In Praise of the Invisible

Late last year, the Queen Sofía Institute in New York invited me to do, for a few minutes, something I would happily do for hours on end: talk about translation and translators. The occasion was the awards ceremony for a prize the institute organizes to honor the best translation from Spanish to English in the United States. The 2023 prize was won—and deservedly so—by the translator Charlotte Whittle, who recreated El infinito en un junco in English as Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Irene Vallejo’s beautiful book discusses, among a thousand different things (all of them interesting), the historical importance of translation. I have always believed in the relevance and even necessity of taking every opportunity to publicly declare our gratitude to translators, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of them are responsible for a great part of what we mean when we say: I am human.

Allow me to begin with a declaration of principles: if we read and write literature, I believe, it is due to a feeling of dissatisfaction. The life we have to live is not enough for us; we rebel against the fact that we get just one life, in the sense that we don’t have another after this one, but also against the confinement inside a single identity, a single place in the world, a unique point of view from which to look at the world until death. This is frustrating because we always want to live and know more: we want to have other lives. Literature is a remedy (an imperfect one, but we have no other for the moment) for these deprivations; anyhow, translation takes this privilege one step further, and gives us the gift of access to even more different, even more remote lives, or bridges the abyss that separates us from those distant lives. That’s why I can say that my vision of the world, my morals, my comprehension of what we are as human beings, has been molded by Homer and Tolstoy, by Aristotle and Chekhov, despite not speaking a word of Greek or Russian. I have often said that without translation I would not be able to talk about my Colombian reality, because to do so I need two words that once upon a time were translated from Greek: politician and idiot. You see: translation enriches our comprehension of life.

For several years I earned my living as a translator, and I have always thought there is no better school for an apprentice writer than literary translation. The equation is very simple: we learn to write by reading, and translators are the best readers in the world. A good translator understands all the intents and purposes; like a good impersonator, she can do all the voices. A good translator also recognizes all the shortcuts, all the snares, all the cheap tricks, and this, for a translated writer, is an invaluable incentive. (More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.) Finally, translators are the best error detectives. Their emails cause me real panic, for they are the tangible proof that, no matter how many times you proofread a manuscript, there will always be some mistake that will only become visible—to the author’s enormous despair—once the book is already published and in the process of being translated. But Borges used to say that his first reading of Don Quixote had been in English, and that later, when he read the original in Spanish, he thought it was a mediocre translation. I don’t know why, but this anecdote consoles me.

The Queen Sofía prize honors, as I said, a translation from Spanish to English. No one can be better aware of the importance of translation than a Latin American novelist, for our novel reached maturity, at least in part, thanks to certain translated discoveries. García Márquez would not have written what he wrote had he not discovered Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, that strange annunciation of magic realism, or Faulkner and Hemingway and Albert Camus: all books and authors he read in translation (and many published by the great Victoria Ocampo, who I’ll have to talk about in another article). The same can be said in the opposite direction: without Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or without Norman Di Giovanni’s of the works of Borges, a whole generation of North American novelists would be more difficult to imagine: Toni Morrison and John Barth come to mind. But many others too: The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is an admirable novel that would be inconceivable without Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

I mean that translation is, among many other things, a possible antidote against closed-mindedness and xenophobia of the spirit. Translation broadens our sense of what human beings are, what they say and think and feel; also, what language does to the world. Gregory Rabassa says that something like Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty may be applicable to translation: “every time we call a stone a pierre,” he writes, “we have somehow made it different from a stone or a Stein.” I don’t know about you, but to me this seems frankly magical. Many years ago I talked it over with Javier Marías, one of the great novelist-translators of our language, who published his rendition of Tristram Shandy when he was in his early twenties, and later produced Spanish versions of works by Joseph Conrad and Isak Dinesen. Marías told me that the most mysterious aspect of translation is the simple circumstance of our acceptance of it. How can a text still be the same after losing all that has made it possible, which is the language? How can we feel we’ve read W. G. Sebald or Thomas Bernhard, those of us who do not know German, when not a single one of the words in the translated text is the decision of the author? We are aware as we are reading that the words are by Miguel Sáenz (or Anthea Bell, Michael Hulse, Martin Chalmers, Ewald Osers, Michael Hofmann, etc.) and nevertheless we go on thinking: I am reading Bernhard, reading Sebald, reading Joseph Roth.

