True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.
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Josefina Massot (JM): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?
Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.
Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’
So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges.
Then there is the comedy: the valet spiking the Count’s bedtime drink with coffee to exacerbate his insomnia, because he (the valet) wants to hear more and more of the Variations; or the star pianist and orchestra conductor who have rehearsed different concertos and don’t realize until they are on stage, waiting for each other to start. There are some real laugh-out-loud moments. But the set-up has to be handled so carefully for them to work. This is probably what took the most drafts . . . Meanwhile, there are some lines that are so deadpan they are very easy to miss; and if a word is out of place, they will fall flat.
JM: I was also wondering if your extensive background in Philosophy (you hold a Ph.D. from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) might have given you a leg up, not only in terms of managing the book’s ‘erudite’ content, but also in striking the right kind of balance between analytic and associative thinking—the former being particularly useful in parsing individual passages’ many subtleties, the latter ideal in tying these sundry bits together into a cohesive whole. Did you find yourself donning your ‘philosopher’s cap’ with particular gusto?
FP: It’s a long time since I’ve worn that hat in an academic context, but I’m sure it helps me not to panic when things take an ontological turn, or I need to ensure that the brief references to Wittgenstein or Leibniz are coherent. You describe the challenge perfectly: it demands a combination of abstraction and instinct, in very careful proportions. And there’s no doubt I’ve always enjoyed novels with a philosophical undertow to them. Yet I’m eager to emphasize that the book is not ‘intellectual’ in a dry sense, and certainly doesn’t require any specialist knowledge on the part of readers—though I hope it would spur them to want to learn more about some of the less well-known artists, musicians, and historical events that Sagasti weaves into the story (even if only to find out how much is made up!). He is also very democratic in his musical tastes, and transcends the boring old gap between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture: Bach sits comfortably alongside the Beatles.
JM: Is there any one notion or association, amid the myriad established by Sagasti in the book, that you found particularly moving or memorable?
FP: At several points the music of the book builds to moments of real emotion, some quite devastating, some understated, all deeply true. One of the most poignant for me, as the father of a six-year-old who enjoys putting her to sleep with songs and poems (not sure how much she enjoys it, but it’s effective!), is when Sagasti asks at what point we sing our child a lullaby for the last time: ‘. . . one day, unknowingly, we sing our child their final lullaby. They’d asked for it. Perhaps it’s been a few nights already. We don’t know that it’s the last time, but our child does. It takes a while for sleep to come.’
More abstractly, an image that particularly resonated with me was the one he uses frequently here of the circle, and how to break out of an endless cycle of repetition, which is a kind of immobility. This conflict between immobility and fluidity is one I’ve found emblematic of many things.
JM: Fireflies and A Musical Offering can be thought of as a unit of sorts—certainly in structural and stylistic terms—but I assume they differ in other ways (I haven’t yet had a chance to read the former). Sagasti, at any rate, has claimed that A Musical Offering is more intimate, more lyrical, and more emotional than its predecessor. Would you agree? As a close reader of both, could you point to other notable differences between them?
FP: This was my first impression, too. Unlike in Fireflies, here he occasionally uses the first person pronoun, and mentions events from his own childhood and from when he was a young man. And all those observations of the subtle changes that occur as children grow up can only come from experience. But otherwise, they are very much of a piece in terms of style and structure. One focuses more on artists, the other on musicians, of course, but the same themes appear. What sets them apart, I suppose, are the emblematic images that link together the stories in each: in Fireflies it is people plummeting to earth, the stars, cold forests, mouths that open wide . . . In A Musical Offering it is people falling silent, the night, sand, the circle . . . The word ‘night’ alone appears ninety-one times in this book!
JM: Sagasti is a self-professed music buff, and this shines through in several of his books. It’s not just their content: music sprouts from both their structure and their language. I’ve always had the sense that Spanish speakers have a higher tolerance for structural divergence than their Anglo-American counterparts; less controversially, English and Spanish vary wildly in their musicality—their tempos, their harmonies. How did you go about handling these issues in translation?
