{"id":429972,"date":"2020-04-10T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=429972"},"modified":"2020-04-12T17:40:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-12T21:40:34","slug":"a-dream-come-true-by-juan-carlos-onetti-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/04\/10\/a-dream-come-true-by-juan-carlos-onetti-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Dream Come True” by Juan Carlos Onetti [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Spencer Ruchti<\/strong>\u00a0is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. His writing has appeared in <\/em>The\u00a0Adroit Journal,\u00a0The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Dream Come True<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Archipelago Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Juan Carlos Onetti\u2019s characters imagine pissing on one another\u2019s faces, smoke cigarettes in funny ways, wear hats (donning hats, removing hats, tipping hats), run wild with euphoria through the frigid night, fall face-first in cornfields, suffer from happiness without warning. They are accused of being \u201cruined by Hamlet<\/em>,\u201d turn into dogs (or do they?), feel all at once \u201cunworthy of so much hatred, so much love, so much willingness to cause suffering.\u201d They are ridiculous men. They are mean and corrupt. They are serious men. (And yes, they are mostly men.)<\/p>\n

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1909, Juan Carlos Onetti was the author of more than two dozen books, including A Brief Life<\/em>, his most popular translated into English, and a recipient of the Cervantes Prize and the Uruguay National Literature Prize. Onetti\u2019s novels and stories are often set in the fictional town of Santa Mar\u00eda, a place that Katherine Silver calls \u201cOnetti\u2019s Macondo.\u201d Silver also quotes Onetti when citing her guiding light in bringing these stories to English-language readers: \u201cA poet is someone who writes things\u2014not necessarily in verse\u2014that arouse in me mysterious sensations, which I call poetic, for lack of a better word.\u201d<\/p>\n

Archipelago Books\u2019 monumental collection of Onetti\u2019s stories, A Dream Come True<\/em>, spans over 54 years of the author\u2019s dense and difficult to work. It takes a certain kind of foolishness to follow Onetti, let alone to enjoy him. The pleasure of reading him is often at the sentence level: take one of my favorites from \u201cThe Possible Baldi,\u201d about a lawyer who invents multiple identities for himself. \u201cHysterical and literary, Baldi sighed.\u201d What the hell does it mean? I care not; I feel designed to love it.<\/p>\n

Edmund White has called these sentences \u201cpoetically correct but literally false,\u201d \u00e0 la the Modernists of Onetti\u2019s lifetime (Joyce comes to mind, and many have cited Faulkner). Onetti is never satisfied with any singular meaning. If anything, his is a language that extends beyond comprehension, probably to the chagrin of his few readers. How fortunate, then, that Onetti has Katherine Silver rendering his absurd theatrics, a translator whose vocabulary and rhythm provide the engine of this collection. Here\u2019s a passage from Onetti\u2019s earliest story, \u201cAvenida de Mayo \u2013 Diagonal \u2013 Avendia de Mayo\u201d:<\/p>\n

Owen rose and threw away his cigarette.<\/p>\n

\u2018Ya.\u2019<\/p>\n

Suaid started walking, trembling with nervous happiness. Nobody on Calle Florida knew how oddly literary his feeling was. The tall women and the doorman at the Grand were equally oblivious to the polyfurcation Owen\u2019s ya<\/em> took on in his brain. Because ya<\/em>, or ja<\/em>, could be either Spanish or German; and from here there arose unforeseen paths, paths where Owen\u2019s incomprehensible figure split into a thousand different shapes, many of them antagonistic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I love most here is Silver\u2019s use of the word \u201cpolyfurcation,\u201d a cognate of Onetti\u2019s polifurcaci\u00f3n <\/em>in the original, a word that in a strictly prescriptionist sense does not exist in English. <\/em>Silver\u2019s solution here is elegant and simple\u2014a mashing together of \u201cpoly\u201d and \u201cbifurcate\u201d in lieu of splinter<\/em>, fork<\/em>, subdivide<\/em>, words that fail to fulfill the mathematical complexity of Onetti\u2019s polifurcaci\u00f3n<\/em>. \u201cPolyfurcate\u201d here means to atomize, as if with the intent to obscure the meaning of the original thing\u2014just as in the above passage, when Owen\u2019s thoughts fragment into \u201cunforeseen paths\u201d and \u201cincomprehensible figures.\u201d And like Owen\u2019s thoughts, A Dream Come True <\/em>is a polyfurcating text, a collection at odds with itself, at odds with clarity in the name of aesthetic truths. A complex Onetti sentence may not make sense on the first read, but thanks to Katherine Silver, one can always feel joy in the vibrations of his prose.<\/p>\n

