Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño and the Translator's Task
Jeremy Garber, Powells.com
If literature is indeed "a dangerous occupation," as Roberto Bolaño surmised in his speech accepting the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos Prize (for The Savage Detectives), then 2666 is certainly his attestation. Completed (though left partially unedited) shortly before his death in 2003, 2666 is a monumental work, one deserving of the most exalted acclaim.
 The late Chilean writer's masterpiece fuses many different genres and styles, yet is comparable to no other novel in modern literature. It comprises an entire world, perhaps the entire world. Divided into five distinct, yet synthesizing parts, 2666 stands not only as the enviable acme of literary creation, but also as an act of utmost tenacity and courage.
"At least from my perspective," Natasha Wimmer says, "2666 is much cooler in tone and more formal, while The Savage Detectives is more personal, both in the autobiographical sense and also in the sense that it's about the characters."
Wimmer should know. She translated both novels into English.
Additionally, Wimmer has translated works by Mario Vargas Llosa (Letters to a Young Novelist, The Way to Paradise, and The Language of Passion); Laura Restrepo (Delirium); Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Dirty Havana Trilogy); Gabriel Zaid (The Secret of Fame and So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance); and Rodrigo Fresán (Kensington Gardens). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Believer.
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"[A] consummate display of literary virtuosity powered by an emotional thrust that can rip your heart out. Unquestionably the finest novel of the present century — and we may be saying the same thing 92 years from now." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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"A novel like 2666 is its own preserving machine, delivering itself into our hearts, sentence by questing, unassuming sentence.... Bolaño has proven [literature] can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable." Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review
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"[An] utterly unique achievement — a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaño's unsettling mix of precision and mystery." San Francisco Chronicle
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"A contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature." Susan Sontag
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"Often somber, even haunting, these short stories unfurl in the low-lit peripheries of prescience and immediacy that Bolaño most likely knew all too well." Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
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"Bolaño the poet's 'deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet' can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play." Publishers Weekly
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"As today's Chile moves to distance itself from the atrocities of the military period, it is forced to confront the ghosts of its past. In Bolaño's able hands, those treacherous ghosts have universal value." Los Angeles Times
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"Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, Nazi Literature is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have." New York Times
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Jeremy: Did translating The Savage Detectives make translating 2666 any easier, having become familiar with Bolaño's pervasive use of idiomatic language and slang?
Natasha Wimmer: It did, although maybe less so in terms of idiomatic language and slang and more in terms of some of his turns of phrase and the rhythms of his sentences.
2666 is actually quite a bit less idiomatic than The Savage Detectives, though individual sections are very idiomatic and were just as challenging.
The Savage Detectives is told from the first-person voices of more than forty characters; 2666, although there are lots of perspectives, is pretty much told entirely from an omniscient third-person. That made it a pretty different book to translate. In fact, I think that people who read The Savage Detectives might be surprised by how different it is.
At least from my perspective, 2666 is much cooler in tone and more formal, while The Savage Detectives is more personal, both in the autobiographical sense and also in the sense that it's about the characters. The section that is most similar is the Amalfitano section ("The Part about Amalfitano").
Jeremy: In the essay you wrote, Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives, you mentioned that he took seriously the idea of literary immortality. Are you aware to what extent he was cognizant of his own burgeoning reputation before he died?
Wimmer: Extremely so. Just a few months before he died, he was at a conference in Seville, where they named him the best living writer in Latin America. He was definitely aware of it, and he was also very aware of the fact that 2666 would be his masterpiece, or that he intended to make it his masterpiece. He was always telling his friends that he was writing his big book. So yes, he was aware of it.
Jeremy: In that same essay, you also cite the 1976 infrarealist manifesto he wrote, in which he excoriates the so-called coffeehouse poets. Presumably, he read many, if not all, of the Boom writers; he not only rejected them stylistically but, seemingly, also thematically. Do you suspect there will be a legion of young Latin American writers who attempt to emulate him, or worse, expropriate his style as their own?
Wimmer: I'm sure there will be people who try to emulate him, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. At the same time, I feel like writers of the younger generation who are making their mark have struck out in all directions. Maybe that's the mark of this generation, that they're not united under a single banner like the writers of the Boom, who shared many more characteristics.
