{"id":305766,"date":"2017-04-05T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-05T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/05\/among-strange-victims-by-daniel-saldana-paris-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:32:42","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:32:42","slug":"among-strange-victims-by-daniel-saldana-paris-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/05\/among-strange-victims-by-daniel-saldana-paris-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Salda\u00f1a Par\u00eds [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is by George Henson, a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, contributing editor for World Literature Today<\/em> and Latin American Literature Today<\/em>, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Among Strange Victims<\/em><\/a> by Daniel Salda\u00f1a Par\u00eds, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 72%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 16%<\/b><\/p>\n

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum, as does publishing. The death of Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Latin America\u2019s enfant terrible<\/em> left such a vacuum.<\/p>\n

Every agent, publisher, reviewer, bookseller, and even reader, has been searching far and wide, high and low, in every nook and cranny of Latin America for the next Bola\u00f1o, a new literary wunderkind that will fill the void created by Bola\u00f1o\u2019s untimely death. In fact, the search for the next Bola\u00f1o has been a boon, providing American publishers, literary translators, booksellers, and readers a new crop of fresh, talented Latin American writers: Valeria Luiselli, Yuri Herrera, Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Daniel Salda\u00f1a Par\u00eds, to name but a few.<\/p>\n

Among the names that emerged as possible heirs to the Bola\u00f1o phenomenon is that of Andr\u00e9s Neuman, whom Bola\u00f1o himself seemed to have anointed when he wrote that \u201cthe literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.\u201d Then came the Hay Festival\u2019s Bogot\u00e1 39<\/em> and Granta\u2019s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists<\/em>, a list\u2014in book format\u2014whittled down from 39 to 22.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that none of the names that appear on these lists appears on this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span> long list. To be fair, some were nominated, while others made the long list in years past. But, still, their absence from this year\u2019s long list is telling. To borrow a Spanish idiom, \u201cBrillan por su ausencia<\/em>\u201d [They shine by their absence]; in English, \u201cThey\u2019re conspicuous by their absence.\u201d<\/p>\n

If such a list existed today, there is little doubt that the author of En medio de extra\u00f1as v\u00edctimas<\/em> would make the cut. Just as there is no doubt that Coffee House Press, publisher of Among Strange Victims<\/em>, the English translation, has attempted to anoint Salda\u00f1a as Bola\u00f1o\u2019s heir apparent. Witness the novel\u2019s logline: \u201cSlackers<\/em> meets Savage Detectives<\/em> in this polyphonic ode to the pleasures of not measuring up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s title is taken from the epigraph\u2014\u201cOn park benches, among strange victims, the poet and amputees come sit together,\u201d\u2014written by Arthur Cravan, the Swiss poet, pugilist and avant-gardist whose bohemian life\u2014and a series of forged passports\u2014took him from Switzerland to France to Spain to the United States and eventually to Mexico, where he died under strange circumstances in Mexico.<\/p>\n

The novel revolves around Rodrigo, a young functionary, a \u201cknowledge administrator,\u201d a title he has invented for himself, who works in a museum, a slacker to borrow from Coffee House\u2019s tagline, who\u2019s content to go through life without making any decisions. Or what there is of his life.<\/p>\n

My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another. What\u2019s in between deserves another name. Sundays don\u2019t count: they consist\u2014I\u2019m exaggerating here\u2014of twenty-four wasted hours of which I will remember nothing the following day, and that following day, Monday, marks the beginning of the reign of inertia, whose only function is to carry me along smoothly, as if floating on a cloud of certainties, to the next Saturday. What\u2019s more, on Saturday\u2019s I masturbate twice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To move the plot, Salda\u00f1a employs a common novelistic trope, mistaken identity, in which Cecilia, the museum director\u2019s secretary, slips our young slacker a note saying, \u201cI accept.\u201d Thereafter, we learn that someone posing as our young protagonist proposed to Cecilia. To build a twenty-first-century novel around such a clich\u00e9d trope could have easily derailed, careening into pratfalls and platitudes. Salda\u00f1a, however, is too good a writer. That is not to say that there is not a thread of humor in this novel. Writing in Factor cr\u00edtico<\/em>, Goio Borge describes the humor this way:<\/p>\n

[Salda\u00f1a\u2019s] tools are a brilliant syntax, the ability to achieve recurring images of great force, a set of relationships among plot elements that go beyond a merely forced structured, and humor, a corrosive humor that never gives way to belly laughs, but continues to show itself in every phrase in the book, charged with a sardonic irony that offers readers no respite[.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 2015, I had the pleasure of translating an essay written by Daniel for Literary Hub<\/em>, titled \u201cSergio Pitol: Mexico\u2019s Total Writer,\u201d to coincide with the publication of my translation of Pitol\u2019s The Art of Flight.<\/em> I say pleasure because Salda\u00f1a\u2019s admiration for Pitol is equal to my own and because his prose was truly a joy to translate. Clean. Measured. Unsuperfluous. But also, because there is something uncannily Pitolean about this novel. And that is a very good thing.<\/p>\n

Salda\u00f1a\u2019s translator, Christina MacSweeney, is no stranger to BTBA<\/span> readers. Her translations of Valeria Luiselli\u2019s Faces in the Crowd<\/em> and The Story of My Teeth<\/em> were finalists in 2015 and 2016, respectively. In an interview with Words Without Borders<\/em>, MacSweeney was asked about being a British translator (MacSweeney received an MA in translation from the University of East Anglia) who translates Latin American Spanish into American English. Her answer:<\/p>\n

With Among Strange Victims<\/em>, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive \u201cbloody\u201d (my translation of pinche<\/em>) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with \u201cdamn.\u201d But the problem was, I\u2019d already used \u201cdamn\u201d in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on \u201cfrigging,\u201d which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At first read, MacSweeney\u2019s rendering for pinche<\/em> seems off. Admittedly, the thought that pinche<\/em> might have been rendered as \u201cbloody\u201d was even more jarring. As a frequent translator of Mexican writers, I\u2019m often called on to translate pinche<\/em>. After further consideration, I decided I liked MacSweeney\u2019s choice. There\u2019s something refreshing about it. As all translators know, expletives and swear words present all kinds of challenges, having to do with many factors, dialect, geography, generation, context, tone, register, etc., not to mention pinche<\/em> is multivalent. It can be used to express something that is negligible, defective, of poor quality, having little or no value, austere, and even unusually big. It can be used to express contempt, scorn, mockery, and even pity.<\/p>\n

In the end, I like translators who teach me something about translation, who give me new solutions to old problems. MacSweeney is one of those translators. Her translation of Among Strange Victims<\/em> is clean, measured, unsuperfluous, just as is Salda\u00f1a\u2019s prose. Consider the following fragment:<\/p>\n

The small office he had been designed was, indeed, full of pigeons. The birds lived in four cages piled one on top of the other, blocking the only external window. Vel\u00e1squez explained that the office had belonged to an agronomist who, one fine day, had declared himself to be ill and never returned. His student had received the news with complete indifference, and no one had made any effort to discover his whereabouts. After a few months he had been dismissed, and the caretaker confessed that the agronomist had left him in charge of a number of pigeons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MacSweeney\u2019s translation achieves everything a translation should. And there\u2019s something remarkable in that. Prize-worthy, in fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[65766,35996,64586,48766,56766,59426,65776,65256,1646,37876],"class_list":["post-305766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-among-strange-victims","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-fiction","tag-christina-macsweeney","tag-coffee-house-press","tag-daniel-saldana-paris","tag-george-henson","tag-review","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396742,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305766\/revisions\/396742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}