The Translator’s Invisibility

{268} The translation, by Paul Blackburn, is properly colloquial, elegant and eloquent, and is flavored with just enough touches of Spanish and French phrases to spice the narrative. At this point in the development of a freer form for prose writing, Cortázar is indispensable.

(Stern 1967:248)

Yet perhaps this passage should read “Blackburn’s translation of Cortázar is indispensable” to innovative prose. In the regime of transparent discourse, where fluency routinely makes the translator invisible, even reviewers who praise the translator by name are likely to reduce the translation to the foreign author. Blackburn’s translation, although fluent, is inevitably free at points, departing from “Cortázar,” inscribing the Spanish texts with different linguistic and cultural values, enabling them to produce effects that work only in English. A closer look at Blackburn’s discursive moves will reveal the effectiveness of his Cortázar translations.

“Continuity of Parks” (“Continuidad de los Parques”) is a brief but characteristic text from End of the Game that seamlessly shifts between two realistic narratives, finally provoking a metaphysical uncertainty about which is the text, which reality. A businessman sitting in an armchair at his estate reads a novel about an unfaithful wife whose lover goes to kill her husband; when the crime is about to be performed, the victim is revealed as the businessman sitting in the armchair at the opening. At the climactic end, the “real” man reading a novel suddenly becomes a character in that novel, just as the characters suddenly become “real” to end the man’s life. Cortázar involves the Spanish-language reader in this conundrum by, first, constructing the businessman as the narrative point of view and then, without warning, abruptly shifting to the lovers. The rapid conclusion is a bit jolting, not only because the text ends just before the murder occurs, but because the reader was earlier positioned in the victim’s point of view, assuming it to be reality.

Blackburn’s fluent translation enables this positioning most obviously by using consistent pronouns. The subject of every sentence at the opening is “he,” maintaining the realist distinction between the man’s reality and the fictiveness of the novel he is reading:

He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it down because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again {269} on his way back to the estate by train; he had permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquillity of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters.

(Cortázar 1967:63)