Jeremy: In your Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666, you wrote, "It could be argued that the non-sequitur is Bolaño's trademark literary device, and that in it reside all the temptations and terrors of the random."
How much of 2666's overall effect and that of his writing in general is attributable to this disorienting and tangential use of narrative? It seems there is a certain dread employed in his use of them, as if they served to delay the inevitable horror that patiently awaits on the next page.
Wimmer: That's a perfect way of putting it. I mean, on the macro level, 2666 is made up of all these stories within a story. Especially in the last section ("The Part about Archimboldi"), it seems as if Bolaño is always breaking away to tell some tangentially related story. And then on the level of language, he drops all logic and heads into this rift that only vaguely makes sense. I think that's intentional.
It really struck me how different By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives, and 2666 are. No one ever says this, but to me they seem very different, and I've sort of racked my brain trying to figure out what the common goals are behind them. There is this anti-rhetorical drive where he is trying to avoid saying the obvious, even to the point of trying to avoid eloquence, and he drops into something that doesn't quite make sense.
Jeremy: I read in the notes from his executor at the end [of the uncorrected proof] that he was very conscientious when he wrote and would go back and polish later. I've heard differing accounts of how finished part five ["The Part about Archimboldi"] was when he died. Some have said he had finished and was merely tinkering, while others posit that he had major revisions to do. Do you have any indication?
Wimmer: I don't know. If I hadn't known it was unfinished, I wouldn't have guessed. That's probably the best I could say.
Jeremy: I've read that you lived in Spain as a child and that's where you learned Spanish, and then later you studied it in college. When did you decide that translating literary fiction was something you'd excel at?
Wimmer: I never thought of it as a career, but I liked the idea of translating. There was a translating class in college that I was interested in taking, but it never fit into my schedule. It didn't occur to me that this was something I could make a living doing until I worked in publishing.
I always knew that I wanted to be involved with books in some way. In college, I pretty much decided I would never be a fiction writer. I ended up trying publishing, and from there I moved to translating. It seemed to me that translating was the way I could get closest to the book without actually writing it myself, and I found that to be satisfying.
Jeremy: Do you initially query a publisher about translating a specific author, or an author's work, or do publishing houses employ staff translators?
Wimmer: The way it happened for me was that I was working editorial at FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux], and FSG does a lot of books in translation. Because my background was in Spanish literature, I did a lot of work looking at sample translations and working with translated manuscripts.
At a certain point, a book came in, Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, and we were having a hard time finding someone to translate it. I thought, Maybe I'll give it a try. That's how I got started. I got in through the back door, and I was grateful to FSG for giving me the chance.
Jeremy: I suspect most readers are unaware of the translation process. I've read elsewhere that you proceed page by page. Is that your general method of working?
Wimmer: I usually do between five and ten pages a day. I do a quick translation in the afternoon of, say, five pages, and the next morning I revise. Working that way, I make my way through the book, and then at the end I spend a pretty long time going back over the whole thing and revising it again.
Jeremy: Do you ever return to something you've worked on, after it's been published, and wish you had the chance to rework it?
Wimmer: I have a hard time looking at anything that I've translated for months, sometimes even longer, after it comes out. It's painful. I think writers feel the same way, but for translators it's almost worse because there are so many compromises. You know there are places where you could have done a better job.
Jeremy: Besides Bolaño, you've also translated works by Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Restrepo, Gutiérrez, whom you just mentioned, Gabriel Zaid, and Rodrigo Fresán (who was one of Bolaño's friends). Are there different challenges in translating works by authors who stylistically are so different from one another?
Wimmer: The biggest challenge for a translator from Spanish is that there are so many regional and different kinds of Spanish. I have not yet translated a book by a writer from Spain; everything has been by Latin American writers. In some ways, Bolaño comes the closest because he was in Spain for so many years.
It's a major challenge. I do a lot of research on a particular regional vocabulary. In translating The Savage Detectives, I spent a couple months in Mexico City. There's always more I can do in that regard.
Jeremy: Did you travel anywhere while translating 2666?
Wimmer: No. I could have gone back to Mexico or I could have gone to Germany or I could have gone all over the place, but mostly it's set in Bolaño's imagination. It would have been nice to travel, but I didn't.
