Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Alfaguara
Lima, 2010 (English translation scheduled for publication in 2012)

Review by Ángel Fernández (Gélico)

The adventure narrated in El sueño del celta (The Dream of the Celt) begins in the Congo in 1903 and ends in a jail in London one morning in 1916. It recounts the life’s journey of a legendary individual: the Irishman Roger Casement. Hero and villain, traitor and liberator, moral and immoral, this multifaceted figure was extinguished and reborn after his death. He was one of the first Europeans to denounce the horrors of colonialism. Out of his journeys to the Belgian Congo and the South American Amazon came two memorable chronicles that shocked the society of his time.

Unlike other authors who plagiarize themselves again and again, Vargas Llosa seems to seek out new horizons, both thematic and stylistic. And his writing conveys such a strong desire to dig up and explore new stories that it would be easy to forget that this author is now 74 years old. Few young writers display the vitality of the veteran author of La ciudad y los perros (published in English as The Time of the Hero) and Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service).

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize victory in 2010 has inspired great expectations of his latest novel, which hit bookstores last year. His readers will not be disappointed; El sueño del celta brings together some of the writer’s greatest qualities, and also fits in well with some underlying motifs repeated throughout his body of work. As he did in La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981/1984), Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandra Mayta, 1984/1985) or La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000/2002), the novelist has drawn this story from well-documented historical facts. In this case, he traces the life’s journey of an extraordinary character: the Irishman Roger Casement (1864-1916), who carried out several important diplomatic missions for the British government before being drawn into the Irish secessionist project, which he attempted to promote with the help of the German army. He was arrested, sentenced to death by an English court and executed.

The eventful life of Casement, whose reports to the Foreign Office and diaries provided valuable information for the novel (even its title comes from one of his writings), can be divided into three basic stages: his journey to the Congo to oversee the Belgian administration in rubber extraction, a similar mission to the rubber groves of the Peruvian Putumayo (as the rubber exploitation was controlled by a British-based company), and finally, after he was released from his diplomatic obligations, his progressive assimilation of Irish nationalist theories, which soon aroused suspicion in the British intelligence service and thwarted his aims.

These three stages are reconstructed through successive flashbacks from the moment of narration, when Casement, now condemned to death, is locked away in an infested dungeon while he awaits news of the pardon requested from the political authorities. Avoiding flashy displays of technique, with a narrative pace that gives each event and detail the attention it warrants, the narrative immerses the reader in the cruel and horrifying measures adopted in the Congo by the Force Publique to use the indigenous people as manpower, subjected to absolute slavery, to ruthless treatment that includes plundering, forced recruitment, torture, mutilation and murder. His task of observing and taking note for his future reports of the exploitation of the natives, masked with the pretext of “opening the way for civilization through trade” (p. 51), makes Casement’s journey to the Congo a veritable descent into hell that inevitably recalls passages of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at certain moments.

The apparent impassivity of the narrator, whose narrative style is almost journalistic, cannot conceal the unbridled greed and savagery of the European occupiers, the brutality of the dominators over the dominated. Thus, Casement catches Lieutenant Francqui whipping a hand-bound boy: “The child must have lost all feeling some time ago. His back and legs were a bloody mass and Roger recalled one detail: beside the little naked body marched a column of ants” (p. 57). The narration does not describe the events in an emotional or emphatic way – hence its journalistic quality. What it does record is Casement’s violent outrage, because it is concerned with constructing a character – regardless of whether he actually existed, like many others who appear – and details his psychological evolution. It is at once a historical chronicle and a novel, as in all of Vargas Llosa’s best works.

El sueño del celta describes an existential adventure in which the darkness of the human soul appears in its purest and, thus, most tarnished state. One of Mario Vargas Llosa’s greatest novels.

Translated by Martin Boyd

The original Spanish version of this review originally appeared in Cañasanta. The English translation of Vargas Llosa’s novel is scheduled for publication this year.

I recently had a discussion with another translator about the use of the English word “alien”. Those of us who grew up subjected to the cinematic expression of Ridley Scott’s terrifying imagination would probably be surprised to know that most English dictionaries do not list “a creature from another planet” as the first definition of the word “alien”. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, gives the following as the first definition of the noun form: “a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living”. The extraterrestrial definition of the noun comes second. Three definitions are provided for the adjective form: (1) “belonging to a foreign country”, (2) “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and, finally, (3) “supposedly from another world”. In any case, whatever the recognized uses of the word “alien” may be, I would argue that for most English speakers it invariably conjures up images of frightening lizard creatures or terrorizing mutants, and that it is therefore no longer appropriate to use the term in reference to fellow human beings.

