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Dear readers,
Remember when I kicked the month off by creating a list of short works and writing, “These days I just want to finish what I start and breathe a little before taking on any new commitments”? And then at no one’s request, I took on creating a directory of BookStacks? I’m about halfway through this project. Maybe I’ll complete it by the 4th of July fireworks.
Ah well. As much as I like following through, any itch to take a beat on my part usually hides within it my true desire: to bring something new into the mix. My summer transitions from “done” to “doing something new” tend toward swirl cone more than sudden leap from land to lake.
Maybe that’s why I so loved A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft.
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This collection of five stories features tenacious main characters. Each embarks on a mission, often dubious or ill-advised, in response to an event, a yearning, or both. It marks a shift in how they understand themselves and in most of them, this shift parallels changes in the landscape and global realities of the Córdoba region of Argentina they call home.
An abandoned wife visits her husband’s mountain lair. A young tourist’s death and an embarrassing rejection spur a teen girl to seek a reckless encounter, opening her to a spiritual experience. A meticulous outsider hired to change the topography of a town finds himself caught in the middle of a family standoff. An old man seeks to give his middle-aged daughter away in marriage to provide a home for them both; she learns to let her own desire guide her. The ghost of a dead husband appears in a dream; a naked woman in the snow makes his message clear.
The personalities form many triangles, but pairs provide the the torque that moves the stories forward the characters alternately resist or yield to each other’s will. These pairs are tightly structured, yet they feel natural. The dialogue between them builds realistically, loyal to each, and their words resonate with their unique emotional landscapes.
I can read well in Spanish; it’s my second language. But I chose to read this in Croft’s English translation I discovered A Perfect Cemetery in the first place through learning more about her.
At the end of the second story titled “Silvi’s Dark Night,” Silvi’s father Helmut describes the view, and her future, as “swell.” It’s a word both my grandfathers used when they were alive, when they wanted to transfer their enthusiasm to one of us youngsters who might not duly appreciate the object of it. It brought me to a nostalgic standstill, appropriate to the story’s ending. But in the pause, I noticed something: I was trying to imagine what the word had been in Spanish.
That thought made me realize I had been reading the book, inside my mind, not in Spanish but not quite in English, either. It is artistically written so that the English never seems distant from the story. But I couldn’t pretend not to know it had originally been written in Spanish, a language that I know and love and could also recognize within it. And so my mind had been somehow absorbing it as though it were a swirl cone, neither chocolate nor vanilla but its own flavor. Until I got to the word “swell” and tasted the languages separately again.
I decided for myself the origin of “swell” could have been “estupendo” (“great” or “stupendous” per the dictionary) or “hermosísimo ”—an exaggerated form of the word “beautiful” that can sound a bit silly. I moved on to the rest of the stories.
To my surprise, Croft’s afterword “On Conversation” begins: “This is the story of a word. The word is ‘swell.’” In it, she answers my question about the original text. Turns out I was wrong. Falco’s word was the common “hermoso.”
But in reading Croft’s essay, I realized there’s a way in which I was not wrong after all. She shares her experience of reading the stories for the first time: They appeared to her as a silent movie playing within her mind, the contours of them “dazzling and precise as Frank Lloyd Wright’s skylit spiral path,” the characters conversing in “not Spanish or English or the German that surrounded me then, but a kind of fluid protolanguage that was nonetheless clear as a bell.” In this, I gained better words for my own linguistically unique experience with the book.
One important detail that came through clearly for Croft: she heard her father’s voice as Helmut—and she knows for certain he would have said “swell.” Just as my grandfathers might have in a scene with this same emotional tone, regardless of what the dictionary may say.
This reminded me of the interview I linked to in my reading of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star earlier this month.
In it, the author declared that she never reread her books, and she never read the translations either. Asked if this was because they’re generally bad, she says, “I don’t even want to know. But I know that I’m not the one writing.”
Are translators to approach a book as readers first, or as writers? Is the resulting book the author’s, or theirs? What changes when an English version will be read by more people than the original, or serves as a necessary precursor to reach readers in other world languages? These are the central questions dramatized for entertainment in Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey included in my April list.
In her essay, Croft responds more personally and plainly. When it comes to constructing the mental movie of the book, “Falco wrote the screenplay, but I was the director of these sweeping films, just as you have been—as every reader will be.” In these mental movies, the characters speak “according to their personalities, as Falco created them and as I read them, and the translation we have created together is now its own being.”
Lydia Davis, like Croft, works as both a writer and a translator. The two enhance each other: “in translation, you are writing, yes, but not only writing—you are also solving, or trying to solve, a set problem not of your own creation… You are not beset by that very uncomfortable anxiety, the anxiety of invention, the commitment to invent a piece of work yourself, one that may succeed but may also fail, and whose success or failure is unpredictable.” She says that while translating the long introspective sentences of Proust, she reacted against them in her time away from his works by creating the one-liners stories she’s also known for.
This brings me around the spiral, back to where I started. Just as a translation blends something complete with something just beginning, alleviating the anxiety inherent in creation and potentially loading the mind and body with the very resistance necessary to overcome it, I like braiding together endings and beginnings in life, integrating both into something new.
Speaking of this, to kick off my March provocation about Transformation I shared a photo of my driveway agave spikes. Here’s how that turned out. They’re dry AF now in this desert heat but do you see the blooms opening in a spiral pattern in the April photos? I had no idea!
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And now, those have dried into the seeds of new plants. I’m trying to propagate some of them. There are hundreds. If you’re in Tucson and want to try to get some of them to grow for you too— hit me up.
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I’m curious to know your thoughts on Bookshop, on how you incorpoarte new things into your life, on short works, on how to grow plants from their pups. Please share your wisdom in the comments!
I really enjoyed the short reads this month so much that I’ll likely keep one going as a sidebar to other books throughout the summer. I’ve created long list of good ones— later this weekend I’ll post it for paid subscribers. And I’m working on my June provocation, too. Subscribe and you won’t miss anything!
Cocktail of the month: Lost in Translation from Bar GPT, after one of my favorite movies I rewatched recently, only to realize it’s turning 21 this year. Whaaat?
Be well and stay cool out there!
Abra