{"id":276886,"date":"2010-03-08T15:25:54","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T15:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/03\/08\/interview-with-margaret-schwartz\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:41:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:41:02","slug":"interview-with-margaret-schwartz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/03\/08\/interview-with-margaret-schwartz\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Margaret Schwartz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on last week’s serialization of Margaret Schwartz’s introduction<\/a> to Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)<\/em>, here’s an interview that she did with Meredith Keller, one of our current interns.<\/p>\n

Meredith Keller: I know you spent your Fulbright year studying Macedonio Fernandez\u2019s life and work, but how did you first come across him?<\/b><\/p>\n

Margaret Schwartz: I first encountered Macedonio in a lovely phrase from Borges: \u201cWhat will die with me when I die? What fragile, pathetic form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a roan horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?\u201d I have always been fascinated by the idea of traces\u2014small, seemingly insignificant tokens that mysteriously open on to hidden worlds. That\u2019s what the name Macedonio Fernandez was for me. I was moved enough by the passage to look him up, started reading him, and that was it for me. I remember the first time I walked by the corner of Serrano and Charcas, too\u2014there\u2019s a gas station there, now.<\/p>\n

MK: Aside from those studying Argentine literature (or working at Open Letter), I don\u2019t think many American readers are familiar with Macedonio. How is he perceived in Argentina?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: I\u2019d say that Macedonio is considered a folk hero more than a literary giant. Everybody knows him, but only the academics and literary folk have actually read him. Popularly, however, he\u2019s sometimes viewed with more affection than Borges, who is often considered a snob or a tourist attraction. In academic and literary circles, where people do read and respect him a great deal, he\u2019s often viewed as a kind of postmodern visionary. There are lots of books in Spanish about his prescience on topics as diverse as postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. There is also a group of young people, hipsters I guess, who run an \u201cAnarchist Archive\u201d in San Telmo and they have some Macedonio first editions.
\nI think if you\u2019re down there as an American and you\u2019re interested in Macedonio, people treat you really well, because he\u2019s not so well known outside of Argentina. They feel really honored and excited that you\u2019ve taken the time to discover someone that they feel is deeply intertwined with their national values and the peculiarity of what makes them Argentines. And that\u2019s across social strata. The first time I was in Buenos Aires I stayed at a kind of ladies boarding house, and the women I met there were all really working class and not very educated. But they seriously framed a copy of the letter of permission I got from Macedonio\u2019s granddaughter, Maite Obieta, that I was going to use for the Fulbright application, because they were so emotional about my work. Strange, but true, I swear!<\/p>\n

MK: Museum must\u2019ve been a particularly difficult book to translate. Was there a theoretical (or maybe procedural?) approach that you used for this project?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: The key to my process in this case is the hours and hours I spent in Macedonio\u2019s archive, reading his handwritten manuscripts, notebooks, and diaries. Almost all of Macedonio\u2019s books were published posthumously, which means he never got a chance to decide what order things should be in, and what things should get cut and what things should stay. That biographical fact, plus the spiraling, open-ended nature of his prose and the ideas he\u2019s trying to express about consciousness, make reading him (and translation is in some ways a very special kind of reading) into a sort of detective work. You work with clues\u2014with traces, like I said before. And you have to go with your hunches. In my case, those hours spent reading accumulated in my subconscious to make a kind of Macedonian murmur. It took a long time to hear\u2014but there\u2019s an earnestness and melancholy about him, despite all his irony and silliness. Once I realized that, I found I had a voice for him, and I had the confidence to translate him without trying to be ridiculously faithful to his insane syntax.<\/p>\n

As for theoretical approaches\u2014is it clich\u00e9 at this point to talk about Benjamin? Though I don\u2019t buy the idea of a shared linguistic essence, his ideas about translation resonate with my process for The Museum of Eterna\u2019s Novel<\/em>. As a translator, you have to believe there\u2019s something there<\/em>, that you can pull out of the source language and sort of embed in the target language. I\u2019d hesitate to call it a truth or an essence, but it\u2019s something<\/em>. So when I was translating Macedonio I would kind of put my ear to the tracks, metaphorically speaking, and listen for what he might sound like in English. Maybe that\u2019s why when I do readings of Macedonio I sometimes end up sounding like my old Jewish relatives. <\/p>\n

MK: Which leads nicely into my next question: Do you have any favorite sentences from the book?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: Sigh! There are so many good ones. When I read Thirlwell\u2019s preface I was struck by some of the passages he quoted. I was like, \u201cWait, did I translate that? It\u2019s beautiful!\u201d You get very close to things when you\u2019re working on a book. So I\u2019ll pick the one that a friend picked: \u201cAll the statues that saddened the plazas were evicted, and in their place grew the best roses.\u201d <\/p>\n

MK: I know this if your first book-length translation to be published, but are there other Spanish writers you\u2019ve worked on? Ones that are maybe easier to translate than Macedonio? It\u2019s hard to imagine anyone starting off with such a complex novel . . .<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: I have actually mostly translated Macedonio. [blush.] I was working on another of his books, called The Newcomer\u2019s Papers<\/em>, when I met Chad from Open Letter, and we started working on _Museum of Eterna\u2019s Novel_\u2014which I had also translated parts of, but wasn\u2019t actively working on at the time. Macedonio is what made me want to do literary translation.<\/p>\n

I did also translate an issue of Popular Communication<\/em>, which is an academic journal in Media Studies (I\u2019m an assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University). That was a really rewarding experience, because so much work in our field is global, but it doesn\u2019t get circulated as it should because all of our major journals are in English. So I really salute Popular Communication<\/em> for that\u2014it\u2019s much rarer in academia than you\u2019d think.<\/p>\n

But the experience of doing that translation\u2014well, everything seems so much easier after<\/em> Macedonio! But it was also interesting to find that one still struggles with voice\u2014how to make it sound like an academic article would in English, with the same kind of diction, the same kind of authoritative register. It was fun.<\/p>\n

MK: In your introduction to the novel, you cite Scalabrini Ort\u00edz\u2019s statement that Macedonio was Buenos Aires\u2019s only authentic philosopher, and elaborate that \u201cHe\u2019s an archetype, a kind of distillation of what it is to think like an Argentine, of the particular poetics and mournful solitude of the South.\u201d Is there something unique about the way Argentina\/Macedonio thinks?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: Argentina has typically viewed itself as kind of unique in Latin America\u2014a sort of different breed. Which is why if you talk to people from other parts of that region they\u2019ll often say that Argentines are snobs! But historically, Argentina developed as a nation in a far corner of the Spanish empire, during the colonial period. The land is mostly flat, with lots and lots of plains\u2014the pampas\u2014and so it developed as a ranching country, much like the American west. It had a very small population of immigrants, and its indigenous population was mostly nomadic\u2014not like the big civilizations of Peru and Mexico. So if you put together those factors\u2014the small population, the quickly decimated native people, and the huge expanses of land\u2014you get a certain individualism, and a certain sense of isolation. The archetypal Argentine is the gaucho\u2014a man who works as a ranch hand and as a mercenary, who travels with the herd and who sells his knife or his tracking skills to the highest bidder. Romantically he\u2019s often pictured with his mate and his guitar, alone on the prairie, much like our cowboys.<\/p>\n

Now Macedonio, of course, was no kind of cowboy. But he came from a very old family, one that traced its roots back to the earliest colonial times. He was Argentine, through and through, in a nation that identifies itself, much as the U.S. does, as built on immigration. And he was a highly original thinker who believed in the uniqueness of the Argentine people. His writing is full of witty references to life in Buenos Aires, and to little details of everyday life that have a very distinct Argentine flair to them: mate<\/em>, a strong tea drunk from a gourd; empanadas<\/em>, alfajores<\/em>, whistling tea kettles and chilly winter patios and lost buttons and dimly lit street corners. His writing, but more properly his persona, which he cultivated in life and which Borges amplified after his death, exemplifies the kind of courteous, self-effacing, idealistic yet melancholy feeling that is part of the romanticism in Argentine literature about those empty, lonely, vast expanses to the south.<\/p>\n

MK: Anyone who\u2019s ever tried to translate literature knows that it takes more than fluency, a solid grasp of grammar, and a good dictionary\u2014the true challenge and key to a successful translation is rendering the poetics and refined artistry of the original prose in the target language. You describe Macedonio\u2019s prose as \u201cbaroque\u201d and \u201ccomplicated and ornate,\u201d where the \u201cdiction is antiquated if not necessarily high-register.\u201d How did you go about conveying these characteristics in English?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: I tried to keep the register high, even absurdist, without tangling the syntax too much. I remember insisting that the verb \u201cto redact\u201d not be changed to the simpler \u201cto write,\u201d for that reason. There\u2019s something of the old-timey soap box salesman in Macedonio\u2014there are no cars<\/em> or carts<\/em> in his world, only conveyances, contraptions<\/em>. He also reminds me of a silent film comedian, like Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin: there are a lot of exaggerated, winking asides and grandiose yet absurd gestures, a lot of madcap, Keystone-Cops-esque sequences. So where I could, I let run on sentences run on. I tried to find a way to keep all that loopiness, even when sometimes I had to straighten out the syntax or cut a long sentence up.<\/p>\n

MK: Do you have any recommendations or advice for aspiring literary translators?<\/b><\/p>\n

MS: OK well this will sound very goofy, but it\u2019s true: Translate what you love! I worked for ten years<\/em> on this, and I never hoped to get it published. Then one day I met Chad at a conference and he asked me what I was working on. I said, \u201cOh, you won\u2019t have heard of him, he\u2019s this Argentine avant-gardist . . .\u201d and he said, \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to get the rights to that book for the past five years.\u201d Suddenly I had a press that really believed in translation and an editor who loved the project. It was perfect. You\u2019re not going to make a million being a literary translator, so why not let your passion guide you? You\u2019ll be happier, and you\u2019ll attract people who care about the project the same way you do. It\u2019s a win-win!<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following on last week’s serialization of Margaret Schwartz’s introduction to Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), here’s an interview that she did with Meredith Keller, one of our current interns. Meredith Keller: I know you spent your Fulbright year studying Macedonio Fernandez\u2019s life and work, but how did you first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2616,12626,31136,31176],"class_list":["post-276886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-interview","tag-macedonio-fernandez","tag-margaret-schwartz","tag-meredith-keller"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349296,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276886\/revisions\/349296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}