The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader

“The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” (1931) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books, 1999)


I am not sure which is the most erudite writer: Borges the storyteller, Borges the poet, or Borges the critic. Perhaps the question is moot when it comes to the literary tradition which Borges helped build: the intellectual tradition, a poetic and metaphysical-philosophical bent, the striving for excellence at every imaginative turn of the pen. With Selected Non-Fictions, with its doors and windows opened wide to inquiring minds, Borges is a critical tradition unto himself. The fount of his critical production derives from all the resources available to a librarian. Borges the reader is the most erudite writer.

The superstition in the essay “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” referred to the “superstition about style”. This was a general tendency of readers to look for or characterize a writer’s style (mannerisms) in order to appreciate a literary text. Borges rejected this form of readerly “affectation.” This led him to state that "strictly speaking, there are no more readers left". There are only potential literary critics. He meant this in a most ironical sense.

For our librarian, greatness in a work could exist beyond stylistic flourishes. There could even be an “absence of style” if it comes to that. Don Quixote was sloppy in parts, but it was still great, owing perhaps to its idiosyncratic absence of style. Borges did not consider Cervantes to be a stylist (“in the current acoustical or decorative sense of the word”). Don Q was great not because of its style but because of its other novelistic attributes. A perfect page, our librarian critic suggested, was an “everlasting fallacy” (For this phrase, our critic gave a nudge to Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, but I did not get the reference.). A perfect page to Borges was not immutable:

On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Góngora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in Spanish, acclaimed it for eternity. The German, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of the Quixote is more alive than the stylist’s anxious verbal artifices.

This passage I quote in full because I just realized Roberto Bolaño plagiarized (borrowed/paraphrased) the idea in an interview where he said: A work like Don Quixote 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 Quixote would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature.

Are they (our librarian and his fanboy) saying that one test of a masterpiece is its resistance to translation? Are Helen Lowe-Porter’s supposedly unfaithful translations of Thomas Mann tomes not a hindrance to the perception of the latter as a great novelist?

* * *

The taste of Borges is not always beyond reproach. He does have his personal preferences, but his magisterial coverage of traditions and his wide reading (the reading of a reader’s reader) makes one pay attention.

He is allergic to all-knowing readers. Readers who get ecstatic about style. The superstitious etiquette of readers is to be drawn to the absolute and superlative. This is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever encountered. This is such a weird novel, such a very strange novel. Such a unique reading experience. The best book of the summer.

Ah, to needlessly elevate a book:

Overstating something is as inept as not saying it at all … [R]eaders sense the impoverishment caused by careless generalizations and amplifications.

I admit I am sometimes guilty of this superstition, this affectation for style, this appeal to a definitive assessment and judgement, this Blurbing Syndrome. One has to recognize the beauty of straightforward and imperfect narratives.

The exhortation of our librarian is simple. Book bloggers have to be, first and foremost, readers. Otherwise they become literary critics.


Posted for Stu and Richard's Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months 2018.

Monsignor Quixote (Graham Greene)

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene (Penguin Books, 2008)



Father Quixote was peacefully tending to his parishioners at El Toboso when he received a letter from his bishop. The Holy See was promoting him into a monsignor, and all because he was endorsed by a bishop (a different one) whom he once aided in a time of need. This was a surprise, all the more for the bishop who considered the priest's ways to be bent and misguided. He and the bishop did not always see eye to eye, but the Holy See had the final say and that's that.

With his promotion, the now-Monsignor Quixote found himself vacillating about his new ministry. A new parish priest was sent to replace him and Father (he was still not used to be called Monsignor) Quixote took the opportunity to ask for some time off, a holiday where he could recover his wits and take things in stock. It's not everyday one gets to be elevated to a position one was not asking for. The bishop approved the request, obviously still reeling from the turn of events. How did Father Quixote maneuvered his way into this? (Animosity and hatred among men of cloth weren't really that uncommon.)

It was hard for Father Quixote to be leaving El Toboso after all these years. But he had his marching orders. Leaving with him on his holiday was Mayor Enrique Zancas, also known as Sancho, an open communist and politician defeated in the recent election in the village. The two of them were to ride in Father Quixote's old but beloved Seat 600, named Rocinante. They were bringing a lot of good old Manchegan wine.

The journey of our two characters was a sally into the map and territory of spiritual and religious life. The romp across the Spanish landscapes framed Father Quixote and Mayor Sancho's constant philosophical exchanges, their endless debates between the merits and virtues of Catholic life and Marxism. The parallelism with Father Quixote's "ancestor" was with the way theology was treated as a form of chivalry. In the same way the ancestor steeped himself in books of chivalry (and in the process may have lost his mind), the priest learned the doctrines and teachings governing his religion and blindly stuck to them.

For his part, the unbeliever and worldly Sancho always set off his communist ideals against the Catholic priest's belief. The interaction between the two was not always easy, but with banter and wine, the right mix of good chemistry, a close friendship developed between them. Their adventures "on the high roads of the world" consisted of set pieces that were always a riot of wit.

Mayor Sancho, who played the devil with gusto, was always a taunt to Father Quixote's religious beliefs. But one could also sense the devil's advocate in the character of the priest, who despaired: "How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?"

Considered Graham Greene's last religious book, Monsignor Quixote first came out in 1982. In it, the novelist must have given a synthesis of his belief in God and the ways fiction can dramatize it. Greene's was not a faithful adaptation, but boy was it so faithful. Like belief in the reality of fiction, belief in a supreme being was predicated on how much reality the Author could offer his readers. The Catholic novelist relied on clever dialogues and beautiful ironies to bring his point across.

   "[Don Quixote] was a fiction, my bishop says, in the mind of a writer...."
   "Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God."

