May be a review of text-image

Pesoa by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, translated from Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim (Balangay Productions, 2021)

 

1. Borges’s company

“I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others’,” so said Borges in the prose poem “Borges and I”, from Collected Fictions (Penguin Books, 1998), translated by Andrew Hurley. The poet’s hostile relationship with his doppelgänger—himself, in a fugue-like state—was explored rather gloomily, with a backward glance at a legacy of letters and a sigh. “Years ago I tried to free myself from him ... So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away—and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.” The speaker was sure the legacy will outlast the man, so he lived, allowed himself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, which is the speaker's sole justification. He was yielding his private persona to the public identity of Borges. He learned he could not escape from the edifice of words which now belonged not to himself—may be not even to Borges—but to language or literary tradition.

2. The original and the erasure

A similar identity crisis as Borges’s hounded Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles in Pesoa, a book of erasure poetry translated by Kristine Ong Muslim. Given the violent nature of production of the book—erasure, a kind of parasitic technique, like a vampire feeding off the blood of its victim—the literary hostility was there. Hostile, too, like “Borges and I” because it could not be a paean to its source text, certainly not a homage. The choice of a book—Personal by Rene O. Villanueva—was personal but the deliberate erasures must have been a serendipitous combination of chance, accident, and murder. Arguelles at first channeled his erasures to speak to his doppelgänger. It was the ambivalent struggle of the erasure with its original (erased) identity. Eventually, Arguelles’s doppelgänger multipied, splitting into personalities he could not tame or control. After some walking and self-questioning of Arguelles by Arguelles, other heteronyms joined the fray like the specters of Fernando Pessoas (plural), giving rise to more self-questioning. ‘Arguelles and I’ branched out to ‘Arguelles & Co.’

3. The erasure and the translation

Seven years ago, in writing a few words about Pesoa in its original language, I posed a question: Is not the translation of erasures another set of erasures? Little did I know that one of my favorite poets would undertake the task of translating one of my favorite poets. And that the attempt to answer that question—the appearance of Muslim's English Pesoa last month—would never really fully answer it, would only point to an indication of an answer, and would propound more unsettling questions about the production of poetry, its value, and its reception. How dare the poet hide the process and just bring out the end-product for all to read. How dare the translator translate the product and not the process. Translation excerpts are found here.

It turned out that translating and reading erasure poetry was as straightforward as translating and reading non-erasures. You just have to translate and read them straight through, like how they appear on the page. The process might be hidden, invisible, but the end-product, the crime, was exposed in the light of day to be scrutinized and re-erased.

How then to account for the process in the background, the nagging sense that we are an accomplice (twice over) to Arguelles’s crime of erasure by reading the erased poetry, first in the original and then in the accompanying translation? We were conscious of the crime and hence were complicit to it. Why then do we, I, reader, not feel any guilt? Probably because erasing something was, in the first place, a liberating experience. And to read something that was effaced was equally liberating. The redacted words blended into the surrounding white and the words were compacted to achieve the syntax of what may be poetry: what may be an image of text, as the cover of the translated book—the design was credited to Arguelles himself—proudly displays. Pesoa is an image of a text erased. Text-image (read: erasure) culled from violence sans blood and bruise.

Muslim’s translation intensified the text-image by expounding on simple, short sentences of the original. This is translation through explication and it tended to enhance or emphasize the effect of dislocation from the original. This is translation through elaboration—or belaboring—of the fugue state by creating, for example, double negative. Where in “Ilan” (Count), the first prose poem of the original, it simply said, “Malayo sa buhay ko” (literally: Far removed from my life), the translator opted for redundancy to heighten Arguelles’s—the speaker’s, not the poet’s, but who can be sure anymore—longing for the lives of his literary precursors. The precursors—Fernando Pessoa, Nick Joaquin, Virgilio S. Almario—paved the way for the appearance of (how many? 40? 20?) heteronyms. The translation of the simple sentence was highlighted below.

