A premiere in translation

It is a fascinating, insightful privilege to translate in an overtly collaborative way every once in a while. It can also be rather exasperating. Eduardo Halfon, who left Guatemala for the United States at the age of ten and told us on the first morning of the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school that he usually thought in English before writing in Spanish, was duly shocked to hear five or six different and perfectly plausible suggested versions of the first four-word-long sentence of his book: Hervía la arena negra. 

The title of the first chapter, El baile de la marea, seems fairly straightforward at first glance, but as soon as one person starts to think about it in the context of this story, let alone fourteen people, interesting things arise. Baile almost always means dance or dancing, neither of which evoke the vaivén, the rocking or ebb and flow some of us felt we needed here. Marea is tide, but can suggest mareo or seasickness, and is here used to refer to the current, undertow, rip tide or even waves. Again we had a vast array of opinions about how to translate the title and how to resolve each use of the word marea within the story.

Translators tend to care very much about nuances, rhythms and the delicate balance of sense and sound and to have strong views about what works and what doesn’t, so these discussions can last for a very long time. I was asked to write this introduction to explain how perhaps none of us would feel completely convinced by the results of the week’s tussles. We’d all picked up our Spanish in different ways and places and had a range of Englishes in the group: from several distinct regions of England, Wales, Argentina, Canada and the States. But reading them over again I hope everyone in the group will feel a sense of collective pride in these translations.

Anne Mclean

Two extracts from Mañana nunca lo hablamos

By Eduardo Halfon

translated from the Spanish by

Alba Griffin, Avgi Daferera, Bridget Lely, Hugh Caldin, Jim Knight, Lucila Cordone, Michael McDevitt, Ollie Brock, Sabrina Steiner, Samantha Christie, Shazea Quraishi & Tom Bunstead

with the collaboration of Eduardo Halfon and Anne McLean

The Sway of the Sea

The black sand burned. I had to walk quickly, over pebbles and shells and pieces of plastic and mangrove seed pods until my child’s feet reached the soothing cold of the sea. There was nobody there, except for an old Mayan up to his waist in the waves, fishing with an almost invisible line that he’d cast and then wind back, palm to elbow.

“Give me your hand,” said my father. “The waves are very strong.”

“No. On my own.”

“I said, give me your hand.”

We stood there for a while, in silence, him gripping my hand awkwardly, both knee deep in the cool, foamy water.

“I drowned in this sea.”

Baffled, I looked up to see his face.

“I was about your age when I drowned in this sea.”

My father paused, watching the flight of a perfect line of pelicans, perhaps eight or ten pelicans, their white bellies skimming the surface of the water.

“I didn’t drown here, at Sipacate, it was over that way,” he said, looking to his left, “off the beach at Iztapa.”

On the horizon, an immense cargo ship was going nowhere.

“I went swimming one afternoon, despite the warnings, and before I knew it I had gone too far from the shore. No matter how hard I struggled and kicked and tried to get back, the current kept getting stronger, pulling me further out to sea. Until I drowned.”

I felt something in the pit of my stomach that now, today, I would describe as fear.

“I was rescued by a soldier from the U.S. Marines.”

I was listening to my father speak, but I didn’t want to look at him. I started counting waves.

“There was an American soldier there that day, sunbathing or just walking along the beach, who knows. Anyway, he saw what was happening, or maybe someone alerted him to what was happening, and he dived in, swam out to me, and dragged me back to the beach, dead, and there he brought me back to life.”

That was all he said, and I stood watching the old man fish in a delicate balance with the tide, with the waves, and I shuddered as I understood that my father had been my age then, that my father had died at my age before an American soldier – whom I pictured at that moment as a colossus – pulled him from the sea and gave him back his life. There were things I wanted to ask my father. Ask him what would have happened if the American soldier hadn’t been there, sunbathing or walking, the afternoon my father died, when he drowned in the sea. Ask him who, then, would have been my father if he had died that afternoon in the sea. I wanted to ask my father who I would be without my father.

“Time to go,” he said or perhaps asked.

For some time after, I could still feel in my legs the sway of the sea.

The Lady in the Red Coat

We could already hear the marimbas. My father had parked our jade-green Volvo on Séptima Avenida, and for all his insistence that we wait for him, my mother and my little sister – that we all arrive together – my brother and I were already hurrying towards the huge cabin with its wooden beams and posts and red-tiled roof, towards the sweet smell of smoke and sizzling meat, towards the music of the marimbas. My father shouted at us again, an almost mythic bellow, as we both rushed past a beggar on his hands and knees.

