This is the last column that Javier Marías wrote for EL PAÍS, a tribute to the translators.
The novelist had left it written in July to be published after his usual August break.
This September, his health condition prevented him from returning to his weekly appointment with the readers in 'El País Semanal'.
We hoped to be able to start the new season with this column when he recovered, but after the writer's death this Sunday, it becomes the last installment of 'The Ghost Zone', number 939 since Javier Marías began writing in the newspaper in February from 2003.
If there is an activity that I miss, that is the translation.
I abandoned it decades ago, with minor exceptions (a poem, a short story, the quotes from English and French authors that appear in my novels), and nothing would stop me from going back to it, except my own books and how underpaid it continues to be. essential work, without a doubt one of the most important in the world, not only for literature;
also for the news that arrives, the careless subtitles of movies and series, today's bastard dubbing, medical advances, scientific research, conversations between rulers... But the one I miss is the literary one, to which I dedicated almost all My efforts.
I have always maintained that it is so similar to writing that it is exhausting to combine them.
The “only” difference is the presence of an original text to which one has to be faithful —but not a slave to it—.
That original offers drawbacks and advantages.
Among the first, that one is never
very
free—but quite free—because it must reproduce as best as possible, in its own language, what Conrad or James, Proust or Flaubert, Bernhard or Rilke wrote in theirs;
that is, one cannot invent.
In a novel, yes, from the first to the last line, to the point that sometimes you don't know how to continue, and that's when you wish you had an original to guide you and always dictate what you have to write.
The original text, like the musical score, is there and is immovable, although both the translator and the pianist have a wide margin of choice.
The diction, the preference for a word or its rejection, the
tempo,
the rhythm, the pauses, are their responsibility.
And they can destroy a masterpiece, that too.
I often look back, both in cold sweats and with great pleasure, of my months or years spent translating the three most difficult texts of my life:
The Mirror of the Sea,
written in the fantastic but strange English of a Pole;
Tristram Shandy,
a monumental work from the 18th century no less labyrinthine than Joyce's much-hyped
Ulysses
;
The religion of a doctor
and
The burial in urns,
by Sir Thomas Browne, an English scholar of the 17th century with a prose as majestic as it is sublime as it is convoluted, which aroused the unconditional admiration of Borges and Bioy.
Before her I surrendered: I did not feel able to continue.
After a few months, I thought it was a pity that Spanish-language readers were left without knowing it and, with renewed enthusiasm, I resumed and finished the task.
Why did I care so much about the knowledge of those readers, who in no case were going to be numerous?
Neither do I know.
I simply judged that this wonder deserved to exist in my language, even if it was for the enjoyment and benefit of a few curious people.
Some translators do not make a living from translation —those who do, poor things, are forced to join bad, average and good jobs together, and finish them all at great speed.
The former possess a superfluous and disinterested sense of duty to their countrymen.
If we think of the first translation of
Don Quixote,
of the Dubliner Thomas Shelton and of 1612, only seven years after its publication in Spanish, what had to impel that man to embark on a Spanish novel, long and not easy, of a complete stranger?
I do not know, but it is possible to imagine that Shelton was so generous as not to want to deprive the other Irish or the English of the pleasure that he would have experienced during his reading in Spanish.
If the expression “working for the love of art” was ever appropriate, it is for the work of these translators.
After all, a writer harbors the hope, however remote, of selling a lot and succeeding.
Such glories never await the translator, and even today quite a few publishers allow themselves not to put his name on the cover, as if Ali Smith or Zadie Smith had not needed a contest.
And if we talk about emoluments,
it is to burst into tears.
How is a version of Dickens going to be paid the same as one of the umpteenth current American gossip?
And yet it happens.
There are publishers who have made gold thanks to the work of a translator, who was paid a meager fee per page and that was it, while the title in question sold hundreds of thousands of copies
in Spanish.
I don't know, yes: a daughter can also take care of her mother because of the love she professes for her, but that doesn't prevent her tremendous dedication from being rewarded, only so that she doesn't starve while she gives up earning a living with a job.
From that point of view, I cannot feel nostalgia for my years as a translator.
He has done much better with my novels.
I have enjoyed immense luck that has little to do with merit or talent.
And yet, even so… I remember how satisfied and thrilled I was to “rewrite” in my language a text better than any that I could produce, as was the case with my three translations mentioned.
Read, correct and reread each page and think (always subject to error, one is a poor judge of what one is doing): “Yes, yes, that is how Conrad, Sterne or Browne would have written it if they had expressed themselves in Spanish”.
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