or, On Breaking Out of Literary Isolation By: Brett Alan Sanders Summer, 1997. I had started to translate Mansilla ten or twelve years earlier, in Jim Mandrell's class on the translator's art, at Indiana University, Bloomington. Now, two hours south of Bloomington, just outside of Leopold where I had been teaching at a rural junior-senior high school for the past seven years, I was determined to get back in earnest to the task that circumstances - finishing a bachelor's degree and teacher certification, being a husband and father, launching my pedagogical career, writing some original stories and essays - had for too long kept me from. I had, indeed, translated about a third of the book, first at breakneck speed in a fairly rough draft and then, painstakingly, in consultation and revision. At last, confident that what I had was worthy of consideration by any university press with an interest in Latin American works in translation, I was set to submit a proposal and begin the final push. But first, it occurred to me, I should check the Internet once more for any English-language translations that I might have missed. And there they were, hot off the press that very year: A Visit to the Ranquel Indians, translated by Eva Gillies, University of Nebraska Press; An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians, translated by Mark McCaffrey, University of Texas Press. The original, Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, first published in serial form in 1870, had not previously seen print in English, if at all, since a 19th-century edition vaguely alluded to (I have been unable to locate it) by one of Mansilla's commentators. One of those commentators, in an introduction to one of countless Spanish-language editions, ranks the Excursión beside José Hernández's El Gaucho Martín Fierro and Domingo F. Sarmiento's Facundo in a triumvirate of outstanding works of Argentine literature of that century. As a first-time translator, then, unconnected and without advanced academic credentials, I had counted on both its obscurity and its renown to catapult me into the realm of literary translators (like the formidable García Márquez's own Gregory Rabassa) that even a renowned living writer might consider working with. Instead, anguished, looking into the magic mirror of that computer monitor, I saw my own illusions and all of my labor mocked by those two fresh editions that were suddenly, coincidentally, tauntingly available for purchase (and which I did purchase) on Amazon.com. I had missed my chance! Had I only persisted earlier, more determinedly, untiringly, I might have beaten them by half a decade! In retrospect, I am glad they beat me. At the time, though, my first reaction was to cry. I drove the twenty minutes from county library to my county home and immediately cranked up the old push lawnmower, tore into the better than an acre of unruly country grass that I was then responsible for mowing. By the time I finished, I had worked out a more positive spin on things. If I was not meant to translate Mansilla, I told myself, at least I could not have chosen a better book on which to cut my translator's teeth. And meanwhile, through all of my related readings and researches, surely I was finally ready to write the original story that I had been carrying around in my head for almost twenty years, since I first encountered its seed in a folk song sung by the incomparable Mercedes Sosa, lyrics written by the poet-historian Félix Luna, whose source the blurb on the LP cover mistakenly said to be Mansilla's Excursión. Actually, I had completed more than one book-length manuscript by that time. My South American experience was at the heart of both of them. The first, consisting of a novella and related stories tied to a mythical, García Márquez / Macondo-like town called Magdalena, attempted to weave the inward secrets of my sojourn as a Mormon missionary into a magical-realist tapestry of worldly and spiritual significance. A Utah-based editor expressed interest in the book but ultimately passed on it (even after my most earnest attempt at a re-write) because of obvious flaws occasioned in part by my still being too close to the religious experiences that had engendered it. Thank God that except for one of its stories, which was published in an undergraduate journal at IU called Labyrinth (my first publication except for a number of youthful newspaper articles), it was rejected. The second manuscript, more intimately tied to both Mansilla's book and to that original story that I would turn to now in the summer of '97, was a curious combination of translations and commentary that I called The Red Flamingo: Gaucho Myths and Legends. Represented among the translations were two by Mansilla (one that I had initially translated in Mandrell's class), two by early 20 th -century writer Ricardo Güiraldes, and excerpts from a couple of crucial episodes of Hernández's narrative poem. I introduced each section with a brief author biography, and the whole by an approximately hundred-page literary-historical essay (one chapter of which would be published in the Chicano-Riqueño Studies journal Chiricú) that attempted to set the literary selections in context. The book was intended for a secondary-school or university audience, and at the suggestion of one professor included pedagogical materials, such as suggestions for study-discussion questions and short essays. In any case, while several publishers said kind things about the manuscript, no one took it on. In the end I decided that the introductory package had been a bit over-ambitious for the accompanying text and might itself have made it a difficult sell. That particular effort, though, in conjunction with my larger effort with the Excursión, had prepared me for that other story that surely I alone was born to write. After I came in from mowing the lawn, showered, ate dinner, I sat down and began outlining what I would tentatively