Into the Looking-Glass Wood Read online

  Vargas Llosa, the novelist, defined himself and his colleagues as “professional malcontents, conscious or unconscious disturbers of society, rebels with a cause, the unredeemed revolutionaries of our world.” Vargas Llosa, the politician, declared himself an anti-revolutionary, an advocate of Thatcherism, a defender of President Menem’s shameful amnesty for those responsible for the disappearance of thousands of civilians during Argentina’s military dictatorship, a believer in Peru’s modernization, which would only be possible “with the sacrifice of Indian cultures.” (As Ronald Wright observed in his response to Vargas Llosa’s article in Harper’s, where the statement appeared, “This is of course the sacrifice that many white Peruvians have been eager to perform ever since the first of them leapt ashore with Pizarro.”)

  Such divided behaviour leads to a question that seems unanswerable (or even perhaps unaskable): it concerns the obligations of the writer as artist and as person. Even this dichotomy is suspect: we can read the Odyssey without knowing anything about Homer, but facts of time and place cling to the work like barnacles, giving an imagined shape to an author whose personal history has long vanished into dust. It is all very well to remember that a story is not necessarily the author’s story, that imaginary characters don’t really mouth the author’s words or voice the author’s opinion, that even autobiography is a form of fiction and that writers have only a fumbling idea of what it is that they’ve created; we want fiction to coincide with fact, and we are disturbed when Aristotle offers arguments in defence of slavery; or when the author of Mrs. Dalloway says to her husband, passing a plate to her in-laws at dinner, “Feed the Jews!”; or when the “unredeemed revolutionary” who roused us with The Time of the Hero supports an amnesty granted to torturers and argues for the annihilation of Indian cultures. We want the artist to be worthy of the art, and be the better person we ourselves would wish to be.

  But should a work of fiction be read in the light of what we know (or think we know) about the author? Vargas Llosa himself seems to argue that it should, teasing us with parallels between his life and his work, submitting himself for scrutiny in his 1993 A Fish in the Water, a species of autobiography that is also a political manifesto, a memoir that reads like a curious collaboration between the two Vargas Llosas, but in which the politician Vargas Llosa seems to have had the upper hand. The book is a collection of childhood scenes, adolescent awakenings and jottings from a writer’s notebook that reveal the roots of his fiction, interspersed with loud harangues by the defeated presidential candidate. It opens with an epigraph taken from Max Weber’s significantly titled Politics as a Vocation:

  Primitive Christians also knew very explicitly that the world is ruled by demons and that anyone who becomes involved in politics, that is to say, anyone who agrees to use power and violence as a means, has sealed a pact with the devil, so that it is no longer true that in his activity the good produces only good and the bad bad, but that the contrary frequently happens.

  It is tempting to read this as an accusation, the novelist quoting Weber against the politician.

  When an author puts on paper, together with his other fictional characters, the fictional character that seemingly created them all, and writes, “I am the one who dreamt up these stories; I am who I tell you I am,” most readers find it hard to ignore the voice calling out from the blazing bush. Vargas Llosa himself argues for the fairness of this manner of interpretation. For instance, in a clever essay on the Peruvian writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Vargas Llosa offers a reading of Salazar Bondy’s work as merely the result of the man’s social circumstances. The argument is ingenious: according to Vargas Llosa, social protest in Peru becomes for a writer the visible form of protest against his invisibility as an artist.

