Exchange: Echevarría vs. Tabarovsky
From May to June 2013, Ignacio Echevarría and Damián Tabarovsky exchanged emails. Among other things, they discussed the Spanish editorial system, literary traffic between Spain and Latin America, and the problem of translation. Read their correspondence here.
Hi Damián. Some weeks ago, in one of my columns, I recalled an article of yours in which you noticed that the Spanish market was giving “rise, more than ever before, to the most insolent Latin American literary tradition.” It was 2008, and perhaps a healthy optimism –I said then– could be encouraged at that point. But I fear that’s no longer the case. In the meantime, the economic crisis seems to be undermining the very concept of “Spanish market,” and is doing it to the point that, as I speculated in another column, all the necessary elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present. I mean to say that the radial structure which, generally speaking, characterizes the publishing traffic in the Hispanic realm is less and less justified. I’d like to know that you think about that.
Hi Ignacio
I had already read your column (in Maxi Tomas’ blog: it seems that now Maxi retired it, grew tired of the blog…) and, sure, it might seem like there’s some naiveté in that affirmation. I think it came out in Babelia, in response to a horrendous article by Vicente Verdú that no longer matters. But it is true that in that time there was a line of certain literary autonomy (Aira, Bellatin, Fogwill, etc., etc., etc) that seemed to be entering the Spanish market. I myself felt foreign to that circumstance. But at the same time, always questioning whether that entry functioned as a legitimizer of quality (a word I abhor, and just use to get to the point). In truth, I never thought about it strictly in market terms (sales, awards, those irrelevant things) but rather as the possibility of aspiring to a renovating horizon of reading, one that even produces new effects on writing.
But tell me more about your hypothesis that “all the necessary elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present.” At first glance, it seems like perhaps too optimistic.
I assume you’re well aware, Damián, of the fact that the Spanish editorial system is a sinking ship. The dramatic fall in sales adds uncertainty to a publishing industry that is assailed by the radical transformation of the dynamics and margins of the business, motivated by the new technologies and the change in habits of consumption and reading. In the last column I wrote for El Mercurio (“Towards a new publishing/editorial order”, it was titled), I discussed that issue in light of the not at all flattering numbers from the Nielsen Index, which is apparently fairly reliable. The fact is that the large Spanish publishing groups look to Latin America as a life-vest. They keep doing it, however, with a metropolitan attitude, without creating collective strategies. In this way, a kind of publishing policy is perpetuated, one which rarely functions with the horizon of the language in mind, but rather with the particular horizon of each country. Small publishing houses, for their part, lack the resources to develop expansive, ambitious publishing policies. And in these circumstances Spain still occupies a strategic position, both in the channels of distribution as well as in those of recognition, which corresponds less and less to its share of the market and its cultural weight. What do you think?
Yes, sure, I tend to agree, I share the same perspective. I think of that phrase of Gramsci, about the “old that doesn’t finish dying, and the new that doesn’t finish being born.” Perhaps we’re in that moment of transition, or better yet, at an impasse, which is a theoretical category of great political productivity (the idea that there is a time in suspense/limbo/pause for which we know no resolution, or just know it won’t take place in a linear fashion). In the Argentine case, I could say that the publishing industry succeeded every time Spain had problems: thanks to the Civil War exiles (some from the Marxist left and some Social Christians) who created the first Argentine publishing houses. During the 60s, Buenos Aires was the publishing hub for Spanish language. But Franquismo came to an end (concomitantly with the Argentinian dictatorship of ’76), and the Spanish industry came back to life, became hegemonic, and the Latin American one again entered turbulent times. Now it is evident that the economic, political, and moral crisis that assails Spain (and Europe) makes these foreign little markets appetizing, and conceived of as a sort of army reserve of available consumers. There was a time when the Spanish market discovered that it wasn’t able to function by just importing best-sellers, and that it had to create its own (two Alatriste for every Umberto Eco…) and now we see the bookstores of Buenos Aires flooded with very poor Spanish novels about the Civil War… I don’t know if this will get better, I don’t think so (product of a certain Trotskyite influence, I sometimes think that “the worse it gets, the better”: ironically I’d rather have it fill up with Spanish novels, before having to bear the sorry local mix…). But I want to discuss something you mentioned in passing, and that seems extremely important to me, something with which we can perhaps tackle together: the problem of the “horizon of the language,” as you called it in your previous email. Language seems to be the place where these tensions re-appear, which include the publishing market, money, the economy, politics, syntax. A tension that begins with the name: Do we read and speak in Castilian or Spanish? Is it the same? We, in Argentina, are used to –though we hate them– reading translations into Spanish from Spain, a Spanish from Spain that exaggerates all the localisms, the mark of the latest Catalan fashion; but in Spain it’s not tolerated to read translations into Castilian from Argentina, nor from the rest of Latin America. If a Latin American publishing house tries to go into the Spanish market, it must, almost necessarily, translate in a fairly “neutral” way unlike the way it would for its local market. I say this with two precautions in mind: one, the risk of nationalism (there’s no room here to discuss that, but I confirm my distance with regard to colloquialism, regionalism, and any kind of nationalism). Secondly, above all, what I said must not be read like a complaint, a cry, a victimization; rather like the result of complex relationships of cultural, economic, and political domination. So, what editorial/publishing and literary policy is it possible to conceive of for language, for the Castilian language as a horizon? What do you think of these problems, Ignacio?
You describe very well, dear Damián, the attitude of the Spanish publishing system with regard to Latin America: “a sort of army reserve of available consumers.” And also of available writers, I’d say.
During the 80s the Spanish publishing industry consolidated and grew spectacularly, producing great structures that must be fed at all cost. Following the narcissistic euphoria that in those years made Spaniards think they were a great cultural power, it soon became necessary to find primary goods in other places, especially since mutual competition and the incursion of literary agents had greatly raised the advances for any minimally promising Spanish author. The opening of the Spanish market to Latin American authors, which began to occur at the end of the 90s (after more than two decades following the Boom and the catastrophic consequences of the tariffs crisis in the 70s), belonged to this dynamic. In this context, the arrival of Bolaño had an explosive effect similar to the one produced by the arrival of Vargas Llosa and García Márquez in the 70s. But the conditions are very different, not to say completely inverse. The Boom occurred in a moment of great cultural effervescence, with a utopic horizon where notions of the avant-garde and revolution (two issues Bolaño recurrently addresses in his work) were still fully valid. In the 90s, the opening of the Spanish market to Latin American authors is a product, as I’ve already said, of its need to supply itself with cheap, novel authors and with a new market of readers. But there’s no real expectation of renovation and change. That’s where I draw my distance from your 2008 assessment that the Spanish market was giving “rise, more than ever before, to the most insolent Latin American literary tradition” (and I promise this is the last time I remind you of this phrase). It was never like this, really. Authors like Fogwill or Aira were published, or Sada and Bellatín, for strategic reasons, and prestige; and above all to see if one of them –Piglia for instance– made it big. But, unlike what happened in the 60s, the Spanish literary system has remained almost impermeable to the projects of that “insolent tradition” to which you referred, and resistant, in general, to the novelties coming from Latin America. At the beginning of this year I published a column (“Impugnación” was its title) in which, among other things, I drew attention to the fact that in the lists of best titles of 2012 there were barely any Latin American authors. Concretely, in El Cultural, the supplement that published my column, in a list of “the ten best works of fiction published in the past twelve months by Spanish and Latin American authors” there were no Latin American authors, none! Only half of the critics who’d been consulted mentioned some Latin American author in their particular lists, but the total amount of mentions only added up to half a dozen, among a total of eighty. That’s how things stand, after fifteen years of “openness” of the Spanish market to Latin America. On the other hand –and to add a touch of humor to this rant–, in a recent poll done by the Madrid newspaper ABC on what the best Spanish novel of the XXI century had been so far, the most voted novel was La fiesta del Chivo, by Mario Vargas Llosa, with the argument that he had taken the Spanish nationality in 1993. What can you say to something like that, what can you do but laugh out loud? If a normal literary and publishing traffic is sought between Spain and Latin America, the coordinates according to which said traffic has been established must be altered radically, and that depends, among other things, on a change in attitude by Latin American authors with regard to their relationship with Spanish editors. It also depends on having a collective reflection on the questions you ask yourself and me: Do we write and speak in Castilian or Spanish? Is it the same? What publishing and literary policy is it possible to consider for the language, for the Castilian language as horizon? Those are fundamental questions, about which I’d like to discuss some things. But I’ve overextended myself for today. I’ll take a breather, and we’ll pick it up where we left off. In the meantime, I’ll read with interest what you have to say about it.