FP: I agree on the point about tolerating structural divergence—though there are exceptions among English-language writers, of course (can I recommend Alasdair Gray, if you don’t know him already?). Broadly speaking, I feel Anglo readers have less time for this kind of experimentation, especially where it seems merely fanciful. I was aware of walking a constant tightrope in terms of capturing Sagasti’s unique narrative voice. It is a very delicate balancing act: the many parts held together by the internal harmonics of the book, and the echoes and repetitions that are sent back and forth between segments. Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse. As reviewers including yourself have noted, there is a risk of it seeming a ‘dazzling gimmick’ or ‘sounding pompous, silly or both.’ What maintains the reader’s suspension of disbelief, and the focus on the humanity and the universal experience that is at the core of the book, is this very musical quality of the writing that you note. It lulls and soothes the reader into a kind of dwam state, where the mind can drift, before startling us back into full awareness again. I liken it to watching certain kinds of film that give you space to think your own thoughts as the images unfold, and then summon you back with a change in pace.
Sagasti writes in very well-rounded, self-contained sentences. The words are placed just so. He requires an alertness to patterns and repetition. An example towards the start is his minute description of the interaction between Count Keyserling’s valet and the harpsichordist, Goldberg: ‘Vasya, standing to one side, follows Goldberg’s hands; Goldberg, the score.’ This structure is repeated a few lines later: ‘He closes the door to the room; Goldberg, the lid of the harpsichord.’ Then there are the passages that really attempt to embody the piece of music they are describing, to perform it like a type of ekphrasis: in particular the wonderful extended account of Ligeti’s Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes that opens chapter two. To catch those kinds of rhythms, I would read long sections aloud. It is striking how many changes you make as a result of reading out loud, things that hadn’t stood out to the eyes alone.
While we’re on music, I must mention two people without whom this book simply wouldn’t exist in English: first, my editor Robin Myers, a poet, translator, and musician, who not only made many improvements to the rhythm and flow but whose familiarity with musical terminology I relied on enormously. Secondly, Fiona Mackintosh (co-translator of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s fabulous The Adventures of China Iron, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize), who not only proofread the book but also advised on a whole host of details from the history of music (for example: in a fifteenth-century painting, a particular stringed instrument could not have been a viola but rather a viol). Between them, they kept me straight and saved me from some terrible, off-key, one-man-band-falling-down-the-stairs-type clangers.
JM: Part of achieving a ‘musica universalis’ is making sure that overly local references in the original don’t alienate target audiences. Along those lines, for instance, you deftly replaced the lullaby Dónde está el lobo feroz with the classic ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby,’ all while retaining the original’s dark undertones. Could you name other challenges encountered or choices made with English-speaking readers in mind?
FP: There weren’t many: Sagasti is already a rather ‘universal’ writer in the sense that he criss-crosses times and geographies and isn’t deeply rooted in a specific cultural milieu. Yet as we mentioned earlier, this book is more personal, and it includes passing references to, for example, characters from children’s TV in 1970s Argentina. They appear in a long, delirious, almost stream-of-consciousness passage that offers no context, but were essential to its pathos, so all I did was insert a little pointer to help the reader picture them.
A related kind of challenge was thrown up in a segment that simply lists alternative spellings of ‘Scheherazade.’ In Spanish, because of its phonetics, the name can be written in seven or eight different ways. But in English there is just one spelling: we borrowed it from German and it stuck. So, what to do? Well, I went back to the source, and used possible transliterations of different forms of the name as it appears in Persian and Arabic.
JM: Given the book’s unconventional nature, did you find yourself resorting to new or atypical translation tactics? Or does every text elicit its own process?
FP: Each book demands its own approach, which is why I don’t believe studying theory is either necessary or particularly useful when it comes to actually doing translation. That said, for me the guiding principle and how you go about achieving it—the actual working process—are always pretty much the same. That is, to convey the author’s ideas with as great a precision as possible in as natural a way as possible in English, while attending to what Tim Parks calls the ‘rhetorical feel’ of the text: its register, sonorous aspects, cultural aspects. Among other things, this means making the ordinary sound ordinary, so that the extraordinary can stand out for what it is. That can mean, in some cases, rewriting or restructuring whole sentences or even paragraphs in order for them to achieve the same effect in English. In the case of A Musical Offering, however, if anything it demanded that I stick closer to the structure, with its mostly brief sentences, some apparently straightforward and others more enigmatic, asking why each word is where it is and finding a formula in English that maps the same hills and hollows of the phrase.
