Three men on a beach walk on the sand. They are in swimsuits. An Italian novelist, a French writer, and an occasional friend. They are stopped in an instant that the photographic lens turns into dialogue. The image, taken from an old newspaper clipping. Has been digitally “intervened” so that it is blurred, accentuated by the movement or the passage of time or the flash of memory.
Or all three things at the same time. A novel like a puzzle, an exercise as bizarre as it is Dynamic. A celebration of joy in slow motion when it comes to narrating: it is entitled ‘Versions of the translator’, by Roberto Ráez (Holguin, 1996), winner of the Calendar Award of Casa Editora Abril.
The story moves, over one hundred and ten pages, through the Cuban sixties. A time of cultural uproar between books and publishers, and the drifts of those times. And a little further, from the seventies to the nineties – and even to this day. The narrator is there to remember it – a crossroads of paths where the novel of learning, the uses of suspense in the shadow of intellectual intrigues and expansions in their shadow.
The combinations of the detective genre, and all with the use of well-understood humour, converge. Heir to the most meticulous knowledge of good narration in a Latin American key: it is a writing that is firmly committed to such horizons.
It is in those perspectives that the author rejoices in an effective and extensive game of verbal mirrors —very Cervantes. Moreover be careful, here we are talking about what the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga pointed out in his ‘Homo Ludens’ (so dear to Lezama, who praised him in his ‘Delphic Course’): “Play is a free action or occupation, which takes place within determined temporal and spatial limits. According to absolutely obligatory rules, although freely accepted. An action that has an end in itself and is accompanied by a feeling of tension and joy and of the consciousness of being in another way than in ordinary life.”
This is how Ráez knows how to displace his narrative devices without breaking the rules of the game – like Dostoyevsky’s vehement player – but uncomfortably spoiled in the manner of Bolaño and Cortázar. Two names that more than protect the young and diligent narrator from Holguin. And it is that ‘Versions of the Translator’ can also be read as a very personal and succulent gloss of the expansions that make possible the in-depth perception of ‘The Savage Detectives’ and ‘Hopscotch’, readings that gravitate with rumbling freedom in this brief but clever novel that, from Cuban narrative, is installed in the imaginary of a vigorous tradition.
I have mentioned before the combinations of the detective genre and they are emphatic in the plot, to point out the question that from the title proposes its investigation: who is this translator? The answer is the novel itself, and it is worth adding that it is a contestation in which a substantial reconstruction of the cultural and literary environments of Havana in the sixties and seventies are intertwined. With names and events of the most specific reality, but transferred to deployments and licenses of the most lighthearted fiction. This is how the persevering narrator of the facts. A kind of film noir investigator, follows the trail of the elusive Adria Mancini.
Divided into two parts, the first is responsible for telling who the author of those pages is, although at first the assertion could not be more irrefutable: “I have forgotten my name. My name is irrelevant. Names almost never say anything and one ends up forgetting them”. To clarify a little later what really concerns readers: “I am a journalist. I try to be a writer. So far, I’m the narrator. During the following paragraphs I will be many more things.” Better, frankly impossible for such a task: the narrator will also be curious (sometimes cautious and sometimes indiscreet, depending on how you look at him). Almost continuously protagonist and always active to invite others.
Thus, we will learn about their efforts, under the tutelage of “the guys from the writers’ construction center”. The vicissitudes of being “a young writer from the provinces who attacks literary contests”, the girlfriend who has travelled to Turin; the fondness for the saga of ‘The Simpsons’; the reading experiments; his interest in the secrets of literary translation —”Translators are a strange model of writer,” a phrase he has written down in a notebook, is like the brightest star in the night of his navigations—; and what we could call the shake-up that opens the doors of history: “Marcelo Costa in Cuba. In 1966. The presence of the Italian journalist on the island was already a fact for me.”
From that character, a simulated Italian writer as a tribute to the apocrypha of universal fiction – from Schwob’s ‘Imaginary Lives’ to Borges’ ‘Fictions’ – Ráez deploys a multifaceted narrative whose sustenance is research as the watchword of the novelist’s profession, that is, to remember Bolaño in this regard – whose ‘Distant Star’ gravitates on the designs of the author of the ‘Versions’. Every writer who undertakes the journey through the horizons of the novel is par excellence a savage detective. One determined to find the truth —”his” truth—, be it Cesárea Tinajero in the famous novel of the Chilean, or Adria Mancini in that of the Cuban.
With grace and ingenuity, Roberto Ráez has written a novel that shows the learning of good literature to which the author of ‘The City and the Dogs’ referred. Apart from the possible of a journey through time that leads to travel through a legendary era of Cuban letters and publications. Thanks to that curious narrator who ventures from his moving observatory, to tell the possible versions of a probable character like some of his contemporaries in that story. A jumping story and distrustful of stiff certainties, prone to the most substantial embarrassment to tell how the savage detective and the unsubmissive translator meet.
Translated by Aliani Rojas Fernandez
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