Like Father Quixote's ancestor, the character of this novel insisted on the recognition of his existence in fact, perhaps in the same way the novelist insisted on the existence of God. The literary imagination as metaphor for the religious imagination. With the cast-iron conviction of his ancestor who vehemently denied the truth behind the "fake Quixote", Father Quixote's passionate insistence on his own free will and self-determination lay at the very root of his religious belief.

   "Why are you always saddling me with my ancestor?"
   "I was only comparing—"
   "You talk about him at every opportunity, you pretend that my saints' books are like his books of chivalry, you compare our little adventures with his. Those Guardia were Guardia, not windmills. I am Father Quixote, and not Don Quixote. I tell you, I exist. My adventures are my own adventures, not his. I go my way—my way—not his. I have free will. I am not tethered to an ancestor who has been dead these four hundred years."

The novel's climax was a cunning one. It showed Greene's position cemented via transubstantiation (in a manner of speaking) of fiction into fact and of doubt into belief. When it comes down to it, belief in something does not really require the existence of the thing one believes in. In the words of another priest in the novel, a Trappist monk: "I suppose Descartes brought me to the point where he brought himself—to faith. Fact or fiction—in the end you can't distinguish between them—you just have to choose."

Don Q, via Cervantes

RANK BADGE, MING DYNASTY, EARLY 15TH CENTURY CHINA EMBROIDERY

In which the blogger posts his final thoughts on the novel, with a nod to its real author.


The pleasures, the comedies, the verisimilitude of Don Quixote are bottomless, unrelenting, imaginative, that the reader, both the open and close ones, will be relishing its tricks and treats. A reader open to the unforgiving comedy will forgive the author for concocting all kinds of humor, from the slapstick to pitch black. The close reader, if by close we mean the closeness to the spirit of adventure, the willingness to be subjected to quixotic winks and, can I say, sanchic-panzic wit, in other words to be "in on the joke", will be rewarded with plenty of amusement. To be laughed about or lapped up. Or, being laughable, simply lopped off.

   '... If you do not believe me, Sancho, I beg you to do something that will correct your mistake and make you see that I am telling you the truth: mount your ass and stalk them [flocks of sheep], and you will soon see how, once they have gone a little way, they turn back into what they were at first and, ceasing to be sheep, become real men again, just as I described them to you. But do not go yet, because I have need of your assistance: come here and see how many of my teeth are missing, for it seems to me that there is not one left in my mouth.'
   Sancho came so close that his eyes were nearly inside his master's mouth ... [Part I, Chapter XVIII, Rutherford translation]

We are inside the mind of the author of the Quixote, who at this point is reading the translator's writing from the manuscript by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. What happens next inside the mouth of our knight errant, where Sancho's eyes peered as close as any close reader of a text, is so gross it could turn one's stomach upside down and spew all the hibernating contents. For that was precisely what happened.

The history sometimes displays humor through puns so sprightly they could make one jump up and down:

   'I didn't cut any capers in the blanket.' Sancho retorted. 'I cut them in the air, and more of them than I'd have chosen to.'
   'I suppose,' added Don Quixote, 'that every history that has ever been written has its ups and downs ...' [Part II, Chapter III]

Somehow the comedy also paints a most disturbing picture of the times. Spain in the time of Cervantes being a time of inquisitive struggles.

   ... Sancho stood up and took himself a good way off, and as he went to lean against another tree he felt something touching his head; he raised his hands and they came into contact with two feet in their shoes and stockings. He shuddered with fear and went to another tree, and the same thing happened there. He screamed to Don Quixote for help. Don Quixote came and when he asked Sancho what had happened and what he was frightened of, Sancho replied that all those trees were full of human feet and legs. Don Quixote felt them, and immediately realized what the cause might be, and said:
   'There's no need to be afraid, these legs and feet that you can feel and cannot see must belong to outlaws and bandits who have been hanged from these trees; in these parts the authorities hang them twenty or thirty at a time when they catch them, from which I deduce that we must be near Barcelona.'
   And he was quite right, too. As they were leaving, they raised their eyes and saw the fruit that was hanging from those trees: bandits' corpses. [Part II, Chapter LX]

There's no need to be afraid. Yeah, right. Can anything be more surreal than some booted pairs of feet dangling lifeless from trees. Indeed, it could be an influence of a scene happening in the night. A powerful, disconcerting image in any context that it will give one pause (there's a striking passage, for example, in Laforet's Nada referring to a hanged man on a tree, quoted in Caravana de recuerdos.) What a strange and black sense of humor the historian must have had to include this unsolicited lesson on the death penalty. Poor Sancho. The comedy is not funny at all when you just plain jump in fright and it's your heart that goes up and down.
 
The translated "true history" was so grounded in the historical and the real that it contained some details that speak of events, conflicts and religious policies in the 16th/17th century. There was also, for example, the prejudice against races, particularly the Morisco people (converts from Muslim) who were forcibly driven out of Spain because of their race.

There was no respite to humor in the novel. Comedy was so well integrated into the history's base and superstructure that it functioned as a conduit for its telling. Humor and history closely accompanied each other.

In addition to poking fun of knightly misadventures and verisimilar historical events, the true history floated certain questions of authorship, translation, plagiarism, and the self-determination of characters. Humor also brought these questions to their feet.

Don Quixote, it turned out, had such a poor regard of translation that he inadvertently belittled his own true history, which was in the first place a purported text translated from the Arabic. In fact, the Quixote is not so much an early instance of metafiction as the progenitor of what could be termed as a meta-translation. That is, a written text that (i) is being put forward as a translation and (ii) is well-aware of the fact.

Here is our knight on the subject of translation (a passage used as epigraph in translator John Rutherford's introduction to the book):

And yet it seems to me that translating from one language into another, except from those queens of languages, Greek and Latin, is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, when, although one can make out the figures, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and one cannot appreciate the smooth finish of the right side; and translating from easy languages is no indication of talent or literary ability, any more than transcribing or copying a document on to another piece of paper is. [Part II, Chapter LXII]

Arabic being one of these "easy languages" instantly made the present written history of our knight already suspect, presumably because it has hidden the smooth finish of the fabric. (Of course, the English translation stitched from the Spanish doubly concealed the lining. So we didn't really stand a chance.) For although Don Quixote extols the virtues of his historian for his supposed accuracy in laying down his adventures, his idea of the inadequacy of translation to deliver the nuances of the whole pattern of the tapestry, humbled the entire enterprise of the paid translator. This seeming inconsistency was yet another manifestation of the pragmatic attitude of the storyteller toward his own tale that harks back to the very first sentences of the novel, where the narrator confessed that the idea for the book (likened to a "son") was conceived while he was in prison.

Idle reader: I don't have to swear any oaths to persuade you that I should like this book, since it is the son of my brain, to be the most beautiful, elegant and intelligent book imaginable. But I couldn't go against the order of nature, according to which like gives birth to like. And to what can my barren and ill-cultivated mind give birth except the history of a dry, shrivelled child, whimsical and full of extravagant fancies that nobody has ever imagined – a child born, after all, in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation? [Prologue]

Ah, truth in storytelling is never as slippery as when one tries to efface the traces of active authorship by electing to be humble before one's own creation. How could something living and vital be willed to be born if the mind that constructed it was, from the start, dry and barren, hence infertile?

One last note. Going back to the idea of translation as the reverse side of the tapestry, this novel metaphor yet proved original thinking on the part of the speaker.

Or not.

It may be possible that this fabric thing was fabricated from another source, in the same way that several lyrics and verses in the novel were filched from other writers and appropriated by Don Quixote as his own. A similar idea on translation was alluded to in The Book of Tea (1906) by Kakuzo Okakura:

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound?

The idea of translation as the reverse of tapestry [PDF] was attributed to an author of the Ming dynasty, whose reign at least overlapped with the lifetime of Cervantes. Who was this Ming author and what exactly did he say, in what book or scroll? Whether the brocade/tapestry idea was independently formulated by Cervantes or whether he absorbed it from the Ming directly or indirectly, is still an open question. In the meantime, those threads were indeed obscuring the design, preventing us from admiring the full frontal beauty of the original.

But why does a viewer choose to look from behind? One can always turn the carpet around and look for the embroidery. An imaginative translation of a meta-translation, from any language, king or queen or subject, has the capacity to reveal the intricate colors by approximating the loops the threads make in the original, using different kinds of fibers. If it is any good, it could even weave another textile of its own, one whose subtlety and smoothness can approach the original patterning. The workmanship preserved regardless of how the translator has woven the materials or operated the loom.


P.S.
Do not believe the blogger when he said this will be his final post on the subject. He has mooched another adaptation that promises to explore some catholic ideas about the nature of truth, or that will probably tackle faithfulness to the source text, if not the author's faith to his brainchild. "Don Q, via Greene" goes like this:

[T]he author continues to explore moral and theological dilemmas through psychologically astute character studies and exciting drama on an international stage. The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village ...

Doesn't that sound the least bit heretical?



(Image source: Rank badge [China] (1988.154.1) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Don Q, via Syjuco

Authorship and the self-determination of characters


At the start of Miguel Syjuco's puzzle novel Ilustrado, a character named Miguel Syjuco began investigating the mysterious death of his mentor, the writer Crispin Salvador. There's no shortage of possible motives to his death. Salvador blazed through the Philippine literary scene with a series of books that divided the critics and earned him a lot of enemies. The character Syjuco reflected on Salvador's career as he searched for papers left behind by the deceased in his apartment:

To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea.

Dingdong Changco Jr, Nuredin Bansamoro, and Reverend Martin are not-so-veiled references to actual personalities in Philippine politics and church affairs. If they were not Danding Cojuangco, Nur Misuari, and Bro. Mike Velarde, then they were at least possible stand-ins or stereotypes of these recognizable personalities who continue to persist in Philippine society: the oligarch and Marcos crony, the Muslim separatist leader, and the fanatical preacher.

Two names are not readily identifiable: Dulcinea and Avellaneda. Who are they in Salvador's life? Avellanada is mentioned earlier on as Salvador's fiercest critic. And we learned later that Dulcinea's relation to Salvador is quite significant after all.

Syjuco's "quixotic" quest to find out the truth about Salvador's death brought him to unexpected places and enabled him to confront some of these characters. "Quixotic," along with "messianic," is a word that appears in page 21 of Ilustrado (via), mentioned in Salvador's Paris Review interview while he is discussing his current engagement in polemical writing.

Dulcinea is of course the name of Don Quixote's object of affection. Don Quixote, the messianic knight errant, is so enchanted with Lady Dulcinea of Toboso that she almost becomes his battle cry, the sole reason for his existence. She is a lady of incomparable beauty, peerless, the one and only muse that drives him to chastity, spurning the designs of other women. The only catch is that Sancho Panza also knew Dulcinea, the three of them being inhabitants of La Mancha, and if we are to believe Squire Sancho, then she is in reality a crude peasant woman, not a lady of noble birth, certainly a far cry from Don Quixote's idealization. (In some ways, what Dulcinea is for Don Quixote, is probably what "the Intended" is for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.) Cervantes's sharp irony is always in full effect as Don Quixote is to finally "meet" Lady Dulcinea later, but this time only in enchanted form.

