On Translating Rex

In her translator's introduction in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, Esther Allen makes some interesting points about Jose Manuel Prieto's novel Rex and its rather singular relationship with translation:

He began his literary career as a translator from Russian to Spanish, and in this particular novel, even more so than in his two earlier ones, he writes as a translator, to expose the way in which all meaning is temporary and provisional, dependent upon its immediate context, subject to infinite and unpredictable shifts. Language, and the literary texts that are made from it, is not a diamond, its super-hard molecules permanently ordered in a fixed pattern, its great value impervious to the ups and downs of the marketplace; it is, rather, a luminous uproar, inevitably illusory and impermanent, dissolving into an ungraspably fine floating powder when any determined will is brought to bear on it.
The English translation of Rex makes that point in a way its author, who finished writing the novel in 2006, could hardly have dreamed of. Though the book was written to describe the strategies used to overcome the terrible experience of totalitarianism, as Prieto says in the Author's Note, the reader who comes to the English translation in 2009 won't be able to help reading this book, with its depiction of an obscene and ostentatious wealth founded on fakery, supposedly valuable objects that turn out to be of no value whatsoever, as being about a collapse much closer to home than that of the Soviet Union.
Though Rex is undoubtedly enriched by the added dimension that the current global economic crisis has bestowed upon it, its translation into other languages, other contexts, is only a first step on the way to what the text finally demands?translation into other mediums altogether. As I translated Rex, I kept visualizing it all on a stage . . .