Roberto Bolaño, in a 2002 interview, tells us that
. . . literature is not made from words alone. Borges says that there are untranslatable writers. I think he uses Quevedo as an example. We could add García Lorca and others. Notwithstanding that, a work like Don Quijote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it–bad translation, incomplete and ruined–any version of Quijote would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature.
The interview, conducted by Carmen Boullosa, was originally published in Bomb. It’s now collected along with three other interviews, all meticulously annotated (there’s also a fabulous introductory essay by Marcela Valdes) in a collection called Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview, new from Melville House. While you’re browsing Melville House, I highly, highly recommend Tom McCartan’s column “What Bolaño Read,” which will be ongoing through next week. Great stuff. Biblioklept will run a proper review of The Last Interview later this week (no big surprise for regular ‘klept readers: I love it. Get it. Read it. Give it to the Bolaño fanatic in your life), but in the meantime, back to the quote.
I’ve written so much about Bolaño over the past year yet I’ve never really reflected on his English translators, Chris Andrews (the shorter works) and Natasha Wimmer (the long books), probably because I wouldn’t know how to begin. Reading interviews with Andrews and Wimmer (links above) is enlightening. Andrews attests that he tries to avoid “a translation that is unduly distracting,” and remarks on Bolaño’s epic syntax. Wimmer says she simply tried “to follow Bolaño’s lead,” but admits to her reviewer that she might have missed some puns (“Missing things like that is the translator’s great dread, but it’s probably inevitable occasionally, especially with Bolaño”). In both of the interviews, Bolaño’s translators come off as critical readers whose love of their source material is clearly at the forefront of their project. I have to believe–and have to is the operative term here–that their translations are faithful to Bolaño’s text (and spirit), that they are not, to use the man’s term, a “shit storm” on his oeuvre. But, given Bolaño’s own definition of “literature,” I’d also aver that his masterpiece 2666 could weather any shit storm (hell, the thing was, I suppose, technically incomplete at his death). In any case, I find Bolaño point reassuring, not just in light of his own work, but also within the context of a greater canon of world literature. His suggestion that real literature speaks beyond “words alone,” that storytelling is more than mere verbal tricks and schemes, should be an affirmation to anyone who’s ever been unsure that he’s properly “got” Kafka or Haruki Murakami or Dostoevsky or whomever. And I like that idea quite a bit.
Biblioklept 