Sergio Pitol - The Art of Flight

Translating in general is an agonizing process. It is acknowledging defeat in the face of unavoidable cultural loss. Consider the word campechano , which can be a gentilic that refers to inhabitants of the Mexican state of Campeche as well as an adjective meaning “good-natured” with a hint of indifference. For Mexicans, it is impossible to separate one meaning from the other. To describe someone as campechano is to say he possesses the same carefree bonhomie as the inhabitants of Campeche. This kind of cultural loss is inevitable, but the careful translator, especially the one who sees himself as a custodian of culture, will strive to minimize it. Such is translating every writer, but especially translating Pitol.

Translating Pitol means catching a parodic reference to The Communist Manifesto ; it means reading The Sound and the Fury in order to translate Caddy’s calzoncitos as “drawers.” It is knowing that “in the beginning was the Word,” and that inmundicia , in order to maintain the biblical reference, is best translated as “uncleanness” not “dirt” or “filth.” It is tracking down un-cited quotes by Galdós and Paz and Cortázar and Bobbio and Gide and James and Woolf and Duras and Beckmann. It is studying Beckmann’s tryptic The Departure to be able to translate Pitol’s painstaking description. It is reading not only the diaries of Mann but also those of his son Klaus and those of Lezama Lima. It is reading Berenson’s The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance .

Translating Pitol is learning that “will of reason” comes from Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and that “people of reason” is a reference to the culturally Hispanized. It is tracing idioms back to the Quixote and to The Celestina , and deciding if or how they can be retained. It is discovering titles to novels embedded in sentences. One example is “la princesita negra de los brezos” (“the little black princess of the heaths”), an arcane reference to a nineteenth-century novel, Das Heideprinzeβchen , by Eugenie Marlitt, translated into English as The Princess of the Moor , and Spanish as La princesita de los brezos . Pitol, however, modifies the title by adding the adjective negra (black) in order to describe an effeminate young black man of high rank whom he observes in a two-bit dive in Barcelona’s gothic quarter. Although Pitol employs the metaphor to great effect, it demands much of the reader and poses a herculean challenge for the translator. Ultimately, I had to determine to what end Pitol was employing such an esoteric literary reference. Was Pitol, as he is wont to be, simply in conversation with himself? In other words, was it nothing more than a recondite inside joke? Or was he providing an insight into the infinite ways literature lives inside all of us at all times?

Translating Pitol, then, requires being — or becoming — familiar not only with such arcane literary references but also the breadth of Mexican and Spanish culture, as well as American, British, Polish, German, and Russian literatures. Translating Pitol requires reading philosophy, theology, drama theory, and the Italian Renaissance.

Translating — and reading — Pitol provides an incomparable humanistic education.

In the end, translation is about making choices and having trust. A reader must accept that a translator has made good-faith decisions about how to render a word, a pair of words, an idiom, or a metaphor. Once that is done, the translation should stand on its own weight.

No translation happens in a vacuum, nor is it a solitary endeavor. Ideally, a translator enjoys the opportunity of collaborating or, at the very least, consulting with the author during the translation process. But in recent years Pitol has suffered from a cognitive disorder that has resulted in a progressive loss of language, making it impossible to consult with him on this translation. I cannot express to you how distressing this news was. Not only because of the effect that my inability to consult with Pitol would have on the translation but also knowing that he had lost the one thing that had meant the most to him in life, as he expresses throughout The Art of Flight, where we also learn how much Pitol valued the collaborative process, both as translator and translated writer. Finally, I recall with fondness the email he sent almost two years ago: “Your interest in my work fills me with happiness and gratitude. I would love nothing more than to see my Trilogy of Memory translated into English, a language that I adore and in which none of my books exists.”

Absent, then, the opportunity to consult with Pitol, I relied heavily on those secondary resources to which translators routinely recur: writers, other translators, and editors, all of whom are intimately familiar with Pitol’s work, and who graciously made themselves available throughout the process. My eternal thanks go out to Elena Poniatowska, Alberto Chimal, Raquel Castro, Beatriz Meyer, María Rosa Suárez, Luis Jorge Boone, Omar Villasana, Rodrigo Figueroa, Rodolfo Mendoza, Gregorio Doval, and Miguel Kimball-Santana.

I am also indebted to Charles Hatfield and Rainer Schulte at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas for their mentorship, to Michelle Johnson and Daniel Simon at World Literature Today for their unfailing support, and to Scott Esposito, whose thoughtful reading of the text and many suggestions made this translation better. A special thanks to my publisher, Will Evans, for his unwavering patience and commitment to publishing not only this translation, but also The Journey and The Magician of Vienna , which along with The Art of Flight make up Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory.”

More than anyone, however, I am indebted to maestro Sergio Pitol, for serving as my guide and tutor through the literary and linguistic worlds that were formerly unknown to me, for his erudition, for his boundless imagination, and, finally, for his infinite and inextinguishable spirit.

George Henson

Dallas, Texas, 2015

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