Martin Boyd

Juan Rulfo, the legendary Mexican author whose English translators have been unable to do him justice.

In Part 3 of my series of articles on translating Latin America, I explored the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary boom that began in the 1960s. This “boom” has been closely associated with the genre of “magical realism”, characterized in the English-speaking world as the Latin American literary mode par excellence. According to Sylvia Molloy, althoug it is not so much a Latin American invention as a “transculturation” of French symbolism, magical realism was singled out by US readers to signify, “as surely as Carmen Miranda’s fruity cornucopias, ‘Latin America’”, thereby becoming a “regional, ethnicized commodity”, a form of “essentialized primitivism” (374) that reinforces preexisting stereotypes of Latin America as a magical territory, beyond the reaches of civilization, where the laws of science and reason do not apply. Molloy suggests that “[m]agic realism is refulgent, amusing, and kitschy,” but the reality it describes “doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, here [in the United States]” (375). Unfortunately, the author adds, the fact that only a small number of Latin American authors comfortably fit the magical realist mould has condemned much Latin American literature to the “ever-expanding purgatory of the untranslatable” (375)… unless the work can be “rewritten” to fit into the genre, as seems to be the case of Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, a novel which is surely one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, but whose two English translations have failed to convey the simultaneously Gothic and realist tone of the original.

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Martin Boyd

“Giants” (Gary Willis, 1992)

In 1992, a friend gave me a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was the first work of Hispanic literature I ever read, and it opened me up to a world that appeared more vital and powerful than anything I had ever encountered before. At the time, I was sharing a house in London with an artist who was working on a series of paintings featuring Don Quixote, and thus the tragicomic exploits of Spain’s mythical knight errant were combined in my imagination with the singular history of Macondo, both narratives inviting me into the vast, labyrinthine dominions of the Spanish-speaking world.

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Martin Boyd

The idea that a translation should be a faithful representation of the source text is a widely accepted truism that few would think to question. It is a concept that has guided most writing about translation for the past two thousand years, as debates in translation studies have tended to revolve around questions of the best methods for achieving “faithful” representation, whether it be St. Jerome’s idea of “sense for sense” translation, or Schleiermacher’s recommendation of a “foreignizing” technique; only in a few rare cases has the debate turned to whether such “faithful” representation is even possible… or desirable.

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