Heather Cleary on Translating Chejfec

Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is just out in Heather Cleary’s translation. Chejfec is a bit of a strange author to translate, since his prose is so purposely baroque and off-putting that it can make it look like a translator is doing a bad job, when, in fact, she’s being true to the original.

Cleary has addressed some of these issues on her blog. Well worth a look.

Though the essay is predominantly about Chejfec’s experience of writing and language toward the end of his father’s life, the passage above might just as easily describe the sense of linguistic estrangement that pervades The Planets, out this week with Open Letter.

For one thing, there’s the bio/bibliographical proximity of the period on which the essay centers and the composition of the novel. More significant, though, is the notion of writing in—and through—the shadow of another’s voice. Just as Chejfec suggests that his adopted style bears the marks of his father’s speech, the narrator’s language in The Planets is haunted by that of his childhood friend, identified only as M “(M for Miguel, or Mauricio; it could also be M for Daniel since, as we know, any name at all can reside behind letters),” one of the thousands lost to state violence during Argentina’s Dirty War. The book, which weaves the narrator’s reflections on the friendship and its loss together with anecdotes told by M and his father, and almost clinical glosses of what has already been recounted, is in some ways one that M might have written, had he lived; at the same time, it can only exist in his absence.

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