{"id":1281,"date":"2017-01-09T20:22:45","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T02:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.wp\/2017\/01\/piglia-translation-sergio-waisman\/"},"modified":"2023-06-07T12:47:58","modified_gmt":"2023-06-07T18:47:58","slug":"piglia-translation-sergio-waisman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2017\/01\/piglia-translation-sergio-waisman\/","title":{"rendered":"Piglia en ingl\u00e9s de Sergio Waisman"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/>p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/>p.p6 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #2d2d2d}<br \/>p.p7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; color: #2d2d2d; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/>p.p8 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 18.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p9 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 27.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>span.s1 {text-decoration: underline}<br \/>span.s2 {color: #2d2d2d}<br \/>span.s3 {color: #000000}<br \/><\/style>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>Fragments From the Piglia Translations, With Translator\u2019s Comments<\/b><\/h3>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: justify;\"><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Fragmento de <i>Nombre falso<\/i>:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Un cr\u00edtico literario es siempre, de alg\u00fan modo, un detective: persigue sobre la superficie de los textos, las huellas, los rastros que permiten descifrar su enigma. A la vez, esta asimilaci\u00f3n (en su caso un poco paranoica) de la cr\u00edtica con la persecuci\u00f3n policial, est\u00e1 presente con toda nitidez en Arlt. Por un lado Arlt identifica siempre la escritura con el crimen, la estafa, la falsificaci\u00f3n, el robo. En este esquema, el cr\u00edtico aparece como el polic\u00eda que puede descubrir la verdad. Escritura clandestina y culpable, escritura fuera de la ley, se entiende que Arlt haya buscado que sus libros circularan en un espacio propio, fuera de todo control legal\u2026 Por otro lado, como en toda buena novela policial, lo que est\u00e1 en juego no es la ley, sino el dinero (o, mejor: la ley del dinero)\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Por fin: cuando se dice \u2013como Arlt\u2013 que todo cr\u00edtico es un escritor fracasado, \u00bfno se confirma un mito cl\u00e1sico de la novela policial?: el detective es siempre un criminal fracasado (o un criminal en potencia). No es casual que Freud haya escrito: \u2018La distorsi\u00f3n de un texto se asemeja a un asesinato: lo dif\u00edcil no es cometer el crimen, sino ocultar las huellas\u201d. En m\u00e1s de un sentido, el cr\u00edtico es tambi\u00e9n un criminal. (<i>Nombre falso<\/i> 122 \u2013 123)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From <i>Assumed Name<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">A literary critic is always, in some way, a detective: he pursues the contours of texts, the tracks, the traces that allow him to decipher its enigma. In turn, this assimilation (in his case a bit paranoiac) of criticism with police pursuit, is present with all clarity in Arlt. On the one hand, Arlt always identifies writing with crime, swindling, falsification, theft. In this scheme, the critic seems to be like the police officer who might uncover the truth. Writing that is clandestine and guilty, writing that is outside the law, it is understandable that Arlt wanted his books to circulate in their own space, outside all legal control\u2026 On the other hand, like in all good detective novels, what is at stake is not the law, but money (or, better yet: the law of money)\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Finally: when someone\u2014like Arlt\u2014says that every critic is a failed writer, does that not in fact confirm a classic myth of the detective novel, that the detective is always a frustrated criminal (or a potential criminal)? It is not a coincidence that Freud wrote: \u2018The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficult thing is not to commit the crime, but to hide its tracks.\u2019 In more than one sense, the critic is also a criminal. (<i>Assumed Name<\/i> 124 \u2013 125)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Translator\u2019s Comment:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><i>Nombre falso\u2014Assumed Name<\/i>\u2014was the first book I translated. From the beginning, I loved the play with names, attribution, authorship, and property, which was reproduced\u2014and magnified\u2014in translation. The literary intrigue begins with the title of the book and continues through \u201cLuba,\u201d Piglia\u2019s brilliant short story, which he falsely attributes to Roberto Arlt toward the end of the book. But not entirely falsely, as it turns out. Piglia\u2019s work with citation and plagiarism speaks directly to the task of the reader, of the critic\u2014and of the translator. Not knowing what I was getting into, I found myself implicated in the confusion of equivocal originality present in Piglia\u2019s work, assuming a name that was not mine, trying to say the same, in my own tongue\u2014which is also not quite mine\u2014and immediately finding everything different. Translating <i>Nombre falso<\/i> revealed levels of mediation and re-writing, even as it added another one: the inevitable distancing of a practice (translation) that is meant to bridge differences.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The fragment cited above appears in \u201cHomage to Roberto Arlt,\u201d a nouvelle that doubles as a scholarly homage to the early twentieth-century writer who Piglia helped to reframe as one of the key writers of the Argentine tradition. The text includes a literary investigation of Arlt\u2019s notebooks. But the investigation is also an exploration of filiations and influences, of homage and imitation, and ultimately of the role of re-reading and re-writing\u2014of mis-translation\u2014in the Argentine literary tradition. As Piglia suggests in this footnote, the translator\u2014much like the critic, much like the reader\u2014reproduces the \u2018crime\u2019 of writing. That it be re-written in another language is fitting of the equivocation\u2014as well as the homage\u2014implied in \u201cassuming\u201d an-other\u2019s name.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Fragmento de <i>La ciudad ausente<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2026 Como si la m\u00e1quina se hubiera construido su propia memoria. \u00c9sa era la l\u00f3gica que estaba aplicando. Los hechos se incorporaban directamente, ya no era un sistema cerrado, tramaba datos reales. Por lo tanto se ve\u00eda influido por otras fuerzas externas que entraban en el programa. <i>No s\u00f3lo situaciones del presente<\/i>, pens\u00f3 Junior. Narra lo que conoce, nunca anticipa. Volvi\u00f3 a <i>Stevensen<\/i>. Ya estaba todo ah\u00ed. El primer texto mostraba el procedimiento. Ten\u00eda que buscar en esa direcci\u00f3n. Investigar lo que se repet\u00eda. Fabrica r\u00e9plicas microsc\u00f3picas, dobles virtuales, William Wilson, Stephen Stevensen\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Junior empezaba a entender. Al principio la m\u00e1quina se equivoca. El error es el primer principio. La m\u00e1quina disgrega \u2018espont\u00e1neamente\u2019 los elementos del cuento de Poe y los transforma en los n\u00facleos potenciales de la ficci\u00f3n. As\u00ed hab\u00eda surgido la trama inicial. El mito de origen. Todas las historias ven\u00edan de ah\u00ed. El sentido futuro de lo que estaba pasando depend\u00eda de ese relato sobre el otro y el porvenir. Lo real estaba definido por lo posible (y no por el ser). La oposici\u00f3n verdad-mentira deb\u00eda ser sustituida por la oposici\u00f3n posible-imposible\u2026 (<i>La ciudad ausente<\/i> 102 \u2013103)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From <i>The Absent City<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2026 As if the machine had built its own memory. That was the logic being applied. The events were being directly incorporated, it was no longer a closed system, it was weaving in real facts. She was influenced by other forces\u2014external ones\u2014that entered into the program. Not just situations in the present, Junior thought. It narrates what it knows, it never anticipates. He went back to \u201cStevensen.\u201d It was all there already. The first text demonstrates the process. He had to continue searching along these lines. Investigate what was being repeated. It builds microscopic replicas, virtual doubles, William Wilson, Stephen Stevensen\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Junior was starting to understand. At first the machine would get it wrong. Errors are the first beginning. The machine \u2018spontaneously\u2019 breaks up the elements of Poe\u2019s story and transforms them into potential fictional nuclei. That is how the initial plot had emerged. The myth of origin. All the stories came from there. The future meaning of what was occurring depended on that story about the other and what is to come. Reality was defined by the possible (and not by what was). The true-false opposition had to be substituted by the possible-impossible opposition\u2026 (<i>The Absent City <\/i>82 \u201383)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Translator\u2019s Comment:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">When I translated <i>The Absent City<\/i>, I had the strange feeling that the version of the novel that I was writing anew in English was somehow already anticipated\u2014and perhaps produced\u2014by the machine at the center of the novel. I felt, at times, as if my work as a translator was a projection of the machine, with its ceaseless output of stories that are re-workings of other stories, in turn reproduced and circulated throughout a city somehow composed of the stories themselves. A machination of narrating (<i>una m\u00e1quina de narrar<\/i>) as if projected from the original itself, yet distorted, absent but also present. Even my recorded conversations with Piglia from the time, while translating <i>The Absent City,<\/i> seemed organically connected to the recordings of the enigmatic machine. As if my translation were a one of the machine\u2019s stories; as if the author of the translation <i>were <\/i>the machine.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The machine in <i>The Absent City <\/i>is, in fact, a translation machine that thrives in spite of\u2014or perhaps, thanks to\u2014its errors. The first story that the machine mis-translated, we learn, is Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cWilliam Wilson,\u201d a story about the unsettling presence of doubles. To note that the machine begins with error, as the fragment above points out, further accentuates the disorienting effect\u2014and enormous potential\u2014of storytelling and translation in the novel. In and through language, as a mined field of potentiality, in history and in what is to come, a new city based on the (im)possible, imagined as real for a time to come, in the reader\u2019s mind, in translation from its origins. And its origins in translation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Fragmento de <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Tony Dur\u00e1n era un aventurero y un jugador profesional y vio la oportunidad d ganar la apuesta m\u00e1xima cuando tropez\u00f3 con las hermanas Belladona. Fue un <i>m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois <\/i>que escandaliz\u00f3 al pueblo y ocup\u00f3 la atenci\u00f3n general durante meses. Siempre aparec\u00eda con una de ellas en el restaurante del Hotel Plaza pero nadie pod\u00eda saber cu\u00e1l era la que estaba con \u00e9l porque las gemelas eran tan iguales que ten\u00edan id\u00e9ntica hasta la letra. Tony casi nunca se hac\u00eda ver con las dos al mismo tiempo, eso lo reservaba para la intimidad, y lo que m\u00e1s impresionaba a todo el mundo era pensar que las mellizas dorm\u00edan juntas. No tanto que compartieran al hombre sino que se compartieran a s\u00ed mismas.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Pronto las murmuraciones se transformaron en versiones y en conjeturas y ya nadie habl\u00f3 de otra cosa; en las casas o en el Club Social o en el almac\u00e9n de los hermanos Madariaga se hac\u00eda circular la informaci\u00f3n a toda hora como si fueran los datos del tiempo.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">En ese pueblo, como en todos los pueblos de la provincia de Buenos Aires, hab\u00eda m\u00e1s novedades en un d\u00eda que en cualquier gran ciudad en una semana y la diferencia entre las noticias de la regi\u00f3n y las informaciones nacionales era tan abismal que los habitantes pod\u00edan tener la ilusi\u00f3n de vivir una vida interesante. Dur\u00e1n hab\u00eda venido a enriquecer esa mitolog\u00eda y su figura alcanz\u00f3 una altura legendaria mucho antes del momento de su muerte\u2026 (<i>Blanco nocturno<\/i> 13 \u2013 14)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From <i>Target in the Night<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Tony Dur\u00e1n was an adventurer and a professional gambler who saw his opportunity to win the big casino when he met the Belladona sisters. It was a <i>m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois<\/i> that scandalized the town and remained on everyone\u2019s mind for months. He would always show up with one of the two at the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel, but no one could tell which sister he was with because the twins were so similar that even their handwriting was identical. Tony almost never let himself be seen with both at the same time; that is something he kept private. What shocked everyone the most was the thought of the twins sleeping together. Not so much that they would share the same man, but that they would share each other.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Soon the rumors turned into stories and conjectures, and before long no one could talk about anything else. In people\u2019s homes, or at the Social Club, or at the Madariaga Store and Tavern, the information circulated at all hours of the day as if it were the facts about the weather.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In that town, as in all towns in the Province of Buenos Aires, there was more news in a single day than there would be in any large city in a week. The difference between the regional and the national news was so vast that the residents could maintain the illusion that they lived an interesting life. Dur\u00e1n had come to enrich that mythology, and his figure reached legendary heights long before the moment of his death\u2026 (<i>Target in the Night<\/i> 3 \u2013 4)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Translator\u2019s Comment:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In my opinion, the most important element that needs to be recreated in the translation of <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i> is the feel, or the tone of the narrative. Something about the rhythm, the speed of the storytelling, even the attitude of the narrator\u2014as well as the multiple voices and versions of the mystery. For the feel of the narrative is different at different points of the novel. Very noire and syncopated, at times, while at others it\u2019s much more lyrical, or self-reflexive. At times it sounds like a crime novel, at others like the most sophisticated of Modernist texts. The narrative style ranges from echoes of Raymond Chandler, to F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. But that\u2019s already an equivocal translation, a false equivalence. The engrossing mystery of <i>Blanco nocturno <\/i>exists always within the very specific setting of the Argentine pampas, with the corresponding specifics of the characters and the history and the language and the worldview of a small town in the province of Buenos Aires. And the novel dialogues directly with Argentine tradition, from Sarmiento and Jos\u00e9 Hern\u00e1ndez, to Borges and Rodolfo Walsh, among others; and with Argentine history and oral mythologies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So how do you translate <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>\u2014a novel so rooted in Argentine tradition, a novel where the Argentine landscape and ways of speaking are so important\u2014into English? How does one go from <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i> to <i>Target in the Night<\/i>? A noirish detective novel set in the Argentine pampas. A literary thriller; a paranoid fiction. The suspicious death of a stranger from the North (where he is also an \u2018other\u2019: an Afro-Puerto Rican in New Jersey) in a small town in the Province of Buenos Aires (in the South), where his very presence seems to upend the local hierarchies and unveil socio-economic tensions and family secrets, long before the moment of his death\u2026<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Fragmento de <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[En esta secci\u00f3n, Renzi y Croce est\u00e1n investigando juntos las circunstancias misteriosas alrededor de la muerte de Tony Dur\u00e1n:]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Salieron en el auto, a medianoche, hacia Tapalqu\u00e9, por una ruta lateral que cruzaba el borde del partido. Iban en medio del campo, esquivando los alambrados y los animales quietos. La luna se escond\u00eda de a ratos y Croce usaba el buscahuellas, que estaba en el costado, un foco fuerte con una manija que se pod\u00eda mover con la mano. De pronto vieron una liebre, paralizada de terror, blanca, quieta, en el c\u00edrculo iluminado, como una aparici\u00f3n en medio de la oscuridad, bajo el haz de luz, un blanco en la noche que de pronto qued\u00f3 atr\u00e1s. Anduvieron varias horas, sacudidos por los pozos del camino, mirando el hilo plateado de los alambrados bajo el cielo estrellado. Por fin, al salir a una senda arbolada, vieron al fondo, lejos, el brillo de la ventana iluminada de un rancho. Cuando llegaron a la huella y enfilaron hacia el rancho ya empezaba a clarear en el horizonte y todo se volvi\u00f3 de un color rosado. Renzi se baj\u00f3 y abri\u00f3 la tranquera y el auto entr\u00f3 por un sendero entre los yuyos. En la puerta, bajo el alero, un paisano tomaba mate sentado en un banquito. Un polic\u00eda de consigna dormitaba junto a un \u00e1rbol. (<i>Blanco nocturno<\/i> 149 \u2013 150)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From <i>Target in the Night<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[In this section, Renzi and Croce are working together to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Tony Dur\u00e1n:]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They headed out of town in Croce\u2019s car, at midnight, on a side road that bordered the district line, toward Tapalqu\u00e9. They drove across the countryside, avoiding the fences and the still animals. The moon was occasionally covered by the clouds, so Croce would use the searchlight attached to his side of the car, a bright bulb with a handle that could be adjusted by hand. All of a sudden, in the illuminated circle, they saw a rabbit, paralyzed by fear, white, motionless\u2014like an apparition in the middle of the dark. Caught in the light beam, it was a target in the night that they quickly left behind. They drove for several hours, bumping along because of the pits in the road, staring at the silver lines of the wire fences under the stars. Finally, turning off at a wooded path, there was a glow from the lighted window of a country house in the distance. By the time they reached the source and were getting close to the small house, dawn was starting to break on the horizon, turning everything a pinkish hue. Renzi got out and opened the gate so the car could go in and down a narrow road surrounded by bushes. At the door, a peasant was sitting on a bench under the eaves, drinking <i>mate<\/i>. A patrol officer was dozing off nearby, leaning back against a tree. <b>(<\/b><i>Target in the Night<\/i><b> <\/b>128 \u2013 129)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Translator\u2019s Comment:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">One of the most difficult things to translate about <i>Target in the Night<\/i> is the title itself. In Spanish, <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i> has several meanings, and there is no way to reproduce all of those in one single title in English. \u201c<i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>,\u201d translated literally, would be \u201cNocturnal White,\u201d which does not make much sense in English. White Nocturne was a possibility, and it was never that far from Target in the Night. But \u201c<i>blanco<\/i>\u201d in Spanish is not just \u201cwhite.