Suzanne Jill Levine on Adolfo Bioy Casares

(Adolfo Bioy Casares is certainly one of my favorite Latin American writers, and one that I feel is quite underappreciated in the U.S. So I was very pleased to see that Green Integer has just reissued Suzanne Jill Levine's translation of many of Bioy's stories. (Incidentally, Dalkey is also reissuing Levine's excellent book on translation, The Subversive Scribe.) I asked Levine to write a little about this collection and this is what she had to say.)
I gathered this selection of stories in collaboration with Bioy Casares himself, who first organized his short works in anthologies under two categories: Fantastic Tales and Love Stories. These stories are very Argentine in that Bioy, like his compatriots, was an inveterate traveler—always with that sensation of being far from the center, so faraway from Europe, especially Paris—hence several of them take place elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is across the delta, in Uruguay. From his famous Invention of Morel on, Bioy was a meticulous stylist. Less is more was the stoic tenor of his stories and novellas, though there is of course an ironic opacity in his understated approach. As translator, my task was to bring to life his quick humor, and to catch not the tiger by his tail but something just as elusive: the exact nuance or register of his language. He had a subtle ear for colloquial speech, and his narrators and characters tend to invite the reader's laughter unexpectedly, either because of wry depictions or because no matter how hard they seek dignity, their actions and utterances are buffoonish, in a Kafkaesque world where the individual hasn't a chance. A description of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's comic mode by Tom McCarthy (NYT, 12/21/2008) would serve well to depict Bioy's writing: Comic in . . . the sense in which . . . Bergson used the term . . . comedy entailed a tendency toward the mechanical. People, gestures and events become like automata. And yet, we sympathize and identify with these characters: they are us with all our pathos and absurdity.