My colleague fervently disagreed with me, arguing that “alien” is a perfectly legitimate translation of the Spanish word “extranjero” (which would most commonly be translated as “foreigner”, and carries no secondary associations or negative connotations), at least in official contexts related to immigration. His argument was based chiefly on the fact that the term is still widely used by various US government departments, such as the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services or the Department of Homeland Security, to refer to non-US citizens. Underlying our difference of opinion on this question are two very different views of the role of the translator: if we accept that the word “alien” carries a negative connotation, aren’t we, as translators, taking an ideological position to perpetuate what probably reflects a lack of sensitivity to the subtleties of language at official levels, if not a conscious decision to associate foreigners with images of the “unfamiliar, disturbing and distasteful”? Should translators be expected to reinforce lexical choices that hint at intolerance of cultural difference, or do we, as intercultural brokers, have an ethical responsibility to reverse such intolerance?

It might be argued that I am reading too much into a rather minor question of word choice. Yet the words we choose can make a huge difference to the way a message is understood, and when those words are translated, the specific lexical choices made by the translator can have repercussions for intercultural relations. A case in point is an article written by US literary scholar Manuel Hernández-Gutiérrez on literary relations between Mexico and writers of Mexican descent in the United States(1). In this article, Hernández-Gutiérrez is particularly critical of the way the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has represented Mexican-Americans in his novels. A key example he offers of this representation is Fuentes’ only allusion to Mexicans in the US in his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, in which he refers to them as “wetbacks”. The term “wetback” is of course a disparaging reference to the crossing of the Rio Bravo made by some Mexicans to cross into the United States. However, Hernández-Gutiérrez’s criticism of Fuentes for this word choice elides the fact that it was not Fuentes, but his English translator Sam Hileman who chose the term. In the original novel, Fuentes uses the word “braceros”, a term derived from the Spanish word brazo (arm) that was commonly used to refer to hired labourers. By the 1960s (when Fuentes wrote the novel in question), the term had been adopted by the US government to refer to an official program to bring labourers from Mexico to cover labour shortages on US farms. According to the criterion of seeking a semantic equivalent in the target language, Hileman’s choice seems reasonable enough; both bracero and “wetback” refer to Mexican immigrants to the United States. However, while the first associates them with their vital role in supporting the US economy, the second associates them exclusively with the supposed transgression of crossing a border without the permission of those who enforce that border. Hernández-Gutiérrez has quite justifiably interpreted this word choice as a sign of a dismissive attitude towards Mexicans living in the United States. However, he is mistaken in attributing this attitude to Mexican intellectuals like Carlos Fuentes, because the choice was not his. This is a small but clear example of the role the translator can play in contributing to intercultural understanding (or, in this case, intercultural misunderstanding). Given the number of such choices that a translator must make in the translation of a novel, essay or even a political speech, the cumulative effect of translator choices on a text could potentially be dramatic, if not cataclysmic.

The mission of promoting intercultural understanding is complicated even more when the same word assumes different and sometimes opposing meanings in two different languages. One recurring dilemma that translators of Latin American texts often face is the question of what to do about “América”. The problems associated with translating this deceptively simple proper noun into English reflect an ideological chasm between Latin American and Anglo-American views of the world and our respective places in it. For Latin Americans, América is a continent stretching from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to North Pole. But in English, no such continent exists; the land mass denoted by América in Spanish is two continents – North America and South America – and the name America on its own is invariably used to refer to only one nation occupying a relatively small portion of that land mass. We take these denotations for granted, overlooking their inherent absurdity; how is it that a place called “America” is actually a part of a larger region called “North America”, rather than the other way round? Many Latin Americans have taken offence to what they view as an appropriation of the name of their continent, reading into it the suggestion that their region of “América“, as Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano put it, is viewed as a “sub-America, a second class America, of nebulous identification”(2). Such a suggestion has probably never even occurred to most English speakers, as since grade school we have been trained to ignore the illogic implicit in the assertion our language seems to make that America and Latin America are two different places. Translators need to decide how they will cross this ontological divide every time they confront this simple word which in Spanish boldly asserts that all of us living here in “the Americas” actually share a single space.

The point I am groping towards here has already been summed up extremely well by Mona Baker, one of the most prolific authors in the field of translation studies. According to Baker, translators need to “acknowledge the fact that they participate in very decisive ways in promoting and circulating narratives and discourses of various types”(3). There is, then, no such thing as a “neutral translation”, as the choices we make as translators reflect our ideological positions, whether conscious or unconscious.

My own ideological position in relation to translation is based on a belief that it has the potential to dissolve borders. Translations can open us up to different ways of looking at the world, and enrich our understanding of what it means to be human. If, however, we choose to view such differences as “alien”, the borders we have built around us will be as impenetrable as the walls of a fortress… or a prison.

Notes
1 Manuel de Jesús Hernández-Gutiérrez, “Mexican and Mexican American Literary Relations” in Mexican Literature: A History, Univ. Of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 385-437.
2 Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Mexico, p. 16.
3 Mona Baker, “Narratives in and of Translation”, SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 1(1): 2005, p. 4.

Martha Bátiz

My husband and I arrived in Toronto in June 2003, with our twin daughters (who were two and a half years old at the time), two dogs (a couple of adorable pugs) and one cat (a stray, picked up in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico City), after travelling in our minivan from San Antonio, Texas, where we had been living before. The journey north took us one week, but it was an enjoyable road trip as we were able to visit beautiful plantations in Tennessee and even Graceland along the way. We didn’t know anybody in Toronto, and we didn’t have work here. Our Hispanic friends in the United States and our family in Mexico called us irresponsible. How could we abandon everything we had and head off into uncertainty, with two daughters (and pets) in tow, as if it were all just a game? And in a sense it was: a kind of Russian roulette where we bet our whole lives that we’d come out unscathed; and, luckily, so far we have. More or less.

The more time I spend outside my country, the more convinced I become that immigrating is a trauma. You have to adapt to a different language, a different climate, different attitudes, different food, different ways and customs. You must leave behind everything you know and love, and start out on a road towards a tomorrow that never comes, because the today of every immigrant is necessarily infused with yesterday. My husband took a job that paid a lot less than what he’d been earning in San Antonio. I started giving night classes in Spanish, but the pay was so meagre that my first cheque made me cry; so many hours of work had translated into a figure that didn’t reflect the effort made or the hope invested.

Winter came, and with it the shock of snow as a constant feature of daily life; I then understood that being an immigrant means learning to walk like someone who has just been fitted with a prosthetic leg. That first year I also understood, as never before, the power and magic of Vivaldi’s music in his Four Seasons: the rebirth of life in spring, the revitalizing intensity of the summer sun, the caress of the fall colours and the cool October wind, the curse of the return of the freeze, the torpid stillness brought on by the interminable whiteness (I soon came to understand the madness suffered by Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining); and amid all this, the incredible and inexplicable energy to go out every day and get on with life as if it didn’t hurt to breathe the biting air. In Mexico, people sometimes don’t go out until it stops raining, or until the rain lets up a little. In Canada, even in a blizzard you have to get to work, and everybody complains about it, but they go. To join the battalion of heavily clad soldiers who brave the elements every morning requires a determination that is far from common. Those of us who have come to Canada from warmer climes should feel proud of our endurance. We are, in essence, palm trees that have managed to survive and bear new fruit among maples and pines. That’s no small feat.

In the case of my family, I can’t complain: my husband found a better job and has moved his way up through huge effort and discipline. I completed a master’s degree and a Ph.D., and now have the privilege of teaching at York University and the University of Toronto. My creative writing students at U of T invariably dedicate their first writings to their experience as immigrants, and they are always surprised to hear each other’s stories. They are all so similar, they say. Some fled from dictatorial regimes, others from corruption and violence, others from unemployment, desperation or indifference, and all of them – all of us – end up feeling the same uneasiness, the anxiety of not belonging, the pain of distance, of families left behind where the heart also still remains. Some students complain of how tedious it is that we all write about the same thing, but I always tell them no, there’s nothing tedious about it, any more than love or pain are tedious. To leave behind the land where you were born and where you thought you would live forever is like stripping off your own skin. “My skin is my country” says the Canadian writer Kim Echlin, and I feel every letter of this phrase with every atom of my being. As with any open wound, the skin grows back again, but it will always leave a mark, a scar. I feel that scar twinge in the speech of my daughters, who speak with greater confidence in a language that is not the one I dream in; I feel it when I try to write in English and the words don’t flow with the rhythm of my blood; they get clogged, stopped up, and even my breath develops a stammer. Every word is hard work, like every step taken with a prosthetic leg; although it may seem almost natural, almost normal, it is only ever almost. Something there hurts, irritates and hinders, but also, ironically, facilitates existence. A contradiction like this can never be tedious.

