Machine or Guillotine?

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!