call Dorotea of the Pampas. The first draft, which would be finished when school started in the fall, would weigh in at some hundred and seventy manuscript pages: about 40,000 words. First, between outlining and writing, I would spend some additional research time at the university library in Bloomington, and at home reading some texts (like the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales de los Incas) that I had not yet gotten around to. While the central story would concern a young Argentine woman, captured by Indians in the late 19th century, years later resisting her rescue by civilization's army, my plan was to create a much broader scene out of some combination of the Quixote and the Excursión, in both of which many lives other than the central ones were given prominent expression. In Cervantes's book, in the more free-spirited first part, the knight and his squire ended up twice in one particular inn, where the knight's story took a rest while other people's apparently unrelated (and lengthy) tales were inserted. In Mansilla's book it was around the soldiers' campfire, or among the Indians' tents, that those other tales were related either briefly or at equally sustained length. In imitation of those literary examples, I had long envisioned a gathering at some campfire, on the way out of Indian country, where the captive would tell her life story and again plead her case for the freedom to stay where she no longer felt captive; and, between beginning and end of her tale, a profusion of other stories would be tossed out at that same fire by countless other speakers. Those other speakers' tales were what required the most study, and what prompted my many-years' hesitation before the daunting task of writing. Those and the simple necessity of inventing a scenario that would be historically sound and both geographically and socially credible. Mansilla's book, in combination with Hernández's and Güiraldes's, and even Sarmiento's, had gone a long way to preparing me to write about Dorotea, but I also wanted to do much more. Through the Inca Garcilaso's mythical history of his Indian forebears, for instance, I would insert yet one more perspective on the central tale's central concern with such basic questions as freedom, love, and solitude. One's freedom, after all, might be another's enslavement, yet the enslavement of other native peoples to the Incan lords was considered a blessed freedom, according to the narrative of that son of a Spanish conquistador and Incan princess. Likewise (as the Iraqui liberation our nation would seek after 9/11 may not be the same one desired by a majority of Iraquis), the freedom that Buenos Aires's Europeanizing elite were fighting for was not the same one that would from time to time enflame the gauchos and other rabble along that cosmopolitan center's savage periphery. |
Again, the manuscript was occasionally well commented on by different editors. And one literary agent (perhaps I was being preyed upon by her?) suggested that I send it to a book doctor, who for the price of more than a month of a teacher's take-home salary would deliver a product that might or might not find a publisher. What really got things rolling for me, however, was when I finally decided to do one other thing in response to the apparent disaster of being beaten out in the race to translate Mansilla. I decided to write a letter of introduction to both of those translators. With the letters, I enclosed a copy of my self-published chapbook of prose poems called Quixotics. The chapbook (which had sold perhaps a couple dozen copies, and contained the core idea of the larger story in a paragraph called "Dorotea Bazán"), in conjunction with the letters themselves, was sufficient to charm them both into critiquing my present manuscript. And that, within a literary context at least, was the single most inspired thing that I have ever done. Eva Gillies, born in Germany of a German father and an Argentine-German-Jewish mother, raised in Buenos Aires after the rise of Hitler and educated in England after the rise of Perón, subsequently citizen of the world, was the first to respond with an extremely gracious letter. Mark McCaffrey responded later, a bit more skeptically, but also kindly, persuaded by my chapbook that the other manuscript could not be too bad. So I sent them both a copy and waited. The verdict, in both cases, was that the story was too weighted down with the superfluous others, that I was demanding a bit much of my reader. Mark, who was particularly brutal with the text, told me that "a lot of the air went out of the soufflé" when he realized that I was approaching the antiquated literary stylings, not with a sense of irony, but with all seriousness, almost worshipfulness. That is where he helped me the most. He forced me to take a cold look at my illusions and to bring a more 21 st -century literary sensibility and focus to this re-envisioning of a historical past. Eva, for her part, dear friend and confidante that she quickly became, continues to read both my fiction and essays, and is largely responsible for my little Borgesian tale "History of the Knight and the Sophist" becoming the much refined piece that was eventually accepted for publication in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. The year of these new correspondences was 2000. From there I came out in 2001 with a drastic revision, considerably shorter than the first, and finally, a year later, with the draft (closer to ninety manuscript pages and 18,000 words) that finally stuck. It had a new title, A Bride Called Freedom, from a line from a folk song by Argentine poet, singer, and guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui (the pseudonym borrowed from two Inca kings): "Yo tengo tantos hermanos que no los puedo contar / y una novia muy hermosa que se llama libertad" / "I have so many brothers and sisters that I can't count them / and a very beautiful bride