When you immigrate, you change. My husband and I are not the same people who arrived here eight years ago in that little minivan. We have grown and learned a lot. We have learned, among other things, to be grateful for what Canada has given us – security, stability, a high standard of living; to love this new land and, in this way, we have made it ours and made ourselves a part of it. We have given it the most beautiful gift we have to offer: our three children. And we have been happy here, without any doubt. But deep inside, on days of sun, rain or snow, when the wind is like a furious wildcat scratching at the world, and even when no wind blows at all, I feel the pain for the distance, for absences and for all that I left behind and that nurtured me for nearly thirty years; it still hurts to have stripped off that skin. But that pain (like all pain) makes me (and all who feel it) stronger. It makes me alert and compels me to live this new life – which I have had the huge fortune of choosing – to the fullest.

Translated by Martin Boyd

Martha Bátiz is a published author and professor of Spanish literature. She currently lives in Toronto.

Nineteen men and ten women from four Canadian provinces have been nominated for this year’s awards. Award winners include two recipients of the Order of Canada, an internationally-recognized genomics researcher, an international human rights lawyer who worked for the United Nations in war-torn countries and speaks seven languages, an award-wining journalist, the organizer of the largest Hispanic event in Canada, and a world-renowned specialist in the philosophy of science who holds 15 honorary international degrees and has written close to 100 books and scientific publications.

The award winners were selected by past winners as well as journalists and executives from the CBC, the Toronto Star, the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance, the organization FOCAL and the Canadian Council for the Americas. Kelly Daize, OCRI’s Director of Business Development, ensured transparency of the nomination and judging process. Travel and insurance company Ingle Insurance, Copa Airlines, award-winning English school International Language School of Canada (ILAC), and Canada’s largest engineering firm SNC Lavalin are the sponsors.

Since its beginnings in 2007, the awards have recognized 40 Hispanics from six provinces representing 13 countries of origin. This year’s awards ceremony is being held in a cocktail reception format. “This is a chance to mingle, do business, and celebrate our accomplishments as Canada’s creative class in our capital,” said program director Mauricio Ospina of HispanicBusiness.ca. Ospina is the lead proponent of 10% Hispanic ownership of the Pan-American Village, which is being built for the athletes of 2015 Pan-American Games in Toronto.

According to a Statistics Canada study based on the 2006 census, Canada’s 740,061 Hispanics are five years younger and more likely to be university educated than other Canadians. Most Hispanics live in the Greater Toronto Area and over 70 percent have arrived in the last twenty five years. A recent study conducted by the organization FOCAL puts Spanish as the third most commonly spoken language in Canada.

For more information, contact: Mauricio Ospina
Mauricio.Ospina@HispanicBusiness.ca

With so many books being written and published in English, you might ask, why should we care for stories that have originally seen the light in a different language? Consider, however, that literature is food for the soul. The 100-mile-diet may be attractive to environmentalists, and people can certainly live on what is produced locally, but there’d be so much that we would be missing if we limited ourselves only to those texts readily available to us.

Literature nourishes our curiosity and our spirit by opening new and unexpected experiences to our eyes, minds, and hearts and exposing our senses to different textures, sounds, and odours. For writing a book is similar to baking a long-secret family recipe. In crafting each page, the author patiently spices words, kneads sentences, and ages feelings and sensations so they will have a firm and distinct body, all with the intention of creating something magical that will permeate the readers’ memories and hearts. The author is saying to the reader: “Here, take a slice of my world. See what it tastes like.” It’s an intellectual communion – good literature, at least, has always had that sacred aura for me.

So consider the literary translator as sous-chef, but one tasked with many responsibilities. He or she cannot rely on the comfort of the bureaucratic anonymity other kinds of translation might offer – his or her name will be permanently associated with the literary world. He or she has the power to increase a book’s readership. Not many Canadians read Slovenian, for example, but a book translated from that language into English can potentially reach thousands who might not otherwise have known it existed. But the best – and most challenging – part of the job is the active participation it demands in the creative process.

The translator is cooking the same recipe for a different crowd, with one caveat: only the use of local ingredients is allowed. Working within the confines of the words that are available in his or her language to create the same effect as the original text is simultaneously the translator’s constraint and liberation. Literary translators become chefs themselves as they try to recreate the moods and the flavours that inhabit the stories they are working with. The music, the rhythm, the drama and the fun must all still be there, alive on the page; the blood that runs through the veins of the characters must flow as naturally as before, but in a new language. The job demands not just passing one word from one language to another, but the deconstruction and reconstruction of entire worlds for new people to taste and enjoy.

In most large Canadian cities we are lucky to find excellent cuisine from all over the planet. It is not only fitting, but utterly important, that we also find international short stories and novels as well, prepared in English, ready for us to enjoy. As humans, we can find a deep connection to one another when sharing nourishment, be it for the body or for the soul. The huge advantage of literature over food is that it can be taken anywhere, shared with anyone at any given time, and it doesn’t have a best-before date.