It’s strange, but it could be said that, from Latin America, the situation is specular, with the difference (not slight, but key), that Spain has the economic power in the Spanish-speaking world. I mean: around here Spanish authors are not appreciated that much, they don’t even function at the scale of a certain decorative prestige, as you insinuate was the case with us in Spain. Beyond the high-profile stars, few Spanish authors are renowned. For example, I don’t know how many in Buenos Aires read Gopegui, Magrinya, or Marta Sanz. Several younger authors published some book or other, with money from the Spanish state, and generally went unnoticed. I believe that, among other things, the large shadow of Borges, who almost despised Spanish literature, has something to do with it. Our friend Fogwill is also heir to that prejudice: he assumed the only thing there was in Spain was money (I remember when I would contradict him, and he’d call me an “employee of Claudio López”). That combo of a hefty advance, a brief period of fame, the piece on Babelia and, in the best of cases, an invitation to Barcelona, are part of the reason for many writers’ interest in publishing in Spain. I’m sometimes disappointed by that attitude, not only because the advances that Constantino Bértolo got for me were minimal… but because I read many good Spanish authors: Mercedes Cebrián, Rosa, Julián Rodríguez, Elvira Navarro or the ones mentioned earlier, among others. For those of us in this situation –readers here and there– there’s always the temptation of feeling as a sort of “bridge” between both sides of the ocean. But few places are less interesting to me. Before looking at the meeting points –which of course exist– I’m interested in emphasizing the contradictions. I believe in the productivity of conflict. The discussion about language is one of those points. Let’s take a case, that of translations. I always valued Vila Matas’ translation of Copi and Javier Marías’ of Auden or Ashbery, still unrivaled (given that I read at least three translations of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). But I consider them exceptions. In general translations done in Spain are very bad, I believe even for Spaniards. And for us they are, almost, unreadable (sometimes they don’t even seem made for a Spanish market, but only for the readers of some café in Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona…). However, there is no intention of catering to those markets, as is said in marketing, I mean the Latin American markets. It wouldn’t be too pricey, not to take on two translations (one for Spain, another for the rest of the language) but instead publish one, for Latin America, to simply attenuate the uber-local effect of the Castilian used in the metropolis. Why isn’t it done? It’s not a matter of money, but rather, I would venture, because of an ideological position in the Spanish publishing industry, but also in the state (the Instituto Cervantes) and which consists in thinking that the language is one for all Iberoamérica (it’s funny, the only place where Iberoamérica is mentioned is in Spain), and that, of course, that only language is the one of Spain. I can see that situation very clearly (which, on the opposite side, also obstructs the entry into Spain of translations made in Latin America) but what I wonder is how to argue against that dominant position, without falling into a defense of a kind of nationalism, of localism of the language, of regionalism of the language, or of any other kind of essentialism. I refer to translations, not to my own writing, where I naturally write with “vos,” etc, in a natural manner. But as an editor, it’s a question I don’t stop asking myself: if the translation is too “Argentinian” it complicates the arrival to the Spanish market, but if it tends to the “neutral” it turns inevitably into a bad translation. I mean: can we think of the whole language, but from here?
A last point I didn’t discuss, because it’s not clear to me: what kind of change in attitude do you ask of Latin American writers with regard to Spanish editors?
PS: although it’s absurd, I believe that having received an award as a Spanish writer must have made Vargas Llosa very happy…
I fear work is catching up with us, dear Damián. I don’t know if there’s time or space to discuss so much and such ramifying matter. Let’s start with that issue that wasn’t clear to you: the change in attitude I ask of Latin American writers in their relationships with Spanish editors. You yourself answer this in part, when you speak of the supposedly hefty advance, of the brief “fame,” the piece in Babelia and –in the best case– the invitation to Barcelona as decoys with which Spanish editors attract dozens of Latin American writers. Let’s start by telling those writers that, today, advances are –as you’re well aware– miserable; the “fame” imperceptible; that, no matter how great their prestige is in Latin America (unequivocal sign of the metropolitan nature of the Hispanic cultural space), today no one in their right mind takes Babelia seriously, in Spain or elsewhere; and that since the “year of the crisis,” 2008, promotion trips to Barcelona, or to the Casa América in Madrid, are thriftily administered. The next step is to advise those writers not to sign contracts by which they cede their book rights worldwide without due guarantees; most of the time, those contracts fail to fulfill the expectation of having the books distributed in different countries of Latin America (even when it’s a multinational), and the opportunity for local editions is lost. I briefly mention a transcendental and important issue: for many Spanish editors, and not only large publishing houses, publishing a Latin American writer only seems profitable if, besides Spain, the work can be sold in the country of origin and perhaps other countries. But few of these editors are capable of fulfilling their objective, and with their greedy hoarding of rights they’ve managed to “atrophy” the circulation of a good many works which, were they not “caged” by the contract, might have had different luck. We find ourselves before another example of the distrust of Spanish editors of the resonance and profitability of publishing Latin American writers. But I don’t want to extend myself on this. What I do want to do is finish this point crying out for what should be obvious: the natural context of a writer is the tradition from which he comes; his natural audience is made up, firstly, by his own countrymen, and every step in making his work available to a public which is mediated by foreign criteria (strategic, commercial, or whatever) undermines the adequate impact of that work. Here you can see a debate which has been decisive in the twists and turns of Latin American literature: the debate between cosmopolitanism and regionalism (there’s the feint of a polemic between Arguedas and Cortázar), a debate which should be framed today by the terms localism/internationalism. This is a fundamental debate, with depths still unreached.
In terms of your thoughts on language… Hmm, it seems to me that here we hit a hard spot. I’m not sure I share your dark assessment on Spanish translations. There would be much to say about it. In any case, it surprises me that you suggest, even in passing or informally, that the desirable thing to have would be two translations: one for Spain and another for “the rest of the language.” Do you think that “the rest of the language” offers the sufficient homogeneity so that a solution of this kind would work out? For the Mexican ear, are Mexican translations better than Spanish or Colombian ones? I ask, I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be, since they deal with idiomatic realities as different as the Castilian spoken in Argentina and the one spoken in Spain, if not more so.