\u201d The most important meaning of \u201c<i>blanco<\/i>\u201d in the context of the novel is \u201ctarget.\u201d \u201c<i>Tiro al blanco<\/i>\u201d is target shooting; \u201c<i>dar en el blanco<\/i>\u201d is to hit the target. While <i>blanco<\/i> does mean white, it also means blank, as in a blank space. Tony Dur\u00e1n, the mulatto Puerto Rican from New Jersey, the strange foreigner who travels to the small town in the Province of Buenos Aires, is a dark man at the center of a dark mystery. He is also a target from the moment he sets foot in the Argentine town. Or perhaps Tony Dur\u00e1n has gone to the town with a secret target in mind. These possibilities emerge from the title, and from a number of scenes in the novel that work by juxtaposing opposites: black and white, day and night, past and future, presence and absence, tradition and innovation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I considered several options before arriving at <i>Target in the Night<\/i>. In the end, the centrality of the target, as well as the feel of the story, outdid the lyricism of White Nocturne. Nocturnal Target, or Night Target, were not far off. White Night would have overly simplified things, although it would have kept the <i>blanco<\/i>&#8211;<i>nocturno<\/i> binomial. Night Blanks, or Blank Night sounded mysterious, but too ambiguous. Night Vision, although intriguing, would have changed the meaning too much. Likewise, I considered A Shot in the Dark, but found it off the mark. Conrad Aiken has a lovely poem entitled \u201cWhite Nocturne,\u201d and while there are some very beautiful passages in Piglia\u2019s novel, and while there is definitely something poetic about <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>, the novel has a jazzy, driving feel to it, a noirish hook much closer to <i>Target in the Night<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Fragmento de <i>El camino de Ida<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">En aquel tiempo viv\u00eda varias vidas, me mov\u00eda en secuencia aut\u00f3nomas: la serie de los amigos, del amor, del alcohol, de la pol\u00edtica, de los perros, de los bares, de las caminatas nocturnas. Escrib\u00eda guiones que no se filmaban, traduc\u00eda m\u00faltiples novelas policiales que parec\u00edan ser siempre la misma, redactaba \u00e1ridos libros de filosof\u00eda (\u00a1o de psicoan\u00e1lisis!) que firmaban otros. Estaba perdido, desconectado, hasta que por fin \u2013por azar, de golpe, inesperadamente\u2013 termin\u00e9 ense\u00f1ando en los Estados Unidos, involucrado en un acontecimiento del que quiero dejar un testimonio.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Recib\u00ed la propuesta de pasa un semestre como <i>visiting professor <\/i>en la elitista y exclusiva Taylor University; les hab\u00eda fallado un candidato y pensaron en m\u00ed porque ya me conoc\u00edan, me escribieron, avanzamos, fijamos fecha, pero empec\u00e9 a dar vueltas, a postergar: no quer\u00eda estar seis meses enterrado en un p\u00e1ramo. Un d\u00eda, a mediados de diciembre, recib\u00ed un correo de Ida Brown escrito con la sintaxis de los antiguos telegramas urgentes: <i>Todo dispuesto. Env\u00ede Syllabus. Esperamos su llegada.<\/i> Hac\u00eda mucho calor esa noche, as\u00ed que me di una ducha, busqu\u00e9 una cerveza en la heladera y me sent\u00e9 en el sill\u00f3n de lona frente a la ventana: afuera la ciudad era una masa opaca de luces lejanas y sonidos discordantes. (<i>El camino de Ida<\/i> 13 \u2013 14)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[\u2026 Poco despu\u00e9s Renzi viaja a New Jersey para ense\u00f1ar un curso de posgrado sobre Hudson; en la siguiente escena se encuentra para hablar y almorzar con Ida Brown:]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Terminamos de comer y salimos por Witherspoon hacia Nassau Street. El sol hab\u00eda empezado a disolver la nieve y caminamos con cuidado por las veredas heladas. Iba a tener unos d\u00edas libres para ambientarme, cualquier cosa que precisara no ten\u00eda m\u00e1s que avisarle. Las secretarias pod\u00edan ocuparse de los detalles administrativos, los estudiantes estaban entusiasmados con mi curso. Esperaba que estuviera c\u00f3modo en mi oficina del tercer piso. Cuando nos desped\u00edamos en la esquina frente al campus, me apoy\u00f3 la mano en el brazo y me dijo con una sonrisa:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2013En oto\u00f1o estoy siempre caliente.