Martha Bátiz is a Mexican writer and professor of Hispanic literature. She currently lives in Toronto. This article was originally published in the print journal Exile :

The practice of translation as a facilitator of reciprocal understanding and appreciation, however, represents only one aspect of the Festival. Other events include round-table discussions in which the creative works of the Festival guest writers will be studied. The literary section of the Festival also offers to the public a great variety of readings of original works, as well as book launches, musical concerts, stage performances, and so much more.

For more information, visit the festival website here.

In 2005, my husband and I took the decision to move from Mexico City to Toronto, Canada. The motivation behind our move was both professional and personal, as my husband had lived a part of his childhood in Toronto, and I had previously had the opportunity to perform in one of Toronto’s major festivals. It was not an easy decision to make, but I personally felt a strong impulse to make a big change. And indeed, it was a big change; much bigger than we had expected.

We arrived in Toronto in the summer of 2006 with the idea of staying here for at least a few years. During the first few months after our arrival, we suffered severely from culture shock. Everything was different. The supermarkets were huge, but they seemed empty, as they didn’t have anything that we used to eat in Mexico. Where were the nopals, the panela cheese, the corn tortillas? The traffic laws were a total mystery: we had to stop the car at every corner to carefully read the signs listing the hours and dates when left turns were not permitted. Even walking around the city required a whole new range of resources. I remember very well the first time I accepted an invitation to dinner at the house of a Canadian friend, and she gave me directions to get to her house. “When you come out of the subway,” she said, “walk two blocks north and then turn east. The house is right there, on the southeast corner.” “What?” I wondered. “To the north, then east, the southeast corner?” In Mexico, they would tell you something like, “go straight ahead until the corner where the willow tree is, and then turn right towards the house with the yellow roof.” Nobody uses the cardinal points to give directions. It seemed that in Canada to find anything you need to take a compass with you.

Shortly after our arrival, my husband established his own company and I began connecting with the Canadian music world. Within a few months I started playing with the Ontario Philharmonic, the orchestra that I am still playing with now. Although everything was going well, my resistance to adapt to Toronto lay under the surface. I think they every immigrant must experience something like this, on different levels, as it takes its time to really open up to a new place. Now, looking back on that time, I see it as the seed of a great blossoming both personally and professionally.

Another important occurrence related to that blossoming was my meeting Barbar Croall, a Canadian composer, pianist and flautist. During our first fall in Toronto I had the opportunity to attend a concert where I heard her work Noodin for two transverse flutes. I remember that from the first to the last sound I was captivated by the beauty of the work and its powerful invocation of Canada’s winter wind.

A few months later, I had the opportunity to meet Barbara personally. After that meeting, we began working together on artistic projects, which has led us to what today is PULS, our musical and interdisciplinary ensemble, with which we have had the opportunity to perform at the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, among other places. Over the course of our musical collaboration we have incorporated aspects of Mexican and Canadian indigenous cultures. Barbara is Ojibwe, and her connection with her culture is very profound and has a strong impact on her artistic creations. Her expression of her culture through her art has led me to reflect deeply on my own roots since I arrived in Canada, so that now both our work as a duo and my own work is influenced by Aztec culture. In this sense, I see out work as a meeting point between two American cultures, which evoke in us the need to express music from the perspective of an ancestral world where sound is something sacred.

Our creative work as a group together with the collaboration of Fides Krucker, an exceptional singer and voice instructor, and Alejandro Ronceria, Colombian director and choreographer, has led to the creation of Fire, a piece that forms part of our stage concert Four Visions. This piece clearly reveals the interconnection of the two indigenous cultures brought to the stage in a musical-dramatic performance. It is a kind of work that requires a lot of honesty on our part and humility in the face of artistic creation. Only in this way can the true essence of the work be made to emanate in all its fullness.

Without a doubt, my experience in Canada as an artist has led to artistic collaborations and creations very different to what I was previously familiar with as a classical violinist. They have been experiences that have led me to view and experience music from a broader, richer perspective. This has been due not oly to my musical experience but also to the fact of living in a country with different customs and cultures. One of the most enriching aspects of the experience of living here has been the opportunity to see Mexico “from the outside”, to reflect on my culture from another point of view. In this way, I have come to better appreciate the wonders of my culture, and also to recognize its limitations.

I believe that living in an environment different from your native country is something that can be extremely enriching; it’s just a question of allowing it to be so, and being open to new life experiences.

Paulina Derbez is a Mexican violinist and composer currently based in Toronto. For more information, visit her website: www.paulinaderbez.com