides or speaking with editors and translators, “neutral language” appears as a recurring topic referring to a “common,” “international,” or “general” variety of Spanish that might transcend national borders. The adjective “neutral,” loaded with meaning during times of war, seeks to avoid linguistic competition, but in pretending to erase its polemos does nothing but make it more evident. Varieties of language are in competition because some are prioritized and others are undervalued in the publishing industry.
So-called “neutral Spanish,” created for the audiovisual industry, quickly spread to the globalized publishing industry in Spanish. According to the Argentine researcher Gabriela Villalba, neutral Spanish is an “imposition, on the part of the publishing market, for a literary koiné that meets the needs for exportation” (2017: 382). Although supposedly deterritorialized, this koiné must be close to the Madrilenian standard, filtered through the Pan-Hispanic sieve. Its most salient characteristics are: “the use of tú/ustedes and their verbal forms for the second person, aspectual variations in the use of the preterites, with the Rioplatense variety only using the simple form, the use of lexical variations from standard Spanish following the Madrilenian standard, represented by the DRAE [Diccionario de la Real Academia Española], and the neutralization of references to regional varieties” (Villalba 2007: 3).
Depending on where it is expressed, this translation koiné will take on different functions. It is true that, in Spain and in Latin America, publishers aim for a wide circulation of content on both sides of the Atlantic, but the translation strategy for guaranteeing this circulation is not the same. For some, the recourse to the neutral is a way of guaranteeing that circulation, while for others, it is no more than an unviable strategy.
Among Argentine publishers, there are those who defend neutral language as a positive, consensual Utopia, and others who see it as a negative horizon that cuts off discourse. However, everyone mentions it when it comes to tying the causality of the circulation of books to avoiding local traits in the translated text. Leonora Djament, of the Eterna Cadencia publishing house, acknowledges a certain tension with respect to this: “We believe neutral Spanish doesn’t exist, but at the same time, we know we are translating for the entire region, and we have to bear in mind readers in all Spanish-speaking countries when we translate.” Maxilimiano Papandrea, of the Sigilo publishing house, makes the same point. He doesn’t believe his translators write in neutral Spanish, but he does believe they avoid locally branding their texts with Rioplatense Spanish, since this would sound very dialectical. “If I distribute in Spain, this strategy would be suicide,” he concludes. Salvador Cristóbal, of the Fiordo publishing house, has the same opinion. He envisions a regional translation for Latin America free of Argentinisms. In this sense, neutral Spanish would be, for him, a “pretty Utopia. A pure one doesn’t exist, but you can try to create it.”
The circulation of translated books in Latin America requires a strategy that renders invisible local varieties and brings them close to the Madrilenian standard under its “neutral” guise…
Oftentimes, publishers buy the translation rights for the entire Spanish-speaking world, and given that they distribute in the entire area, their translation strategy ends up corresponding to their economic concerns. However, this strategy is also defended by small publishers that acquire translation rights solely for national distribution. In these cases, as Villalba (2017) points out, translation into neutral Spanish continues to operate as a “practice of prestige,” allowing us to continue believing that books, in an eventual promising future, will surpass boundaries and reach more readers. This trait of supposed incoherence with these publishers’ real conditions of circulation demonstrates, on the contrary, that symbolic capital cannot be reduced to economic reasoning: neutral Spanish is a translation strategy that provides legitimacy in the Argentine and Latin American cultural field.
The opposite representation is at play with Spanish publishers, as is the case with Anagrama, which translates from Barcelona for the Spanish-speaking world, given that this press buys the translation rights for the entire language area and is very much present in the region, distributing or printing directly in Latin American countries. Conscious of the unease that their translations trigger in Latin America, Teresa Ariño justifies the publisher’s procedure: “Yes, there are lots of complaints, but what are we going to do? They are books that cannot be ironed out. For us, doing something standard is ironing out the book.” The standard (“a general Spanish from here”) is the variety they use—that is, a Spanish closer to the Spanish of Madrid. At the same time, the localization of products to Latin American varieties is unthinkable: “We cannot produce editions for other countries, it’s an economic question, of the market,” Ariño concludes. Again, economic reasoning is used to justify a translation policy. The neutralization of the text in these cases would not endow their books with prestige, but quite the contrary. At the same time, the variety that is permitted in translated literature is their own.
The unequal relationship among varieties, when they leave their national territory—be it Iberian Spanish circulating in Latin America or Latin American SPanish circulating in Spain—is confirmed by Ana Mata, a Spanish translator and instructor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, who in her professional trajectory with Spanish publishers has had to adapt translations coming from Latin America to the European variety, as well as prepare books in Barcelona that will circulate throughout the Americas: “For example, one of the books I am currently coordinating is going to be released in Colombia before it’s released here. I asked ‘So, when the translation arrives, do I have to treat this book in some fashion?’ The answer: ‘No, we’re doing it from here.’ The translation was done here, but the book is going to be released in Colombia first. I say this because the opposite isn’t done. When it happens in the other direction, and a book that has been put out there by international imprints and is re-released here, it will indeed be corrected for release in Spain.”
These statements encourage us to think about the importance of understanding the social conditions in the production of “neutral Spanish” in order to leave behind the cliché according to which the common language is that which is not marked by local singularities. If literary language cannot be conceived of outside the authors’ traits in the “here and now,” then literary translation, understood as a creative practice, cannot erase those material conditions either.
In this way, be it prestige-granting neutralization in the case of Latin America or adaptation to local traits in the case of Spain, in both cases, we see that editors appeal to an economic argument in order to justify opposing translation strategies. The circulation of translated books in Latin America requires a strategy that renders invisible local varieties and brings them close to the Madrilenian standard under its “neutral” guise; while in Spain, the Madrilenian standard is deemed the one that can circulate freely throughout the Spanish-speaking world. From the Iberian perspective, the strategy of neutralization would rob translations of literary value; they can be labeled “European” without no shame. In this way, we can see clearly the unequal distribution of not only economic but also symbolic capital in the globalized publishing world of the Spanish language, the varieties of which are in conflict when it comes to choosing the language with which translated literature is produced.
Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio
