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I DON’T THINK IT’S entirely gonzo to propose that a reader who considers herself clued up in the art of
fiction is going to have read War and Peace and Ulysses and Madame Bovary and at least maybe
some of the ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. What’s only wishful is that this ideal reader will have read
these works, as they say, in the original. To be fluent in Russian, English, French, and Spanish—this
is a very rare achievement. And even if such a person exists, can this imaginary linguistic überfemme
also read the German of Franz Kafka, and the Italian of Carlo Emilio Gadda, not to mention the Polish
of Witold Gombrowicz or—?
You get the picture. The history of literature is a world history. No one claims to be an expert in
novels who only reads novels in Portuguese, or Tagalog. And so the history of literature necessarily
exists through translations. The reader who wants to investigate the difficult art of the novel will end
up with a whole warehouse of imported goods.
But maybe these propositions—which are in fact explosive—seem only ordinary truths, so let’s put
this another way. Literature is one of those strange arts where the original is often experienced as a
multiple. And sure, this isn’t so strange, if you just think of a multiple as a useful form of mechanical
reproduction, like a postcard, but this way of thinking has the problem that the relation of a postcard
to a painting is really not the same as that between a translation and its source. The most perfect
translation is at once precisely the same size as the original it mimics and an entirely different thing—
as if you’ve mimicked the exact measurements of Michelangelo’s David, but also made it out of JellO.
I’m just saying: the existence of translation at the center of literature represents a crazier situation
than it might at first seem. Because—to limit our investigation of literature to the novel only—one of
the things that the history of the novel represents is a frenzied, patient attempt on the part of every
novelist to be as singular as possible, and the medium they possess for this singularity is a language.
The finished singularity goes by the moniker style, and style can only be encoded in a novel’s words
and syntax. So why then do we read Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, if we cannot read Der Proceß?
Why, in fact, do we call The Trial Kafka’s at all? Isn’t a style, in the end, precisely fated to be
linguistically unique?
These are menacing philosophical questions, and I’m not in the business of answering such
questions in a miniature prefatory note. I’m only in the business, for now, of posing them—so that the
reader can understand the crisscrossing puzzlement that went into the project they now hold in their
hands. It was a project whose motives were partly grand philosophy and partly therapeutic. Because
the strangeness is that while novels and their translations seem to exist in a very odd and
complicated relationship, the general bookstore mode is to treat translations as so many
transparencies, so many invisibilities. We hardly mention their presence at all. And this may well be to
avoid the embarrassing intricacies of the philosophical problem, but embarrassment, I think, is no way
to conduct intellectual life. The proper way is confrontation. You need a hypothesis, and then an
experiment.
Under the blank gray sky of London, my hypothesis, I considered, looked something like this:
HYPOTHESIS
The art of the novel is an international art. Its history is international, and the mechanics of this
history is translation—which means that the art of fiction, having survived this history, must be
tougher than it looks.
A novel, in other words, is an airplane. Its style is entirely transportable. And the deeper contention
here was that not just the basic telenovela storyline of Der Proceß can be rewritten in any language,
but also – and less obviously – the more intricate details and tricks and precisions of its sentences.
(Which, if true, would lead to the perturbing possibility that the essence of literature’s forms is in fact
not specifically linguistic. But let’s abandon that disturbing paradox or contradiction for the moment.)
While the proposed method for testing this hypothesis could therefore be an experiment where
translation would be conducted under even more high-pressure, hectic conditions than usual.
THE EXPERIMENT
What would happen if a story were successively translated by a series of novelists, each one
working only from the version immediately prior to their own, the aim being to preserve a
story’s style?
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At this point of happy abstraction, however, the experiment needed some sad parameters. The initial
attempt to make a model followed the rough thinking that if you took a story, then subjected it to a
translation, and then translated that translation back into the original language—according to the
formula (this is scientific, totally) A–B–A—then you would have a simple device for testing the effects
of translation on a given story. But then this thinking became extended. Absolutely, the usual
translation is from A to B. I think that’s unobjectionable. But if B is translated into C, is it possible to
say that C is also a translation of A? Can you, in other words, make a translation from a third
language? I sort of hoped you maybe could. The proposed model A–B–A therefore became a new
model that was now something like A-B-C-D-A. This, however, stalled on the worry that such a
model would create a project so international that only a few people could read more than a fraction
of it. And so, xenophobically weighting the project in the interests of the English-speaking reader, it
was decided to adapt this slightly, giving a final formula—if X = English—of A–X–B–X–C–X, etc.
With some occasional variation (half of the chains here extend to include a D; in others B ended up
following directly on A, or C on B), this became the finished procedure.
(One more variation: in the spirit of a finale, or epilogue, the editor invented for himself his own
risky distillation of this Speedy Gonzales experiment—to translate a story with a foreign novelist, as a
duo, from a language the editor could not speak. This may well seem unethical, but the lack of ethics
was the point. The reader will find this piece of immorality at the issue’s close.)
This kind of experiment would have its philosophical usefulness, but I also hoped that it might
create various kinds of sensual pleasure for the curious reader. There would be the pleasure of
observing how far the stylistic essence of a story—its singularity—really could survive such a stylistic
epidemic. And there would also be the pleasure of observing this initial singularity being transformed
into a series of new singularities: the multiple new possibilities created by each new novelist’s style.
And then there would be the simple gargantuan pleasure of reading as many of the resulting stories
as you could, in as many languages as you were able. In other words: one story multiple times, or
multiples stories once.
As hinted at earlier, in this experiment fiction writers would be preferred to genuine trained
professional translators. Some of these writers of fiction might also be translators, but most of them
were not—some, in fact, would be doing a translation for the first and only time in their writing
careers, from languages in which they were not uniformly fluent. One mischievous motive for this rule
was that the scope for elongations and omissions and simple mistakes would be therefore very much
increased. It was high-pressure, after all, this experiment. But more importantly, this bias toward
writers had an aesthetic aim: to subject each story to as much stylistic multiplicity as possible.
In this spirit, the instructions given to each translator were maximally minimal: to provide an
accurate copy that was also a live story. Some interpreted this to mean the minutest attention to
linguistic detail; others interpreted it to mean total rewriting and rewiring. The editor made no
theoretical or aesthetic judgments of his own—or at least, not out loud. Those judgments were left to
the conscience of each author. For after all: a translation is a series of minute decisions. And these
decisions will be shaded differently in relation to the more abstract conditions of time and fame. There
are maybe four categories of translation, it turned out—of the celebrated dead, of the uncelebrated
dead, of the celebrated living, and of the uncelebrated living. Each one can constrain or free the
novelist-translator to various degrees of stylistic chutzpah.
As for the choice of those original stories, this was deliberately multiple, too. Some were provided
by an invited and living author; some were chosen by the initial translator in the series; a couple were
explicitly chosen by the editor. The only rule governing the choice of source material was that the
pieces would either not have been translated before into English or, if they had been previously
translated, would be as unknown as reasonably possible. This principle of unknownness allowed for
the selection of one English original—by Richard Middleton, a British writer from the beginning of the
twentieth century—which makes its first apperance here in Spanish, as translated by Javier Marías.1
(If a reader wishes to say that Richard Middleton is in fact very well known, then that reader is
welcome. But she is on her own.) The originals themselves, it was decided, would remain outside the
scope of the issue; what the reader will find here is translations all the way through.2
The network of writers who undertook this experiment was also governed by chance procedures:
emerging via friendships, favors, and random pleas to strangers, diverted by sad refusals and
disappointments, always subject to the higher law of other writers’ language skills…
And then, as mentioned, the experiment’s final rule was that, until the series was completed, each
translator was allowed to see only the directly preceding version in the series—just the text they were
translating, rather than any earlier versions. Only the first translator in each series had access to the
original. This parameter was partly designed to prevent novelists nervous about their linguistic skills,
who might want to refer back to previous versions in a language that they could read, from doing so—
but really it was because this whole category of the original was what the project was, after all,
determined to at least politely frazzle.
These, then, were the rules. Having made them up, the exhausted editor’s remaining role was that
of impresario—a giant exercise in cajoling these international novelists to work.
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And now here it is, the project!—a zigzagging series of series, like some throwback to the modernist
days of multilingual magazines, with multilingual titles and multilingual readers. To put that
multilinguality in numbers: this issue is based on twelve originals, with more than sixty multiples, the
whole thing in the process encompassing seventeen languages. Yes, there it is, the material – and I
don’t think it demands a single, sustained reading experience. You can loop through it in various
ways, randomly, here and there among the sequences, or more sternly, following each sequence
through to the end, with our exhausted translators’ commentary as a guide. (Because yes, as the
project approached its conclusion, it became obvious that there was a problem of transparency. If, in
the series X–B–X, X1 differs vastly from X2, how would the reader know if the differences originated in
1 In fact, the Middleton series contains two exceptions: Marías’s translation of the story breaks the rule that no translation would have been
previously published. But that first publication was in Spain, and in 1989. It is basically archaeology.
2 For the intrepid originalist, bibliographical notes appear on page 228.
B’s version of X1, or X2’s version of B? And what if both of them had been equally libertine? And so on
completion of their story, each translator was invited, if they wanted,3 to write a miniature commentary
on what they’d done with as much comprehensiveness as they liked—outlining their ethical thinking,
their minute problems, their giant rearrangements.) An anthology and a notebook, at the same time!
And it occurs to me that one happy accident of amassing all this material is that it represents a mini
conjuring trick, or optical illusion—a quick global map of some of the most agile practitioners, alive or
dead, in the young art of the novel, that is also a portable library of experiments with fiction. Although
I do say accident—because the true conclusions of this scheme, I think, are really philosophical. And
they are entirely threatening.
The experiment, I’m trying to say, didn’t quite work in the way that I expected. Which proves, I
suppose, at least that it was a true experiment. The degree to which each story emerges unscathed
veers wildly in each case. Sometimes, I think that the hypothesis was neatly confirmed—like in the
series based on
in the series based on
. Other times, it seems very obvious that it was gruesomely demolished—like
.4 To be frank, as I read the finished versions and their acommpanying
commentaries it sadly occurred to me that contradiction was this project’s mode. A gracious sense of
fidelity to the dead overlaps with an ungracious glee in infidelity; a teeming corruption of sound or
sense (often with the aid of that gorgeous, perilous gizmo, Google Translate) both destroys a story’s
local beauties, and yet also reveals its form; a multiple that was almost identical in every version
could be wildly different in substance because of one key word.5
You, dear reader, can therefore decide how you think the biscotti should crumble. My personal
unexpected side-effect has been an anxiety caused by the strange way so many stories’ forms or
styles ebbed and flowed, impervious to the series of singular stylists who rewrote them. Yes, I’ve been
left wondering about the basic premise of the whole experiment—that pure and noble concept of style.
I mean, I’ve always believed in style as the ultimate ideal, the basic unit of literature. A style, according
to this ideal, corresponded to a unique vision. Such a vision was the goal of every writer. But now I
wonder if this idea of a novelist’s style should be stranger, and more mobile. I keep remembering
some quip by Picasso, defending his own multiple technical approaches. Different subjects, he argued,
require different methods. It was that simple, why he changed technique so much. And I wondered,
3 Some preferred not to.
4 The reader can fill in the blanks.
5 So that, to pick one example, when John Wray writes a story about an animal in a synagogue, and Nathan Englander writes a story about an
animal in a shul, this is a very different story, while remaining almost identical. And therefore when Alejandro Zambra subsequently
translates this same synagogue or shul as a casa, something just as massive occurs once again.
then, if my literary idea of style was too abstract. Was it based on a presumption that life in its entirety
were a single subject, rather than an infinite amalgam of subjects?
Maybe there was a hidden reason, I began to think, why Kierkegaard is there at this project’s
opening. For Kierkegaard isn’t really a fiction writer—but also, well, he is, with his multiple texts, and
multiple pseudonyms, and multiple self. He felt like this experiment’s secret hero, or saint. My thinking
about style, I’m just saying, in comparison to this project’s seething novelties, now seems slightly
ponderous. And just as much as I will like someone because she manages to admire both Karl Marx
and also Mme du Deffand, I wonder now if the future for style should be multiplicity. It should be
allowed any anachronism—for why should the styles of the past be forbidden to you?—just as it
should be allowed any geographical displacement. 6 My new ideal, I’m thinking, and not without a
qualm, is the pure, unembarrassed inauthentic.7
But basta: because you, dear reader, may be led to entirely opposite conclusions…
For now, as a coda, I just want to hazard something even more wild and unproven. And the
wildness would go something like this. Maybe in some hypothetical future, literature will become the
pure international—oblivious to the problems of time and space—and somehow the language in which
you write or read your literature will be less important than the singular, multiple structures which those
languages happen to form… I really do not know. Nor do I know whether such a future represents
apocalypse or utopia. But if it does—well, then, perhaps this home-made contraption will represent an
early harbinger, or proof.
A.T. (London)
6 For which the word would be what—anatopism?
7 And while I fretted about this, I did then happen on a kindred spirit in the form of one of my favorite dearly departed restaurants, Mission
Street Food, in whose book Karen Leibowitz discusses the whole problem of describing what kind of food they do, coming up with the lovely
credo: “We feel authorized to make dishes outside our families’ ethnic traditions, and we freely mix different cultures’ ingredients and
techniques, because we like to eat delicious food, wherever it comes from”—an unashamed credo that I’m putting in delighted italics, here in
this footnote, and that comes with its own sober footnote to Edward Said’s Orientalism, where Said defines all cultures as “hybrid,
heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.” Which could be this introduction’s smuggled epigraph.