To discuss the circumstances of the character Syjuco finally meeting the Dulcinea character in Ilustrado is to spoil a lot of things. Let me just say that it is one of the best parts of the book and completely overturns the whole puzzle, such that what one is looking at all along is not a completed jigsaw but the jigsaw turned upside down to reveal another puzzle.

At the start of the second part of the history of the ingenious knight Don Quixote, in its prologue, we are told that a "false" second part of the Quixote was published in 1614, a year before the actual second part by Cervantes came out. In one of the rare moments in the errant knight's history, the "real" author of the Quixote directly speaks to the reader of the book ("illustrious or perhaps plebeian reader") in a furious, or at least ambivalent, tone about certain licenses taken by another writer, a native of Tordesillas, to continue his history and to do so in very poor imitation. Cervantes's resentment is evident as he starts to refute and discuss the disagreeable personal attacks to his character in the spurious second part. The full title of this second part is Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha ... compuesto por el licenciado Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, natural de la villa de Tordesillas. Avellaneda is a pseudonym. The identity of the author was never known.

Yet another notable scene in Ilustrado is the character Syjuco's "confrontation" with the critic Avellaneda. This direct reference to the author of the false Quixote, in the guise of a literary critic, is a brilliant play on a book that is, like the true Quixote itself, concerned with truthful transcription of history and ultimately with the question of authorship.

The last chapters of the Quixote are almost devoted in fact to the question of authorship and of Avellaneda's poor depiction and appropriation of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. What better way to demonstrate the falsity of Avellaneda's version than to point out that Don Quixote is "no longer in love with Dulcinea del Toboso" and that Sancho Panza's wife is not given the same name she had in the first part (Part II, Chapter LIX). It is understandable that Don Quixote flared up whenever mention of this second part reaches him.

It is almost as if the whole conception of the "real and truthful" second part of the Quixote is but a kind of direct response or reaction to Avellaneda's book. In any case, Cervantes has given Cide Hamete Benengeli enough leeway to write and publish the continuation and to faithfully incorporate what happened outside in his history. As the events in real life directly impinge on the fictional, the extra-literary is given a life of its own.

The Avellaneda affair has so consumed Don Quixote that, on his own initiative (yes, possibly without any intervention from any author, real or imagined), he intentionally changed his itinerary just to prove that he is the authentic character, to assert his own palpable existence. Here he and Sancho are speaking to a certain Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from the false Quixote(!), who they "accidentally" met at a village inn. They were able to persuade Don Álvaro Tarfe that they were the real characters (Part II, Chapter LXXII, tr. John Rutherford):

   'I do not know,' said Don Quixote, 'whether I am good, but I do know that I am not the bad Quixote, as proof of which I should like you to know, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, that I have never in my life set foot in Saragossa; on the contrary, having been told that the fantasy Don Quixote had taken part in the jousts in that city, I refused to go there, to prove to all the world that he is a fraud; and so I went straight on to Barcelona ... And although what happened to me there was not very pleasant, indeed was most disagreeable, I can bear it all without heaviness of heart, just for the sake of having seen Barcelona. In short, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, I am the Don Quixote de la Mancha of whom fame speaks - not that wretch who sought to usurp my name and exalt himself with my thoughts. I entreat you, sir, as you are a gentleman, to be so kind as to make a formal declaration before the mayor of this village to the effect that you have never in all the days of your life seen me until now, and that I am not the Don Quixote who appears in the second part [by Avellaneda], nor is this squire of mine Sancho Panza the man whom you knew.

Don Álvaro Tarfe was convinced and subsequently executed an affidavit in front of the village mayor and the notary (both of whom, as it happened, conveniently entered the very same village inn they were eating in) to the effect that "Don Quixote was not the man who appeared in print in a history entitled The Second Part of Don Quixote de la Mancha written by one Avellaneda, from Tordesillas." De facto and de jure then, Don Quixote's authenticity was validated beyond reasonable doubt.

Don Quixote's reactions to the spurious sequel and the actions he took to uphold the truth demonstrate the freedom granted by the storyteller to his own characters, such that the character is given complete power to set the record straight in the story he found himself in. The storyteller has transferred to the character his right to self-determination, to speak for himself, to chart his own plot in his own story. Right up to his own death, Don Quixote was so affected by the false character impersonating him that the author of the false history, Avellaneda, even featured in his last will and testament, albeit in a tone of reconciliation.

The author Syjuco, in the spirit of granting his characters the same freedom and right to self-determination, has produced Ilustrado. It is a novel that is a fitting tribute to what is authentic and original in books.



Related post:

Don Q, via M. Menard

Don Q, via M. Menard

I have already told you that enchantment can take many different forms, and it could be that these have changed in the course of time, so that what happens nowadays is that the enchanted do all the things that I do, even though formerly they did not. So one cannot either argue against the customs of the times, or draw any conclusions from them. I know for certain that I am enchanted, and this is enough for the comfort of my conscience; because my remorse would be great indeed if I thought that I am not enchanted ...
- Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XLIX, tr. John Rutherford

Jorge Luis Borges, author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," couldn't be more forthcoming. His analysis is unimpeachable (from the "unauthorized" translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni):

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this catalogue is no more than a rhetorical eulogy to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

Truth, the offspring of history. Now there’s an idea! The blind man couldn’t be more authoritative. By way of two short quotations from two ‘distinct’ sources (Cervantes and Menard), the self-appointed literary executor of the self-appointed author of the Quixote is almost committing that unpardonable crime in the republic of letters – plagiarism.

