Martin Boyd

In an article published in 1987, prominent literary translator Margaret Sayers Peden took issue with Hileman’s translation of Carlos Fuentes’ classic novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz, accusing him of “total, and incredibly insensitive, restructuring” of the source text, completely undermining Fuentes’s original intention (“Translating the Boom” 170). Indeed, Hileman does appear to show an almost cavalier disregard for the punctuation and paragraphing of the original text, eliminating points of ellipsis, periods and commas and inserting paragraph breaks and lexical connectors in an apparent effort to ‘regularize’ Fuentes’s deliberately irregular style. But there is another apparently systematic omission in Hileman’s translation that Sayers Peden does not identify. That she overlooks it is not surprising, because her analysis is exclusively concerned with aesthetic questions and the omission to which I refer has implications that are more ideological than poetological.

Throughout Fuentes’ novel, the fluid flow of the Spanish narrative is interrupted with the occasional, jarring appearance of English words or phrases. The first of these intrusions appears a few pages into the novel, when Artemio Cruz, on board a domestic flight from Hermosillo to Mexico City, looks up to see the illuminated English words “No smoking, Fasten Seat Belts” (La muerte… 16). The sudden appearance of English in the midst of the Spanish text acts as a red flag to the reader, who is thus alerted to the fact that Artemio’s position of privilege is the product of his complicity with a foreign intrusion into his country; air travel in Mexico, available only to the wealthy elite, is a luxury brought in by the gringos. In subsequent pages of La muerte…, the various trappings of the world of commercial luxury in which the Cruz family live are signalled with similar intrusions of English – as they play games of bridge (26), drive in their limousine (27), or confront a manager in an exclusive boutique who tells herself, “como decían los americanos the customer is always right” (26). And significantly, in a meeting with the US investors who seek to exploit Cruz’s status as a Mexican citizen to appropriate Mexican resources, another intrusion of English comes in Cruz’s frank self-description as a Mexican stooge for US imperialism: he is a front-man for the US investors (31). This network of foreign intrusions supports one of the framing narratives of the novel: the betrayal of the principles of the Mexican Revolution to US economic interests. Fuentes also alludes to the role of the gringos as the new colonizing power (successors to the Spanish Conquistadores) in a passage in the novel that plays with the vulgar Mexican Spanish verb chingar (generally translated in English with the vulgar equivalent “to f*ck”):

-Se chingaron al indio
-Nos chingaron los gachupines
-Me chingan los gringos
-Viva México, jijos de su rechingada: […] (La Muerte 179)

The stream of vulgarities acts as a kind of street-slang synopsis of Mexico’s history of victimization: the Indian was exploited, the Spaniards exploited us, the gringos are exploiting me. But in the translation, this is rendered as follows:

The Indians got f*cked, and the Spaniards f*cked us
I don’t like f*ckin’ gringos
Viva Mexico, you f*ckin’ f*cked up f*ckers […] (The Death 137)

The English translation breaks up the triad established in the original by combining the first two lines of the excerpt into a single line, and the use of the adverb form of the expletive in the second line (“f*ckin’”, which as an adverb in English loses its usual meaning to become merely an expression of disdain) destroys the pattern of exploitation altogether, and, even more significantly, inverts the role of the gringos, who are perpetrators of an assault in the Spanish original, but passive objects of contempt in the translation.

It would be rash to assert that this was a conscious strategy by the translator to silence the underlying anti-US sentiment in the original novel. After all, the problem of how to render the intrusion of English in a translation into English is not easy to resolve, and without information on the translation process (Hileman, like many translators of his generation and in keeping with US expectations of “translator invisibility”, did not write a translator’s preface for The Death of Artemio Cruz and appears to have published no articles elucidating his translation praxis), we cannot know whether Hileman simply overlooked the question of the English phrases altogether, or took a conscious decision not to address the issue, or perhaps even proposed a solution that was vetoed by the publisher.

What we do know is that the decision, whether conscious or not, effectively silences one of the narratives framing the novel. In this respect, it is significant to note that responses in the English-speaking world to The Death of Artemio Cruz rarely take up a central theme discussed in critical analyses of La muerte de Artemio Cruz in Mexico: the protagonist’s betrayal of his nation by “accepting and facilitating a new foreign colonization: that of US imperialism” 29, my translation. Instead, responses by US critics to The Death of Artemio Cruz have tended to focus on the novel’s “depiction of the political corruption of a revolutionary ‘caudillo’” (Rostagno 121), while eliding the question of US involvement in facilitating that corruption. In the original New York Times review of the novel, published in May 1964, Mildred Adams suggested that the political message of the novel was that the promises of the 1911 Revolution have been “betrayed by those who made them”, with Artemio Cruz standing as a “hero-villain” archetype of the “hard-fisted exploiter”, but Cruz’s status as a stooge for US exploitation is absent from her quite detailed analysis. Even literary scholar Harold Bloom suggests that the novel essentially “laments Mexico’s self-betrayal” (2), implying that the corruption and exploitation depicted in the text is an entirely domestic affair, and synopses of the novel in US encyclopaedic publications generally describe it as a critique of the failure of the Mexican Revolution, with no reference to its depiction of the role of US influence in that failure (see, for example, Magill 730; Melville Logan et al 517).

In 1991, a re-translation of The Death of Artemio Cruz by Alfred MacAdam was published by the Noonday Press, perhaps in response to the criticisms of “insensitive restructuring” of Hileman’s translation. Unfortunately, in this new translation the question of the intrusion of English phrases remains unaddressed, and although the translation of the “chingar” passage quoted above is slightly stronger (“the gringos give me a f*cking headache”, 136), it still fails to convey the suggestion of Mexico’s victimization by the gringos as conveyed in the source text. Thus, six decades after his death, Artemio Cruz’s English voice continues to keep mum on a point that he seems so insistent upon in his native Spanish.