Translation as amateurism - Roberto Arlt's The Flamethrowers - a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror

Caravana de Recuerdos is for some reason encouraging people to read some literature from Argentina this year – a “full year of “’the strain of doom’” that characterizes so much Argentinean literature from its beginnings.  What, now, who needs it, you might say, loudly.

Regardless, I took a run at doomy Roberto Arlt’s The Flamethrowers (1931), not really a novel on its own but rather part two of the perfectly titled Seven Madmen (1929).  A bunch of anarchists, nihilists, and lunatic gangsters jitterbug around Buenos Aires as part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government by means of poison gas, funded by and manufactured at a chain of brothels.  This plan somehow does not work, and the first part of the novel jerks to a halt with the shattering of the conspiracy.  Someone is murdered, maybe?  I find crazy stories hard to remember.

Seven Madmen is available in two good, professional translations, but for some reason no one published The Flamethrowers until 2017, when the tiny, deconstructionist River Boat Books released it.  The translator is either Larry Riley, who learned Spanish solely in order to read and then translate this book, or is possibly the oddball novelist Rick Harsch under a complexly-maintained pseudonym.  Please see Steve Holt on Twitter for the plausible evidence.  “Riley’s” translation is amateurish in both the better and worse ways.

The Astrologer’s hands remained in the pockets of his shirt.  He listened to Hipólita contemptuously scrutinizing her with a grimace that left his eyelids half closed, so as to filter through his eyes the possible intentions of his visitor. (22, the second page if you want to check the Spanish)

Some of the prose, especially in its more functional mode, has this kind of strain in the English, an awkwardness that a professional translator would relax.  Where exactly do the adverbs go in the sentence; “shirt pockets,” or just “pockets”; drop “so as”; do something with “filter through his eyes,” something.  The tone ought to be more informal.

Having said that, the entire novel, in conception, characters, incidents, meaning, and of course prose, is completely insane, written by the eighth madman.  The novel had better have some awkwardness, some pieces that just ain’t right, where there is no way to know who is to blame, the translator, the author, or the metaphysics.

Sometimes “Riley” gets the voice right, especially in sections that are more interior or extreme, like “The Death Agony of the Melancholy Ruffian” or “The Curtain of Anguish,” a piece of tormented late-night mad scientist existentialism:

The voice shrank and retracted.  Erdosain felt that it was searching for a cranny in his flesh where it could be safe from his horror.  It filled up his belly as if it wanted to make him explode.  And Erdosain’s body vibrated as if it had been placed upon a chassis supporting a supercharged motor.  (75)

Elegance and efficiency are beside the point in scenes like this.  And these are the best parts of the novel, easily, the important parts.

The good side of amateurism is that the translation is an act of love, and I am glad to have it.  I finally know how the dang story ends (in a bloodbath, as I could have guessed).  And parts of the translation are pretty good.  Someday someone will do a better one, but now I have this one.

I once thought that blogs and the like would lead to a lot more amateur translation.  On this very website there is a short piece by César Aira that as far as I know has still not been translated anywhere else.  My Spanish is a lot worse than “Larry Riley’s.”  Let’s get it all out there, then fix it up.

We're discoverers who have only a vague idea of the direction we're heading in - Restless writers

Of which I am one, sitting in a library, dithering, restlessly thinking about restlessness, not an activity that leads to repose or, I fear, clear thinking.

That title is from the very end of Roberto Arlt’s Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that is as jittery as they come.  No one in the novel can sit still, although they can be drugged or stunned or clubbed on the head.  Everyone is full of schemes – inventions, secret societies, plans to conquer Argentina with brothels and poison gas (the brothels will finance the poison gas), the usual.  Everyone is more or less nuts, as the title warns, but insanity is insufficient.  Everyone is restless, including, most importantly, the author, who flits about, unwilling to stitch all of his pieces together.

So many of the early proto- or pre-Modernists are preternaturally restless.  I mean something other than energetic.  Honoré de Balzac or Anthony Trollope obviously had reserves of energy that stagger me, but they could plant themselves at their desks and write.  Charles Baudelaire wrote plenty, really, but his restlessness is part of his art.  He must have sat still often enough, but the rest of the time, he’s out in Paris, wandering about, with no purpose other than being there.

The protagonist of Arlt’s Mad Toy (1926) names two personal heroes, the men he wants to be when he grows up: Charles Baudelaire and Rocambole, a fictional bandit and adventurer.  Isidore Ducasse emulated Baudelaire, and in Maldoror (1869) also invokes Rocambole, as a sort of heroic evil-doer.  Arlt can’t have known Ducasse, can he?  Ah, who cares.

I suspect that part of what we find modern in characters like Don Quixote, or Hamlet, or Moll Flanders, is their restlessness, their dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and their psychological need for change.  I wonder how to link the idea to Modernism, though.  It was Dante, after all, in the 14th century, who sent Odysseus off on one final adventure.  Perhaps the difference in the 19th century is the pace of change, the certainty that the world is shifting out from under our feet. 

Arlt is a real Buenos Aires writer, just as Baudelaire and Ducasse were Paris writers. Not that urbanism explains everything.  Who was more of a city writer than Charles Dickens, and who was more energetic?  But his novels generally end with the promise of rest, a new steady state.

