This week’s Translation Tuesday treat comes by way of translator Jacob Rogers—step into the Borges-infused metafictional world conjured by Galician author Xurxo Borrazás, in which literary analysts play crime detectives, and the rug can be pulled from under one’s feet by unreliable narrators.
The policeman grasped the folder, flipped it open with his fingers, and contemplated the note.
“What might you all know about Pierre Menard?”
It was blank on the back and had no return address. He considered throwing it into the trash, but in the end decided to pass it on to the commissioner, who was reading the papers in his office. He typed Menard into the computer, then Pierre, French, psychopath, and pervert, without the name appearing in any file, neither in anonymous nor in see here.
While drinking coffee with a colleague they determined that there was a question in it, and that such things are formulated in search of answers. The matter found them in a playful mood, and as always they turned to the mainstream media to sound it out. They fabricated a report that a French farmer, Pierre Menard, had grown a head of lettuce which would enter The Guinness Book of Records for its twelve kilograms of weight and its eighty centimeters of diameter, with a photoshoot and statements from the proud record-holder included. A letter arrived two days later:
“It is not just a landscape that is unique at any given moment. A simple photograph of that landscape is a thousand worlds, because we are no longer the same as before. Lettuceheads!”
The last allusion was the only thing they understood. They talked about the case with someone else, for the fun of it, and there was a leak.
At the station they were receiving calls from a Latin American diplomat, a retired nurse, and various university professors who offered themselves up like exorcists. They all agreed on what was obvious: the identity of this Menard, who could be no other than the character in the story by Borges, the writer (no clarification is superfluous).
Various departments of Literature, Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Criminology participated in the new response; the philosophers were invited last minute and with an unclear task in the assessment. The text sought a provocation, a hand to hand, perhaps overly blunt, given their profound ignorance of their interlocutor’s intentions.
“The excuses some readers give to free themselves from their insecurities can be refined to infinity, though that doesn’t stop them from being excuses, unreal mystifications reflected in a mirror.”
This time six days went by until the arrival of the reply. In that time they pinned half of the unsolved crimes on the interlocutor, and the latter’s silence was interpreted as a turn towards action. At this point the person still hadn’t been classified as sore.
“I read my P.M. for the…time,” it said in the third communiqué, “and I dreamt of reading it with the book in my hands, from a steep angle, and with the glasses sliding down my nose. One could change many words, whole phrases, alter the structure. If I didn’t do it that was because altering the text wouldn’t make it more mine—it’s impossible for it to be more my own. If the anonymous reflect complex excuses, you should know that I’m aiming at infinity.
J.B.”
The linguistics group broke the letter up into three blocks, which corresponded with the three basic elements of a sentence—nouns, verbs, and adjectives—with the following results.
Nouns: time, book, hands, angle, glasses, nose, words, phrases, structure, text, anonymous, excuse, infinity.
Verbs: read, dream, read, slide, could, change, alter, do, alter, make, be, reflect, know, aim.
Adjectives: steep, many, whole, impossible, my own, complex.
The series of adjectives was given for the psychiatrists to do; the series of verbs turned out to be disquieting, and the nouns to be mysterious. Returning to the text, it was obvious that he was a man of letters, a man because what was visible was a paranoiac, unequivocally masculine process of identification with the true author of Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, that is, with Borges, J.B. The dangerous nature of this individual was made clear in the last clause, which begins with the imperative, and in the determination that permeated the anecdote and its immediate analysis. Both extremes converged at the same point: megalomania.
The philosophers added that among his readings would be included Nietzsche, Saint-Simon, the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, Leibniz, R. Llull, Feyerabend, and Kant himself—they were always so perceptive. The ones with posts in Literature tacked on Poe, Baudelaire, Valéry, Novalis, and some others; they all enjoyed themselves in the group meetings.
In Borges’ story this Menard decides to write Don Quixote, filling up drafts and thinking over each step in order to arrive at a text which would not differ verbally from Cervantes’, except in the absence of the prologue to Part Two, the 20th century version being nevertheless much richer and more ambiguous. The work ended up unfinished, despite the fact that the story’s narrator asserts that he sees in the “final” Don Quixote a kind of palimpsest, in which, with attention, some traces of Menard can be glimpsed.
From the point of the view of the police, however, all this was completely pointless. Why did this J.B., the author of the notes, address himself to the police and not to the university or the publishing houses? Where was the connection to the crime hidden? And if it was all just a ploy, what was its purpose?
Being a reader of Borges and an aficionado of crime myself, I possess some information which is tenuous, but which now, with the passage of time, is easy to relate.
The next message from the police and their cabinet was laconic and disconcerting:
“The forces of order are sustained by public funds and do not solve rhetorical problems. Who are you essentially?”
Had they forgotten to place a comma after “you,” or might they be truly intelligent?