Fernando, Joaquin, Virgilio, and others. These people from the past, their world and history grew inside me. They lived completely different lives that were far removed from mine. Whenever I read them, I could not help but covet what they had and did not have. There is no such thing as self: only a world of questions. How much and how many should be counted. A lot, and it is never enough. 40, maybe in excess of 40, more than 40, I think twenty is not enough. A person is made up of dissociated identities. I did try to become a stranger to mankind. No, really, I have been untethered from myself for far too long. Only one of them is among the ones present here.   

The maximalist translation approach in lieu of the minimalist original was in itself a form of erasure, splitting the concise chemical compound into its constituent atomic elements. The translator said so in her note to the translation as she made a case for a fit-for-purpose poetics of translation.

As a translator, I am very much into clarity of purpose and uncovering ‘ulterior’ motives. I intervene, holding a portable light source to illuminate the passageways and figure out what lurks in the narrator’s peripheral vision. ... My translation becomes an act of filling in the gaps because it is my contention that the narrator is not being intentionally evasive. His hold on reality is simply too shaky.

...

Pesoa is translated this way—with a broad stroke, its coded message presented partly decoded in English but just enough so as not to spoil it for the reader.

So she opted for clarity over ambiguity/vagueness. Yes, I dig it. I would rather have a somewhat clear text-image than unintelligible rhetoric. Which should be the task of the translator, according to Walter Benjamin whose credo of translation is a form of illumination of the original, facilitating the view of the original through transparent lenses. 

The significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation. A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade. [translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt]

Literalness, in Benjamin’s reckoning—“a literal rendering of the syntax”—was not being too literal but being literary or having the creative license to draw or invent the arcade’s text-image. In Pesoa, the arcade of self was crossed by Arguelles and Arguelles. The definitive break or split of selves into more than two—40? but 20 may be enough!—personalities was apparent on page 19.

Marami ang ako o hindi ako. At kulang ang sarili. Pero ako, ako! Siyempre hindi ako lang ako. Maya-maya, ipagpapatuloy ko ang paghakbang, tatawirin ang labirinto, maglalakad.

I, as well as the selves that are not me, comprise a multitude. And the self is never enough. But the me inside of me is me! Of course, I am not the only one in me. Later, I will continue to walk, to cross the labyrinth, to trespass. 

And the translation would really sound staid if done literally. My literal attempt seven years ago proved this. I noticed, though, that the first edition of the poems in 2014 were not prose poems but poems set off properly in broken lines. This second bilingual edition removed the line breaks and connected the sentences. This new prosing of the poetic text-image was, I could not help but say, a second erasure of the original text! The original was re-erased, done over again, re-rendered.

Erasure (and re-erasure) was a perfect method of thievery because the evidence was non-existent: it was erased. It may even be a perfect murder because no blood is spilled in its wake. Muslim’s way of translating the text-image was reading between the texts, between the interstices of invisible ink and the premeditated violence of disappearing the words.

“The self is a concoction”, the poet wrote. So was the text-image in original and in translation. If meanings were a concoction of our imagination, then the discovery of meaning, the discovery of the self, was also a concoction. Ad infinitum.

4. The crime of the eraser

The awareness of the process of re-rendering kept me wide awake as I read. This made me tense as I read. I may have overtly romanticized the idea of erasure to the point that I considered it a crime of theft or murder.

I should just say instead that Pesoa is guilty of the crime of obsession, of stalking. The author stalking for meaning someone's text to produce a poetic text-image. Then re-rendering that text-image into prose poetry format. The translator stalking the poems to produce her own text-image where a poet stalked himself to generate other selves.

I discovered that there was a me who could be a multitude. There goes the banality of self. I figured there had to be a me in order for others to be themselves.

The assertion of self was always a way to engage with the world. How much more the assertion of a company of others who hid behind the banal existence of the self and the self: the eraser and the erased: the text-image and the text it is derived from. 

5. Arguelles & Co.

In “Borges and I”, the eponymous poet wrote: 

I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.

In Pesoa, Arguelles wrote: 

I have been untethered from myself for far too long. Only one of them is among the ones present here. 