Some have compared Onetti to Cort\u00e1zar and Garcia Marquez. In his stories he pivots from modernist ambitions to playful noir (see the map at the end of \u201cThe Tragic End of Alfredo Plumet\u201d) to the nightmare logic of David Lynch. The title piece, \u201cA Dream Come True,\u201d is a story about a struggling theater impresario, down on his luck after a lousy season, who agrees to stage a nearly impossible play for a mysterious woman. The woman hasn\u2019t a word written down, and only has a vague vision of what must occur on stage\u2014a scene, she later reveals, that came to her in a dream, and that she is willing to pay a considerable sum to reproduce. When the play is finally performed to perfection (to an empty theater, of course), the mysterious woman dies instantly, having, the reader assumes, reached some final equilibrium, though of what kind? We are never meant to know. \u201cI understood that this was it, this was what the woman was searching for,\u201d the director thinks. \u201cI understood everything as clearly as if it were one of those things one learns forever as a child and words are later useless to explain.\u201d Sleep and death are inextricable as Onetti (literally!) dramatizes the act of passing into the void. A line from Anne Carson\u2019s Glass, Irony, and God <\/em>comes to mind: \u201cWho in a nightmare can help himself?\u201d<\/p>\n

The collection also includes \u201cA Long Tale\u201d and \u201cThe Face of Disgrace,\u201d two pieces published sixteen years apart that present two version of the same story, with entire sentences or phrases shared between the two (the latter seems to be an expansion of the former). The narrator, Capurro, is staying at a resort of some kind where he might grieve his brother\u2019s suicide. In both stories, Capurro becomes obsessed with a young woman he sees riding a bike along the shore. In \u201cA Long Tale,\u201d he is blamed for her murder, and the reader is never completely acquainted with the truth. In the \u201cThe Face of Disgrace,\u201d Capurro tells a new version of the story, this time from the first person, and in it accounts for his intimate relationship with the woman, as well as an alibi for the time of her death\u2014and in the end he\u2019s still arrested for her gruesome death. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ll sign whatever you want, without reading it. The funny thing is, you\u2019re wrong. But it doesn\u2019t matter. Nothing, not even this, really matters at all.\u201d Capurro ponders the \u201cdeceptive, perhaps deliberate, distortion\u201d of his memories, and the garden of forking paths that\u2014perhaps for the author, but certainly for the reader\u2014allows both versions of the same story to coexist in Onetti\u2019s literary universe.<\/p>\n

Onetti can be cruel, Onetti can be a slog, but who wouldn\u2019t be thrilled by a story like \u201cMontaigne,\u201d about a wealthy man who invites six of his closest friends to watch his suicide? \u201cI don\u2019t want to ruin your Sunday,\u201d he notes in the invitation, \u201cWhoever fails me will be cursed because he won\u2019t have the opportunity to make amends. There will be abundant food and drink.\u201d The suicide is mostly greeted with disbelief and boredom. Onetti\u2019s tone is perfectly deadpan, skewering the malaise of the young and rich, their poverty of thought, and their total indifference to humanity.<\/p>\n

Onetti\u2019s late work is marked by brief vignettes and unpublished sketches, which give this collection a truly complete feeling. The reader sees the author at all stages of the writing process, and all the stages of his career. How fortunate we are to have this archive of stories preserved in English, in all of their mysterious sensations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Spencer Ruchti\u00a0is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The\u00a0Adroit Journal,\u00a0The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[70272,2176,70262,696,70252,37876],"class_list":["post-429972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-a-dream-come-true","tag-archipelago-books","tag-juan-carlos-onetti","tag-katherine-silver","tag-spencer-ruchti","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429972","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=429972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430012,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429972\/revisions\/430012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}