            El Rodeo. That was the name of the restaurant. It was one of the few family restaurants in Guatemala in the seventies, and perhaps the only one in the capital that opened for lunch on Sunday. I remember it was always packed, and that everything was big, at least from my child’s-eye view: the thick mahogany tables, the chairs upholstered in black-and-white cowhide, the heavy leather-bound menus, the bull’s head on the wall just inside, the vast grill where half a dozen sweltering men were cooking. In fact, all the people who worked in the restaurant – chefs, waiters, bartenders, musicians – were men, and they were all identically dressed: black trousers, long-sleeved white shirt, black bow-tie.

            “Didn’t you hear me?” My father caught up with us in a fury.

            My brother and I were still hovering in the doorway, straining to see the two marimbas in the back corner.

            “We’re all supposed to arrive together,” my father roared. “Not like animals.”

            “Come on, boys,” said my mother, carrying my three-year-old sister and struggling to herd us towards a table that, to my dismay, was far from the marimbas.

            It was the same ritual every Sunday. We would go to the table with my mother while my father greeted his friends and acquaintances along the way; we would sit down making sure we left him the chair with the best view of the main entrance (“I like to see who’s coming in,” he used to say); my brother and I would order and gulp down our only soda of the day (an unbreakable rule), and then sit quietly, behaving ourselves until my father finally arrived, all smiles, asking the usual question:

            “Do you know what you want?”

            My father called the waiter over and ordered sirloin and rib-eye, guacamole, grilled spring onions, a basket of garlic bread. The waiter took away the two empty bottles. My brother kicked me under the table.

            “Can we?” I asked.

            My father shook his head, frowning.

            “Ten minutes,” he said gruffly, and my brother and I grinned, pushing back our enormous black-and-white chairs and running towards the marimbas.

            We didn’t like the marimba music. Not that much. What we liked was to watch the marimba players, watch the mallets moving in the hands of the marimba players, watch the almost perfect coordination of the rubber-tipped mallets of guava wood in the hands of those uniformed, dark-skinned, expressionless men.

            There were four men: two at each marimba. One was blind, or maybe half-blind (he had a milky gaze), but he handled the mallets just like the other three. We stood in front of them, watching in silence, a rapt silence, until the song ended abruptly and the half-blind man put one of the mallets in his mouth and began to chew frantically on the rubber tip, and at the same time we heard our father shouting behind us. Those ten minutes were never enough.

            “Sit down, boys,” said my mother, “before the meat gets cold.”

The sirloin, grilled corn and a baked potato lay steaming on my plate. I was old enough to use a steak knife now. Proudly, with great concentration, I began to cut my steak.

            “That lady over there, the one in the red coat,” my father whispered, but I wasn’t sure if it was to me, or my mother, or the whole table. And then, pointing with his chin towards the entrance, he whispered again: “she was one of the guerrillas who kidnapped my father.”

            The marimbas started up.

            I was nearly nine and I knew some of the details of my grandfather’s kidnapping: odd, fragmented, nonsensical details. I knew it had happened in 1967, four years before I was born. I knew that the kidnappers had christened it “Operation Tomato” because of my grandfather’s skin, which was so fair it was almost pink. I knew that every night his kidnappers would ask him what he wanted for dinner, and that my grandfather would say a pizza from Vesuvio’s, with anchovies. I knew that in the evenings his kidnappers would challenge him to a game of dominoes, and that he’d always let them win. I knew that my grandfather had presented his kidnappers with the two gold-plated fountain pens he’d had on him. I knew that, after thirty-five days of negotiations, a high ransom had been paid. I knew that my grandfather had walked all the way back to his home on Avenida Reforma, his money untouched in his wallet, his three-carat ring still on the little finger of his left hand. And that was about all I knew. But I had always imagined the kidnappers as any child imagines a villain: stinking, shaggy and fat, with a few missing teeth, their greasy faces covered in warts, pimples and scars. I never pictured a lady, much less a beautiful lady, proud and preening in her red coat.

            “Garlic bread?” asked my father, offering us the basket.

            I reached out my hand. Grabbing a piece of crusty, oily bread, I miscalculated and took too big a bite. I chewed with difficulty, my mouth half open, while the lady in the red coat greeted everyone and laughed with everyone and glided over to her table next to the marimbas.