I don’t believe that a translator of the Quixote in English had yet the privilege to also translate the Pierre Menard story. But let us assume that the words of John Rutherford (translator of my Quixote Penguin edition) are faithful to the words of Cervantes. That is, its reliability as assured as the glorious recounting of the illustrious knight errant's history, by the Arab historian Cide Hamete, through his conscientious Moorish translator. Thus, the Borges persona in the Borges story will now gush, in translation, via Monsieur Menard (Part I, Chapter IX):

... truth, whose mother is history: the imitator of time, the storehouse of actions and the witness to the past, an example and a lesson to the present and a warning to the future.

If there is any objection to the veracity of these lofty thoughts, then they must read Anthony Bonner's translation, in Ficciones (Grove Press, 1962), who saw fit to include the original words [the brackets below are present in the translation]:

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

... la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.

[... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

If there is another cause for objection to be made, then they must answer to Sancho Panza. As with Cervantes, it is always a revelation to read Borges on the conundrums of a perfect translation, the perfect transfer of truths, judgements, and meanings. And so the passage quoted in the ingenious history can be stretched to infer an equation of "history" with "translation." Just substitute the word “translation” with “history” and a striking duality is achieved. The history that Cervantes was recounting is labeled as a translation from the Arabic language, and the story that Borges was telling is about an unsung French scholar whose fluency in Spanish language is evident, isn't it, from thirty-nine words of wisdom. So in a sense, it is the role of the translator as historian, the ideal kind, that is being depicted and repeated. The translator as a practitioner of history can mean being a model student of contexts and milieus, word plays and puns, who happily immerse himself into the language where the work to be translated is happily swimming, baiting it out carefully and putting it in the happy aquarium of another language.

Truth is the offspring of history because true history derives its authenticity from a semblance of truth. History is hanging on to the truth, to the words that express this truth, like a squire who hangs on to his every master's words. So we recognize from the vagaries of translation the creation of something non-definitive and yet heroic for striving so hard to replicate the sense and the poetry of its source text. Each translation (history), is an artifice (document) in the service of art or life, a literary theory which stands trial to the test of time.

Cervantes could not have anticipated the multiple transfers of meaning, truth, and realism through translation, right? Menard did, yes? If we define History as a direct transfer of reality, the ongoing moment, or the unfolding of events, then the text of that History is another history. The historian tries as much as he can to replicate real events truthfully, in words and paragraphs and chapters. Otherwise, he stands accused as inventor of history. The same with translations, of poetry in particular. During the priest’s burning of books in Don Quixote’s study (Part I, Chapter VI), a translation of poems was summarily dismissed for its supposed failure to recreate the Italian original.

'Well, I've got that book in Italian,' said the barber, 'but I don't understand a word of it.'
'Nor would it be a good thing for you to understand it,' replied the priest, 'and we could have done without that captain bringing it to Spain and turning it into Castilian, because he left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.

We are certainly lucky to have come upon Monsieur Menard's poetic endeavors, even if he demonstrated his mastery of translation in just a few precious words. The narrator of Don Quixote knew that only a 'truthful' Spanish rendering of the knight's tale from the Arabic can bring it to life, can give birth to history. And so he worked toward achieving the ideal of translation (Part I, Chapter IX, Rutherford translation):

I had to draw on all the discretion I possess not to reveal how happy I felt when I heard the title of the book [History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian]; and, getting in ahead of the silk merchant, I bought all the papers and notebooks from the lad for half a real; and if the lad himself had had any discretion and had noticed how much I wanted them, he could well have expected and indeed exacted more than six reals. Then I went off with the Moor to the cathedral cloister and asked him to translate the notebooks, or at least all those that had to do with Don Quixote, into Castilian, without adding or omitting a single word, and I offered to pay him whatever he asked. [my emphasis]

This sentiment was echoed by Don Quixote's friend Sansón Carrasco, BA, as Sansón distinguished between the poet and the historian (Part II, Chapter III):

'... it's one thing to write as a poet and quite another to write as a historian: the poet can narrate or sing events not as they were but as they should have been, and the historian must record them not as they should have been but as they were, without adding anything to the truth or taking anything away from it.'

The task then of the translator of a history, specially a history riddled with poems and song-and-dance numbers like the Quixote, is very hard indeed. For how does one strike a balance between narrating events objectively ("as they were") and interpretively ("as they should have been")? Clearly this applies to the genre of historical poem, or history in prose poem. It's wonderful how Pierre Menard found the solution to the problem: he subjected the text through a very careful scrutiny of its every nuance and substance. That is, through the most exacting of filters: the truth, only the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Menard’s version of the Quixote is timeless because it superseded any and all versions before and after it. Those who translated the Quixote (in any language) before Borges wrote his story can only be considered, at best, "proto-Menards." The proto-Menards are prefiguring Menard’s excellent job. Those who made further attempts to translate the Quixote after Borges published his story are, sorry to say it, just Menard-wannabes. Menard supplanted all possible translators. He is the definitive and restored version.

There are, however, two writers who have interesting opinions about this Menard affair, and I recently had a conversation with their ghosts. One is a certain Avellaneda, author of an extant second part of the Quixote. The other is a certain Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The former vehemently disputed the whole thing and would not accept the Frenchman's lucid version. He insisted that his inspired sequel can hold his own against the ravings of a madman, "an unpublished fraud" (to quote Avellaneda's strong words), and against the imagination of the madman's equally mad protégé Jorge Luis Borges, "inauthentic fanatic." The latter Cervantes, presumably the original author of the Quixote, was amused, smirking at the former's tantrums. Another writer, someone straight from the Ming dynasty, was close by, meditating.


I started Don Q in July as part of the "Windmills for the Mind" read-along, hosted by Stu at Winstonsdad's Blog. I finished it a few weeks ago.



Related posts:

Don Q, via Cide Hamete Benengeli

Half a Don Q

Don Q, via Cercas

Don Q, via translators

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (Jorge Luis Borges)

Don Q, via Cide Hamete Benengeli

Do we live in the age of translation?

Cervantes, an early instance of greatness in the "history" of the novel, has a ready answer in Don Quixote. The novel is presented as a translation by a Spanish-speaking Moor, from the Arabic of a certain historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, of the history of the knight errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. While the unnamed narrator recounts this "translated" history, he constantly reminds us of this fact. At several junctures in the novel, the narrator interjects the (i) translator's and (ii) his own annotations of the Arab's version of the events. In Part II, for example, the narrator interrupts the story to say:

Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words: 'I swear as a Christian and as a Catholic ...'; to which the translator adds that when Cide Hamete swore as a Christian and a Catholic, being a Moor, as he most certainly was, he only meant to say that just as when the Christian and Catholic swears something he swears, or should swear, the truth, and he swears to tell the truth in everything he says, so Cide Hamete was also telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Christian and a Catholic, in everything he wrote about Don Quixote ... [Part II, Chapter XXVII, tr. John Rutherford]

Ah, the truth! And then Cide Hamete (through the translator, via the narrator) goes on to discuss a seeming "inconsistency" of previous events in the first part of the history, specifically the theft of Sancho Panza's donkey by the convict Ginés de Pasamonte. The inconsistency arises presumably from the "printers' carelessness" that led to the omission of the incident in the publication of the first part of the history. This "has led many people to offer their opinions and blame the printing mistake on the author's poor memory."

It appears then Cervantes craftily introduces a mistake in this long and clumsy history, but its teller (Cide Hamete), its translator, and its narrator are there to set the record straight. The mistake acquires a new kind of significance as Ginés, now a puppeteer and master of a fortune-telling ape, becomes embroiled again in the glorious adventure of our knight errant and his squire.

In an article in The New York Times, novelist Michael Cunningham argues that the act of novel writing is an act of translation: "the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper." The sense of translation here is as an internal interpretation of the novelist's story before finally writing it down. This is for works in the original language. As for translated books: "The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation." Cunningham completes his idea:

Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.

In the case of the Quixote, a pack bag of postmodern tricks and a vessel of wit, the act of its translation is more assiduously mapped. The translator is translating a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. Confound the reader! To specify: the translator (Edith Grossman, or John Rutherford, or Burton Raffel, or Samuel Putnam, etc.) is translating a translation (by the unnamed narrator of the Quixote) of a translation (by the Moor who translates to Spanish) of a translation (by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli) of a translation (by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra). And lest we forget, the unnamed narrator is only the “second author” of the history, the “first author” being the one who was telling it right up to the section where the manuscript was supposedly truncated at the end of Part I, Chapter VIII.

In the case of Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", a ménage à trois between the novelist, translator, and reader is compounded by another interest, lost in flames. But that's for another post maybe.

To answer the question posed above, it may be best to quote again an interruption by our narrator regarding the integrity of Don Quixote's written history, demonstrating as it is how the telling of Truth in every History is ever so relative in every telling of it. At every remove, of the novelist from the story, of the translator from the source, of the teller from the tale, and of the reader from the page (not to mention the English translator's remove from the Spanish prose), the accumulation of subjective interpretations and authorial decisions is staggering.

It is said that in the original manuscript of this history one reads that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter his translator did not render it as the Moor had written it, with some sort of complaint against himself for having undertaken such a dry and limited history as this one about Don Quixote, always feeling himself restricted to talking about him and Sancho, never daring to venture out into any digressions or more serious and entertaining episodes; and Cide Hamete added that to have his mind, his hand and his pen always constrained to writing about one subject and speaking through the mouths of so few characters was intolerable drudgery, which yielded nothing to the author's advantage, and that to avoid this problem he had in the first part had recourse to certain tales, like those of Inappropriate Curiosity and the Captive Captain, which stand, as it were, apart from the main story – although the other tales narrated there are events in which Don Quixote himself was involved and which could not be omitted. [Part II, Chapter XLIV]

And then the narrator went on to describe Cide Hamete's justifications for the apparent divergence of style between the first and second parts of the history. The translator and narrator of the Quixote both seem to be acting as apologists for the historian, smoothing out the wrinkles in the narrative, and justifying the choices and style of its composition. Cide Hamete is, at least according to the translator, undermining the very virtues of the history he is writing, stopping short of calling it “boring” in many places. These self-references constitute an assertion of the freedom of the “multiple storytellers” in Don Quixote to comment on the work at hand and play with realism, without which the story will indeed be just an assembly of “intolerable drudgery,” “a dry and limited history.”


I'm presently on page 792 of the book, which I'm reading intermittently since July as part of a group read, at Stu’s Winstonsdad's Blog. Obviously I was waylaid by other books and failed to stick to schedule.

(First posted in early form in Project Dogeared)

Half a Don Q

I'm halfway through the antics of Don Quixote. This spine-cracking reading is once again part of  the readalong over at Winstonsdad's Blog by Stu, who I want to thank here as I just won a book giveaway from him! Gracias, Stu!

I'm still catching on. It's Week 6 and I'm supposed to cover up to page 600 (I'm reading a hundred pages a week in my Penguin edition/Rutherford translation). As if reading my mind, Stu just declared a cease-read; the reprieve is to last for another week. However, I have an unexpected travel to Manila and so I'm still stuck at the end of Part I (page 479). I still hope to make some progress over the weekend.

The first part of this prancing, entrancing novel ended with more extravagant exuberant excursuses (say that word 20 times) for our ingenious knight. Not least of our hidalgo's glorious adventures is his own caging, like an animal. Talk about irreparable book-madness. Despite his involuntary confinement, it's quite heroic how Don Q still retained his errant spirit. He's still in fighting form against all the elements that conspire to defeat him. It seems like the whole of first part, not only those curious events set in the castle, is enchanting and enchanted.

