“In a special action of the case the plaintiff declares, that he is a hackney coachman.” “The defendant maintains that he accidentally stood naked in front of the window.” These excerpts are taken from courtroom reports dated, respectively, the late 17th and early 21st century. Although the reporting verbs used in these two cases are, technically speaking, interchangeable, “declare” would look more out of place in the second example than “maintain” in the first. Today we usually declare love or bankruptcy, war or independence, profits or goods, but rarely our personal details.
The protagonist of Sostiene Pereira, a 1994 novel by Antonio Tabucchi, declares a great many things in Patrick Creagh’s translation, titled Declares Pereira and first published in 1995 by Harvill, a London-based press with an interest in European literature. When the book was reprinted in the US, the title lost its inversion, becoming Pereira Declares (perhaps in line with the advice given in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, whose authors, Dave King and Renni Browne, think that “‘said he’ fell out of favor sometime during the Taft administration”), and the story, initially billed as A True Account, became A Testimony (and thus closer to the original Italian subtitle Una testimonianza), but the declarations remained in the text. They stayed there until 2010, when the independent British publisher Canongate reissued Creagh’s translation as Pereira Maintains. The only difference between this version and the earlier ones is that “declares” is replaced by “maintains” throughout—a change that, despite being easily made with a find-and-replace tool, produces a profound effect.
The novel is set in the summer of 1938 in Portugal. Pereira is a journalist working on a second-rate paper that never prints anything that might upset the censors, who have a lot of work under the Salazar regime. An ageing widower with a weak heart, overweight and lonely, the protagonist is interested in death and French literature, preferring to ignore politics, including the tightening dictatorship in Portugal, the rise of Fascism in Europe and the Spanish Civil War. A chance encounter with a young lefty, Monteiro Rossi, turns Pereira’s life upside down in just a few weeks. First he commissions Rossi to write obituaries of prominent writers. What Rossi produces is “completely unpublishable”—an attack on D’Annunzio, a paean to Lorca—but Pereira still pays him out of his own pocket and grows more and more attached to the boy. Soon Pereira starts helping Rossi in the work he does to support the Spanish Republicans. The book ends with Pereira taking a serious personal risk when he commits a courageous act in the name of truth.
This might sound like a histrionic good-vs-evil tale, but it is not. The book manages to avoid sentimental drama thanks to a mere two words—those used as its title. The third-person narrative, unsensational, matter-of-fact, is punctuated with the reporting phrase sostiene Pereira, which appears every paragraph or so. We know from the start that the protagonist is relating his version of events to someone, but never learn who the listener is. A single phrase, used regularly throughout the text, changes it drastically, invoking a sinister atmosphere. Who is Pereira telling his story to? The account appears to have been transcribed word for word—“Lisbon was glittering in the azure purity of an Atlantic breeze, Pereira maintains”—bringing to mind a witness statement. Although Pereira’s fate is never revealed, the fact that he “maintains” rather than “declares” makes us 21st-century readers more likely to think of the narrative as a police report.
Patrick Creagh’s translation is even more effective than the original in creating suspense.
If Tabucchi inserts sostiene Pereira at the start of each chapter, Creagh often moves the phrase from the first sentence to the second, as if to catch the reader unawares. The solemnity of the occasion is stressed by the frequent use of “he cannot presume to say”, which replaces the less official non saprebbe dirlo, “he couldn’t say”, whenever there is a gap in Pereira’s account. There are some exaggerations: for instance, we read that “the police had killed a carter who supplied the markets, because he was a Socialist”, while the original simply says, ”..and was a Socialist.”
But where the translation takes real liberties is in its preference for informal idiom. Expressions like “it’s giving me the jitters”, “at the drop of a hat”, “all on edge” charge the original with a new energy, making it sound a lot more conversational, as you’d expect a word-for-word recollection to be. A bland provvedere (“to provide”) becomes “to fork out”, an afternoon is described not simply as caldissimo (“extremely hot”), but as a “scorcher.” Creagh’s colloquialisms often have a distinct British flavour: “to tick off”, “to take a dekko”, “in a pickle” all correspond to general-purpose, neutral Italian words.
Creagh said of his translation that “some phrases are more colloquial in English than in Italian”; he “even tried to use only idioms that would have been current in 1938 and to hand them to the right speaker, to make slight linguistic differences between the characters.” One fine example of that is the unexpected appearance of “Bolshie” (i sovversivi, “subversive types”). It took me a moment to understand it wasn’t “bolshie” one had to “keep your eyes peeled” for, but when the penny dropped, I could vividly see the city run by uncouth policemen, their presence making Pereira uncomfortable. When explaining to Rossi that his obituary of Lorca will never pass censorship, Pereira uses the same Italian word, this time translated as “traitor.” He can be informal too: “Now spit out what you wanted to confess before lunch”, he says to Rossi, who is covering his mouth with a napkin, as if trying not to blurt things out. The original uses “confess” twice, but the translator doesn’t miss his chance to be inventive. In another scene, insulted by a thug, Pereira tells him, as befits an old-school gentleman: “You are the last word in infamy.”
These and similar linguistic touches Creagh skilfully employs prop up the novel’s spare structure, helping to bring the protagonist alive. Pereira, whose life is all in the past, is willing to provide details of his lunch, but “does not think it proper to reveal” certain thoughts and memories: the testimonial genre means that we have to fully rely on the witness to share with us what he chooses to share—and on the translator to tell the “true story” in English.
One other thing we learn about Pereira is that he is also a translator (as was Tabucchi, who translated Fernando Pessoa into Italian). With no examples of his translation style, we can only guess whether he updates the 19th-century French writers he translates, or turns to a quaint variety of Portuguese. Nor do we know if Pereira ever has to deal with practical aspects of publishing, such as the necessity to come up with enticing titles. What we are told is that he sits at his desk through nights and takes his work with him on holiday, stumbles over tricky passages and occasionally strikes gold. One morning, “he began to read over the Maupassant story he had translated, in case there were any corrections to be made”, Pereira maintains. “He found none.”
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Anna Aslanyan is a journalist and translator. She writes for a number of publications, including 3:AM, the Independent, the LRB and the TLS—mainly about literature and arts. Her translations from Russian include Post-Post Soviet? Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, a collection of essays edited by Ekaterina Degot (University of Chicago Press, 2013).