Jeremy: Are you currently in the midst of a translation?
Wimmer: I'm not working on a book right now, but I'm working on a couple of small things.
Jeremy: Do you have plans to translate English-speaking authors into Spanish?
Wimmer: No. Translators, especially literary translators, almost always translate into their native language. I wouldn't feel qualified to translate into Spanish.
Jeremy: Are there authors you'd like the opportunity to translate?
Wimmer: There is nobody I'm dying to translate right now, although I'm reading a book in translation from the Spanish that I'm really admiring: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya. I saw him speak a year or so ago and was really impressed.
Jeremy: Do you have any opinions on why Americans seem so reluctant to read literature in translation?
Wimmer: I think it's partly a matter of habit. To the reading public, translations seem exotic and more difficult. They're just not as common as they are in other countries, especially in places like Germany and France, where there is much more of a mix of translated and original fiction.
People say that Americans are incurious, but I don't know that that's the case. It's probably just a lack of familiarity. If you live in Europe, you are very close to other countries, and chances are you've traveled to them. That makes you more curious and interested. Americans are isolated in that sense, but hopefully that is changing.
Jeremy: Who are some of your favorite authors?
Wimmer: Wow, that's a pretty broad question. Of contemporary North American writers, I am a big fan of David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Norman Rush, and George Saunders.
Jeremy: You were awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA] to translate 2666. Are grants commonly awarded to translators?
Wimmer: The NEA is pretty generous. I didn't know about the program until recently, and I'm not sure how long it has been going. It's a great program. The PEN Center also recently established a grant program [PEN Translation Fund] that is pretty well funded. There is some money out there, which is definitely much appreciated.
Jeremy: Do you think Bolaño's prominence had much to do with you being awarded the grant?
Wimmer: I don't know, but I assume it did. I think it was generally acknowledged that 2666 was an important book. It's also a very long book, and so maybe it was a hardship grant [laughs].
Jeremy: Do you have any indication whether he preferred the book's title to be pronounced "Twenty-six sixty-six" or "Two thousand six hundred sixty-six"?
Wimmer: I have no idea. In Spanish, when you say a phone number, for example, it'd be "twenty-six sixty-six," not "two six six six."
Jeremy: Did you have a chance to meet Bolaño before he died?
Wimmer: I didn't.
Jeremy: He left behind a rather accomplished body of work. Are you aware of plans to translate his remaining stories, poems, and literary criticisms? Would you be involved with such translations?
Wimmer: A lot of it has already been translated, and in fact most of the later stuff has been translated, except for the poetry. I don't think I would be translating any more of it because he is also translated by Chris Andrews, who works for New Directions, and most of the other stuff is under contract to New Directions as far as I know.
The one thing I would love to translate is a collection of essays that he published called Entre Paréntesis. They are really fantastic. If you read Spanish, I recommend them.
Jeremy: Were they literary criticisms?
Wimmer: Some of it is literary criticism, some is more essayistic. He's really funny, scathing, and opinionated to the point of bizarre. It's good.
Jeremy: In his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize [in 1999, for The Savage Detectives], he made mention of his affinity for the number eleven, having won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize, having worn the number on his jersey, and having encountered it repeatedly throughout his life. Do you happen to know if it is coincidental that FSG is publishing 2666 on 11/11?
Wimmer: I have no idea, but you should point that out to them or ask the editor. I would be surprised actually because I don't know if the editor has read that essay, and I'm not sure that it has been translated. I would say it's most likely coincidental.
Natasha Wimmer spoke with Powell's by phone from her home in Brooklyn, New York, on October 23, 2008.
In addition to translating Bolaño's two major works, Wimmer has written a stunning essay about the Chilean novelist and poet. Entitled Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives, the biographical essay explores the Bolaño mystique, his youth, his place amongst literary contemporaries, and his prowess as a singular and accomplished novelist.
Following her translation of 2666, Wimmer also wrote Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666, a selection of clarifications and elucidations on the more obscure, esoteric portions of the text that will prove enlightening to any serious reader of Bolaño's masterpiece.
Read Jeremy's full review of 2666.
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