I found another article on the translations of this "sloppiest" of masterpieces: "Don of a new era" by Ian Garrick Mason. After four centuries, the new era is still smirking in delight.

Don Q, via Cercas

This is my post for Week 2 of windmills for the mind: a reading of Don Quixote at Winstonsdad's Blog. I' ve finished the Rutherford translation at around page 200. Eight more weeks to go.


There is in Soldiers of Salamis, a war novel by Javier Cercas, a striking scene at the beginning of the third and final part of the book. A journalist named Javier Cercas (yes, it was one of those books where writers name the protagonist after themselves) was asked by his publisher to do some interviews with "people of some prominence" who emigrated to Spain, one of which was the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño (yes, again). On the strength of a series of well-received novels in the 1990s, Bolaño - pithily described as having "that unmistakable air of a hippy peddler that afflicted so many Latin-Americans of his generation exiled in Europe" - was getting more famous and notorious in the Latin American literary scene. He was 47 years old at the time of Cercas's visit, and he just won a "considerable literary prize" (most likely the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for the best Spanish language novel, for Los detectives salvajes).

Cercas (the character, unless otherwise noted) was suffering from writer's block, having already written a big chunk of text for his novel-in-progress. He has taken a leave of absence from his work in the magazine to concentrate on the writing of his novel, a "true tale" of the Spanish Civil War. This unwritten story was slowly consuming him, and he was able to write the main storyline way before the end of his leave. However, after rereading his effort (which constitutes the second section of the novel), Cercas found himself at a loss as to how to continue the narrative. He then cut short his leave from magazine work as he could no longer find a way out of the story whose very incompleteness was taunting him. His attempt to simultaneously write the novel and to make sense of it was leading him to a dead-end. Here was the first conversation between the two character-novelists, just before the actual interview, quoted in dialogue form, but was in the actual written in prose, as translated by Anne McLean. The setting was in Bolaño's modern residence in Blanes, Spain:

Bolaño (opening the door): Hey, you're not the Javier Cercas of The Motive and The Tenant are you?

(Cercas nods.)

Bolaño: I know them. I think I even bought them.

Cercas: Oh, so you were the one, were you?

Bolaño (ignoring the joke): Hang on a second.

(Bolaño went to a hallway and came back after a while.)

Bolaño (brandishing the books triumphantly): Here they are.

(Cercas flipped through the books and saw they were worn copies.)

Cercas (sadly): You read them.

Bolaño (sort of smiling): Of course. I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street.

...

THE PROOF

What is striking about this scene was Cercas's bittersweet sense of dejection and personal vindication by having been read by a fellow writer. Later on, when Bolaño summarized what he remembered of the two books and pronounced his generous assessment of them, Cercas was touched by this gesture that he almost felt like hugging the "softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean [he'd] only just met."

Cercas flipped through the books and saw they were worn copies. - It is characteristic of Soldiers of Salamis to rely on the physical evidence or an eyewitness account before accepting the truth or falsity of the claims. The novel is concerned about the search for truth, and the mere mention of a statement will not simply be enough for the claim to be accepted as "the truth." The whole novel, with its meta-structural design, is about the unearthing of evidence about an execution that took place during the war. The conversation just quoted is a representative of this acid test for truth; it is only one of the many trial-like scenes that consciously assesses the veracity of claims. Cercas had to note that the books are worn and this will be perfect evidence that Bolaño did read the two books. The book is littered with these scenes of validation and parsing of evidences, testimonies, and first-hand accounts in books and interviews. The sole test of the validity of truth is in the hard evidence.

The conversation between the two writers is also striking for two more reasons. One, the interview that took place became an impetus for a new story to take place in the novel, for a shift in the direction of the war story that Cercas was trying to finish. The consequence is that the novel was actually finished and the privileged reader (privileged in the sense of being dragged to the adventure like the sidekick Sancho Panza) was privy to how the story reached its conclusion. The other thing to note here is how Bolaño's last statement above was, in fact, Cervantean.

I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street. - This bookish sentence stuck to me and I was surprised that a similar one appears in Don Quixote. This is the narrator (Cervantes?) recounting how he found the missing section of the book, which suddenly materialized in a shopping market [Part I, Chapter IX, Rutherford translation, my emphasis]:

I say, then, that for these and many other reasons our gallant Don Quixote is worthy of continuous and memorable praise - which shouldn't be denied me, either, for all the hard work and diligence I devoted to searching out the conclusion to this agreeable history; although I'm well aware that if heaven, chance and fortune hadn't helped me, the world would have been left without the pleasurable entertainment that an attentive reader of this work can enjoy for nearly two hours. And this is how I found the missing part:

One day when I was in the main shopping street in Toledo, a lad appeared, on his way to sell some old notebooks and loose sheets of paper to a silk merchant; and since I’ll read anything, even scraps of paper lying in the gutter, this leaning of mine led me to pick up one of the notebooks that the lad had for sale, and I saw that it was written in characters that I recognized as Arabic.

I don’t know how both statements appear in the original Spanish, but they are essentially alike that one cannot help but assume that Bolaño (or more precisely, the character named Bolaño, as told by a journalist named Cercas, in a book by the novelist Cercas), knowingly or unknowingly, appropriated a statement by Cervantes (or more accurately the narrator of the Quixote).

Both the Quixote and Soldiers of Salamis are soaked in meta-fictional solutions and both are concerned with a mimesis of authenticity. The three parts of Soldiers of Salamis are, structurally, fictive write-ups: (i) the journalist’s research about an incident in the Spanish war, (ii) the novel he wrote about it, and (iii) the continuation of an "interrupted" book whose ending was initially obfuscated but later brought into focus. The conceit - the telling itself of the novel - is its own wordplay.