The problem of translation is framed by a much wider and deeper problem which is that of the language written in Castilian. It’s no longer about the old metropolis exercising a droit du seigneur on the language, whether it is through the Academia, whether through the publishing or journalistic industry. It has more to do with the “diglossia characteristic of Latin America,” which has its roots in a historic and cultural process which Ángel Rama masterfully described in The Lettered City. I’ve referred to this issue on multiple occasions, the last of them in a prologue for an anthology of essays by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (Carácter y destino, Ediciones UDP). The point is that, much more markedly than in the Peninsula, in Latin America there is a radical divergence between the language spoken on the street and the written language. That’s the starting point for whatever is understood as Latin American literature. A long time ago, regarding an anthology of Latin American stories published in Spain with much hype, I drew attention on the absence of idiomatic coloring, of linguistic contrasts, that was evident in this anthology. It is not only (though it is also) that Spanish editors tend to dismiss the literary projects that work on the surface of language; it is that Spanish and Latin American writers, all of them, tend to use a standardized language, a kind of writerly “latin” or koiné, which circulates internationally, and which barely registers local variants, such as that “vos” that you use in your novels. In the use of that “extraterritorial” Castilian resides, in my mind, one of the keys of Bolaño’s success, for example. And that’s even now, when Spanish editors no longer roll a bulldozer over texts coming from Latin America, as they did before. There’s a lot more respect in this regard. What remains, however, is that internalized diglossia in most of those who write in Castilian. I don’t mean to say that in today’s and yesterday’s Spanish and Latin American literature there’s a lack of colloquialisms, verbal localism, regionalism: the issue goes further, to the language written as a kind of “overlanguage.” In addition to this, it should be acknowledged that Castilian from Latin America lives alongside tens or hundreds of languages original to the continent, of which there is barely any written record.
The issue, as I say, is vast, and to me, fascinating. The truth, in any case, is that the Latin American writer who works at the level of language, of his or her local language, is condemned to isolation. And from the possibility of acceding to a potential audience of four hundred million speakers (which are naively thought of as sharing one same language) comes that written language which most writers opt for.
Dear Ignacio,
It’s true, we’ve gone into that which you call “ramifying matter”, which is not foreign to that which one of my teachers –Héctor Libertella– called The Tree of Saussure. But it’s ok that it is that way, and I also like that we brush upon so many problems, as if drafting an inventory, an index for future discussions. It’s not a small deal, at least, to be clear about what to discuss.
I’ll recount an anecdote, or perhaps two, perhaps illustrative of several of the things we’ve been talking about. When I received the galley proofs, with the corrections suggested by the printing house, of what would be my first novel published in Spain, I found myself in the following situation: at the beginning of the book, with a phrase that said “se mudó a un departamento con vista a Plaza Italia,” the correction suggested “se mudó a un piso con vistas a Plaza de Italia.” The correction not only changed the Argentinian mode of speaking in my text, but the name itself of a place in Buenos Aires (Plaza de Italia instead of Plaza Italia). Obviously I called Constantino who, also obviously (or perhaps not that obviously: it becomes obvious because it’s him, because he is how he is and he is clear about all these issues) told me not to heed the correction. But, what if I had? What if I had bumped into a different editor? What was at work there was the standard publishing production system which tends to homogenize the language, a homogenization that always goes from the center to the periphery (although I coincide with you, in that these kinds of corrections are no longer as frequent in Spain).
The second anecdote happened after the publication of Autobiografía médica, a novel which was preceded by La expectativa. Both were read, in some manner, as novels about social decline, about characters that promise, that seek a social ascent and then don’t make it and fall (I don’t even know if I agree with that reading: probably not). But a foreign editor, who translated those two novels, told me: “Very well: now write a third one on the subject, and we’ll make a trilogy and position your books in that direction.” I already had in my head another novel (it ended up being Una belleza vulgar) which didn’t take that path (although maybe it did: it’s the fall, but of the leaf of a tree…). What was I to do? Follow that suggestion? If I did, I would most likely receive a bigger advance, and more importantly the books (and as a result: myself) would surely have greater visibility in the market. (The trilogy about the Argentine social fall!). What I mean is that the market (even for writers like myself, that don’t “sell” much, are not “successful”, etc.) is always present, and that it’s indispensable to always have the material conditions of the production of texts in mind.
And I connect this to what you were saying about the change of attitude of writers in relation to editors (independently of whether they’re Latin American or Spanish), which goes beyond the editors, and would be something like the possibility of thinking about these issues: language, editing, circulation of texts, the market…all of that crisscrossed by the material conditions of writing. The easiest way to solve these issues, for a writer who does more or less well, is to find an agent, and that’s it. Someone who will find you a publishing house, get you the advance, take care of bureaucratic issues (which really are a pain), and etc. etc. Someone who’ll allow us to dedicate ourselves “only” to writing. But writing is never “only.” Beneath that false naiveté, it still seems necessary to me that a writer should develop critical thoughts on those issues.
