In the past, it was simply assumed that the author would watch over his own work. publishing-had only recently come into existence in the Spanish-speaking world. The editor-as we know that person in U.S. Our daily reading exercise was actually the first time he’d ever gone over his Spanish original with an editor. Mac Adam recalled that “this collaboration was a shock for Carlos. The project included a trip to Mexico with Fuentes and the editor from the publishing house for a one-week marathon editing session in a secluded country house. Indeed, what a magnet! And not without immediate rewards. This was unlike anything I’d ever translated in my life, but the honor of translating the author of The Death of Artemio Cruz was an opportunity I would never turn down.” My Spanish, my English and my sanity would all be put to the test. After all, the novel is long, unimaginably complex and contains a huge range of styles, including long passages in the local slang of Mexico City. Mac Adam first collaborated with Fuentes in 1984 on the book Christopher Unborn, and remembered accepting the assignment “with tremendous misgivings. Three of them graciously agreed to be interviewed for this article: Alfred Mac Adam, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Margaret Sayers Peden. I began to think of Fuentes in terms of those who knew him and his work rather better than most, and what they remembered about translating his stories and essays and novels. As I looked at the long list of his works, my eyes hovered over the names of the translators who have introduced him to the English-speaking world over the last fifty years. News of his death made me think of his legacy of words and ideas, and of his penchant for promoting his fellow writers. As a journalist he was provocative and known to wield “a fearsome pen.” During his visit I wondered what it might be like to translate his books, and mused on the many ways there might be to prepare for an opportunity of that kind. He was an articulate force in social, political, and academic circles, well-endowed with the courage of his convictions which he expressed with a natural urbanity and sparkle that made him a welcome guest on interview shows all over the world. He was that quintessential Latin American figure-the public intellectual. I met Fuentes briefly in 1977, when he came to address the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference and the Texas Book Fair. To abstain from criticism is, I think, a way of being pessimistic to engage in criticism is to be concerned with the matters at hand and with the country.” I see criticism as our way of being optimistic in a growing nation such as Mexico. Then I went and saw the real country and this created a conflict in me … In the tension between my imagination and reality, my literary possibilities as a novelist were born…. With his passing, a major chapter in the literature of the Spanish-speaking world comes to an end.įuentes once told NPR (National Public Radio) that when he was a boy living in the United States, his father, a career diplomat, taught him “…the history, geography, the values of Mexico. He had lived the fullest of lives, and was widely regarded as one of the grand old men of Latin American letters. Margaret Sayers Peden).Ĭarlos Fuentes died on in Mexico City. “Nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed.” -Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra (trans. The author Tony Beckwith is not only a writer, but a translator, interpreter, voice talent and cartoonist.Ĭarlos Fuentes: The Writer and his Translators America Reads Spanish is pleased to be able to share the following article about Carlos Fuentes with its readers.
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