Ignorant of the experience to come, I opened the violet-jacketed copy of Julio Cortázar’s short story collection, and found myself on the other side of the Looking Glass in one minute flat. Where to begin on this dazzling book? Perhaps with Paul Blackburn’s translation into splendid, flexible English, whose metaphors carry the savage accuracy of a punch in the stomach.
The reviewer for The Nation described Blackburn’s reliance on current English usage, but also pointed to a foreignizing tendency in the lexicon, which, the reviewer suggested, would foster innovations in English-language prose:
{268} The translation, by Paul Blackburn, is properly colloquial, elegant and eloquent, and is flavored with just enough touches of Spanish and French phrases to spice the narrative. At this point in the development of a freer form for prose writing, Cortázar is indispensable.
Yet perhaps this passage should read “Blackburn’s translation of Cortázar is indispensable” to innovative prose. In the regime of transparent discourse, where fluency routinely makes the translator invisible, even reviewers who praise the translator by name are likely to reduce the translation to the foreign author. Blackburn’s translation, although fluent, is inevitably free at points, departing from “Cortázar,” inscribing the Spanish texts with different linguistic and cultural values, enabling them to produce effects that work only in English. A closer look at Blackburn’s discursive moves will reveal the effectiveness of his Cortázar translations.
“Continuity of Parks” (“Continuidad de los Parques”) is a brief but characteristic text from End of the Game that seamlessly shifts between two realistic narratives, finally provoking a metaphysical uncertainty about which is the text, which reality. A businessman sitting in an armchair at his estate reads a novel about an unfaithful wife whose lover goes to kill her husband; when the crime is about to be performed, the victim is revealed as the businessman sitting in the armchair at the opening. At the climactic end, the “real” man reading a novel suddenly becomes a character in that novel, just as the characters suddenly become “real” to end the man’s life. Cortázar involves the Spanish-language reader in this conundrum by, first, constructing the businessman as the narrative point of view and then, without warning, abruptly shifting to the lovers. The rapid conclusion is a bit jolting, not only because the text ends just before the murder occurs, but because the reader was earlier positioned in the victim’s point of view, assuming it to be reality.
Blackburn’s fluent translation enables this positioning most obviously by using consistent pronouns. The subject of every sentence at the opening is “he,” maintaining the realist distinction between the man’s reality and the fictiveness of the novel he is reading:
He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it down because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again {269} on his way back to the estate by train; he had permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquillity of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters.
Blackburn’s translation has all the hallmarks of fluency—linear syntax, univocal meaning, current usage—easily setting up the “he” as the position from which the narrative is intelligible, the description true, the setting real. The translation is also quite close to the Spanish text, except for one telling deviation: the parenthetical remark in Blackburn’s last sentence revises the Spanish. Cortázar’s text reads, “de espaldas a la puerta que lo hubiera molestado como una irritante posibilidad de intrusiones” (in a close version, “with his back to the door which annoyed him like an irritating possibility of intrusions”). Blackburn’s revision adds the aside, “had he thought of it,” which suddenly shifts to a new discursive level, a different narrative point of view, at once omniscient and authorial, identifying the “he” as a character in Cortázar’s text and briefly undermining the realist illusion established in the previous sentences. Blackburn’s fluent translation possesses considerable stylistic refinement, present even in this subtle revision, an addition to the Spanish that is very much in tune with Cortázar’s narrative technique.
Blackburn’s choices show him strengthening the realist illusion when the narrative suddenly shifts to the description of the novel, positioning the reader in the lovers, erasing the line between fiction and reality. But then—following the Spanish text closely—he momentarily redraws that line by using literary terms to describe the novel (“dialogue/diálogo,” “pages/páginas”) and by making a tacit reference to the reading businessman (“one felt / se sentía”):
The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not {270} come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity.
On the one hand, Blackburn increases the verisimilitude of the translation by adding more precise detail, like the phrase “through the forest,” which is absent from the Spanish text (in another passage, he similarly adds the phrase “leading in the opposite direction” to “On the path” (ibid.:65)). On the other hand, Blackburn exaggerates the melodramatic aspects of the scene: he uses “lustful, panting” to render one Spanish word, anhelante (“craving,” “yearning,” “panting”), and chooses “raced” for corría (instead of the flatter “ran”). Two other additions to the Spanish text produce the same exaggerated effect: “unforeseen,” in the sentence, “Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes” / “Nada había sido olvidado: cortadas, azares, posibles errores” (Cortázar 1967:65; and 1964:10)); and “flying,” in the sentence, “he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying” / “él se volvió un instante para verla correr con pelo suelto” (Cortázar 1967:66; and 1964:10). Blackburn’s melodramatic lexicon reinforces the realist illusion, making the narrative more suspenseful, suturing the reader more tightly in the lovers’ position; yet it also classes the narrative in a popular fictional genre, the steamy romance, encouraging the reader to interrogate the realist illusionism that dominates English-language fiction—most obviously in bestselling novels. Cortázar’s text challenges individualistic cultural forms like realism by suggesting that human subjectivity is not self-originating or self-determining, but constructed in narrative, including popular genres. This and the fact that it is a businessman who turns out to be living a fiction dovetail with the critique of bourgeois values, economic and cultural, that recurs in Blackburn’s other writing.