480
PARTISAN REVIEW
most delicate and distanced means: rather like a technician handling
radioactive isotopes with elaborately articulated forceps through a
protective barrier. The content of his book is made safe for us, sterilized
as it were, by the complicated technique, and in its remoteness, the
experience of reading
A Plan for Escape
is something like the experi–
ence of reading Hawthorne 's stories; but Bioy could not write of his
tales, as Hawthorne could write of his, that they "have none of the
abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the written
communication of a solitary mind with itself. They never need transla–
tion. " Bioy's does seem a solitary mind in communication with itself,
and the translation his fiction requires may be what we have come to
expect of the act of reading in the time since Hawthorne's hypothetical
censure.
In
contrast, the stuff of Asturias's book still seems the exuber–
ance of nature. Complicated technique applied to sprawling substance
was to be the direction novelists of the so-called boom in Latin
American fiction would all take, while the delirious language of
Asturias was only sometimes to
be
their medium, indicating, perhaps,
that while Asturias's huge book is a great novel in itself and a major
step within the development of Latin American fiction , Bioy's thin one
belongs more to the history of that form.
And what of the translations of these translations? They are bOth
good, as we have come to expect of recent translations from Latin
America. I admire the way that Gerald Martin has dealt with the text
quite freely in places so as to write it into English, and I especially
admire his persistent elimination of the quite natural subordination of
the Spanish in order to get an English that streams in confluence with
its subject. Suzanne Jill Levine, who looks to becoming the Constance
Garnett of Latin American fiction, has done a clean job but her
"Translator's Preface " to
A Plan for Escape,
like her preface to
Cobra,
disturbs me more than any questions about her text (such as why she
interpreted the book's more general Spanish title to include the specific
article with which it appears in English). These prefaces, which really
have nothing to do with her translations as such, are branded by a
medieval insistence on "levels" of meaning, curiously deposited com–
mas, and an embarrassing lapse in referring to Bioy-Casares's "reac–
tions against the horrors of Fascisim and Nazism which then shook the
world, including his own country, Argentina." (One thought the
world had included Argentina for quite some time now.) I don 't know
whether such lapses are tactics or a want of tact, but they certainly
cause the reader to wonder, beyond the question of translators who