All I have done here is wander into Pascal’s insight that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”*  Pascal got that right.  And now, somehow, I was quiet enough, and still enough, to have written something, and will restlessly move on.  For the next few weeks, healthful and pure books, exclusively.

* p. 48, Modern Library edition, 1941, trans. W. F. Trotter.

Even so, it cannot have been good for his health - I marvel at Argentinean literature

Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy is a short book – 130 pages or so – that packs in a lot of different pieces.  They do not all mesh so well, but they all contribute to the messy energy of the novel.  The tour of Buenos Aires, circa 1910, was as interesting to me as anything else.  The markets, the shops, and the immigrants, all of those immigrants, Italians, mostly, but also Spaniards, Eastern European Jews, Turks, and who knows who else.  The novel is drizzled with Italian and even a bit of Yiddish, as well as Argentinean slang.

Buenos Aires was a rapidly growing city of immigrants.  Some potted facts, which I should probably look up, so don’t trust me: at the end of the 19th century, Argentina had a higher proportion of immigrants than the United States.  The per capita income was close to that of the U.S., too.  It was right around then that a mismanaged financial crisis (which also affected the U.S. and Australia, but less severely) led to the divergence of income that we still see today.  If the economic problems are mentioned in Mad Toy, I missed it.

To an American, by which I mean a norteamericano, by which I mean a yanqui, Argentinean history is unusually interesting.  It parallels the history of my own country in key ways – the immigrants, the frontier, the cowboys, the wars with indigenous people – that help me understand U.S. history better.  I want to learn more about it.

Argentinean literature has become best known for its fabulists and metafictionists – Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and so on – which makes the instrumental use of literature as substitute history or sociology even trickier than usual.  I’ve read a couple of the tiny novels of César Aira – Ghosts (1990) and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000).  The latter is a historical novel, set in the 19th century pampas, featuring a “real” German painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas.  But Aira is a surrealist, so even the apparently accurate map of Argentina that New Directions put in front of Chris Andrews’s 2006 translation of the novel is open to suspicion.

Part of my favorite section of that novel:

The horse began to turn beneath him. It was till turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining. The horse’s mane was standing on end, like the dorsal fin of a swordfish. From that moment on, like all victims of personalized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering, Why did it have to happen to me? The sensation of having electrified blood was horrible but very brief. Evidently the charge flowed out as fast as it had flowed into his body. Even so, it cannot have been good for his health. (32-3)

And then later an Indian pretends to make out with a giant pink salmon (p. 71).

So what I’m saying is, I want someone to organize an Argentinean Reading Challenge Readalong, starting with Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), moving on to the gaucho epic Martín Fierro (1872/1879) of José Hernández, and continuing with Leopold Lugones, Roberto Arlt, and then on to Adolfo Bioy Casares and Fogwill and so on.  There’s an Argentinean writer who just uses his surname, which is “Fogwill.”  Curious thing, Argentinean literature.

So, to whomever sets this up, thanks in advance!

Roaming the city by guess and by God - Robert Arlt and Mad Toy

At the age of fourteen I was initiated into the thrilling literature of outlaws and bandits by an old Andalusian cobbler whose shoe repair shop stood next to a green-and-white-fronted hardware store in the entryway of an ancient house on Rivadavia Street between the corners of South America and Bolivia. (21)

The first sentence of Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy (1926) tells the reader what he’s in for.  It’s got literature, it’s got bandits from serialized adventure novels,, it’s got an immigrant and his work.  Right away, it plunges you right into Buenos Aires – the colors of the stores, the ironically-deployed street names.

And it’s not just the first sentence, but the first paragraph. Mad Toy is like a punchy newspaper column.  Like a serialized novel in four short chapters.

Arlt was a contemporary and pal of Borges.  They were the young lions, tearing up Argentinean literature, disrespecting their elders and betters, running wild in Buenos Aires.  Sounds like fun.  Arlt unfortunately died young, though, age 42.

Mad Toy is an energetic mess, which fits its brilliant, restless teenaged hero.  He wants to be, and could be, a famous thief, or an inventor, or a writer.  He hops from job to job, like Lazarillo de Tormes.  The used book store in the second chapter is particularly hellish (warm thoughts to actual used book store owner Colleen), all abuse and drudgery, completely unrelated to the books that drew him to the job.

The novel bounces from episode to episode and style to style, just as the hero roams the city.  Charles Baudelaire, the great flaneur, is one of the book's presiding spirits.  Here we have an acte gratuit:

Behind those doors was money. The shop owners would be sleeping peacefully in their luxurious bedrooms, and there I was like a dog, roaming the city by guess and by God.

Trembling with hatred, I lit a cigarette and maliciously threw the burning match on a human mass that was curled up asleep in a doorway.  A small flame skimmed along the rags and tatters.  In a trice the wretch was upright, formless as darkness, and threatening me with his enormous fist.  I hit the road.

And then the next paragraph, after a break:

In a secondhand store on Ninth of July Avenue I bought a revolver and loaded it with five bullets, then caught a streetcar and headed for the docks. (110)

Is this a Cain or Hammett novel?  This is only one mode of Mad Toy, though.  The novel is a picaresque, a noir, a portrait of the young artist.  It’s hardly a tightly wound perfect work of art, but it’s good enough that I want to read the other Arlt novel that has wandered into English.

Translations by Michelle McKay Aynesworth, 2002, Duke University Press.