Invisible Dog: Fabio Morábito, translated by Richard Gwyn

This week's blog is by Richard Gwyn, translator of Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito, which is published this month! Use the code NOVBOOKS for 20% off and free UK P&P.

I first stepped inside Fabio Morábito’s world in May 2014, when I attended a writers’ group (a tertulia in Spanish) that he has led for many years, in the upstairs space of a large cafeteria in Mexico City. I had been taken there by two friends, the poets Pedro Serrano and Carlos López Beltrán. Towards the end of the meeting, I was asked to read the Spanish versions of some of my own poems and can recall being shrouded in a miasma of imposter syndrome. As a non-Mexican, reading my work to a group of hospitable but inquisitive Mexican poets —attentive, I could sense, to every nuance of my spoken Spanish — the net effect was to bring on a self-questioning that had recurred a few times already in that vast, sprawling city: what on earth am I doing here?

I need not have concerned myself. Being a foreigner, and an outsider to the Spanish language, is an experience with which Fabio Morábito is himself familiar. The son of Italians, Fabio was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but spent much of his childhood in Milan before migrating to Mexico with his family at the age of fifteen, and learning Spanish as a second language. He had already, by then, acquired all the characteristics of the budding literary nomad.

The opening lines of one of his best-known poems sets out the core of the matter. In my translation, the poem begins: 

Because I write in a language

that I learned,

I have to be awake

while others sleep.

I write like someone

scraping water from the walls . . .

I write before daybreak, 

when I am almost the only one awake,

and can make mistakes

in a language that I learned.

‘To those who inquire’, says Fabio, in a short essay titled ‘Writing in Someone Else’s House’, ‘I always have the answer that, with regard to Spanish, I have the sensation of having caught the last train, and I add that the train had already started moving, and I had to run so as not to miss it.’ ‘Perhaps I’m wrong’, he continues, ‘and the train did in fact leave without me. It is a doubt I can’t stop thinking about and perhaps the one that underlies much or all of what I write.’

For me, as a translator, there was a particular appeal, an appealing sort of friction, in translating a poet for whom the language in which he wrote was not the mother tongue. In the same essay, Fabio claims that ‘no one like the writer who comes from another language is as sensitive to the voracious and demanding nature of writing. Experiencing in the first person writing’s ability to disfigure a lived experience, reinventing it from the root, their awareness of style will be in principle much sharper than that of the native writer.’ For the parvenu writer, he tells us, ‘style is everything.’ This immediately raises questions about the concern with style shown by other writers who wrote in their second (or third) languages, such as Conrad, Beckett, and perhaps most vividly, given his extraordinary devotion to style, Nabokov.

The idea of translating from another language into English is to make the words sound as though they were composed in English, which of course they were not. So we pretend, and share the pretence. If the translation is any good then we forget we are pretending. The word metaphor is useful here. Translation is essentially a metaphoric process, in the sense of ‘transferring from one domain of experience to another’ with the difference that the ‘domain of experience’ in question is another language and all the associated cultural baggage that goes with it. I remember being particularly impressed on discovering that the public transport system in Athens was called METAPHORA, so that even getting a bus from A to B involves some manner of crossing from one domain of experience to another.

But more than that, there is the profound satisfaction for the translator – something akin to the breaking of a code or the unravelling of a puzzle – when the correct phrase or expression slots into place, which makes translation, when it is going well, such a rewarding occupation.

Borges once said ‘The translator is a very close reader; there is not much difference between translating and reading.’ This simple, clear approach is in stark contrast to much of the talk and theorizing about translation which takes place in academic circles.

The most helpful advice I have read on the craft of translation has always been to keep it simple, like Borges’ remark about being a close reader: understand the source text and put it into language as clearly as possible. Working from these purest of principles, and with the minimum of self-deception; these are the kinds of rules even an inveterate self-doubter should find easy enough to follow. And to remember that translation is an expression of the almost. An inexact science, and one in which the capacity for failure is harmoniously entertained.

There is easy slippage between my ‘own’ writing (which is never entirely my own, but one set of possibilities among an infinite set of potential texts) and the act of translation. Certainly I see myself first and foremost as a writer – the translator part is almost an invisible but essential component of the writer part – and yet I don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

It is always likely to work out better if we translate people with whom we share ways of seeing and thinking. Successful translation implies ways of identification with the original text and carrying its echo into another life, so how much better are our chances of bringing this off successfully if we are excited and inspired by the work awaiting translation? In this I was fortunate, because Fabio’s poetry speaks to me clearly, although not — and this is crucial — without hesitation. The science of the almost is inevitably weighted down by doubts and self-questioning. There is always another way of doing this line, this phrase, just as, in life, at crucial moments, there is always another possible turning point in the labyrinth. And at certain of these moments, we might well ask, as I did ten years ago, on attending Fabio’s tertulia in Mexico City: what on earth am I doing here? But if we do, we may end up doing something we had never set out to do, which may not be a bad thing at all.

Please join us this evening, Wednesday the 6th November, at 7pm online to celebrate the launch of Invisible Dog! Both Fabio and Richard will be in conversation with host Curtis Bauer. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Book your place here.