The Translator’s Invisibility

Blackburn’s translation has all the hallmarks of fluency—linear syntax, univocal meaning, current usage—easily setting up the “he” as the position from which the narrative is intelligible, the description true, the setting real. The translation is also quite close to the Spanish text, except for one telling deviation: the parenthetical remark in Blackburn’s last sentence revises the Spanish. Cortázar’s text reads, “de espaldas a la puerta que lo hubiera molestado como una irritante posibilidad de intrusiones” (in a close version, “with his back to the door which annoyed him like an irritating possibility of intrusions”). Blackburn’s revision adds the aside, “had he thought of it,” which suddenly shifts to a new discursive level, a different narrative point of view, at once omniscient and authorial, identifying the “he” as a character in Cortázar’s text and briefly undermining the realist illusion established in the previous sentences. Blackburn’s fluent translation possesses considerable stylistic refinement, present even in this subtle revision, an addition to the Spanish that is very much in tune with Cortázar’s narrative technique.

Blackburn’s choices show him strengthening the realist illusion when the narrative suddenly shifts to the description of the novel, positioning the reader in the lovers, erasing the line between fiction and reality. But then—following the Spanish text closely—he momentarily redraws that line by using literary terms to describe the novel (“dialogue/diálogo,” “pages/páginas”) and by making a tacit reference to the reading businessman (“one felt / se sentía”):

The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not {270} come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity.

(Cortázar 1967:64)

On the one hand, Blackburn increases the verisimilitude of the translation by adding more precise detail, like the phrase “through the forest,” which is absent from the Spanish text (in another passage, he similarly adds the phrase “leading in the opposite direction” to “On the path” (ibid.:65)). On the other hand, Blackburn exaggerates the melodramatic aspects of the scene: he uses “lustful, panting” to render one Spanish word, anhelante (“craving,” “yearning,” “panting”), and chooses “raced” for corría (instead of the flatter “ran”). Two other additions to the Spanish text produce the same exaggerated effect: “unforeseen,” in the sentence, “Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes” / “Nada había sido olvidado: cortadas, azares, posibles errores” (Cortázar 1967:65; and 1964:10)); and “flying,” in the sentence, “he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying” / “él se volvió un instante para verla correr con pelo suelto” (Cortázar 1967:66; and 1964:10). Blackburn’s melodramatic lexicon reinforces the realist illusion, making the narrative more suspenseful, suturing the reader more tightly in the lovers’ position; yet it also classes the narrative in a popular fictional genre, the steamy romance, encouraging the reader to interrogate the realist illusionism that dominates English-language fiction—most obviously in bestselling novels. Cortázar’s text challenges individualistic cultural forms like realism by suggesting that human subjectivity is not self-originating or self-determining, but constructed in narrative, including popular genres. This and the fact that it is a businessman who turns out to be living a fiction dovetail with the critique of bourgeois values, economic and cultural, that recurs in Blackburn’s other writing.