Southeaster Read online

  ‌Translator’s Notes

  It may be of interest to signal where I moored my point of honest dealing in my translation of Haroldo Conti’s Castilian-Spanish text Sudeste. It was the rhythmic sensibility that drew me into the novel, from its first lines:

  Entre el Pajarito y el río abierto, curvándose bruscamente hacia el norte, primero más y más angosto, casi hasta la mitad, luego abriéndose y contorneándose suavemente hasta la desembocadura, serpea, oculto en las primeras islas, el arroyo Anguilas.

  In Rhythms (Stanford, 1995), Nicolas Abraham describes rhythm as the origin of the ‘fascinated consciousness’ that projects a story forward and produces the sense of enchantment we know when reading the best stories. My reading of Sudeste was formed by this immediately intuited aspect, the rhythms ever-present in the novel’s style, which are reinforced and intensified by the cycle of the seasons and the movements of nature, the intervals of the protagonist Boga’s journeys and the laconic dialogues with those he comes across around the rivers of the Paraná Delta. Mooring a translation to this stylistic feature of the novel was for me the natural choice, but it required the identification of suitable points of anchorage.

  Conti’s use of punctuation forms a distinctive ‘respiration’ in his text, a rhythmic feature that is also pronounced in well-known authors such as Isabel Allende – and often cancelled in the translation of their texts. The difficult interest in writing Sudeste into English centred on the presentation of this respiration in a language with a quite distinct music. The work of translating the poetic quality of a text lies in the selection of words and phrases with appropriate sounds to convey the relevant meaning, but the flexibility required when structuring such phrases into sentences that present the rhythmic style of Conti’s writing brings word size into play.

  The register of Conti’s text is poetic but, at the same time, its narrative is simple and direct. Shorter words are not only more flexible bricks in the building of lines of rhythmised text, they also lend themselves to his plain-speaking register. It is at the level of this bricking that Southeaster (South-East in the Immigrant Press edition of 2013) is anchored to Sudeste.

  Not that I was aware of this for many months into the writing: while reading lends itself to the analytical act of interpreting, writing is rather more intuitive work. It was the rhythmic sensibility of the novel at both its underlying, narrative level, and at the surface level of its respiration, that formed the enchantment through which the writing of the translation found its form.

  Discussion of the practice of translation is keen in the matter of the basic beliefs, policies or procedures – the theory – a translator works from. For a fiction translation, it requires study alongside the novel in its first language to suggest where the work of translation has been moored, to which aspects of the source text it shows ‘fidelity’. But a translator is first a reader, and Marcel Proust has something to say about the unfaithfulness of readers:

  Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women.1

  Were the reading translator able to feel sure of any such ascribed authorial intention, writing its exact reproduction into a new language would still be the commonly argued ‘impossibility’ of translation.

  The concern of the practising translator might better be seen as that of an honest dealer in the work of bringing the source text into a new tongue. Distances will remain between a source and its translation, those natural in the play between the languages involved and, apropos of Proust’s lament, those between the readings of the author and translator. What matters is to find a text declaring itself worthy of our company as readers: the faithfulness in that.

  I have retained terms from the Spanish text to name particular features of the geography of the Delta where the use of an English term might mislead in what it suggested. The most important of these terms is related to the spectacular movements in the water level of the rivers and streams that are the principal influence on the lives of those who live here. The bajante is the fiercest of these, when the rivers can literally empty themselves of water, but the crecientes, under the influence of winds from the south or east, are also impressive, and intervene in the novel with particular force. These can reasonably be translated as the kind of surge experienced in other environments, and so I use this term in the text. Local geographical names are also retained, despite the obvious temptation of signalling the Terror Shallows [Bajo del Temor], for instance.

  Born in the town of Chacabuco in western Buenos Aires province, Haroldo Conti was a keen reader as a youngster and wrote scripts for the school puppet theatre. A second stimulus to writing was his father’s love of telling stories, many recounting the events and personalities of his journeys as a travelling salesman. But small-town life in Conti’s beloved Chacabuco ended when his parents separated, and his mother took him to the capital city to attend secondary school.

  His later schooling included two seminaries, an environment Conti said didn’t suit him but where he discovered what he termed missionary novels, tales of preaching the gospel amongst the ‘unbelievers’ in far-off places. He could never remember if he finished it, but the young author wrote a first novel set in Africa and inspired by this reading. He eventually experienced a crisis of faith and left his studies to return to Chacabuco.

  Conti became a secondary-school teacher of Latin and, whether or not he relished the work, he was regarded by his fellows as a conscientious colleague, until the political difficulties in Argentina began to interfere with his attendance. But his passion was writing, particularly for the cinema, in favour of which he considered putting aside fiction at one point. Indeed, Southeaster was first conceived as a film script, and directors have brought other of his literary work to the screen, taking advantage of its preference for strongly visual narrative.

  Among his many and varied activities, Conti trained as a civil pilot of light aircraft; it was flying that led him to discover from the air the landscape of the Paraná Delta. He rented a small wooden house, which he later bought, sited on a stream in the islands of the Delta, just across from Tigre, and known to most as the Gambado – but names are slippery in these parts, as Conti has related.