The Cervantean statement is a classic aphorism for bookworms. Don Q is about books, bookishness, bibliophilism. The character of Don Q and his conception of himself are a composite of the heroic characters in books of chivalry. The tricky realism of Cercas's novel, and any novel masquerading as a proto-novel for that matter, can be traced to the post/modernist Don Q. Whereas Soldiers of Salamis ended its story by relating how the ending was achieved in the final chapter, the ninth chapter of the Quixote tells of the narrator's efforts to continue the story which abruptly ended in the eighth chapter. There are two authors to the Quixote; Soldiers of Salamis has one, though he was assisted by another, in a manner of speaking.

At which point, seeing that it is quite late already and I have said too much, I decide to publish these notes and to say more what will be related in the next blog post.

Don Q, via translators

I’ve started Don Quixote for windmills for the mind, a group readalong that's being organized by Stu at Winstonsdad's Blog. I had the book with me since last year and was only searching for an opportunity to tackle it. What better way to read this millennial object than with a group of readers. Millennial in terms of scope, importance, and length (i.e., running at almost 1,000 pages or more). I don't know where I'll find the gumption to read this all by myself.

Reading started on July 19 and discussion begins July 26. Most of the readers will be reading the translation of Edith Grossman (Vintage, 2005) though other translations of the Quixote will do. I will be reading the text of John Rutherford (Penguin Classics, 2003), 1032 pages in all, including endnotes. That will be some 100 pages per week, for 10 weeks.

In an essay called "One Master, Many Cervantes," Latin America scholar Ilan Stavans said that there are 18 different English versions of the book (19 if one includes Pierre Menard's unusual "translation"). In the past decade alone, 3 translations of the book came out, from Grossman, Tom Lathrop, and John Rutherford. Earlier translations were by Samuel Putnam and Burton Raffel, among others. As to which translation is likely to be the most faithful, there are varying opinions. I particularly sought out the Rutherford translation in the bookstore on the basis of Margaret Jull Costa's indorsement of it:

Don Quixote makes huge demands on the translator: there is comedy, broad and subtle, poetry, good and deliberately dire, there are proverbs and puns, and, above all, there is Cervantes' own wry, playful voice as narrator. Both of those "anniversary" translations [Grossman's and Rutherford's] were good, but it seems to me that John Rutherford's translation (the one that was largely ignored) most satisfyingly meets the challenge to the translator and does what all fine English translations should do, breathing English life into every sentence. If you don't know Spanish and have never read Don Quixote or are thinking of reading it again, then this is the English translation I would recommend, recreating as it does the novel's vibrant (and, to the modern sensibility, sometimes cruel) humour, and doing equal honour to its pathos.

I'll take Jull Costa's word for it. Her translations of Javier Marías and José Saramago are among my favorite books from Iberia. 

On the other hand, Stavans loved the version of Grossman who transformed Cervantes' prose into "a deliciously postmodern American hodgepodge." "What makes the translations superior," Stavans notes, "is the symmetry between form and content. More than anything else, what makes them an endless source of curiosity is the way they connect with readers across time. Grossman makes Cervantes look good. What else can an author wish for from a translator?"

There is another opinion about this matter of Don Quixote translation. If you ask Roberto Bolaño, he wouldn't care whose English version he will be reading. Not least because he knew Spanish but because of some interesting conjectures. He said something to that effect in an interview (collected in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview, and partly quoted here):
 

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 stay to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature. We may lose a lot along the way. Without a doubt. But perhaps that was its destiny.

He went further in an essay ("Translation Is An Anvil," translated by Guillermo Parra) from Entre paréntesis (Editorial Anagrama, 2004; forthcoming in English translation by Natasha Wimmer):

Cervantes, who was underestimated and disdained while he was alive, is our greatest novelist. There is hardly any disagreement about this. He is also the greatest novelist – according to some the inventor of the novel – in lands where Spanish is not spoken and where the work of Cervantes is known, above all, thanks to translations. These translations can be good or not, which isn’t an obstacle for the Quijote’s reason to impose itself or fertilize the imagination of thousands of readers, who don’t care about verbal luxury or the rhythm and force of Cervantean prosody which any translation, no matter how good it is, will undo or dissolve.

Sterne owes Cervantes a great deal, and in the XIX century, the novelistic century par excellence, Dickens does too. Neither one, it’s almost too obvious to say it, knew Spanish, from which we can deduce that they read the adventures of Quijote in English. What is marvelous – and yet natural, in this case – is that those translations, good or not, knew how to transmit what in the case of Quevedo or Góngora they didn’t and probably never will: what distinguishes an absolute masterpiece from a dry masterpiece, or, if it’s possible to say so, a living literature, a literature that belongs to all mankind, from a literature that merely belongs to a specific tribe or to a segment of that specific tribe.

There are two radical ideas here. One is that a translation is not an obstacle to "fertilize the imagination" of a reader. The other one is that any translation, without exception, undoes or dissolves the "verbal luxury or the rhythm and force of Cervanean prosody." Still, a residue of the living masterpiece will rub off on the reader. Perhaps, if Bolaño's theory will hold, only a work with a capacious vision as the Quixote can get away with the conceit, nay, treason of translation. (Which leads me to think whether the great Latin American novel Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa, the Brazilian Ulysses, also survived its botched translation.) Perhaps also the active reader of Don Q, in any language, is its best translator, with the passages being received by the brain and converted in a visual basic program code of imaginative interpretation, or whatever happens in the critical faculties, ghost in the shell. The converse, at least, is generally accepted to be true. That is, the translator as one of the closest readers there can be.


Image: Don Quixote by Adrien-Louis Demont, 1893, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria