‘“This then,” thought the princess, “was the change Daddy announced to me, only I was unable to see it. It wasn’t enough to dream it; the dream had to become flesh in my body. They may be tadpoles now, but when they are born they will have changed into little boys and girls just like any others — no, not just like any others: more beautiful than any others, as beautiful as suns. This time everything will be different,” thought the princess that night before she fell fast asleep.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have, in different ways, rewritten this novel.
On the one hand, the English-language version of The Islands is shorter than the Spanish original by some hundred pages. When I began writing Las Islas in 1992, some of its realities required a certain degree of introducing to the reader: the internet, virtual reality, new drugs. Today we take them for granted to such an extent than any explanation or over-insistence would be embarrassingly redundant, so that explanatory material has gone. In other cases, I have let go of elements that I judged would be of little interest to readers outside Argentina.
Turning my 600-page novel into a two-hour play in 2011 allowed me to see how further cuts inevitably increased the power of what remained. At the same time, my work on the adaptation, together with the contribution of director Alejandro Tantanian and our wonderful team of actors, brought new action, scenes and dialogue into play: some of these I found so irresistible I had to include them in this renewed version of the novel.
Translation is an exacter science than writing. Ian Barnett’s practised eye detected many errors and inconsistencies that I was happy to mend; some of these corrections have found their way back into Spanish, in the new edition to be published this year in Buenos Aires.
I believe, with Borges, that ‘the concept of the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion’, and that what endures, in art as in life, is not what lasts but what lives on, not what achieves finality but what constantly transforms and renews itself. I don’t know if The Islands will endure, but I have grown fond of its penchant for mutability, of its refusal to settle down and sit still.
Who knows if there are other versions yet to come.
Carlos Gamerro
March 2012, Buenos Aires
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