This has a corollary: good translations make the translator disappear; bad ones make them visible. Maybe there is some truth in the cliché, and good translators might be invisible in the work. However, I believe, and with complete conviction, that they should be very visible, as visible as possible, in our society of readers. Or of citizens, indeed, because that is also what translations, their presence in our societies or our sustained contact with them, indirectly create. Yes, it’s true: translators’ names should be on the covers of books. And it’s true: they must be better paid. And it’s true: the industry, this publishing industry that depends on them, must begin now to protect them from the uncontrolled onslaughts from what we call artificial intelligence, which could very well be the greatest step backward that human beings have taken. And we readers of literature should give our thanks to these invisible figures, telling them every once in a while that we see and recognize and appreciate them.

Late last year, the Queen Sofía Institute in New York invited me to do, for a few minutes, something I would happily do for hours on end: talk about translation and translators. The occasion was the awards ceremony for a prize the institute organizes to honor the best translation from Spanish to English in the United States. The 2023 prize was won—and deservedly so—by the translator Charlotte Whittle, who recreated El infinito en un junco in English as Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Irene Vallejo’s beautiful book discusses, among a thousand different things (all of them interesting), the historical importance of translation. I have always believed in the relevance and even necessity of taking every opportunity to publicly declare our gratitude to translators, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of them are responsible for a great part of what we mean when we say: I am human.

Allow me to begin with a declaration of principles: if we read and write literature, I believe, it is due to a feeling of dissatisfaction. The life we have to live is not enough for us; we rebel against the fact that we get just one life, in the sense that we don’t have another after this one, but also against the confinement inside a single identity, a single place in the world, a unique point of view from which to look at the world until death. This is frustrating because we always want to live and know more: we want to have other lives. Literature is a remedy (an imperfect one, but we have no other for the moment) for these deprivations; anyhow, translation takes this privilege one step further, and gives us the gift of access to even more different, even more remote lives, or bridges the abyss that separates us from those distant lives. That’s why I can say that my vision of the world, my morals, my comprehension of what we are as human beings, has been molded by Homer and Tolstoy, by Aristotle and Chekhov, despite not speaking a word of Greek or Russian. I have often said that without translation I would not be able to talk about my Colombian reality, because to do so I need two words that once upon a time were translated from Greek: politician and idiot. You see: translation enriches our comprehension of life.

For several years I earned my living as a translator, and I have always thought there is no better school for an apprentice writer than literary translation. The equation is very simple: we learn to write by reading, and translators are the best readers in the world. A good translator understands all the intents and purposes; like a good impersonator, she can do all the voices. A good translator also recognizes all the shortcuts, all the snares, all the cheap tricks, and this, for a translated writer, is an invaluable incentive. (More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.) Finally, translators are the best error detectives. Their emails cause me real panic, for they are the tangible proof that, no matter how many times you proofread a manuscript, there will always be some mistake that will only become visible—to the author’s enormous despair—once the book is already published and in the process of being translated. But Borges used to say that his first reading of Don Quixote had been in English, and that later, when he read the original in Spanish, he thought it was a mediocre translation. I don’t know why, but this anecdote consoles me.

The Queen Sofía prize honors, as I said, a translation from Spanish to English. No one can be better aware of the importance of translation than a Latin American novelist, for our novel reached maturity, at least in part, thanks to certain translated discoveries. García Márquez would not have written what he wrote had he not discovered Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, that strange annunciation of magic realism, or Faulkner and Hemingway and Albert Camus: all books and authors he read in translation (and many published by the great Victoria Ocampo, who I’ll have to talk about in another article). The same can be said in the opposite direction: without Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or without Norman Di Giovanni’s of the works of Borges, a whole generation of North American novelists would be more difficult to imagine: Toni Morrison and John Barth come to mind. But many others too: The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is an admirable novel that would be inconceivable without Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