Last topic for today: I don’t answer about the possibility of translations for Spain or Latin America, or for different Castilians in Latin America, because I’m not even sure what I think about the subject. I feel, yes, an uneasiness about how these things have been until now, about how translation –as a practice, but also as something political– was affected (I’d almost say: was the heart) by the strategies of publishing concentration. And I also feel the certainty or, better yet, the desire, that they change. We go back, then, to the beginning, to your first intervention, in that all the elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present. At first I was skeptical of this affirmation, and throughout this conversation I’ve moderated that skepticism…I don’t know…I always go back to Gramsci’s aphorism: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Previous entries:
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
Hi Damián. Some weeks ago, in one of my columns, I recalled an article of yours in which you noticed that the Spanish market was giving “rise, more than ever before, to the most insolent Latin American literary tradition.” It was 2008, and perhaps a healthy optimism –I said then– could be encouraged at that point. But I fear that’s no longer the case. In the meantime, the economic crisis seems to be undermining the very concept of “Spanish market,” and is doing it to the point that, as I speculated in another column, all the necessary elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present. I mean to say that the radial structure which, generally speaking, characterizes the publishing traffic in the Hispanic realm is less and less justified. I’d like to know that you think about that.
Hi Ignacio
I had already read your column (in Maxi Tomas’ blog: it seems that now Maxi retired it, grew tired of the blog…) and, sure, it might seem like there’s some naiveté in that affirmation. I think it came out in Babelia, in response to a horrendous article by Vicente Verdú that no longer matters. But it is true that in that time there was a line of certain literary autonomy (Aira, Bellatin, Fogwill, etc., etc., etc) that seemed to be entering the Spanish market. I myself felt foreign to that circumstance. But at the same time, always questioning whether that entry functioned as a legitimizer of quality (a word I abhor, and just use to get to the point). In truth, I never thought about it strictly in market terms (sales, awards, those irrelevant things) but rather as the possibility of aspiring to a renovating horizon of reading, one that even produces new effects on writing.
But tell me more about your hypothesis that “all the necessary elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present.” At first glance, it seems like perhaps too optimistic.
I assume you’re well aware, Damián, of the fact that the Spanish editorial system is a sinking ship. The dramatic fall in sales adds uncertainty to a publishing industry that is assailed by the radical transformation of the dynamics and margins of the business, motivated by the new technologies and the change in habits of consumption and reading. In the last column I wrote for El Mercurio (“Towards a new publishing/editorial order”, it was titled), I discussed that issue in light of the not at all flattering numbers from the Nielsen Index, which is apparently fairly reliable. The fact is that the large Spanish publishing groups look to Latin America as a life-vest. They keep doing it, however, with a metropolitan attitude, without creating collective strategies. In this way, a kind of publishing policy is perpetuated, one which rarely functions with the horizon of the language in mind, but rather with the particular horizon of each country. Small publishing houses, for their part, lack the resources to develop expansive, ambitious publishing policies. And in these circumstances Spain still occupies a strategic position, both in the channels of distribution as well as in those of recognition, which corresponds less and less to its share of the market and its cultural weight. What do you think?
Yes, sure, I tend to agree, I share the same perspective. I think of that phrase of Gramsci, about the “old that doesn’t finish dying, and the new that doesn’t finish being born.” Perhaps we’re in that moment of transition, or better yet, at an impasse, which is a theoretical category of great political productivity (the idea that there is a time in suspense/limbo/pause for which we know no resolution, or just know it won’t take place in a linear fashion). In the Argentine case, I could say that the publishing industry succeeded every time Spain had problems: thanks to the Civil War exiles (some from the Marxist left and some Social Christians) who created the first Argentine publishing houses. During the 60s, Buenos Aires was the publishing hub for Spanish language. But Franquismo came to an end (concomitantly with the Argentinian dictatorship of ’76), and the Spanish industry came back to life, became hegemonic, and the Latin American one again entered turbulent times. Now it is evident that the economic, political, and moral crisis that assails Spain (and Europe) makes these foreign little markets appetizing, and conceived of as a sort of army reserve of available consumers. There was a time when the Spanish market discovered that it wasn’t able to function by just importing best-sellers, and that it had to create its own (two Alatriste for every Umberto Eco…) and now we see the bookstores of Buenos Aires flooded with very poor Spanish novels about the Civil War… I don’t know if this will get better, I don’t think so (product of a certain Trotskyite influence, I sometimes think that “the worse it gets, the better”: ironically I’d rather have it fill up with Spanish novels, before having to bear the sorry local mix…). But I want to discuss something you mentioned in passing, and that seems extremely important to me, something with which we can perhaps tackle together: the problem of the “horizon of the language,” as you called it in your previous email. Language seems to be the place where these tensions re-appear, which include the publishing market, money, the economy, politics, syntax. A tension that begins with the name: Do we read and speak in Castilian or Spanish? Is it the same? We, in Argentina, are used to –though we hate them– reading translations into Spanish from Spain, a Spanish from Spain that exaggerates all the localisms, the mark of the latest Catalan fashion; but in Spain it’s not tolerated to read translations into Castilian from Argentina, nor from the rest of Latin America. If a Latin American publishing house tries to go into the Spanish market, it must, almost necessarily, translate in a fairly “neutral” way unlike the way it would for its local market. I say this with two precautions in mind: one, the risk of nationalism (there’s no room here to discuss that, but I confirm my distance with regard to colloquialism, regionalism, and any kind of nationalism). Secondly, above all, what I said must not be read like a complaint, a cry, a victimization; rather like the result of complex relationships of cultural, economic, and political domination. So, what editorial/publishing and literary policy is it possible to conceive of for language, for the Castilian language as a horizon? What do you think of these problems, Ignacio?
