The Translator’s Invisibility

The success of Latin American writers like Borges and Cortázar was both critical and commercial, owing to numerous, mostly favorable reviews, the support of trade publishers like Grove, Pantheon, and New Directions, and publishing subventions issued through the Center for Inter-American Relations, a cultural organization funded by private foundations. The translations were very well received. Rabassa’s version of Hopscotch won the 1966 National Book Award for Translation. Within the first six months of publication, The Winners sold 8195 hardback copies; within five {266} months, Hopscotch sold 6965. Both novels were quickly reprinted as paperbacks. Blackburn’s End of the Game (1967) received some twenty enthusiastic reviews in England and the United States, and selections appeared in The New Yorker and Vogue. Within three months of publication, 3159 hardback copies were sold, and during the next few years several stories were frequently anthologized. By 1974, there had been four paperback printings. The paperbacks, ironically enough, were published by Macmillan, who retitled the book Blow-Up to capitalize on the publicity from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1967 film, a free adaptation of a Cortázar story.

The cultural intervention that Blackburn failed to make with his Provençal translation came to pass with the Cortázar—in a different genre, in a modern language, and with a contemporary writer. The English-language success of Latin American writing during the 1960s undoubtedly altered the canon of foreign fiction in Anglo-American culture, not only by introducing new texts and writers, but by validating experimentalist strategies that undermined the assumptions of classic realism, both theoretical (individualism, empiricism) and ideological (liberal humanism). The Latin American boom must also be counted among the cultural tendencies that altered the canon of British and American fiction during the 1960s, the proliferation of diverse narrative experiments inspired by {267} modernism: Donald Barthelme, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, among many others.

Blackburn’s work with Cortázar continued the modernist cultural politics that animated his Provençal translation: he recovered a foreign literature that was currently marginal in Anglo-American culture, so that it might make a cultural difference in English, interrogating dominant literary values (realism, bourgeois individualism) and influencing the development of new English-language literatures. Blackburn’s work with Cortázar displayed a foreignizing impulse in choosing to translate marginal texts, but he also produced translations that were foreignized enough to be compellingly strange. The remarkable thing about the translations that supported the canonization of Latin American fiction in English is that they are distinguished by considerable fluency. Blackburn’s translations smuggled Cortázar’s fiction into Anglo-American culture under the fluent discourse that continues to dominate English-language translation. Translating fluently, insuring the illusion of transparency and the evocation of a coherent voice, positioning the reader in a narrative point of view, ultimately heightens Cortázar’s modernist effects, the discontinuities that dislodge the reader from the narrative positioning and encourage a self-consciousness sceptical of the realist illusion. The reviewer for the British magazine Books and Bookmen acknowledged the foreignizing impulse in Blackburn’s choice of Cortázar, whose “world is a strange one, and to most people, I would think, an unfamiliar one.” But the reviewer also felt that the fluency of Blackburn’s translation was powerful in delivering this strangeness:

Ignorant of the experience to come, I opened the violet-jacketed copy of Julio Cortázar’s short story collection, and found myself on the other side of the Looking Glass in one minute flat. Where to begin on this dazzling book? Perhaps with Paul Blackburn’s translation into splendid, flexible English, whose metaphors carry the savage accuracy of a punch in the stomach.

(Stubbs 1968:26)

The reviewer for The Nation described Blackburn’s reliance on current English usage, but also pointed to a foreignizing tendency in the lexicon, which, the reviewer suggested, would foster innovations in English-language prose: