The dinghy gently bumped the hull, he lifted out his arms and sought the gunwale in the shadows. His body followed after them, and left him dangling out. I don’t think I can hold on, he told himself serenely. I’ve got no more to give…
His face was pressed against the hull, the odour of the boat just like the odour of the ditch.
It’s dead from end to end, he said. The river’s got inside it.
His hold began to slacken.
He tried to lift his body up before he lost his grip, and the pain came back to life. Perhaps it was what he needed. The pain brought back some life, and with the gunwale for support he found his feet. If he could stand up on the dinghy’s bench, the gunwale would be waist high, and all he’d have to do would be to topple forward over it and hang there from the boat. He put his first foot down and then he waited for a while. And then, and with the same intent, he stood up on the other foot and dropped across the gunwale. He didn’t try to check the blow, and felt as if his innards burst. He hung there on the gunwale, exactly as he’d planned, and felt the dinghy start to slip away beneath his feet, and that his blood was warm and oily as it rippled down his legs.
Slowly and determinedly, with not a thought of anything, not even of the pain, still vivid and enraged, as if it was a case of simply testing to the limit the extent of his endurance, until it was exhausted, he lifted up his body and fell down onto the deck.
There, he thought, with a smile that never reached his lips. There we are, old chap…
He was lying here like this when he heard the tired drumming of an engine from the Sueco entering the Bajo.
It’s Lefty, he told himself, his face against the deck planks.
He lifted up his head, and there above the gunwale he recognised the darkened silhouette of the barge, riding on the current through the doubtful light of evening.
He doesn’t need to come in on the current with this flood tide, he thought.
He felt no pain at all now, but his body weighed like lead. He tried to sit, and succeeded only in falling and crashing his head against the deck. But he was measured and persistent, and after two or three attempts he sat himself up at last. Now he was sitting on the deck, his back against the housing and the river there in front of him.
The wind blew from the river. That damp and stealthy breeze, like the grazing of a shadow.
The boat released a small complaint.
The night was coming down.
He felt nothing of his body now, not even as a weight, now he felt the boat instead. Himself and the boat, this unhappy Aleluya, were now a single body that was dying with the day. The timbers and the stories of the past made their complaints through him.
He watched the darkened river with his big eyes like those of a dying fish.
Something of the day remained across the River Plate, but already it was night around the boat.
Long Fourcade must have passed an hour ago, he thought.
The wind got up again.
He could no longer see the meagre light he’d watched earlier, far off in the distance, but he remained before the night with his big eyes of a dying fish now opened very wide.
Translator’s Notes
It may be of interest to signal where I moored my point of honest dealing in my translation of Haroldo Conti’s Castilian-Spanish text Sudeste. It was the rhythmic sensibility that drew me into the novel, from its first lines:
Entre el Pajarito y el río abierto, curvándose bruscamente hacia el norte, primero más y más angosto, casi hasta la mitad, luego abriéndose y contorneándose suavemente hasta la desembocadura, serpea, oculto en las primeras islas, el arroyo Anguilas.
In Rhythms (Stanford, 1995), Nicolas Abraham describes rhythm as the origin of the ‘fascinated consciousness’ that projects a story forward and produces the sense of enchantment we know when reading the best stories. My reading of Sudeste was formed by this immediately intuited aspect, the rhythms ever-present in the novel’s style, which are reinforced and intensified by the cycle of the seasons and the movements of nature, the intervals of the protagonist Boga’s journeys and the laconic dialogues with those he comes across around the rivers of the Paraná Delta. Mooring a translation to this stylistic feature of the novel was for me the natural choice, but it required the identification of suitable points of anchorage.
Conti’s use of punctuation forms a distinctive ‘respiration’ in his text, a rhythmic feature that is also pronounced in well-known authors such as Isabel Allende — and often cancelled in the translation of their texts. The difficult interest in writing Sudeste into English centred on the presentation of this respiration in a language with a quite distinct music. The work of translating the poetic quality of a text lies in the selection of words and phrases with appropriate sounds to convey the relevant meaning, but the flexibility required when structuring such phrases into sentences that present the rhythmic style of Conti’s writing brings word size into play.
The register of Conti’s text is poetic but, at the same time, its narrative is simple and direct. Shorter words are not only more flexible bricks in the building of lines of rhythmised text, they also lend themselves to his plain-speaking register. It is at the level of this bricking that Southeaster (South-East in the Immigrant Press edition of 2013) is anchored to Sudeste.
Not that I was aware of this for many months into the writing: while reading lends itself to the analytical act of interpreting, writing is rather more intuitive work. It was the rhythmic sensibility of the novel at both its underlying, narrative level, and at the surface level of its respiration, that formed the enchantment through which the writing of the translation found its form.
Discussion of the practice of translation is keen in the matter of the basic beliefs, policies or procedures — the theory — a translator works from. For a fiction translation, it requires study alongside the novel in its first language to suggest where the work of translation has been moored, to which aspects of the source text it shows ‘fidelity’. But a translator is first a reader, and Marcel Proust has something to say about the unfaithfulness of readers:
Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women.1
Were the reading translator able to feel sure of any such ascribed authorial intention, writing its exact reproduction into a new language would still be the commonly argued ‘impossibility’ of translation.
The concern of the practising translator might better be seen as that of an honest dealer in the work of bringing the source text into a new tongue. Distances will remain between a source and its translation, those natural in the play between the languages involved and, apropos of Proust’s lament, those between the readings of the author and translator. What matters is to find a text declaring itself worthy of our company as readers: the faithfulness in that.
I have retained terms from the Spanish text to name particular features of the geography of the Delta where the use of an English term might mislead in what it suggested. The most important of these terms is related to the spectacular movements in the water level of the rivers and streams that are the principal influence on the lives of those who live here. The bajante is the fiercest of these, when the rivers can literally empty themselves of water, but the crecientes, under the influence of winds from the south or east, are also impressive, and intervene in the novel with particular force. These can reasonably be translated as the kind of surge experienced in other environments, and so I use this term in the text. Local geographical names are also retained, despite the obvious temptation of signalling the Terror Shallows [Bajo del Temor], for instance.