You describe very well, dear Damián, the attitude of the Spanish publishing system with regard to Latin America: “a sort of army reserve of available consumers.” And also of available writers, I’d say.
During the 80s the Spanish publishing industry consolidated and grew spectacularly, producing great structures that must be fed at all cost. Following the narcissistic euphoria that in those years made Spaniards think they were a great cultural power, it soon became necessary to find primary goods in other places, especially since mutual competition and the incursion of literary agents had greatly raised the advances for any minimally promising Spanish author. The opening of the Spanish market to Latin American authors, which began to occur at the end of the 90s (after more than two decades following the Boom and the catastrophic consequences of the tariffs crisis in the 70s), belonged to this dynamic. In this context, the arrival of Bolaño had an explosive effect similar to the one produced by the arrival of Vargas Llosa and García Márquez in the 70s. But the conditions are very different, not to say completely inverse. The Boom occurred in a moment of great cultural effervescence, with a utopic horizon where notions of the avant-garde and revolution (two issues Bolaño recurrently addresses in his work) were still fully valid. In the 90s, the opening of the Spanish market to Latin American authors is a product, as I’ve already said, of its need to supply itself with cheap, novel authors and with a new market of readers. But there’s no real expectation of renovation and change. That’s where I draw my distance from your 2008 assessment that the Spanish market was giving “rise, more than ever before, to the most insolent Latin American literary tradition” (and I promise this is the last time I remind you of this phrase). It was never like this, really. Authors like Fogwill or Aira were published, or Sada and Bellatín, for strategic reasons, and prestige; and above all to see if one of them –Piglia for instance– made it big. But, unlike what happened in the 60s, the Spanish literary system has remained almost impermeable to the projects of that “insolent tradition” to which you referred, and resistant, in general, to the novelties coming from Latin America. At the beginning of this year I published a column (“Impugnación” was its title) in which, among other things, I drew attention to the fact that in the lists of best titles of 2012 there were barely any Latin American authors. Concretely, in El Cultural, the supplement that published my column, in a list of “the ten best works of fiction published in the past twelve months by Spanish and Latin American authors” there were no Latin American authors, none! Only half of the critics who’d been consulted mentioned some Latin American author in their particular lists, but the total amount of mentions only added up to half a dozen, among a total of eighty. That’s how things stand, after fifteen years of “openness” of the Spanish market to Latin America. On the other hand –and to add a touch of humor to this rant–, in a recent poll done by the Madrid newspaper ABC on what the best Spanish novel of the XXI century had been so far, the most voted novel was La fiesta del Chivo, by Mario Vargas Llosa, with the argument that he had taken the Spanish nationality in 1993. What can you say to something like that, what can you do but laugh out loud? If a normal literary and publishing traffic is sought between Spain and Latin America, the coordinates according to which said traffic has been established must be altered radically, and that depends, among other things, on a change in attitude by Latin American authors with regard to their relationship with Spanish editors. It also depends on having a collective reflection on the questions you ask yourself and me: Do we write and speak in Castilian or Spanish? Is it the same? What publishing and literary policy is it possible to consider for the language, for the Castilian language as horizon? Those are fundamental questions, about which I’d like to discuss some things. But I’ve overextended myself for today. I’ll take a breather, and we’ll pick it up where we left off. In the meantime, I’ll read with interest what you have to say about it.
It’s strange, but it could be said that, from Latin America, the situation is specular, with the difference (not slight, but key), that Spain has the economic power in the Spanish-speaking world. I mean: around here Spanish authors are not appreciated that much, they don’t even function at the scale of a certain decorative prestige, as you insinuate was the case with us in Spain. Beyond the high-profile stars, few Spanish authors are renowned. For example, I don’t know how many in Buenos Aires read Gopegui, Magrinya, or Marta Sanz. Several younger authors published some book or other, with money from the Spanish state, and generally went unnoticed. I believe that, among other things, the large shadow of Borges, who almost despised Spanish literature, has something to do with it. Our friend Fogwill is also heir to that prejudice: he assumed the only thing there was in Spain was money (I remember when I would contradict him, and he’d call me an “employee of Claudio López”). That combo of a hefty advance, a brief period of fame, the piece on Babelia and, in the best of cases, an invitation to Barcelona, are part of the reason for many writers’ interest in publishing in Spain. I’m sometimes disappointed by that attitude, not only because the advances that Constantino Bértolo got for me were minimal… but because I read many good Spanish authors: Mercedes Cebrián, Rosa, Julián Rodríguez, Elvira Navarro or the ones mentioned earlier, among others. For those of us in this situation –readers here and there– there’s always the temptation of feeling as a sort of “bridge” between both sides of the ocean. But few places are less interesting to me. Before looking at the meeting points –which of course exist– I’m interested in emphasizing the contradictions. I believe in the productivity of conflict. The discussion about language is one of those points. Let’s take a case, that of translations. I always valued Vila Matas’ translation of Copi and Javier Marías’ of Auden or Ashbery, still unrivaled (given that I read at least three translations of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). But I consider them exceptions. In general translations done in Spain are very bad, I believe even for Spaniards. And for us they are, almost, unreadable (sometimes they don’t even seem made for a Spanish market, but only for the readers of some café in Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona…). However, there is no intention of catering to those markets, as is said in marketing, I mean the Latin American markets. It wouldn’t be too pricey, not to take on two translations (one for Spain, another for the rest of the language) but instead publish one, for Latin America, to simply attenuate the uber-local effect of the Castilian used in the metropolis. Why isn’t it done? It’s not a matter of money, but rather, I would venture, because of an ideological position in the Spanish publishing industry, but also in the state (the Instituto Cervantes) and which consists in thinking that the language is one for all Iberoamérica (it’s funny, the only place where Iberoamérica is mentioned is in Spain), and that, of course, that only language is the one of Spain. I can see that situation very clearly (which, on the opposite side, also obstructs the entry into Spain of translations made in Latin America) but what I wonder is how to argue against that dominant position, without falling into a defense of a kind of nationalism, of localism of the language, of regionalism of the language, or of any other kind of essentialism. I refer to translations, not to my own writing, where I naturally write with “vos,” etc, in a natural manner. But as an editor, it’s a question I don’t stop asking myself: if the translation is too “Argentinian” it complicates the arrival to the Spanish market, but if it tends to the “neutral” it turns inevitably into a bad translation. I mean: can we think of the whole language, but from here?
A last point I didn’t discuss, because it’s not clear to me: what kind of change in attitude do you ask of Latin American writers with regard to Spanish editors?
PS: although it’s absurd, I believe that having received an award as a Spanish writer must have made Vargas Llosa very happy…
I fear work is catching up with us, dear Damián. I don’t know if there’s time or space to discuss so much and such ramifying matter. Let’s start with that issue that wasn’t clear to you: the change in attitude I ask of Latin American writers in their relationships with Spanish editors. You yourself answer this in part, when you speak of the supposedly hefty advance, of the brief “fame,” the piece in Babelia and –in the best case– the invitation to Barcelona as decoys with which Spanish editors attract dozens of Latin American writers. Let’s start by telling those writers that, today, advances are –as you’re well aware– miserable; the “fame” imperceptible; that, no matter how great their prestige is in Latin America (unequivocal sign of the metropolitan nature of the Hispanic cultural space), today no one in their right mind takes Babelia seriously, in Spain or elsewhere; and that since the “year of the crisis,” 2008, promotion trips to Barcelona, or to the Casa América in Madrid, are thriftily administered. The next step is to advise those writers not to sign contracts by which they cede their book rights worldwide without due guarantees; most of the time, those contracts fail to fulfill the expectation of having the books distributed in different countries of Latin America (even when it’s a multinational), and the opportunity for local editions is lost. I briefly mention a transcendental and important issue: for many Spanish editors, and not only large publishing houses, publishing a Latin American writer only seems profitable if, besides Spain, the work can be sold in the country of origin and perhaps other countries. But few of these editors are capable of fulfilling their objective, and with their greedy hoarding of rights they’ve managed to “atrophy” the circulation of a good many works which, were they not “caged” by the contract, might have had different luck. We find ourselves before another example of the distrust of Spanish editors of the resonance and profitability of publishing Latin American writers. But I don’t want to extend myself on this. What I do want to do is finish this point crying out for what should be obvious: the natural context of a writer is the tradition from which he comes; his natural audience is made up, firstly, by his own countrymen, and every step in making his work available to a public which is mediated by foreign criteria (strategic, commercial, or whatever) undermines the adequate impact of that work. Here you can see a debate which has been decisive in the twists and turns of Latin American literature: the debate between cosmopolitanism and regionalism (there’s the feint of a polemic between Arguedas and Cortázar), a debate which should be framed today by the terms localism/internationalism. This is a fundamental debate, with depths still unreached.
In terms of your thoughts on language… Hmm, it seems to me that here we hit a hard spot. I’m not sure I share your dark assessment on Spanish translations. There would be much to say about it. In any case, it surprises me that you suggest, even in passing or informally, that the desirable thing to have would be two translations: one for Spain and another for “the rest of the language.” Do you think that “the rest of the language” offers the sufficient homogeneity so that a solution of this kind would work out? For the Mexican ear, are Mexican translations better than Spanish or Colombian ones? I ask, I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be, since they deal with idiomatic realities as different as the Castilian spoken in Argentina and the one spoken in Spain, if not more so.