I should add that this isn’t something you plan ahead or do consciously. It emerges in the process as part of the response to the work, and you can only really reflect on it once it’s over. And this is why I think approaching a text with a ‘theory’ falls down. You can’t attack a text as if everything were a cryptic puzzle you’re trying to decipher (even when a text may contain cryptic puzzles). Your familiarity with the language has to be such that you can produce at least a half-decent version before you turn to the dictionary. I have the impression that translation works best when you feel you are replicating to some extent the actual process of writing the author went through, with all the mysteries that can involve, all the creative leaps that sometimes need to be taken.
JM: A Musical Offering is teeming with hidden jokes and allusions, many of which I’m certain I’ve missed! Did you consult with Sagasti to ensure you’d pinned them all down—or to answer any other questions pertaining to the book at large? If so, could you tell us a little bit more about the author-translator dynamic?
FP: Well, to be honest I don’t know if I got them all. But then, I’m not sure Sagasti has pinned them all down either. I’m only half-joking . . . Of course we need to differentiate between something deliberately planted, and a connection that a reader makes of their own accord. With this kind of digressive text, such echoes naturally proliferate.
I did almost miss a rather important detail, because at first I thought it was simply a typo. Despite his seeming invitation to play his musical offering on an infinite loop by dropping the qualifier in the final chapter’s title ‘da Capo al Fine’ (as you mention in your review), Sagasti in fact inserts a deliberate error that, like Gould’s ‘gesture of modification’ in his final version of the Variations, allows us at last to step outside of the endless circle. It is something very subtle—‘one for the real nerds,’ he told me. But what a good thing I checked with him! I invite your readers to see if they can spot it.
As for the author-translator relationship—and speaking of making allusions—although we had corresponded very amiably during the process of translating Fireflies, we only met properly when he came to Scotland last year. Together with Sam McDowell from Charco Press we visited Little Sparta, the garden crammed with sculpture-poems that Ian Hamilton Finlay carved out of inhospitable moorland in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh. Sagasti had dreamt of visiting this place for years (there are echoes of Hamilton Finlay in the cover art for A Musical Offering). I know the place quite well, so I was trying my best to explain some of the works as I led them around the maze of paths—it is a veritable ‘garden of forking paths.’ At one such fork, unsure of which way to lead them next, I turned to look at him, and he slowly removed an imaginary handkerchief from his pocket, and mimed tying it through the hole in an imaginary metal nut. He then mimed tossing this oracular way-finding device ahead of us, just as the character of the Stalker does in Tarkovsky’s eponymous film. Little Sparta as the Zone: the perfect connection. I’ve now taken to calling him my Connection Man, after the shaman figure in one of my top ten all-time books, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
JM: Are you planning to translate other work by Sagasti in the near future? Could you give us the scoop? And if not, what else lies ahead?
FP: I’d love to have the chance to translate his most recent work, Leyden Ltd., but I fear it might be too experimental even for Charco (or maybe not . . .? No pressure!). It is a novel composed entirely of footnotes. I guess it’s what happens if you take his method in Fireflies or A Musical Offering to its logical conclusion!
It’s probably a scoop for no one other than myself, but you might be amused to hear that apparently Luis is incorporating me in some shape or form into the book he is currently writing. I won’t say any more, but he keeps sending me enigmatic questions and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s an elaborate revenge plot . . .
Otherwise, I’m now working on my second book by bestselling Peruvian writer Renato Cisneros, also for Charco Press. It is a follow-up to The Distance Between Us and delves further back into the past of his family, revealing all manner of dark secrets. Coming next year!
Thank you so much for such interesting questions, and I hope your readers really enjoy A Musical Offering.
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator working from Spanish, French, and Italian. He studied at York and Warwick universities before moving to Mexico City for twelve years, where he completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has lived in Berlin since 2016. Fionn specializes in translations in the fields of art and architecture, humanities and social sciences, and international development. As a literary translator he translates and edits Latin American fiction for Edinburgh-based Charco Press, including translations of Fireflies by Luis Sagasti (shortlisted for the UK Translators’ Association First Translation Award, 2018), The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros (winner of an English PEN Award, 2018), a co-translation of Fate by Jorge Consiglio (2020), and most recently Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering (2020). Twitter: @elusiveword
Josefina Massot was born and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied Philosophy at Stanford University and worked for Cabinet Magazine and Lapham’s Quarterly in New York City, where she later served as a foreign correspondent for the Argentine newspapers La Nueva and Perfil. She is currently a freelance writer, editor, and translator, as well as a blog editor at Asymptote.
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