  Writers without publishers and without readers, with no audience to stimulate and make demands on them, or to force them to be rigorous and responsible, soon look to find the reason for this unfortunate situation. They then discover that there is blame and that this blame must be apportioned to certain people. The frustrated writer, reduced to solitude and the role of pariah, cannot, unless he is blind and stupid, attribute the neglect and the sorry condition of literature to men from the countryside and the suburbs who die without having learned to read and for whom, naturally, literature cannot be a vital or a superficial need because, for them, it does not exist. The writer cannot blame the lack of national culture on those who have never had the opportunity to create it because they live in conditions of constant oppression and suffocation. Their resentment, their fury, focuses logically on that privileged sector of society in Peru which knows how to read and yet does not read, on those families which have the resources to buy books and, yet do not buy them, on that class which had the means to make Peru a cultured and decent country and did not do so. (…) By the very fact of being a creator here, one belongs within the ranks of the victims of the bourgeoisie. From there, it is only one step for the writer to become conscious of this situation, take responsibility for it and declare himself a supporter of the disinherited of Peru, the enemy of their masters.

  The argument is elegantly set forward, and its very elegance hides its fallacy. An appreciative audience does not necessarily lead to literary rigour and responsibility (witness the oeuvre of the would-be mayor of London). And to suppose that a writer will side with the disinherited merely out of spite and personal revenge is to disallow political conviction, whatever its source, and says less about the wilfulness of writers who call themselves socialists than about the murky ethics of Mario Vargas Llosa.

  Following Vargas Llosa’s method, then, it is fair to suggest that his political persona contributed to the astonishing failure of his 1993 novel Death in the Andes. Here the characters, in particular the Indian characters, are caricatures, stock figures, as lifeless as Agatha Christie’s swarthy foreigners or Rider Haggard’s savage Africans. In The Time of the Hero, the cadets came “from the jungle and the mountains, from all departments, races and economic backgrounds,” and the conflict (involving murder, betrayal and revenge) stemmed not from discrimination against their class or the colour of their skin, but from the clash of individuals against the oppressive military system that demanded from them endurance of pain and blind obedience. Not any one person, but the school itself (and, on a larger scale, the whole of Peruvian society) was responsible for the tragedy. And in this, the writer once again saw clear: no single individual is at the root of evil, but rather the collective, all-encompassing social structure that determines who is in and who is out, defining itself by that which it excludes through fear and prejudice. Death in the Andes, on the other hand, fails not because it is a racist novel (which it is) but because its racism prevents Vargas Llosa from writing well—that is, prevents him from giving his characters, even those he abominates, a soul, as he managed to do in The Time of the Hero.

  Vargas Llosa’s hatred of the Andean Indian is evident in both his fictional and non-fictional accounts. Analysing the prejudices in which the “particolored” Peruvian society is steeped, Vargas Llosa writes in A Fish in the Water:

  It is a grave error, when discussing racial and social prejudices in Peru, to believe that they act only from the top down; parallel to the contempt that the white shows towards the mestizo, the Indian, and the black, there exists the bitterness of the mestizo against the white and the Indian and the black, and of each of these latter three against all the others, feelings—or perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of impulses or passions—that lie concealed behind political, professional, cultural, and personal rivalries, in accordance with a process which cannot even be called hypocritical, since it is rarely rational and seldom openly revealed.

  As Herbert Morote has pointed out, in his essay Vargas Llosa, Tal Cual (San Sebastian, 1997), this is equating the hatred of the victimizer for the victim with the hatred of the victim for the victimizer. It is saying that those who for centuries have been denied their identity, their language, their culture, their most eleme
ntary rights, do wrong in showing bitterness towards their oppressors. But Vargas Llosa, the writer, knows better: “In the majority of cases, [prejudice] is unconscious, stemming from an ego that is hidden and blind to reason; it is taken in with one’s mother’s milk and begins to be shaped by the time of the Peruvian’s first birth-cry and babblings as a baby.” This doesn’t, of course, justify Vargas Llosa’s prejudice, but it goes some way to explain it. Interestingly enough, when Vargas Llosa writes about Indians other than those of his immediate surroundings, the faraway Amazon Indians for instance, the prejudice lifts and the novelist once again becomes articulate: these Indians are interesting, interested characters, exotic but alive, respected and respectable. This is what happens in The Storyteller, one of Vargas Llosa’s finest achievements, a Heart of Darkness in which Kurtz finds at the core of the Peruvian jungle not the horror but the joy, the learning of a culture by the act of giving himself over to it, by lending it his voice in order to tell it its own stories. In Vargas Llosa’s words: “Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors.” The second Vargas Llosa should have this engraved in letters of fire.

  In the meantime, while Vargas Llosa the politician was sealing his pact with the devil, Vargas Llosa the novelist was continuing his dialogue with the Other, and from the chronicle of the sufferings of his fellow humans he turned to the depiction of their joys. In 1988 he began writing what he himself has called “erotic fiction,” and published In Praise of the Stepmother in the appropriately named series “The Vertical Smile,” edited by Esther Tusquets in Barcelona. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto followed a few years later.

  Vargas Llosa once defined erotic love as a “complicidad de fantasmas” (“a collusion of ghosts,” “a complicity of fantasies”); these ghosts or fantasies have never been absent in Vargas Llosa’s work, and in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and In Praise of the Stepmother they have merely risen to the surface. Few contemporary erotic novels (in whatever language, I believe) explore this sensual surface without indulging in despair or pathos, few have the courage of playfulness. From Georges Bataille to Nicholson Baker, the erotic novelist normally insists on the wages of sin; Vargas Llosa instead proposes a free-for-all romp, no cover charges and no dress code enforced.

  In Praise of the Stepmother is a happy version of Phèdre with a few minor adjustments: it is Foncho, barely an adolescent, who seduces his stepmother, the beautiful Lucrecia, while Don Rigoberto, her husband, tries to retain her through a game of ingenious erotic fantasies. Even though the novel ends badly (Lucrecia is kicked out of the house and the jealous Rigoberto is tortured by her absence), it reads like a jubilatory erotic saga, an intuition confirmed in the second volume, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. In Praise of the Stepmother proposed a series of tableaux vivants based on various paintings, from Jordaens’s Candaules, King of Lydia to Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, through which Don Rigoberto and his precocious son depict the glories of the beautiful Lucrecia. In The Notebooks the depictions are limited to the work of one painter, Egon Schiele, through whose tortured, vibrant, erotic paintings and drawings this Dionysian family plays out their imagined desires. Which scenes are real and which are daydreams? It doesn’t matter, of course: the erotic bliss is only partly physical. Most of it is made up of words and pictures, stories and images, the lover as novelist and painter.

  Vargas Llosa’s language, always just this side of baroque, plays in The Notebooks with all manner of nuances, from the coldly descriptive to the cloyingly childish, from the mystical-amorous Spanish of the seventeenth century to the contemporary Peruvian of politics and advertising—and the translator’s task is not an easy one. Compared to Spanish, English has a limited erotic vocabulary. Spanish exuberance quickly becomes in English purple prose, metaphors of sex sound arch or clinical when translated. Even the sweetest, most common nothings lack an appropriate equivalent in the reticent English tongue. And yet even with a loss of tones, Vargas Llosa’s erotic tales shine through the English version, utterly joyful, a celebration of how our body imagines Paradise.

  It may be that great literature, the literature that Northrop Frye defined as “possessing a vision greater in kind than that of its best readers,” somehow precludes the moral ugliness of prejudice, cannot be at the same time great literature and hate literature. It may be that when a writer stoops to prejudice, he loses control over his craft and his words refuse to follow, so that he is left merely with tags and tokens, the husks of language. This happens to Neruda in his anti-Nixon poems, to Chesterton in his moments of anti-Semitic or racist bathos, to Strindberg in his diatribes against women, to Peter Handke in his excuses for the Serbian atrocities, to Pound, to Céline, to many others.

  For Frye, a “major” writer is one within whose work readers can grow up “without ever being aware of a circumference.” I believe this is true of the novelist Vargas Llosa, whose incommensurable books—ambitious, wise, arrogant, sprawling, intimate, pathetic, angry, playful, contradictory, illuminating—keep on relentlessly extending their boundaries well beyond the grasp of the other Vargas Llosa, their ineffectual reader.

  Reading White for Black

  And what shall I say of those more properly called traitors than translators, since they betray those whom they aim to reveal, tarnishing their glory, and seducing ignorant readers by reading white for black?

  JOACHIM DU BELLAY,

  Defense and Example of the French Tongue, 1549

  We can only prohibit that which we can name.

  GEORGE STEINER,

  After Babel, 1973

  THROUGHOUT PART OF 1992 and 1993, I worked on the translation of three short stories by the late Marguerite Yourcenar. The stories, published in French under the title Conte Bleu, which I rendered in English as A Blue Tale, are very early works by the writer who was to become, in later life, such an accomplished stylist. Understandably, since they were written with the exuberance and know-all of youth, the stories stray from time to time from sober blue to lurid purple. Since translators, unlike writers, have the possibility of amending the faults of the past, it seemed to me that to preserve every glitter and volute of Yourcenar’s young text would have been nothing but a pedantic undertaking, less intended for lovers of literature than for literary urologists. Furthermore, the English language is less patient with ebullience than French. And so it was that a few times—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—I silently clipped an adjective or pruned an outrageous simile.

  Vladimir Nabokov, criticized by his friend Edmund Wilson for producing a translation of Eugene Onegin “with warts and all,” responded that the translator’s business was not to improve or comment on the original, but to give the reader ignorant of one language a text recomposed in all the equivalent words of another.1 Nabokov apparently believed (though I find it hard to imagine that the master craftsman meant this) that languages are “equivalent” in both sense and sound, and that what is imagined in one language can be reimagined in another—without an entirely new creation taking place. But the truth is (as every translator finds out at the beginning of the first page) that the phoenix imagined in one language is nothing but a barnyard chicken in another, and to invest that singular fowl with the majesty of the bird born from its own ashes, a different language might require the presence of a different creature, plucked from bestiaries that possess their own notions of strangeness. In English, for instance, the word phoenix still has a wild, evocative ring; in Spanish, ave fénix is part of the bombastic rhetoric inherited from the seventeenth century.

  In the early Middle Ages, translation (from the past participle of the Latin transferre, “to transfer”) meant conveying the relics of a saint from one place to another. Sometimes these translations were illegal, as when the saintly remains were stolen from one town and carried away for the greater glory of another. This
is how the body of St. Mark was transferred from Constantinople to Venice, hidden under a cartful of pork, which the Turkish guards at Constantinople’s gates refused to touch. Carrying away something precious and making it one’s own by whatever means possible: this definition serves the act of literary translation perhaps better than Nabokov’s.

  No translation is ever innocent. Every translation implies a reading, a choice both of subject and interpretation, a refusal or suppression of other texts, a redefinition under the terms imposed by the translator who, for the occasion, usurps the title of author. Since a translation cannot be impartial, any more than a reading can be unbiased, the act of translation carries with it a responsibility that extends far beyond the limits of the translated page, not only from language to language but often within the same language, from genre to genre, or from the shelves of one literature to those of another. In this, not all “translations” are acknowledged as such: when Charles and Mary Lamb turned Shakespeare’s plays into prose tales for children, or when Virginia Woolf generously herded Constance Garnett’s versions of Turgenev “into the fold of English Literature,”2 the displacements of the text into the nursery or into the British Library were not regarded as “translations” in the etymological sense. Pork, Lamb or Woolf, every translator disguises the text with another, attractive or detractive meaning.

  Were translation a simple act of pure exchange, it would offer no more possibilities for distortion and censorship (or improvement and enlightening) than photocopying or, at most, scriptorium transcription. Alas, pace Nabokov, it isn’t. If we acknowledge that every translation, simply by transferring the text to another language, space and time, alters it for better or for worse, then we must also acknowledge that every translation—transliteration, retelling, relabelling—adds to the original text a prêt-à-porter reading, an implicit commentary. And that is where the censor comes in.