Something wrote the page. Someone who was present. But still one could not be sure who among the poet’s company was the one present in there, in the book of poetry. I propose it is the reader of the text-image. The reader is ever present in the reading. He is a faithful heteronym of the eraser Arguelles, author of the Pesoa.

Enter: Pierre Menard.

 

 

Teserak

 

Ang Bangin sa Ilalim ng Ating mga Paa ni Ronaldo Vivo Jr. (UngazPress, 2021)

 

Kinokoronahan ang demonyo sa panahong ito at alam nilang nasa panig nila ang marami. Kapangyarihan, impluwensiya, simpatya. Lunod na lunod sa saya, lasing na lasing sa ligaya. Walang paglagyan ang bukal ng pera-palit-dugo. Dugo't luha ang langis ng giyerang minamakina. Pinananagot ang mga naghahabol ng kasagutan. Kaya iiyak na lamang ang mga magulang ..., magdadasal sa Panginoon, hihingi ng hustisya sa langit. Mabubuhay sa takot habang kinokoronahan ang diyablo.

Kung ang nobela ang referendum ng administrasyong Duterte, may natalo na. Hindi na kailangang hintayin ang desisyon ng ICC sa krimen ng ubusang lahi. Natalo ang diyablo ng panahon; nanalo ang mambabasang matindi ang kapit. 

Ngunit ang nobela ay isa lamang babasahin, isang espasyo ng pagkukuwento ng malagim na digmaan laban sa dangal at pagkatao ng mga disenteng tao. Ang nobela ay isa lamang sagunson ng mga pangyayaring idinidikta ng panahon. Binubuksan nito ang bangin sa ilalim ng ating mga paa, dinadala tayo sa mga sitwasyong wala sa atin ang kontrol. Hindi natin hawak ang puwersa ng lipunang gumugupo sa ating kaluluwa. Nasa paligid lang ang may kapangyarihang pumaslang sa katinuan ng sambayanan. Isang kapangyarihang higit sa ating lahat. 

Ang nobela ay may lalim, may talim at sentido para ipahayag ang katotohanang nakakubli sa bangin. Pero hindi natin kailangang magpatiwakal para maapuhap ang katarungang nakalingid sa kukote. Kailangan lang natin ng sapat na oras para magbasa ng nobela. Sapagkat ang social media ay nakompromiso na ng mga retarded at pekeng interlokutor, nobela na lang ang ating matatakbuhan. Ito ang ating masasandalan sa mga panahong salat sa talino ang malayang diskurso ng cyberspace. 

Sa labas pa lamang, dinig na namin ang kulob na tunog ng nalulunod na bayo ng baho ng speakers sa loob.

Kakaibang timpla ng 'baho' ng rakrakan at ratratan ang pinasisinayaan ng nobela ni Ronaldo Vivo Jr. Ang Bangin sa Ilalim ng Ating Mga Paa ay akustikong banggaan ng mga nilalang at paninindigan sa rehimeng Duterte. Nakatukod ito sa tradisyon ng panitikang diniligan ng agos ng disyerto, kinalmot ng kuko ng liwanag, at nagbukas ng maikling imbestigasyon sa isang mahabang pangungulimbat. 

Ang nobelista ay isa ring abogado ng demonyo. Nilalantad nya ang mga kalapastanganang BAU (business as usual). Hinaharaya tayo ng kapanabikang mala-noir. 

“Is there a Philippine noir?” masusing tanong ni Resil B. Mojares sa isa nyang lektura na ganuon din ang pamagat at sinipi sa Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017). Ang Bangin ay noir sa isang konsentradong anyo. Walang kagatul-gatol nitong binababad ang mga tauhan (at mambabasa) sa “langis ng giyerang minamakina”. Mariing sinasagot ang pansin ni Mojares na “the social system of which the crime is symptom and effect is not strongly developed [in the Jessica Hagedorn-edited Manila Noir] (which perhaps makes of the novel a form more suited to noir)”:

How does one explain the fact that our experience of authoritarianism and state terrorism has not produced the kind of powerful memorable fiction that dictatorships in Latin America and Central Europe produced? Has corruption, even high-level corruption ... been so “normalized” that we can no longer summon real anger and outrage in the face of it? Has crime become so “mediatized” that we can think of it only in terms of eccentric characters ... instead of the institutionalized corruption and amorality of which they are, all at once, cause, symptom, and effect? 

... To say that our realities seem stranger than fiction says something about these realities, but does this not also tell us where fiction has failed?

... Has the ceaseless stream of crime stories in media so desensitized us, dulled empathy, that we can no longer summon the will to inquire into what lies behind the news or share in the real human suffering that is at the hidden heart of these stories. [sic]

Tila isang tahasang sagot ni Vivo kay Mojares ang Bangin, kung saan ang amor ng amoralidad at pagkabulok ng sistema ay namuong tingkal. Hinawan ng nobelista ang sining ng nobela, mapa-noir man o mapa-tiktik: ang papaliit na papaliit na konsentrikong mga bilog; ang misa para sa pagkautas ng kaaway; ang teserak. 

Ang mga tauhan ay tumatakbo patungo sa kanilang kakahinatnan. Ang nobelista ay hukom at berdugo sa kanyang mga tauhang gumagalaw sa lipunang walang maskara kung saan kinokoronahan ang diyablo. Ito ang “sikretong mundo” na nilusong ng nobela ni Vivo at tugon sa huling katanungan ni Mojares sa kanyang sanaysay.

There are many ways of writing noir. But what excites me about the genre, particularly for the Philippine case, are its possibilities as a medium for social investigation and political critique, a form of representing a society ruled by violence, corruption, and criminality. Fredric Jameson, in an influential essay on Raymond Chandler, has focused the attention of scholars on how hard-boiled detective fiction affords the reader a cognitive mapping of urban space, as the detective or protagonist undertakes an investigation, exploration, or search that brings him to the “anonymous” and “secretive” places in his city and thus uncovers what past and present crimes have made society what it is. These secret places are not the slums (where crime is most visible, bodies dumped, and noir fiction typically begins) but in the most powerful offices in the land.

If at the core of noir is a narrative of investigation, the uncovering of those hidden and determining forces that have created the crimes of today, how effectively and well have we harnessed the power of noir?

Ang Bangin ay varyant ng ideyal na nobelang noir ni Mojares (ikumpara ang “narrative of investigation” nya sa “nobela ng pagsisiyasat” ni Edgar Calabia Samar sa Halos Isang Buhay). Hindi direktang sinuysoy ni Vivo ang pasilyo ng mga may kapangyarihan kundi ipinahiwatig ang sanhi, sintomas, at kamandag (cause, symptom, and effect) ng gangster land.

Sa season ng halimaw at “kriminal na pulis” (redundante ayon sa batas ng nobela), sa reality ng pandemya na nagpaigting sa dambong at pandadahas, ang Bangin ni Vivo ay bumagsak at pumosisyon bilang isang makapangyarihang nobela ng dekada. 

All happy stories are alike

 

Ang Píping Balalaika at Ibá pang mga Kuwento (The Mute Balalaika and Other Stories) by Ba Jin, translated from Chinese to Filipino by Joaquin Sy (Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, 2017)

 

 

 

Ito ay isang kaygandang gabí. Gabí sa Marseille. (This is such a wonderful night. Night in Marseille.)

Thus ended "Gabí sa Marseille" (Night in Marseille), the seventh of eight stories of Ba Jin (1904-2005) collected in Ang Píping Balalaika at Ibá pang mga Kuwento (The Mute Balalaika and Other Stories), translated from Chinese to Filipino by Joaquin Sy. There was however nothing particularly beautiful about the Marseille night in question. Only the irony of the statement was beautiful, leaving a bitter aftertaste for the reader who witnessed hair-raising squalor and poverty in the French port city where the narrator found himself stranded for an indefinite period of time due to a strike of the shipping crew in the docks. While walking at nights in the city, he was propositioned by a thin and wrinkled prostitute, covered in garish make-up and almost his mother in age, who implored to be her customer for the night, constantly mouthing the words "in the name of charity, in the name of mercy, in the name of saving a life" (alang-alang sa kawanggawa, alang-alang sa awa, alang-alang sa pagsagip sa buhay). Devastated with pity, his young educated self could not process the situation that the night in Marseille offered him. 

Without exception, Ba Jin's stories in the collection, which were originally published in Chinese from 1930 to 1936, were not happy ones at all. His were sad and frustrating stories, devastating even. The themes were the same as the subject of movies shown in the final story "Paglubog" (Sinking): eksena ng karalitaan, pag-ibig, digmaan, kamatayan (scenes of destitution, love, war, death). That last story directly referenced Chekhov, the writer in whom Ba Jin created a precursor. 

The Chinese writer wore his Chekhovian heart in his sleeve. From the opening title story that featured a Russian musical instrument, Chekhov haunted the pages in the cold atmosphere and setting (wintertime China and Russia; other European cities) and the pallor of characters (Chinese, French, Russian immigrants and expatriates). A moral, spiritual, and intellectual malaise seemed to haunt the characters in these pages which, in Filipino translation, must have conveyed the same timbre of loneliness and poetry of the original. Characters could be driven to utter despondency and degradation and poverty. The unlucky end awaiting each was almost a given, pointing to the elusiveness of happiness and the inevitability of misfortune awaiting everyone like death in the door. But there was poetry in the telling, and the collection was coated in the beautiful language of grief and modern varnish of storytelling. 

There was no poverty of imagination in situations of poverty and imprisonment. Prisoners all: the characters—literal or figurative prisoners starved of food or freedom and of meaningful existence. They might stoop so low, they might fight to the teeth, they might give up, but their all too human condition was on display. 

In "Heneral" (General), the impoverished, disgraced, and alcoholic Russian soldier—forced to live in China because of war and whose wife was driven to prostitution so that the family can survive—uttered his final cry after an accident in Russian language. Of course, nobody around him understood him. Except for the reader, maybe, because we know he said the words in the language we read them. 

In "Paghihiganti" (Revenge), with the shadow of indescribable war crimes, revenge was believed to be the pure source of happiness for a character yearning for it against someone called "Nutenberg". After assassinating his target, he realized that the long desired revenge was, after all, a fleeting source of happiness. Now that his enemy was gone, his strength and his reason for living had disappeared as well. 

The intellectual writer in the last story "Paglubog" (Sinking) was representative of the spiritual despondency and poverty of 1930s China and Europe that Ba Jin was mapping in his stories. The intellectual was a scholar of ancient Chinese documents and admirer of old porcelain vases who always unashamedly ordered his followers and students to read all kinds of learned books all the time. While holding a book of Chekhov's stories in English translation, the intellectual was unmasked by his former follower and protégé as a pretender and lacking in substance. When the intellectual recommended that his former student read Chekhov's works because they are truly relevant (totoong makabuluhan), the student confronted him and asked his teacher if he doesn't realize that he was like a character in Chekhov's stories (alam mo ba na gaya mo ang mga tauhan sa mga akda ni Chekhov?). The intellectual denied the accusation. His student was persistent: "In bed the whole day, discussing events that happened hundreds of years ago, believing there is a reason for things as they are, letting fate do its own trick on them, without any desire to change themselves ... Aren't these how the characters in Chekhov's stories behave?" (Maghapong nakahiga sa kuwarto, nag-uusap tungkol sa mga pangyayari ilang daang taon ang nakaraan, naniniwalang may dahilan ang pananatili ng lahat ng bagay, hinahayaang paglaruan ng tadhana, walang paghahangad na baguhin ang buhay ... Hindi ba't ganiyan ang mga tauhan sa mga kuwento ni Chekhov?) After this, the professor became silent. Then with pain in his demeanor, he finally admitted to his student that he might be right, that he might be finished already, that people like him are finally done (Maaaring tama ka. Tapós na nga ako, tapós na ang mga táong gaya ko). Looking in pain at his former professor, the student was as if standing in front of a newly covered coffin (Waring nakatayô ako sa harap ng isang kabaong na katatakip pa lámang). The professor's intellectual pursuits and scholarly output were a foil to his inner spiritual decline. 

Ba Jin's poor and pitiful characters marched ahead following the template of universal characters in the short stories of a Russian master. In a society hostile to world peace and stability, they led deplorable lives in demoralizing conditions, in a cold, harsh, and savaged landscape of war and days preceding the war, materially deprived and spiritually disconsolate days, days when the inertia of existence is itself unbearable and sad. 

All happy stories are alike, each unhappy Ba Jin story is unhappy in its own way. 

 

 

Notes on Trilogía de Jesús

 

You must promise not to understand me. When you try to understand me it spoils everything. Do you promise? 

– The Death of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee (Viking, 2020)
 

The Jesus trilogy by J. M. Coetzee had a tenuous connection to the Old and New Testaments. It's up to the reader to imbue the text with evangelical significance, if at all. The novelist did borrow stray phrases from the testaments with playful panache ('And who do you think you are?' / 'I am who I am!'). Still, the work was written in the philosophical register rather than the religious. By philosophical I meant the Socratic method with which the dialogues proceeded to elaborate on the weighty meaning of existence. And the prose was as spare as a skeleton: the late Coetzee style, one without any excess fluff or fat in its flesh.

Time passes. Then, early one morning, there is a knock on his door. It is Inés. 'I have had a call from the orphanage. Something has happened to David. He is in the infirmary. They want us to fetch him. Do you want to come? If not, I will go by myself?'

So began David's visible descent into illness and death. It was a story already spoiled by the title. So what remained for the reader to ponder in this novel of foregone conclusion? What payoff awaited the reader in the death of David? I wanted to borrow again Walter Benjamin's words in "The Storyteller":

The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the "meaning" of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of the novel—but preferably their actual one. How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them—a very definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s consuming interest in the events of the novel.

Again, it was up to the reader to imbue the proceedings with import depending on whatever "meaning of life" or of death or expired existence could be derived from the reader's experience of David's actual death in the novel.

In a novel such as this then, devoted to death's unfolding, the premonition of death, the inkling of mortality, was but a part of its philosophical design to investigate the meaning of life and death. But for poor David, being nipped in the bud at an early age, unable to experience the "fullness of life", unable to fulfill his destiny, he will forever be remembered as dead at such a young unripe age. 

This was like the moment Benjamin split hair to differentiate between real life and remembered life when it comes to commemorating the dead. Benjamin called "dubious" Moritz Heimann's statement "A man who dies at the age of thirty-five is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five." Benjamin called it dubious for being in the wrong (i.e., present) tense.

A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.

It was thus well and good for the novelist Coetzee to kill David not at the end of the third book of the trilogy but by the middle of the book for his parents—Simón and Inés—to remember him for some time and provide a counterpoint for his meaningless life. By meaningless, I meant the meaninglessness of dying at an early age, as compared to the age of dying in the Old Testament days when people lived for such a long time—Noah at 950 years, Abraham at 175 years. Must be the lack of plastics and the nature-based food diet without the artificial seasonings.

In any case, Max Weber's contrast between Abraham's dying at "a good old age ... and full of years" in Genesis and a person's premature death at a young age in our own (contemporary) information overload culture was illuminating. Weber (maybe Coetzee too) was saying that dying at present times was pointless and meaningless because, unlike in the biblical past when there's no more riddle left to solve after living a life full of years, the present was a beehive of conundrums given the intellectual drought each of us will encounter in the face of a mountain of ideas and information. By our inability to make sense of our own place in this information culture, we die "tired of life", in Weber's pessimistic assessment, unfulfilled by the deluge of ideas that are "merely provisional, never definitive". 

While the singularity of David's character was fictionally established, his untimely death in the hands of the novelist Coetzee was no mere accident of history. He was representative of all human beings looking at the stars above and asking themselves '¿Pero por qué estoy aquí?' But why am I here? Always with emphasis on aquí, as David repeatedly questioned Simón.

To be fair, the story did present us with fictional conceits, if that was the right word at all, with which to examine the philosophical meaninglessness of a boy's life. It may be better to call these conceits the given givens. Or just premise, the first phrase already bordered on tautological.

The first premise was that the novel existed in or as a (fictional) translation. The locale was Spanish, with Spanish names for persons and places and things. Yet the very English of Coetzee always made a visible nudge to the internal translation from Spanish, sometimes even a direct translation after the Spanish.

'I thought Dr Ribeiro was going to test you for allergies. Has he changed his mind?'

'I've got neuropathy in my legs. The injection is going to kill the neuropathy.'

He speaks the word neuropatía confidently, as though he knows what it means. But what does it mean?

* * *

'What are you going to do? says Inés. 

'I don't know, my dear, I don't know. I am quite desperate.'

Querida. He has never called her that before.

This not-quite translation was the same label given to the favorite story of our dying boy David, the children's book version of Don Quixote which we know (in a sense) to be a translation of a translation. So the novel existed—or was here presented—in the language of Spanish, was actually called Spanish in the novel, and yet was here printed in actual English. In the first book of the trilogy, the boy David sang a song in actual German and his song was said to be in words of English. The reader could make of this whatever substitution between nominal words or language, just like the name Jesus can be substituted for David, or whatever transference from idea to fruition, just like Don Quixote substituted reality for fantasy. It has become almost a cliché to witness how the ghost of Don Quixote's fictiveness haunts novelists to death.

The second premise was the lack of memory of the characters Simón and David who, at the opening book of the trilogy, arrived in the Spanish town devoid of memory of their past lives. In fact, all the characters in the Spanish town were all refugees from places they no longer remember. All their previous lives were simply lacunae. With no origin stories to accompany them, they were forced to live from a blank slate. And this detail the reader had to accept at face value. I'm pretty sure if we interview Coetzee and ask him about this, he would say he could not remember why he began his story like this.

Without a priori knowledge of their past existence, the characters must rely on lived experience alone to give context to their current condition. Therein lay, perhaps, the raw creation or abstraction of meaning from the knowledge systems David was exposed to in his education. Much textual space had been given on how David construe meaning from understanding stars and numbers and dancing the patterns of stars in the book. The stars-and-numbers mumbo jumbo in the book was an instance where David's recognition of meaning from codes and symbols were put forward as articles of faith that one could learn and imbibe according to will. After all, one's encounter and comprehension of knowledge systems or belief systems, however grounded in science or rationality, requires a certain faith to be absorbed into the system.

The third premise was that names are said to be insignificant in the book. This was an idea subscribed to by Dmitri, the "passionate" murderer character in the book who was contrasted to Simón, a "reasonable" yet boring person. (Passion vs. reason was a running theme in the trilogy, particularly in the middle book, The Schooldays of Jesus.) In a postscript to his letter to Simón near the trilogy's end, Dmitri propounded this idea on names.

PS I am sure you are aware how unimportant names are. I could just as well have been named Simón, you could just as well have been named Dmitri. And as for David, who cares now what his real name was, that he made such a fuss about?

This was an attempt at misdirection of course. Who cares now why a trilogy starring David is named after a different boy? Jesus, the novelist was being obvious. I dare not say something about referent and reference, signifier and signified. From the rat-like Señor Daga in Book One (daga translates to "rat" in Filipino), we knew Coetzee was up to no good in naming his characters. How about this character on page 62 of Book Three?

Señora Devito is young and so tiny, so fine-boned, that she barely reaches to Inés's shoulder. Her curly blonde hair stands out in a nimbus around her head. She receives them eagerly in her cramped little office, no more than a cupboard really.

Why call a tiny person who can barely manage to fit into a cupboard-like office "Devito"? Seriously, Coetzee?

A good sock to the jaw

"A terrible time is coming" [220], Remo Erdosain warned a pharmacist near the end of The Seven Madmen. Surely he was not referring to the present 2021 terrible but to the continuation of his story in Los lanzallamas (1931). On the previous page, he already said the same to the pharmacist:

I have to do something to bring down this society. There are days when I suffer unbearably. It's as if everything that happens is out of control, like a plunging wild beast. It makes me want to go out into the street and preach mass murder, or to set up a machine gun on every street corner. You must see it: terrible times are coming.

That was from the translation of Nick Caistor. In an afterword to the book called "Arlt's Life and Times", Caistor explained his approach to the translation, a fitting way to deliver in English a South American's mass murdering and mass shooting psyche:

Critics have often complained of Arlt's repetitions, his lack of grammatical accuracy, his wayward logic. The temptation as a translator is to straighten him out, to bring back a decent sense of order and common sense. In translating The Seven Madmen, I have tried not to do this, while at the same time avoiding adding any incoherencies of my own. I only hope that this crazy, disjointed, glorious book still has in English the power of a good sock to the jaw – as Arlt himself described the power of literature.

That was Arlt surely, incoherencies and all. And "a good sock to the jaw" was the knockout he was aiming for in his violent Buenos Aires world. By page 76 of The Flamethrowers, translated by Larry Riley, I was already enamored (read: battered) by the lack of order and common sense to the proceedings. Whether it was the translation of the story or the chaos Arlt deliberately brought to the table, who could tell. As can be gleaned from the first half of the story (in Los siete locos), crazy disjointed glorious was the order of the day.

Larry Riley was kind enough to reproduce and translate for the reader the "Words from the Author" that gave Arlt's standard for a powerful piece of work.

The future is ours, for powerful work. We'll create our own literature, but in our proud solitude we can write books that include the violence of a "left cross" to the jaw. Yes, one book after another, and which those eunuchs [literary critics of newspapers] will spit on.

The novelist Rick Harsch, who supplied the introduction to the book, revealed that Riley "determined to translate [Los lanzallamas] from a language he did not know at all into English". True to the spirit of the Argentinian novelist, who discussed in the foreword how "style", "beauty", and "embroidery" were somehow antithetical to his writing, Riley – with the help of Harsch, presumably, but this was in question – persevered and completed and published his translation. Like Arlt, Riley was brave enough to put out a work for readers other than his family members.

They say I [Arlt] write poorly. It's possible. However, I wouldn't have any difficulty in citing any number of people who write well and who will only let certain members of their family read their work.

If indeed what we have in our hands is sub-par work, then so be it, I'm still rubbing my hands together. The translation could readily capture Caistor's observation of Arlt's penchant for repetitions, ungrammatical formulations, haphazard logic. A terrible translation was in keeping to the terrible times that we – also, Arlt circa early 1930s – live in. You see, Caistor did not smoothen the diction or grammar. So the reader could enjoy Riley's translation as a parody or satire of what could have been. Amateur Reader provided some writing samples. 

It might not be such a shame at all to read flawed translations. In "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" (translated by Natasha Wimmer, and used as an afterword to the 2015 Serpent's Tail edition of The Seven Madmen), Roberto Bolaño noted how Arlt himself was weaned on this kind of translations.

Arlt is quick, bold, malleable, a born survivor, but he's also an autodidact, though not an autodidact in the sense that Borges was: Arlt's apprenticeship proceeds in disorder and chaos, through the reading of terrible translations, in the gutter rather than the library.

While Arlt's standard of a powerful work – that it was like a decisive uppercut to the jaw – was kind of violent and heavy-handed, a rather diplomatic test of a translation's worth, especially in Arlt, is if it made you laugh the way, say, Kafka's confused characters or Bernhard's megalomaniac rants made you laugh. Early scenes in The Flamethrowers – e.g., the virginity scene in pp. 50-55 – already fanned the flames of comedy. Let's see if Harsch, I mean Riley, could keep it consistently.