Translator Chris Andrews on Varamo by Cesar Aira

We're celebrating the release of the newest volume of TWO LINES, Counterfeits, which you can buy right this second direct from us, on Amazon, Powell's, and just about everywhere else. To mark the new book we'll be publishing interviews with some of the translators who have stories and poems therein. This is the third and it's with Chris Andrews, who translated an excerpt from Varamo by Cesar Aira (the whole book will be published eventually by New Directions). This is Andrews' fifth Aira, and it of course joins books he's translated by Roberto Bolano, as well as many others.

Scott Esposito: When Varamo, which we're excerpting in TWO LINES, publishes in 2012, it will be your fourth Aira translation into English. Have you found that you approach the books differently, or have encountered various writing styles? And do you have plans to publish more Aira translations? (If so, please tell us what books they are.)

Chris Andrews: Each book has its stylistic particularities, but the odd one out, of the four I’ve translated, has been How I Became a Nun, which has sections that are wild and choppy, quite different from the syntactically impeccable prose that Aira usually writes. In that book there are internal “psychological” justifications for the stylistic wildness, for example, in chapter three the narrator recounts an experience of delirium when she (or he: depending on the point of view) was recovering from arsenic poisoning. But Aira has also said that he wrote the book very quickly, in an unusual state of exaltation, and that he was trying to break out of his habitual correctness.              

I hope to do more Aira translations, yes. I know that New Directions have acquired the rights to quite a few more books, but I’m not sure what’s next. That’s in the hands of the publisher.

SE: Varamo is about a fictitious "masterpiece of modern Central American poetry," which is more or less made by accident by a low-leven Panamanian bureaucrat. At the end of your translator's introduction, you say that it's hard to imagine this poem "as anything but a document, a footnote to the lucid dream of its genesis." I wonder, would you describe Aira's novels in similar terms, given his odd "constant flight forward" method of constructing them?

CA: Yes and no. Yes, in that all of Aira’s novels are documents that we can use to construct the figure of the author, which is, I think, a natural, even irresistible, thing to do. However, in the introduction, I was saying that Aira’s novel, which pretends to be a dry scholarly document explaining how the poem was written, is itself poetically charged, but if we use the indications in the novel to reconstruct the poem itself, a great deal of avant-garde faith is required to imagine a text as interesting, and poetic, as Varamo. So I think poem and document have changed places. And here I’d want to resist an analogy with Aira’s novels if it implied that the “flight forward” procedure is more interesting that what it produces. The procedure is one thing and its application is another. Aira’s procedure is striking because it’s so radically opposed to common sense and received opinion, but as Raymond Roussel pointed out in How I Wrote Certain of My Novels, an innovative procedure doesn’t guarantee an interesting product: “just as one can use rhymes to compose good or bad verses, so one can use this method to produce good or bad works.” What is truly wonderful, I think, in Aira’s work is the way he applies his procedure, a way that I can only describe with a vocabulary that sounds rather old-fashioned: observation, imagination, a childlike joy in storytelling . . .

SE: You also note that Aira's advocates offer the charitable interpretation that the imperfections in his novels are part of the point, given that he constantly runs forward and doesn't revise. His detractors say the opposite, and you go on to say that this argument opens up interesting questions about art. Do you think this debate is somewhat beside the point, as Aira is clearly getting his books into circulation and making people thing hard about his bizarre premises?

CA: Yes and no. Yes, in that the detractors are clearly not preventing the circulation of the books, in Spanish and in translation, and that’s good news. But if you’re right, and people are thinking hard about his premises, some of those people are bound to find them uncongenial or unsound, because, as you say, they’re bizarre. In a way, Aira’s writing is designed to have detractors, at least for a start, and they won’t all be bad or unsophisticated readers (although I think they’ll be missing out). If his books met with no resistance, that would mean that they weren’t upsetting accepted standards for judgement and setting new ones, which is what they’ve done in Argentina, where Aira is a strong pole of attraction and repulsion. If the debate doesn’t happen in North America, that might tell us something interesting about the segmentation of the reading public there.

SE: Lastly, was there anything particular in Varamo that you found difficult to work in English, or even "untranslatable"?

CA: As always there were lots of difficulties, but most of them were quite banal. There is a wordplay on putter (the golf club) and puta, which I preserved by keeping the second word in Spanish. I think it’s clear enough because it’s a passage about two sisters who are suspected by the local gossips of keeping a house of ill repute, although in fact they make their money by smuggling golf clubs into Panama. But maybe the editor will think differently!