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Me qued\u00e9 seco, confundido. Y ella me mir\u00f3 con una expresi\u00f3n extra\u00f1a, esper\u00f3 un instante a que yo dijera algo y luego se alej\u00f3 resueltamente. Tal vez no me hab\u00eda dicho lo que me pareci\u00f3 escuchar (<i>\u201cIn the fall I\u2019m always hot\u201d<\/i>), quiz\u00e1 me hab\u00eda dicho <i>En la ca\u00edda soy siempre un halc\u00f3n. Hot-hawks<\/i>, podr\u00eda ser. Oto\u00f1o quer\u00eda decir semestre de oto\u00f1o, pero reci\u00e9n empezaba el semestre de primavera. Claro que <i>hot <\/i>en slang pod\u00eda querer decir <i>speed <\/i>y <i>fall <\/i>en el dialecto de Harlem era una temporada en la c\u00e1rcel. El sentido prolifera si uno habla con una mujer en una lengua extranjera. \u00c9se fue otro signo del desajuste que se iba a agravar en los d\u00edas por venir. Suelo ponerme obsesivo con el lenguaje, resabios de mi formaci\u00f3n, tengo un o\u00eddo envenenado por la fon\u00e9tica de Trubetzkoy y siempre escucho m\u00e1s de lo debido, a veces me detengo en los anacolutos o en los sustantivos adjetivados y pierdo el significado de las frases. Me sucede cuando estoy de viaje, cuando estoy sin dormir, cuando estoy borracho, y tambi\u00e9n cuando estoy enamorado. (\u00bfO ser\u00eda gramaticalmente m\u00e1s apropiado decir: me pasa cuando viajo, cuando estoy cansado y cuando me gusta una mujer?) (<i>El camino de Ida<\/i> 21 \u2013 22)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I was living various lives at the time, moving in autonomous sequences: the series of friends, of love, of alcohol, of politics, of dogs, of bars, of nighttime walks. I was writing movie scripts that weren\u2019t get filmed, translating several detective novels that always seemed like the same one, putting together dry books of philosophy (or psychoanalysis!) signed by others. I was lost, disconnected, until finally\u2014by chance, suddenly, unexpectedly\u2014I ended up teaching in the United States, involved in an event about which I\u2019d like to leave testimony.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I received an offer to spend a semester as a Visiting Professor in the elite, exclusive Taylor University. They had lost a candidate and had thought of me because they already knew me, they wrote. We made progress, set a date, but then I hesitated and delayed: I didn\u2019t want to spend six months buried in a barren plain. One day, in mid December, I received mail from Ida Brown written with the old syntax of urgent telegrams: <i>All set. Send Syllabus. Awaiting your arrival<\/i>. It was very hot that night, so I took a shower, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and sat on the canvas chair facing the window: outside, the city was an opaque mass of distant lights and discordant sounds.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">[\u2026 Shortly afterwards, Renzi travels to New Jersey and begins to get ready for his semester as a Visiting Professor; in his first meeting with Ida Brown, we read:]<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">We finished eating and went out Witherspoon toward Nassau Street. The sun had started to melt the snow. We walked carefully along the frozen sidewalks. I had a few days to get settled, anything I needed, all I had to do was ask. The secretary could take care of the administrative details, the students were excited about my course. She [Ida Brown] hoped I\u2019d be comfortable in my office on the third floor. When we said goodbye at the corner across from campus, she put her hand on my arm, smiled, and said:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u201cIn the Fall I\u2019m always hot.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I stopped short, confused. She looked at me with a strange expression, waited a moment for me to say something, and then left, resolutely. Maybe she hadn\u2019t said what I thought I\u2019d heard (\u201c<i>En oto\u00f1o estoy siempre caliente<\/i>\u201d), perhaps she\u2019d said <i>When I fall I\u2019m always a hawk<\/i> (<i>En la ca\u00edda soy siempre un halc\u00f3n<\/i>). <i>Hot-hawk<\/i>, it could be. Fall meant the Fall semester, but it was the Spring semester that was about to start, not the Fall. Of course <i>hot<\/i> might mean <i>speed<\/i>, in some slang; and <i>fall<\/i> could refer to a spell in jail. Meaning proliferates when you speak with someone in a foreign tongue. That was another sign of my imbalance, which would only increase in the coming days. I tend to obsess over language, a bad habit from my years as a student, my ear is poisoned by Trubetzkoy\u2019s phonetics, I always hear more than I should, sometimes I stop at an anacoluthons, or an adjectival noun, and lose the meaning of the phrase. It happens when I travel, when I haven\u2019t slept, when I\u2019m drunk, and also when I\u2019m in love. (Or would it be more accurate, grammatically, to say: It happens when I\u2019m traveling, tired or interested in someone?)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The next few weeks were full of these kinds of strange resonances. I\u2019m unsettled in English because I make mistakes more frequently than I\u2019d like, and I attribute to these equivocations the threatening sense that words sometimes have for me. <i>Down the street there\u2019re pizza huts to go to and the pavement glows, a bluish slate gray<\/i>. I\u2019m unable to think in English, I start translating right away. <i>At the bottom of the street there\u2019s a pizzeria and the asphalt shines critically under a blue light.