Many Voices: A Life in Translation

 

Many Voices: A Life in Translation

By Suzanne Jill Levine

Suzanne Jill Levine reflects upon her lifetime experience of translation, from childhood to present.

July 1, 2013

Published in Writing about Translation

“When we first learn to speak as children, we are learning to translate.”—Octavio Paz

One of the first authors I translated, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, said that I had “too much ego” to be a translator. I took the statement as a compliment even though I still don’t know if it’s true.  What I do know is that author and translator both need to be writers. To begin at the beginning: I read somewhere:

[T]he greatest human yearning is to recover the sense of belonging and possibility that attaches to childhood, that ghostly sensation of how it felt when life was most promising, simpler but more mysterious, at a time when things were vivid because they were first impressions. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. That is what I love, what I am forever seeking.

Cabrera Infante by Oscar Hijuelos

Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Poster by T.A.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

by Oscar Hijuelos

This interview is featured, along with thirty-four others, in our anthology BOMB: The Author Interviews.

In 1964, Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s most famous book, Three Trapped Tigers—an ingenious jazz-rich novel about pre-Castro Havana—brought him to the world’s attention as part of the Latin American boom, but all his works are unique and rewarding. A partial list of the many books he has written includes View of Dawn in the Tropics (1974), Infante’s Inferno (1984) andHoly Smoke (1985). A must for readers of literature, Cabrera Infante’s books are a fantastic distillation of a unique and impassioned—quite Cuban—consciousness. A self-described “writer of fragments,” his narratives about memory, life and history are often funny, always interesting and, from the point of view of the writer’s craft, complex and instructive. As the limitations of space prevent me from the critical appreciation his deeply inventive books deserve, I will speak briefly about the circumstances of this interview. It was conducted by fax, and quickly, due to my own travels and Cabrera Infante’s pressing schedule in London, where he lives with his wife Miriam; we have known each other for ten years. He is a friendly, circumspect, immensely approachable man with a capricious and alert mind. A master writer who, in this context, answers a few questions from an apprentice.

Oscar Hijuelos When you were a child in Cuba what were your first exposures to the notion of narrative?

Guillermo Cabrera Infante As a child I was exposed to the narratives of the movies. But the funnies (or monitos as they were called; in Havana we called them muñequitos) were as important—if not more so. The radio came later, where I heard a series of episodes or comedy programs. I was, by the way, the only one of my friends and/or classmates who read the funnies or could tell the difference between the movies and the serials. From the comic books in Havana I learned that a strip could be a trip, as in The Spirit, where Will Eisner’s heroes were always dressed in blue (blue suits, blue felt hat, blue gloves) and had a sidekick who was a black boy, called Ebony in Cuba as in Ebony Concerto. Serials like The Three Daredevils of the Red Circle (the titles are approximations of the Spanish ones) were exercises in waiting for the Coming Attractions. It is rather baffling—at least to me—that there were more thrills in the funnies than in the movies. I taught myself to read by deciphering the inscriptions in the balloons because my father or my mother was fed up with my insistence on instant gratification by translation. They were all, as it should be, forms of popular art more pertinent than literature then.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Miriam Gómez
Photo by Sara Facio

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The decline of the so-called Cuban cultural renaissance started when Virgilio Pinera came down the ladder of the Czech airplane that brought him back from Brussels via Prague. He deplaned with mincing steps and, fluttering like a tropical butterfly suddenly sprung alive from a collector’s case, stopped briefly and then kneeled and leaned forward to kiss the red Cuban soil – only to smack the tarmac instead. (This gesture proved to be some sort of near-miss-cum-hubris for, you see, the runway had recently been covered with a Russian blacktop.) Though it didn’t really all begin then, but a few months earlier when Lunes, the literary supplement of the newspaperRevolucion, on which Virgilio Pinera was one of the principal collaborators (the word was usually meant in its second sense), was banned and closed down for good. Only it didn’t begin then either, but when they censored and sequestered PM, a documentary sponsored by Lunes that didn’t have any political content to warrant the seizure. That was really the beginning of the end. But let’s start at the very beginning – which was when dictator Batista decided to flee instead of fighting and the 26th of July Movement took over the Government in the name of the Revolution, its martyrs and the poor people of Cuba.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante / The Death of Virgilio Piñera

 The Death of Virgilio Piñera 

BIOGRAPHY

by

Cabrera Infante

The only true writer of the people left in Cuba, Virgilio Pinera, died a different death.

The death of Virgilio didn’t come swiftly or easily either. He was in his small flat in Havana and he felt ill. Somehow he managed to phone for an ambulance, but it took three hours for the ambulance to come. Paperwork. A police state is primarily made of forms to be filled in and out. When the ambulance arrived, they found him downstairs, lying in the street, already dead. Alejo Carpentier, who wanted a heart attack, was almost eighty when he died. Virgilio Pinera, who didn’t want any heart attacks, was 68. Carpentier’s funeral was stately, pompous. Virgilio’s funeral was another play of the absurd by himself. Rumour spread (in socialist countries, rumour runs, Party news crawls – and a running rumour is always trustworthy) that Virgilio had died. He was to lie in state in a humble funeraria. There was a small group of writers, his old friends and a bevy of young writers who looked queer – and queer they were. Virgilio had been their only true teacher, their mentor, their master in the gai savoir. There were fast-fading flowers and there was even a wreath from the Writers’ Union, with no inscription.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Virgilio Piñera

Virgilio Piñera
Poster by T.A.

VIRGILIO PIÑERA
BIOGRAPHY

by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

It was then that Virgilio Pinera came back from Brussels via Prague and missed kissing Cuban soil by about three feet. Some hubris, Early one morning, on militia duty at the gates of Revolucion, I had a phone call from him. I was surprised at first, then I was astounded. Virgilio was calling me from the local gaol at the beach where he lived. He told me he had been arrested on charges of being a passive P. ‘But a capital P, you know.’ I understood: Virgilio meant P, not for Pinera or for poet, but for Pederast. The night before there had been some sort of carnal Kristalnacht in Havana. A special branch of the police, called the Social Scum Squad, arrested on sight everybody walking the streets at night in Old Havana who looked to the naked eye like a prostitute, a pimp or a pederast. This police operation was called the Night of the Three Ps. But at the time Virgilio was miles away, in bed (he believed it was healthy to go to bed early and to rise early), in the shack he christened his big bungalow on the beach. How in hell was Virgilio in gaol?

London Review of Books

Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

Cuban-born novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante dies

Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Poster by T,A.

Cuban-born novelist 

Guillermo Cabrera Infante dies

Associated Press
Tuesday 22 February 2005 16.26 GMT

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, outspoken critic of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and one of the most original voices in modern Spanish-language literature, has died in London. He was 75.

Leonardo Padura / Top 10 Cuban novels

Leonardo Padura's top 10 Cuban novels

Hemingway and Hijuelos are here, but the author of the Havana Quartet also looks beyond the Cuba we think we know to introduce some of the island's more hidden literary treasures

Leonardo Padura
Wed 4 Mar 2009 13.05 GMT

Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of short-story collections and literary essays but international fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde. Like many others of his generation, Padura had faced the question of leaving Cuba, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s, when living conditions deteriorated sharply as Russian aid evaporated. He chose to stay.

Cuba is a country of poets. It would almost be too easy to select 10 poets or books of poetry that play a key role in the short history of Cuban literature. But there are excellent – and diverse – Cuban novelists, too few of whom are available in English translation. The 10 I've picked here will hopefully give some idea of both the country's literary tradition, and its imaginative life.

Street Art
Havana, 2015
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

1. Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier (1962, trans. John Sturrock)

I am convinced that this is the highpoint of the Cuban novel, the perfect fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in narrative prose. In this account of the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, the theme is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions: the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful ideals.

