🦋 Margaritas before swine
I'm a little over a quarter of the way through my rough draft translation of El viaje -- whether I end up revising it into something actually readable or no, it is a very useful exercise from the standpoint of helping me read the story -- it brings the imagery really sharply into focus, this process of reading the passage, sort-of understanding, setting out to render it in my own language, looking up unfamiliar terms, reading again... Goytisolo's punctuation of dialog (which seems to be shared pretty generally in the Spanish stories I've been reading) is to set quoted text off with em dashes -- I've been using this in the translation although it's possible that quotation marks would read more naturally. Not sure about that yet. Here is a passage of dialog I liked a lot, at the end of a drunken rant in which a circus impressario is assuring some of his performers (who have been stuck in this AndalusÃan town for several months without any money to pay for carriage) that he's got feelers out, he's going to get them passage to Lisbon, he's going to pay everybody...
The man took the bottle by its neck and guzzled another slug. His face was soaked in sweat and he was drumming his fingers on the top of his boot.
--People today, only interested in the vulgar --he said, looking at us--. The movies, every day at the movies... The work of an artist counts for nothing...
His tongue was giving him trouble with speaking and he looked around him, his gaze full of irritation.
--I had offers from Algeciras, from Tangiers, from Morocco, and I preferred to come here... They told me that in this town people appreciate art and now look... A sacrifice in vain... Like mixing margaritas for swine...
He was too drunk to go on and he hid his head between his hands. The waiter went and came back with the bottles and, passing by us, gave a wink.
--Don't pay him any attention... Every day it's like this.
Just then, the clock on the town hall struck nine.
It was time to go back; we got up.
The very brief paragraphs and heavy use of ellipses are characteristic of the story. I read a quote from Goytisolo somewhere that he considered Marks of Identity (1966, so half a decade after this) his "first real novel" -- maybe I should put that on my list.
posted evening of Sunday, November 15th, 2009
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