  Conti’s interest in the lives of others wasn’t merely intellectual: he became a keen fisherman and decided to build a boat; he spent a lot of time with an otter-hunter at one point – and all of this investigation went into his writing, of which Southeaster was the first important published expression.

  I met Haroldo in the public lending library in my home town of Úbeda, when I came upon a 1985 edition of Sudeste published in Spain by Alfaguara. I blew off the dust of Andalusia and read the first paragraphs on my feet, between the shelves. Deciding to publish a translation was simply the way to ensure the novel would not have to wait another fifty years to be read in English, and that I could do the work.

  It was important to visit the world of the novel, to clarify aspects of local and boating vocabulary for the translation but also just to see the place. I experienced two sudestadas (south-easterly storms) during a month on the islands. The second sudestada was uncommonly severe. The geography of the Delta means that these south-east winds literally pile up the water from the River Plate – the Southern Atlantic, in effect – and send it across the islands of the Delta, where the water level on this occasion was almost three metres above its level on the River Plate. I spent three nights with the water slapping about under the house – just as Boga does in the lean-to.

  The first act of every morning on the Delta is to draw back the curtains and look outside, for the activity of each day – quite often of each hour – is
determined by the state of the river.

  Each of Conti’s four novels was awarded a literary prize, culminating in the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for his last novel, Mascaró, el cazador americano (‘Mascaró, the American Hunter’, 1975).

  The protagonists in Conti’s first three novels are solitaries, a characteristic that is paired in each case with a desire for the wandering life. In Southeaster, Boga’s life around the islands of the Delta is forced on him by circumstances: the death of the old man for whom he works cutting reeds and the fact that he doesn’t know anything else. Despite the austerity of his life and the discomforts of the solitude it implies, Conti’s protagonist finds comfort and takes a pride in his knowledge of boats and engines, in being able to navigate his way around the rivers and in his handling of the simple tools that are the means to survival in his environment. He observes and learns to read the changes in the natural world – in the river above all. These readings give a meaning to his world, but it is a world that cannot be dominated, and here Conti’s protagonist is distinct from Defoe’s Crusoe: despite the dignity of his daily life, Boga lives with a fatalism that comes from understanding that he lives in a world that has no design behind it.

  If the indifference of this world to man is what gives the first part of the novel its tension, the appearance of the simpleton Cabecita and the dog heralds change. Conti’s protagonist is irritated at once by this interruption to his solitude, yet he tolerates the odd pair and finds himself, at the last, unable to abandon them. The entry, hard on their heels, of a murderous smuggler confirms a turn in the story towards a more conventional dramatic trajectory.

  It is the playing-out of Boga’s dreams and ambitions, and his small achievements in the face of his greater errors and the disasters that befall him, that keep Conti’s story from solemnity. Its enchantment emerges from the understated prose, which provides the space required for readers to do their own imaginative work, and in the rhythmic nature of Conti’s voice.

  The matter of how man might best face life was something that conditioned Conti’s reading; Juan Carlos Onetti’s fictions and the early work of Alan Sillitoe were constants in his preference for writers who expressed a defined attitude before life. As to the nourishing of his writing, Conti held to Guimarães Rosa as the principal stimulus, considering the great Brazilian the figure responsible for renewing the language of Latin American literature; he speaks of reading Guimarães Rosa’s work throughout the writing of Mascaró.

  Politics forces its way into the story of Conti’s life but, despite the political turmoil in Argentina during the period of his writing, Conti avoids overtly political subjects until Mascaró. Repression in Argentina intensified following the military coup of March 1976, and Conti was warned by someone with links to the military that his life was in danger. But he decided against exile and offered his home in the capital as a place of refuge for others under threat of kidnap and murder. Until he was taken from the streets in the early hours of 5th May.‌2

  JON LINDSAY MILES

  Úbeda (Jaén),

  May 2015

  Notes

  1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Vol. 3, Translated by CK Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and by Andreas Mayor, London: Penguin 1989, pp. 939–40.

  2 The known details of Conti’s disappearance were recorded in the CONADEP Report Nunca Más (‘Never Again’, 1984) and can be found at www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/english/library/nevagain/nevagain_248.htm.

  ‌Afterword

  When you set out for Ithaka

  ask that your way be long,

  full of adventure, full of instruction.1

  Haroldo Conti: Voyager

  Los lugares son como las personas. Comparecen un buen día en la vida de uno y a partir de ahí fantasmean, es decir, se mezlcan a la historia de uno que se convierte en la quejumbrosa historia de lugares y personas. Esto es, los lugares y las personas se incorporan en los adentros y se establecen como sujetos persistentes.

  [Places are like people. They turn up one fine day in life, and start to prance around and boast, which is to say, they weave themselves into your story, which becomes the grumbling history of people and of places. Which means the places move themselves inside you, becoming what will be persistent subjects.]2

  The sujeto persistente of Haroldo Conti’s writing, as Jon Lindsay Miles so eloquently maps the terrain, is the river. Southeaster (South-East in the 2013 edition of this translation) was Conti’s first novel, and the chronicle ‘Tristezas del vino de la costa, o la parva muerte de la Isla Paulino’ [Sorrows of the Wine from the Coast, or, the Dead, Unthreshed Grain of Isla Paulino] was his last extensive article, published in April 1976. ‘Tristezas’ was based on a research trip – camera and tape recorder in hand – to Isla Paulino, close to the coastal city of La Plata, in December 1975 and January 1976. We are immediately, recognisably, in the world of Haroldo Conti: the very precise description of landscapes; an attention to the way things work (boats and engines); a blend of popular culture (a song by the folklorista Chango Rodríguez acts as a leitmotif); an analysis of past history and current conditions through the voices of different interlocutors, mainly ordinary people, met along the journey; a sense of loss (tristeza/parva muerte) but also a hope for change, and a very strong sense of bringing what is considered marginal – both geographically and in terms of literature – into strong focus. As he leaves the island, Conti remembers the first Spanish explorer and conquistador in the region, Pedro de Mendoza y Luján, who ‘founded’ Buenos Aires in 1536:

  Y pienso, antes de girar la llave de contacto, con una punta de la isla en el espejo retrovisor, que si don Pedro de Mendoza le hubiese chingado por unos grados habría fundado Buenos Aires en la isla, lo cual habría sido peor para ésta que la creciente del 40, y yo en este momento estaría partiendo de la tumultuosa ciudad de Paulino hacia un lugar nostálgico y desconocido llamado Buenos Aires.

  [And I think, before I turn the ignition key, with one tip of the island in the rear-view mirror, that if Don Pedro de Mendoza had been a few degrees out, he would have founded Buenos Aires on the island, which would have been worse news for the island than the floods of 1940, and I would now be setting out from the tumultuous city of Paulino for that wistful and little-known place called Buenos Aires.] ‌3

  This afterword places the work of Haroldo Conti within a broad account of Argentine literature from its early foundational moments, before going on to present Conti’s views on the nature and function of writing.

  Haroldo Conti and Argentine Literature

  Accounts of Argentine literature offer a defining place to the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in particular his vertebral Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism (1845). In this hybrid text – part literary evocation, part political tract – Sarmiento sets out a vision of post-Independence Argentina which seeks to promote a dynamic export economy linked to the expanding British Empire. The export trade would pass through the city and port of Buenos Aires and yield a high revenue which, he argued, would benefit all areas of the country. The central city of Buenos Aires would thus control a process that would encourage foreign investment, technology and immigration.

  Refracted through the Romantic prose of Sarmiento, this dichotomy between liberalism and autarchy was expressed in terms of a struggle between civilisation and barbarism. Barbarism was equated with the backward interior of the country, with local caudillos (strong men) and the Argentine plainsman – the gaucho – as the inferior social types who represented introverted nationalism. Despite Sarmiento’s sneaking regard for the gaucho and his accomplishments, he argued that civilisation could only be found by way of the adoption of European patterns in political, social and cultural spheres. Argentina had to open its trade to the rest of the world, attract European migrants and, at the same time, acquire values of sociability and respectability which would lead the country out of fragmentation into being a well-organised nation.

  Rivers – as opposed to the p
ampas – play an important part in Sarmiento’s imagined nation and political project, insofar as they allow a flow to ever-widening estuaries and to the sea, and link Argentina as a primary producer to world commerce.

  Sarmiento was an early traveller to the Paraná Delta. He led an expedition there in 1855, and later bought an island and built a house, and he looked to encourage migration to the islands and their commercial exploitation. Unlike the unproductive, feckless gauchos, the local inhabitants – the carapachayos, he called them, after a key river connecting the River Luján with the Paraná de las Palmas – were perfectly and productively integrated into the landscape. In Sarmiento’s always exuberant, hyperbolic use of analogies, he felt that the Delta could be to Argentina what the Nile is to Egypt, or a Venetian community, or the promise of a Far West, a California, but on one’s doorstep.4 Sarmiento’s encouragement did help open the region to commerce and to migration from the late-nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century, before that economy collapsed.

  Haroldo Conti’s world is full of traces of the broken memories of those former times: abandoned houses, the shells of boats. His own modest house, built in the 1950s, sits close to Sarmiento’s wooden house, constructed almost a century before; both are now preserved as museums.

  As Argentina from the 1860s was to develop in line with Sarmiento’s project, so the dominant images of Argentine identity in literature would portray the tension between civilisation and barbarism, Europe and America, the port city and the country. There is little equivalence to the foundational novels of the United States – the fishermen and whalers in Moby Dick or the Bildungsroman of a nation that is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes rewrites Huckleberry Finn in the early twentieth century, he puts his boy-narrator as apprentice to a gaucho, the mysterious Don Segundo Sombra (Don Segundo Sombra, 1926), and their journey takes them across the pampas, not down a river akin to the Mississippi.