Havana Laugh

Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, (Dalkey Archive, 2009). ISBN: 9781564785633. £10.99

Remember the moment of magic realism, when all that was new and exciting in fiction belonged to the friable, fricative, fissile edges of what had once been the colonial centre? When Gabriel Garcia Marquez bestrode the Atlantic like a colossus, reshaping the tired platitudes of European fiction and culture with his metaphysical romances shot through with parrots and generals? When Hollywood thought it would be a great idea to adapt a play based on a novel about an imprisoned transsexual teller of tales based on B-movie plots? That’s the moment when Suzanne Jill Levine wrote The Subversive Scribe, initially published in 1991 by Graywolf and now republished by Dalkey Archive Press, who also publish, in English translation, many of the writers of the Latin American boom.

With the sudden, massive rise of Roberto Bolaño, the 2009 republication of Levine’s study of Latin American fiction’s (b)leading edge, its post-Borgesian neo-baroque of Beckettian jazz philosophers, has come at exactly the right moment. The works — or, if one can apply the word to novels, plays (in the sense of playfulness, dialogicness, a love of cabaret singers, performative character, and a certain theatricality) — of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy discussed here underpin the development and success of Bolaño, but also hint at the rich tradition that infuses the utter difference from contemporary North American fiction which marks Junot Diaz’ miraculous novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Levine puts the difference down to the baroque: alive in Spanish, banned in English by the Royal Society, as recorded by Bishop Sprat. Cathedrals of curlicued words sound, to the contemporary English ear, a little — well — (Joycean / Burgessian / ) Catholic. Levine suggests that rhetoric, and specifically the sound-over-sense charm (meaning both song and spell) of punning and alliteration, are too sexy for Anglightenment culture. Language as sensorium, as generative, vegetative, intimate, elusive, mutable, fleshly, unstable: no assonance please, we’re British. But GCI (as he calls himself in his close-laborations with Levine), Puig and Sarduy (de)construct vertiginous, erotogenic pundean slangscapes; it’s Levine’s paranomasochistic task to Engflesh GCI’s Havanan without the CGI sheen of ‘authenticity’.

Levine has no time for church doctrines of faithfulness: she hasn’t married these texts to love, honour and obey their misquotations and misappropriations of high, low, popular and bacterial cultures. Promiscuity is the order of the day, both for characters who throw off the shackles of bourgeois mores (and psychological plausibility) and in the author-translator tango; Levine is much taken with Borges’ assertion that “the concept of the definitive text belongs to the realm of religion, or fatigue”. Constant, irreverent, shimmying motion is the order of the night: for Infante, translation offers the opportunity to rewrite his novels, including those as yet unwritten. As Levine points out, for example, exchanging tango lyrics for movie taglines in translating Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango inspired Puig’s movie dialogue epigraphs in The Buenos Aires Affair, whose easily-anglicisable title followed the heartbreak of turning Boquitas Pintadas into Heartbreak Tango (Lipstick Traces, sadly, being a song released twenty years too late for the Argentina of the 1940s Puig is recalling — more on lateness, later).

In Levine’s linking of Havana to New York, and linguistic thrills to noirish affairs, The Subversive Scribe suggests the translator as detective (inspired, perhaps, by Martin Rowson’s brilliant gesture of making the narrator of his graphic novel adaptation of The Waste Land a gumshoe named Kit Marlowe) and the novel(ist) as elusive femme fatale, a sub-version of Pound’s thrust at “making the translator a virile violator of the original, now a feminine treasure trove”. Rarely has the eros of translation been better recorded than in the letters between Levine and GCI, a fluid intermingling that implies translation as invagination, Derrida’s concept of “undecidable borders [in which] the outside becomes inside. The outer edge is reapplied inversely ‘to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket’”. It’s a feminisation of language itself, one that resonates in the epilogue, “Traduttora, Traditora,” which claims GCI, literary skirt-chaser, as a gossipy speaker of mother-tongue for whom sexual encounters are merely a prelude to “the pleasure seeker seeking pleasure only in the telling”.

Yet in her translation-as-reading/reading-as-translation of Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Levine also reveals the trans- of translation as the trans- of transsexuality, as well as transnationality. Cuban protagonist, Cobra, experiences a re- — or dis-? — orienting sex change in Morocco as “the Chinese torture of the one hundred slices”; and Levine’s gradual dissection of her translation of this novel (which sounds like a lost Acker/Genet collaboration) exquisitely tortures this reader who reads has enough Spanish to see the différance between. Yet no Spanish could be sufficient to follow these writers, particularly GCI and Sarduy, as, in exile, they go à la recherche du temps perdu, recreating the nuits d’antan. So the trans- of translation is also the trans- of transhistorical, of the shifting signification of pop culture in particular: do readers today still know the particular thrill of being Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, as Puig did as a boy? Levine notes that “Puig’s writing seeks the poetry in ‘bad taste’… thus questioning the category of ‘kitsch,’ which presupposes a judgmental” — to which I would add temporal — “distance”. Time’s more of a bitch than Hayworth.

Yet if Rita Hayworth is now indelibly The Shawshank Redemption’s embodiment of the sentimental femininity of freedom, then that sense of loss is one that GCI, Sarduy and Puig share. Far from revolutionary fervour, their novels — even in their overflowing excess of discourse — are wearily aware that they have arrived late at the party, somewhere between Eliot’s asynchronic swimming through the ruins and the closing-down sale at the megamall of North American postmodernism. Levine argues that “postcolonial Latin America has looked to Europe and North America, compensating for a lack of critical dialogue by translating into its own terms the so-called mainstream culture,” noting that Fredric Jameson compares the displacement of modernism by postmodernism with translation’s displacement of the source text or culture. Although not related etymologically, the late in trans-late is resonant: the translated text’s belatedness creates a temporal as well as cultural gap, further emphasising the cultural gap across which Latin American writers translate dominant European and North American culture — a gap once seen as a developmental delay of the (temporally) Second and Third Worlds. Neruda critic Enrico Mario Santí writes of the valuable delay of translation: “it is the act of translation… that provides the culmination to the earlier revision of literary history by becoming the figure that adopts Western signs as part of a new beginning”.

Postmodern, parodic, sprawling, overpopulated by decaying fragments of pop culture, the novels that Levine tackles are like the Pacific Trash Vortex: a sign of how late it is. The value of translation for her is that it offers the possibility of “a new beginning” located in an ethic of scavenging, recycling, working with what’s available to rethink and resist the expectation of originality (no such thing exists) and equally the notion that writers should simply mass-produce more, rather than revising or reworking. Levine (at)tends most to Borges, Joyce and Eco as her fellow travellers in carrying over (as excess, rather than aiming for a zero-sum game) words and ideas. Running through her delight in linguistic fecundity, like a river through Eden, is a fierce awareness of the political exigency of destabilising meaning, authenticity, canonicity, pomposity and the authoritarian pronouncementality. The more eccentric her strategies, the more we “see how traditional translation practices reveal a fear of the other, a need to turn the alien into the familiar. We are reminded that translation is a manipulative political act, that language — always scarred by its politico-historical context — can be manipulated to censure the foreign”.