2. Cecilia Valdés Or El Angel Hill (Cecilia Valdés) by Cirilo Villaverde (1882, trans. Helen Lane)

This is considered to be one of the best examples of 19th century realism and romanticism in Spanish and the finest evocation of Cuban customs of that era. Its characters departed the novel's pages long ago to become prototypes of what it means to be Cuban. The most beautiful and tragic love story ever written in Cuba, it also encompasses the horrors of the African slave trade and gives full literary expression to the city of Havana. It is the classic.

3. Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1967, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner)

This is the book which created a literary language of Havana. It's a kind of cathedral of words, and no translation could do it full justice, but readers throughout the world have enjoyed Cabrera Infante's fiction thanks to his wit and the stories he welds together in an unrivalled portrait of 1950s Havana nightlife, the golden age of Cuban music and the city. Once you've read this, Havana will never look the same again.

4. Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (1974, trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Admired rather than read or valued, and in many ways poetry rather than fiction, Paradiso is one of the most influential novels in the Spanish language. Written in a completely different register to the baroque of Carpentier or colloquial of Cabrera Infante, the author's mastery of language has created a whole school of "Lezamian" writers. In Paradiso, as in any poet's novel, the way the story is told is more important than the story itself and the digressions much more than mere anecdotes. It is a magnificent exercise in style.

5. The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) by Alejo Carpentier (1953, trans. Harriet de Onís)

Carpentier yet again: we could also include in this list his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World (1957), which gave birth to the aesthetic of "the real and marvellous from America". As in all his work, Carpentier's perspective is universal: he uses the journey of a western intellectual to the heart of the South American jungle to narrate the physical possibility of going back in time to the origins of civilisation. Its great merit, however, is the way it makes us feel the vicissitudes experienced by the novel's musician protagonist, who understands that individuals have no choice but to accept the time and history fate has dealt them.

6. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

This is, of course, the best-known novel about Cuba by a non-Cuban author. And that's fair enough: thanks to The Old Man and The Sea Hemingway was awarded the Nobel prize, the gold medal for which still sits in the famous shrine to Our Lady of Charity at El Cobre, the Caribbean version of the Virgin Mary who is Cuba's patron saint. Although it merely recounts the story of a fisherman who after eighty-four days of "bad luck" finally makes a big catch, the novel is also about man's willpower and spirit of endurance. A beautiful fable for the human condition.

7. Temporada de ángeles (1983), Lisandro Otero; A Season For Angels, not translated.

Another great Cuban novel that is not set in Cuba: it goes back to the English Industrial Revolution, the beheading of Charles I and rule by Oliver Cromwell. It too makes a critique, from a literary perspective, of the fate of the great ideals of justice, freedom and equality. And of the perversity of politicians.

8. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Óscar Hijuelos

Hijuelos was born in Cuba but has lived in the United States from childhood and wrote this Pulitzer-prize winning work in English. Significantly, it is a novel created from all the stereotypical features that have gone into the construction of the image of Cubans for foreigners: their music, dancing, passion as lovers and romantic, rebellious spirit. Although there are more important novels written in Cuba from a literary point of view, the great international success of The Mambo Kings and its nostalgic portrait of a Cuba that is more dream than reality, make it a necessary player in the field of the Cuban novel.

9. Antes que anochezca (1990), Reinaldo Arenas; Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M. Koch (1993)

A novel in every sense of the word, even though the raw materials are more or less real episodes from the more or less real life of its author, Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most intense, maudit, and visceral of Cuban writers. Arenas wrote and published this heartrending work just before his lonely and equally heartrending death in freezing New York. Its style, exuberance and rage are the stuff of great fiction, as was its author.

10. El negrero (1933), Lino Novás Calvo; The Slave-trader, not translated

This novel doesn't take place in Cuba, but mainly in the slave-trading centres on the coasts of Africa and in the boats that transported their human cargo to the island: the Africans who have contributed so much to Cuba's economic, cultural, religious and ethnic riches. The Slave-trader (the story of Pedro Blanco from Málaga, one of the last slave-traders from the middle of the 19th century) is a wonderful novel that, alongside Faulkner's, inspired Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, the creators of the Latin American magical-realist novel.

Translated by Peter Bush

THE GUARDIAN