The response took a while to arrive and in the days of waiting several surprising incidents occurred. Someone at the Central Library requested, with the corresponding reference, a work by Menard, Les problèmes d’un problème, which the librarian couldn’t find in the back. When checking in the physical files and the computer, all of the work by the nonexistent French author appeared, except for Don Quixote. Public cooperation led to a crop of arrests, all of them overturned, and a reputable news agency, without citing sources, spread the news that a French missionary, Jean Pierre Menard, had been devoured by a group of cannibals on the island of Sumatra. Such coincidences caused them to conceive the existence of a powerful organization in the shadows, mistakenly.
The reply was long and arrived nine days later—using recycled paper and the commonest type of laser printer like the previous ones—to a different police station and with another district’s postmark.
“Borges speaks of two Menards,” it said, “well, I am the third; I want to debate his story, to expand my vision, before I die or end up killing someone. Menard benefited from a tercentenary advantage, we of hardly ten lustra, which makes of our purpose an enormous, subtle labor. In any case I will die without putting an end to it, without resolving the enigma. In my edition, P.M. takes up eight pages and, nonetheless, it is impossible to write it like I want to, despite the fact that in the end it would go on occupying an identical (what a word) amount of pages. Menard interests me little, it must be said. One needs no more than go through the list of his published works in order to classify him as tiresome. It is the narrator that intrigues me: his contacts with Menard and his circle, his “shamelessly pragmatic” intellectual formation, his motives, and his indenticonfusion with the French writer in the last paragraph.
“Thinkers have rained down in droves ever since B. Russell and W. James; Borges’ narrator and Menard himself were admirers of Austin, of Ingarden, of Foucault, of W.J. Ong, and of Derrida. How could one obviate them when writing P.M. in this day and age?
“How did Borges, who was himself raised in English, influence the translation of the version of Ficciones (in which P.M. is included) published by Eagle Books in Edinburgh in 1963, which presents discrepancies of nuance with cataclysmic implications? Might there be other translations in the same case?
“Should I, like Menard, abandon my language to write in a porteño Spanish, considering the situation of Galician with Spanish to be on par with that of Spanish and French? That which is for him an archaizing exoticism, what would it be in my case? What other consequences would a Galician translation of the story have?
“Should my Menard include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, even though it wasn’t written? What would happen with the narrator’s multiple citations? Should they be included as well, if not in the writing then in the reading of my story?
“How can I stop myself from using dictionaries and encyclopedias? Borges couldn’t.
“The measurelessness of this task is that which will bring me to suicide. But first…
J.B.”
Despite the last two words the police disentangled themselves from the case, reducing it to a file in their archives. But the attempts made by the departments of various universities to contact the anonymous person did nothing but multiply.
Also, the fact that I used the third person doesn’t mean you should mistrust me. Right now I’m battling on four fronts, and that necessitates deception. The first is the story itself; if I don’t finish it, it won’t be because I’ve already thrown my life away, I’m not stupid. The second front is the police, poor bastards. The file they archived me in is on the screen of my PC right now, along with millions more of them: reports and procedures. Modifying them and muddling them up is as simple as mixing colors as an artist, as searching for rhyme as a poet, tone for a story; a priceless giddiness. The third front is the university, what joy! The professors, doctors, and assistants argue over my identity, and to them I have already been Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo, Xurxo Borrazás, or Alonso Montero, causing the laughter of those who don’t make each suggestion. In some schools they even glance at each other in the hallways and mutter: “I know it’s you, you son of a bitch, you incompetent sore. Since they haven’t published even a blurb by you, you want to make it interesting.” Some go even further and send each other anonymous insults under their office doors, or carve public accusations into the bulletin boards.
The fourth front is you. My story doesn’t even take up eight pages and is easy to write. Take heart, don’t be afraid, I won’t ask you for anything you wouldn’t want to give up. My affection for crime hadn’t crossed the borders of literature until now, and in any case I exercised it in a selective, cerebral way. But we always need an accomplice, don’t we? Or else we would get…out of control.
Translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers
Xurxo Borrazás was born in Galicia in 1963. He graduated in English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He is the author of novels, stories, essays and various volumes of miscellanea in the Galician language, some of which have been translated into English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Polish. His story, “Pena de Ancares,” was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2014 published by Dalkey Archive. He has received the Spanish Critics Award for Fiction and the Galician Critics Award for Non-Fiction, among others. He writes regularly in the Galician Press about culture, ideology and politics, and recently published the article, “Minorities Gone Global,” Charles River Journal. He has translated Henry Miller and William Faulkner into Galician.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician prose and poetry and a bookseller in Asheville, North Carolina, with degrees in both Spanish and Literature and Language. His previous publications include Carlos Casares’ novella, His Excellency (Small Stations Press, 2017), short fiction and poetry by Begoña Paz (InTranslation, 2016), and an excerpt of Xabier López López award-winning novel, Chains (Portico of Galician Literature, 2016). Forthcoming projects include further work by Borrazás, Paz, López López, and Xavier Queipo.