Natasha Wimmer’s lengthy NYRB review essay on Alejo Carpentier (February 22, 2024; archived) has some good Hattic material near the start:
The historical novels that make up most of his oeuvre favor the Enlightenment and its ideas, but there are also currents of mid-twentieth-century surrealism and existentialism, Afro-Caribbean legend, Hollywoodesque epic, and Victorian maximalism. His prose—revered and sometimes gently mocked in the Spanish-speaking world—is extravagant, bejeweled with rare words and majuscules (a rare word he would surely favor), and festooned with lists. The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra describes his grammar school introduction to Carpentier’s verbiage in his affectionate foreword to Adrian Nathan West’s new translation of Explosion in a Cathedral (issued simultaneously with West’s translation of The Lost Steps, from 1953): “Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language?”
This sense of marvel and puzzlement is alive in West’s translations, which reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction. The original 1963 English translation of Explosion in a Cathedral by John Sturrock is mostly sure-footed and highly readable (for better and worse), but West lovingly restores the eccentric sweep and florid detail of the novel, better conveying the grandness of Carpentier’s vision.* That’s only part of the task, though, because for all his ornamentation, Carpentier is not a forbidding writer. West’s translation is sensitive to his humor and irony, and the reader is borne happily along through the thickets.
To begin with, West reverses the decision made by Sturrock (or Sturrock’s editors) to break the text into digestible paragraphs, restoring Carpentier’s monumental slabs of text and thereby the novel’s unconventional pacing. He also takes care not to dispel mysteries unnecessarily. Take the first sentence of the novel: “Last night, I saw the Machine rise up again” (West) versus “I saw them erect the guillotine again tonight” (Sturrock). (In Spanish, Esta noche he visto alzarse la Máquina nuevamente.) Sturrock introduces a prosaic “them,” shifts the ringing Esta noche (“tonight” in his translation) to a weaker position at the end of the sentence, and—most critically—decodes the sinister “Machine,” leaching the text of its cryptic force. (Carpentier never uses the word “guillotine” in this opening section.)
If Sturrock tends to underplay Carpentier’s idiosyncrasies and intensity, West sometimes errs on the side of embellishment, but with a sure feel for voice and cadence. Later in this first passage, for example, the sentence Las olas acudían, se abrían, para rozar nuestra eslora—rendered by Sturrock accurately but rather ploddingly as “The waves came to meet us and parted, brushing along the sides of the ship”—becomes “The waves rose in attendance, sundered and stroked the ship’s flanks.” “Sundered,” especially, is more elevated than se abrían, but the rhythms and alliteration of “sundered and stroked” echo the feel of the original. In West’s “Note on the Translation” in this volume—a pragmatic and insightful text, which, together with his note in The Lost Steps, constitutes a concise master class on contemporary best practices in retranslation—he chronicles his attempts to preserve stylistic difference without resorting to a literalism that ignores the imperfect alignment of the conventions of Spanish and English prose.
What really struck me, though, was this footnote (the asterisk after “Carpentier’s vision”):
Sturrock worked from René Durand’s French translation, which makes West’s translation the first from the Spanish. The use of an intermediary language is common enough in translation, but usually for lesser-known languages—I can’t think of another instance of a novel translated from Spanish via a third language.
There are doubtless other instances somewhere, but what an odd thing to do!
_Explosion in a Cathedral_ is a great title, but seems to be an innovation of the translator, since Carpentier’s Spanish title was kinda boring. I guess we should want to know what the title of the intermediate French version was, but somewhat bizarrely the French wikipedia article on the book uses only the Spanish title.
I suppose it reminds me of the excellent _Explosions in the Glass Palace_, which attracted this fine retrospective appreciation a dozen years ago on its 30th anniversary: https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/rain-parade-explosions-in-the-glass-palace-review/
the title of the intermediate French version
Le siècle des lumières Paris : Gallimard, 1962.
The translation title is reminiscent of Vargas Llosa’s Conversacion en la Catedral, and weirdly so, since the Carpentier work came out first, as if the translator was making a reference not found in the original.
The use of an intermediary language is common enough in translation, but usually for lesser-known languages
Back in the late 90s when I lived in Uzbekistan I read an article in a local newspaper about an author whose book was translated into English. The author told how when he was approached with the proposal to make an English translation of his book, he responded “But it hasn’t been translated into Russian yet!”. When he was told “So what, we’re planning to translate directly from Uzbek”, he understood how he had been living in a cultural paradigm of lesser and more important languages, where the lesser Soviet languages could only be intermediated by Russian, and he was happy that Uzbek now was free of that paradigm.
Using French as a bridge language from Spanish is indeed odd and, needless to say, would not be done nowadays. Sturrock had to have known Spanish, since he wrote quite a bit about Latin American literature. Perhaps he believed (or knew?) that since Carpentier’s first language was French, and René L.-F. Durand had already translated a whole string of books by the author, they were in contact and Carpentier was closely involved in or at least very pleased with the translation? Most authors feel free to change things when they self-translate, and translators are more likely to do so if they have direct approval. Sturrock also may not have felt confident enough translating from Spanish, especially rather baroque Spanish. Although he did publish a translation of literally Baroque short stories by María de Zayas, the same year that his Carpentier translation came out—who knows, that may have also been via French! I don’t see any other translations of hispanophone authors. And just because a translator reads a language quite well doesn’t mean they feel equipped to translate from it. Maybe he did the Zayas first and it was harder than he thought? All wild conjectures, of course.
Anyway, another odd thing is that previous books by Carpentier had already been translated into English, directly from Spanish, by Harriet de Onís, so it’s not as if he was unknown to English-speaking readers and something absolutely had to be done to get him out there.
Although actually, in that first sentence the French sticks to the Spanish almost word for word, so most of the other liberties may also have been taken by Sturrock.
Hint of an explanation: the French edition was published (in Paris) shortly before the Spanish original (in Mexico). Cuba was a mess in 1962.
Apparently, the eponymous painting is now known as King Asa of Judah Destroying the Idols
Vargas Llosa’s Conversacion en la Catedral,
Kafka’s The Trial [1925] has a chapter In the Cathedral, published separately 1915 as a short story.
After posting I realized that not only did Carpentier’s novel predate Vargas Llosa’s. Sturrock’s translation did too. You would think Vargas would be aware of the translation. Obviously the phrase isn’t trademarked, but it’s still interesting.
There is a brief survey of Siglo’s translation titles here. The Dutch version puts guillotine in the title.
The technofascists’ pet “thinker” Curtis Yarvin is presumably all in favour of explosions in the Cathedral.
The chapter in Kafka’s Der Process is called Im Dom; according to German Wikipedia Kathedrale and Dom are not synonymous:
Until I read that, my intuition was that you use Dom if it’s part of the official/popular name of the church (such as Kölner Dom/Dom zu Kölle — and if you’re in Cologne, it’s simply der Dom), and in that case you never call the church Kathedrale.
with the titles, is everyone involved riffing on t.s. eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral? apparently there was a 1949 translation published in spain, and (oddly, unmentioned in that article, at least to my skimming eye) a 1960 translation put out by UNAM – as well as an early translation into french.