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Translator\u2019s Comment:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i>, Emilio Renzi\u2014Ricardo Piglia\u2019s well-known alter ego, of sorts\u2014is invited to a prestigious, private university on the East Coast for a semester to teach a graduate seminar. Here Piglia gives us an Argentine traveler in the U.S., as Renzi experiences, observes and goes on to investigate an unexpected mystery, all the while disoriented because, as an outsider, he sees everything through the lens of mis-translation. Renzi\u2019s perspective is directly related to the fact that he is a foreigner in the U.S.\u2014in a manner very much analogous to W. H. Hudson\u2019s English perspective in Argentina in the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century. <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i> alerts us to this important parallel from the beginning (it is not a coincidence that Renzi has been invited to teach a graduate seminar on Hudson), and later includes important references to Joseph Conrad and J. L. Borges, among others, deepening the complexity of the novel.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Renzi\u2019s perspective as an outsider in American academia, and later in an investigation involving counter-culture movements and anti-establishment ideologies, creates startling insights. Furthermore, Renzi\u2019s unique perspective is manifested in the strangeness he experiences in the U.S., in English, which he expresses in a very specifically Argentine Spanish. The nuances in the language are particularly difficult to translate. The translation of <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i> must recreate the novel\u2019s examination of certain aspects of U.S. society, as seen through the eyes of an Argentine traveler. The challenge to the translator is that the narrator\u2019s adventures and insights occur in\u2014and in parts thanks to\u2014his Argentine language and culture.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The task of the translator of <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i> is to recreate this unique \u201coutsider\u2019s\u201d perspective in English\u2014even when the language and culture themselves are investigated in the novel. The translation should seek to recreate the strangeness that the character experiences, aiming to sound strange in an analogous manner to how the narrative sounds strange, at times, in the original. This strangeness appears in the novel in situations that in and of themselves seem to be untranslatable, but somehow the connotation as well as the denotation of these examples must be rendered in the translation. In everything from the title, to Renzi\u2019s many encounters, to the series of cultural and political reflections along the way, the translator of <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i>\u2014like the reader of Piglia\u2019s work in any language\u2014must be attuned to this rich complexity in form as well as content.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>Works Cited<\/b><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Piglia, Ricardo. <i>Nombre falso<\/i>. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1975.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>La ciudad ausente. <\/i>Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1992.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>Blanco nocturno<\/i>. Buenos Aires: Anagrama, 2010.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>El camino de Ida. <\/i>Buenos Aires: Anagrama, 2013.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>Assumed Name<\/i>. Trans. by Sergio Waisman. Pittsburgh, PA: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>The Absent City<\/i>. Trans. by Sergio Waisman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>Target in the Night<\/i>. Trans. by Sergio Waisman. Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publications, 2015.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u2014\u2014. <i>Ida\u2019s Way<\/i>. Trans. by Sergio Waisman. n. d. TS. \u201cTranslator\u2019s Notebooks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Fragments From the Piglia Translations, With Translator\u2019s Comments Fragmento de Nombre falso:\u00a0 Un cr\u00edtico literario es siempre, de alg\u00fan modo, un detective: persigue sobre la superficie de los textos, las huellas, los rastros que permiten descifrar su enigma. A la vez, esta asimilaci\u00f3n (en su caso un poco paranoica) de la cr\u00edtica con [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4465],"genre":[2013],"pretext":[],"section":[2350],"translator":[],"lal_author":[3601],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-numero-1","genre-dossier-es","section-dossier-ricardo-piglia-es","lal_author-sergio-waisman-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}