Translating Octavio Paz. (Letters).

To the Editors:

Stephen Schwartz's review of my translation of Octavio Paz's Itinerary ("Liberated by America;' February 2000 has only recently been drawn to my attention. His comments naturally reflect his taste, his literary ear, and his politics (whatever they may be), and twice he rightly corrects slips on my part. I also accept that the word "butt" has associations for American readers that it does not have for British readers or for myself. How he manages to call me "politically correct;' however, as if I represent a strand of thinking in universities today, defeats me. But here goes. Had he consulted the British small-press edition, the first one, he would have seen that the title was simply Itinerary. It was the American edition that added "An Intellectual Journey" not the translator. I wasn't even consulted, though maybe Paz's widow gave the go-ahead. The subtitle clearly aims to explain, and surely betrays, an anxiety on the publisher's part that "Itinerary" on its own sounds too much like a tourist brochure. It's more a comment on potential readers, a hope for sales.

About Pablo Neruda, Schwartz hasn't read what I wrote closely enough, or followed Paz's own complex attitudes concerning the Chilean poet. I am criticized for "praising" Neruda for his crucial interventions about being "revolutionary and responsible;' but Schwartz omits my historical point when I wrote "in the 1920s and 1930s," referring to a pre-CP Neruda much admired by Paz and most poets in Latin America and elsewhere. By 194-5 Neruda (like Picasso) had worked out his politics, and he became the Stalinist who certainly was never praised by Paz (or by myself; I have complained in print of his "reams of didactic poetry").

My note on Retamar I thought was simply factual. I cannot see how Schwartz reads "dishonest praise" into it. I applied two adjectives: one was "influential" about Retamar's essay on Caliban, which it was (but that doesn't mean that I endorsed it, which I don't, as I find it skimpy and shallow), the second, "prestigious" about the magazine Casa de las Americas, which at one time was read all over Latin America; it has had many ups and downs, but an anthology of its first ten years, published in 1970, is as good a selection of Latin American writing as you can find, whatever your political agenda. In that sense it was "prestigious." Interestingly, in that 1970 Cuban anthology, Octavio Paz published his wonderful poem "La higuera religiosa" ("The religious fig tree'), written in India in 1965.

My last point concerning substance applies to the comment about my suppression of Hannah Arendt. The version I translated (acknowledged in the British edition), with Octavio Paz's permission and encouragement, was the shortened Barcelona edition of 1994, not the fuller Mexican one. This shorter version was corrected by Paz himself, and Arendt does not figure there.

Now to the impossible task of translating (Paz). My aim, always a risk, was not to translate Spanish literally by using the usual Latinate equivalents. Spanish is not English, and much literary translation suffers from what the two languages share as common roots. I wrote that I "have often shifted away from Latin cognates." Schwartz doesn't agree with my attempts, but he could have given my intentions a more sympathetic ear. That he doesn't is a projection (an unthinking one) of his own agenda. How well I know Mexican Spanish (or how well he knows Mexican Spanish) is not worth pursuing, but I don't know any translator who doesn't work from a dictionary, and if Schwartz found me too clever by more than half, I would answer that Paz's sinuous, thought-provoking, and idiosyncratic Spanish demands more than equivalences. After all, the point, I reiterate, is for Paz to speak through my English. Maybe Schwartz thought that he would have been a better translator (and should have been approached by Paz), a common fantasy among reviewers of translations.

 
Jason Wilson 
University College, London