I mean that translation is, among many other things, a possible antidote against closed-mindedness and xenophobia of the spirit. Translation broadens our sense of what human beings are, what they say and think and feel; also, what language does to the world. Gregory Rabassa says that something like Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty may be applicable to translation: “every time we call a stone a pierre,” he writes, “we have somehow made it different from a stone or a Stein.” I don’t know about you, but to me this seems frankly magical. Many years ago I talked it over with Javier Marías, one of the great novelist-translators of our language, who published his rendition of Tristram Shandy when he was in his early twenties, and later produced Spanish versions of works by Joseph Conrad and Isak Dinesen. Marías told me that the most mysterious aspect of translation is the simple circumstance of our acceptance of it. How can a text still be the same after losing all that has made it possible, which is the language? How can we feel we’ve read W. G. Sebald or Thomas Bernhard, those of us who do not know German, when not a single one of the words in the translated text is the decision of the author? We are aware as we are reading that the words are by Miguel Sáenz (or Anthea Bell, Michael Hulse, Martin Chalmers, Ewald Osers, Michael Hofmann, etc.) and nevertheless we go on thinking: I am reading Bernhard, reading Sebald, reading Joseph Roth.

This has a corollary: good translations make the translator disappear; bad ones make them visible. Maybe there is some truth in the cliché, and good translators might be invisible in the work. However, I believe, and with complete conviction, that they should be very visible, as visible as possible, in our society of readers. Or of citizens, indeed, because that is also what translations, their presence in our societies or our sustained contact with them, indirectly create. Yes, it’s true: translators’ names should be on the covers of books. And it’s true: they must be better paid. And it’s true: the industry, this publishing industry that depends on them, must begin now to protect them from the uncontrolled onslaughts from what we call artificial intelligence, which could very well be the greatest step backward that human beings have taken. And we readers of literature should give our thanks to these invisible figures, telling them every once in a while that we see and recognize and appreciate them.

Elogio de los invisibles

A mediados del mes pasado, el Instituto Reina Sofía de Nueva York me invitó a hacer, durante unos minutos, algo que haría gustosamente horas enteras: hablar de traducción y traductores. La ocasión era la ceremonia de entrega de un premio que el instituto organiza con la complicidad de otras entidades, y que distingue la mejor traducción hecha del español al inglés en Estados Unidos. Esta vez lo mereció —y es muy merecido— la traductora Charlotte Whittle, que puso en palabras inglesas El infinito en un junco, el bello libro de Irene Vallejo que habla, entre mil cosas distintas (y todas interesantes), de la importancia histórica de la traducción. Pues bien, siempre he creído en la pertinencia y aun la necesidad de cualquier manifestación que se nos ocurra para declarar públicamente nuestra gratitud hacia los traductores, y no me parece una exageración decir que todos ellos —y todas ellas: pues las mujeres son mayoría en este oficio— son autores de buena parte de lo que decimos cuando decimos: soy humano.

Permítanme que parta de una declaración de principios: si leemos y escribimos literatura, creo yo, es por un sentimiento de insatisfacción. No nos basta la vida que nos ha tocado; nos rebelamos contra el hecho de que la vida sea solo una, en el sentido de que no tenemos otra después de esta, pero también contra el confinamiento en una sola identidad, un solo lugar en el mundo, un único punto de vista desde el cual miraremos el mundo hasta la muerte. Esto es frustrante porque siempre queremos vivir y saber más: queremos tener otras vidas. La literatura es un remedio (imperfecto, pero no tenemos otro por el momento) para esas carencias; pues bien, la traducción lleva ese privilegio un paso más allá, y nos regala el acceso a vidas aún más diferentes, aún más alejadas, o salva el abismo que nos separa de esas vidas distantes. Por eso yo puedo decir que mi visión del mundo, mi moral, mi comprensión de lo que somos como seres humanos, ha sido moldeada por Homero y Tolstói, por Aristóteles y Chéjov, a pesar de que no hablo una sola palabra de griego o de ruso. A menudo he dicho que sin traducción no podría hablar de mi realidad colombiana, porque para ello necesito dos palabras que alguna vez fueron traducidas del griego: político e idiota. Ya ven ustedes: la traducción enriquece nuestra comprensión de la vida.