called freedom". In the middle version, alternatively retitled Captive Dorotea or La Verde, after the lake where Dorotea's story is related (a paragraph describing that lake was published in the diminutive journal Paragraph), I had cut out the most egregious of the inserted tales and added (as had already been present in other of my fictions) some post-modernist narrative touches. In the final version, after first chopping all but one of the remaining interpolations (and even it I greatly abbreviated, subordinating it to the voice of a skeptical interpreter), I spent a bit more time working on the authenticity of Dorotea's rustic voice and on the packaging for a young adult readership. This had been my original intention for the story, though I had mixed feelings. In the end, I suppose, I find those marketing distinctions a bit artificial, anyway, and hope that (like Huckleberry Finn, which some people would call a young adult novel) this story will appeal also to an older audience. Certainly, though I have clipped some of the more extended sentences, and in some cases preferred a simpler word to a more obscure one, I have still written for the more literate end of that marketing category, and have been at considerable pains to maintain a rich, varied vocabulary including such favorites as "loquacious", which a middle-aged and well-accomplished educator of my recent acquaintance once admitted to having had to look up. At the same time, I was at pains to shape a layered narrative structure with something of an air of sophistication, of a post-modernist flair that nevertheless encloses a Romantic sentiment. It is like nothing he has ever read, Mark McCaffrey told me, which to my ears sounded something like a compliment. In the spring of 2003, this much-revised manuscript was tentatively accepted by the bilingual, print-on-demand publisher Ediciones Nuevo Espacio (ENE). I had pitched it as a bilingual book (they also publish single-language books in either Spanish or English); if they agreed, I would have the text translated for me into Spanish. It was thanks in part to Eva Gillies, who introduced me to the Buenos Aires-based writer María Rosa Lojo, that I was able quickly, after ENE's acceptance of that proposal, to put myself in contact with Sebastián R. Bekes, also an Argentine, who lives in the province of Entre Ríos. María Rosa referred me to him. Our collaboration via electronic mail was a remarkable experience for me. Without him I see no way that I could have produced a Spanish text that would have as accurately reflected both the regional and period idioms. The text as finally accepted was finally published in November 2003 as A Bride Called Freedom / Una novia llamada libertad. Subsequently, I find myself working with Sebastián on some of his Spanish-language stories. Already I had been busy with a couple of María Rosa's books of delicately literate historical fiction (including one set of stories that contains the tale of one Dorotea Cabral, possibly the true historical source of my more loosely imagined character); I have also translated a collection of her prose poems, several of which have already appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals, for the first time in English. These translations have benefited immensely from her own and especially from Eva's critiques. I am currently seeking a publisher for that book. What irks me about all of this is that I chose to live for so many years in something like literary isolation. Yes, I had surrounded myself with a few literary-minded friends who provided some valuable critiques. Yes, I had submitted to many editors, even received a few individualized responses. Yes, I had even studied, in fiction-writing workshops, under a couple of professors and writers at the university, as well as under Jim Mandrell in his translation course. But the only times I had ever written a letter to a living writer whose work I admired, I had been sure to say that, if he were too busy, he need not feel any pressure to answer me. And my naturally depressive nature, aided by a geographical isolation if nothing else, delayed many collaborations and progress that might otherwise have occurred much sooner. Whereas now, by virtue of two letters to the living translators who I first thought had stolen my hope, two letters that dared invite them into the world of my own imaginative endeavors, thanks to that simple determination, my creative life is vastly rejuvenated, my progress comparably accelerated; and more importantly, perhaps, the circle of my friends and acquaintances expanded. Mark Barrett, a Benedictine monk of the Worth Abbey in Sussex, England, in his book Crossings (on the subject of spiritual practice and prayer) that Eva once sent me in answer to my own prevarications regarding religious faith, says this: "that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too" (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2001, p. 47). The American writer Carolyn See, in her book Making a Literary Life (Random House, 2002), admonishes every aspirant to write one "charming note" to a different writer or editor every day, without asking a favor. Some of those writers and editors, she suggests, might even write back. I have not gotten around to writing one of those notes every day - I doubt, anyway, that such a practice (plus the requisite thousand words daily of new writing, or comparable amount of editing) is possible to sustain throughout a secondary-school teacher's, writer's, and family man's full twelve-month calendar -, but I have begun to write an occasional letter of the sort, and I hope thereby to acquire even a few more friends and amiable critics of my work. It does seem clear to me, above all, that Mark Barrett was right: surely a sort of providence began moving for me once I definitely committed myself, through those two letters, to a further immersion in the literary life. |
*First appeared in New Works Review.