The problem of translation is framed by a much wider and deeper problem which is that of the language written in Castilian. It’s no longer about the old metropolis exercising a droit du seigneur on the language, whether it is through the Academia, whether through the publishing or journalistic industry. It has more to do with the “diglossia characteristic of Latin America,” which has its roots in a historic and cultural process which Ángel Rama masterfully described in The Lettered City. I’ve referred to this issue on multiple occasions, the last of them in a prologue for an anthology of essays by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (Carácter y destino, Ediciones UDP). The point is that, much more markedly than in the Peninsula, in Latin America there is a radical divergence between the language spoken on the street and the written language. That’s the starting point for whatever is understood as Latin American literature. A long time ago, regarding an anthology of Latin American stories published in Spain with much hype, I drew attention on the absence of idiomatic coloring, of linguistic contrasts, that was evident in this anthology. It is not only (though it is also) that Spanish editors tend to dismiss the literary projects that work on the surface of language; it is that Spanish and Latin American writers, all of them, tend to use a standardized language, a kind of writerly “latin” or koiné, which circulates internationally, and which barely registers local variants, such as that “vos” that you use in your novels. In the use of that “extraterritorial” Castilian resides, in my mind, one of the keys of Bolaño’s success, for example. And that’s even now, when Spanish editors no longer roll a bulldozer over texts coming from Latin America, as they did before. There’s a lot more respect in this regard. What remains, however, is that internalized diglossia in most of those who write in Castilian. I don’t mean to say that in today’s and yesterday’s Spanish and Latin American literature there’s a lack of colloquialisms, verbal localism, regionalism: the issue goes further, to the language written as a kind of “overlanguage.” In addition to this, it should be acknowledged that Castilian from Latin America lives alongside tens or hundreds of languages original to the continent, of which there is barely any written record.
The issue, as I say, is vast, and to me, fascinating. The truth, in any case, is that the Latin American writer who works at the level of language, of his or her local language, is condemned to isolation. And from the possibility of acceding to a potential audience of four hundred million speakers (which are naively thought of as sharing one same language) comes that written language which most writers opt for.
Dear Ignacio,
It’s true, we’ve gone into that which you call “ramifying matter”, which is not foreign to that which one of my teachers –Héctor Libertella– called The Tree of Saussure. But it’s ok that it is that way, and I also like that we brush upon so many problems, as if drafting an inventory, an index for future discussions. It’s not a small deal, at least, to be clear about what to discuss.
I’ll recount an anecdote, or perhaps two, perhaps illustrative of several of the things we’ve been talking about. When I received the galley proofs, with the corrections suggested by the printing house, of what would be my first novel published in Spain, I found myself in the following situation: at the beginning of the book, with a phrase that said “se mudó a un departamento con vista a Plaza Italia,” the correction suggested “se mudó a un piso con vistas a Plaza de Italia.” The correction not only changed the Argentinian mode of speaking in my text, but the name itself of a place in Buenos Aires (Plaza de Italia instead of Plaza Italia). Obviously I called Constantino who, also obviously (or perhaps not that obviously: it becomes obvious because it’s him, because he is how he is and he is clear about all these issues) told me not to heed the correction. But, what if I had? What if I had bumped into a different editor? What was at work there was the standard publishing production system which tends to homogenize the language, a homogenization that always goes from the center to the periphery (although I coincide with you, in that these kinds of corrections are no longer as frequent in Spain).
The second anecdote happened after the publication of Autobiografía médica, a novel which was preceded by La expectativa. Both were read, in some manner, as novels about social decline, about characters that promise, that seek a social ascent and then don’t make it and fall (I don’t even know if I agree with that reading: probably not). But a foreign editor, who translated those two novels, told me: “Very well: now write a third one on the subject, and we’ll make a trilogy and position your books in that direction.” I already had in my head another novel (it ended up being Una belleza vulgar) which didn’t take that path (although maybe it did: it’s the fall, but of the leaf of a tree…). What was I to do? Follow that suggestion? If I did, I would most likely receive a bigger advance, and more importantly the books (and as a result: myself) would surely have greater visibility in the market. (The trilogy about the Argentine social fall!). What I mean is that the market (even for writers like myself, that don’t “sell” much, are not “successful”, etc.) is always present, and that it’s indispensable to always have the material conditions of the production of texts in mind.
And I connect this to what you were saying about the change of attitude of writers in relation to editors (independently of whether they’re Latin American or Spanish), which goes beyond the editors, and would be something like the possibility of thinking about these issues: language, editing, circulation of texts, the market…all of that crisscrossed by the material conditions of writing. The easiest way to solve these issues, for a writer who does more or less well, is to find an agent, and that’s it. Someone who will find you a publishing house, get you the advance, take care of bureaucratic issues (which really are a pain), and etc. etc. Someone who’ll allow us to dedicate ourselves “only” to writing. But writing is never “only.” Beneath that false naiveté, it still seems necessary to me that a writer should develop critical thoughts on those issues.
Last topic for today: I don’t answer about the possibility of translations for Spain or Latin America, or for different Castilians in Latin America, because I’m not even sure what I think about the subject. I feel, yes, an uneasiness about how these things have been until now, about how translation –as a practice, but also as something political– was affected (I’d almost say: was the heart) by the strategies of publishing concentration. And I also feel the certainty or, better yet, the desire, that they change. We go back, then, to the beginning, to your first intervention, in that all the elements for a decisive rearranging of the publishing/editorial map in the Spanish language are present. At first I was skeptical of this affirmation, and throughout this conversation I’ve moderated that skepticism…I don’t know…I always go back to Gramsci’s aphorism: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
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