Durante varios años me gané la vida como traductor, y siempre he pensado que no hay mejor escuela para un aprendiz de escritor que la traducción literaria. La ecuación es muy sencilla: aprendemos a escribir leyendo, y los traductores son los mejores lectores del mundo. Un buen traductor entiende todos los efectos; como un buen imitador, puede hacer todas las voces. Un buen traductor también reconoce todos los atajos, todas las trampas, todos los trucos baratos, y esto, para el escritor traducido, es un acicate invaluable. (Más de una vez he trabajado una frase con sus traductoras en mente: para que sea mejor o más clara, o para que no sea perezosa ni autoindulgente: para que esté a la altura de su oficio y su talento). Por último, los traductores son los mejores detectives del error. Sus correos electrónicos me causan verdadero pánico, pues son la prueba tangible de que, por muchas veces que se corrija un manuscrito, siempre hay alguna falta que solo se hará visible —para enorme desesperanza del autor— con el libro ya publicado y en proceso de traducción. Pero Borges solía decir que su primera lectura del Quijote había sido en inglés, y que luego, cuando leyó el original en español, pensó que se trataba de una traducción mediocre. No sé por qué, pero esta anécdota me consuela.

El premio Queen Sofia, que así se llama en el país donde se da, distingue, como ya dije, una traducción del español al inglés. Nadie puede ser más consciente de la importancia de la traducción que un novelista latinoamericano, pues nuestra novela llegó a la mayoría de edad, por lo menos en parte, gracias a ciertos descubrimientos traducidos. García Márquez no habría escrito lo suyo si no hubiera descubierto La metamorfosis, de Kafka, o esa extraña anunciación del realismo mágico que es Orlando, de Virginia Woolf, o a Faulkner y a Hemingway y a Albert Camus: todos libros que leyó en traducción (y muchos publicados por la gran Victoria Ocampo, sobre la cual habría que hablar más en otro artículo). Lo mismo se puede decir en el sentido contrario: sin la traducción de Cien años de soledad por Gregory Rabassa, o sin las que hizo Norman Di Giovanni de la obra de Borges, toda una generación de novelistas norteamericanos sería más difícil de imaginar: me vienen a la mente Toni Morrison y John Barth. Pero también muchos otros: Las vírgenes suicidas, de Jeffrey Eugenides, es una novela admirable que sería inconcebible sin Crónica de una muerte anunciada.

Quiero decir que la traducción es, entre otras muchas cosas, un antídoto posible contra la cerrazón mental y la xenofobia del espíritu. La traducción amplía nuestro sentido de lo que son los seres humanos, de lo que dicen y piensan y sienten; también, de lo que el lenguaje le hace al mundo. Gregory Rabassa dice que el principio de incertidumbre de Heisenberg se aplica a la traducción: “Cada vez que llamamos pierre a una piedra”, escribe, “de alguna manera la hemos convertido en algo distinto de una stone o una Stein”. Y no sé a ustedes, pero a mí el hecho me parece francamente mágico. Hace muchos años hablé al respecto con Javier Marías, uno de los grandes novelistas-traductores de nuestra lengua —responsable de Tristram Shandy cuando tenía veintipocos años, y luego de obras de Conrad y de Isak Dinesen—, y me decía Marías que lo más misterioso de la traducción es la simple circunstancia de que la aceptemos. ¿Cómo puede un texto seguir siendo el mismo después de perder lo que lo ha hecho posible, que es el lenguaje? ¿Cómo podemos sentir que hemos leído a W. G. Sebald o a Thomas Bernhard los que no sabemos alemán, cuando ni una sola de las palabras que se encuentran en el texto traducido es decisión del autor? Leemos con la conciencia de que las palabras son de Miguel Sáenz, y sin embargo seguimos pensando: leo a Bernhard, leo a Sebald, leo a Joseph Roth.

Esto tiene un corolario: las buenas traducciones hacen desaparecer al traductor; las malas lo hacen visible. Tal vez sea cierto el lugar común que repetimos sin examinarlo, y los buenos traductores sean invisibles en la obra. Pero en cambio creo, y con toda convicción, que deben ser muy visibles, lo más posible, en nuestra sociedad de lectores. O de ciudadanos, sí, porque eso es también lo que indirectamente crean las traducciones, su presencia en nuestras sociedades o nuestro contacto sostenido con ellas. Así que es verdad: los nombres de los traductores deberían estar en la cubierta de los libros. Y es verdad: habría que pagarles mejor. Y es verdad: la industria, esta industria editorial que depende de ellos, debería empezar desde ya a protegerlos de los embates sin control de eso que llamamos inteligencia artificial, que muy bien puede ser el más grande paso atrás que hemos dado los seres humanos. Y nosotros, los lectores de literatura, tendríamos que darles las gracias a esas figuras invisibles, diciéndoles de vez en cuando que los vemos, que los reconocemos, que los apreciamos.