There is no doubt that Leonardo Padura is one of the most popular of Cuban writers residing on the island. He is no stranger to awards, having most recently won Spain’s Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature; Padura’s despondent detective Mario Conde is internationally renowned as both a drunk and representative of Padura’s generation of writers who came of age in the 1970s, having been educated to be a New Man. But this piece is not about a translator’s relationship to an author who is still very much alive and who likely helped unravel many a “secret” to Anna Kushner about meaning over time.
Rather, the focus is on a fellow whom these days we’d be hard-pressed to categorize as anything but a freak assassin–the Stalinist ideology that formed Ramón Mercader, Leon Trotsky’s assassin who went by distinct identities, seems far-gone, but that doesn’t make Padura’s placement of him in the center stage of Cuban literature an event any less significant for present-day Cuban literature. Trotsky has been, in fact, a historical figure who throughout the last decade has been strategically introduced by particular sectors of Cuban society in order to evoke a distinct, less staid and renovated moment in the Socialist struggle.
Interpreting Cuba’s present through the Soviet past and Russian present can certainly yield different paths for imagining Cuba’s future, but what is interesting in this vignette written by Anna Kushner, translator of Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs (2014), a novel that is slated to become a film, is the extent to which Kushner is hardly reflecting upon the significance of collective recuperation, but rather upon the importance of that freak assassin in her own imagination. In this way, translation facilitates movement away from origins, cultivating unusual bedfellows.
I recall when Anna moved to France from New York City some years back. I’d known her personally through her work at Pen American Center as well as through her translation of one of the most fascinating melancholic masterpieces of the Cuban diaspora, The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. I couldn’t quite get my head around what Anna was doing in Paris translating a piece of fiction, quite unlike Rosales’s, and hardly Parisian. Finally, Anna provides me, us, with at least one answer . . .
–Jacqueline Loss
A la recherche de Ramón Mercader (perdu)
By Anna Kushner
In January 2012, I moved to Paris and took advantage of my initial jet-lagged state to do my best translating at 4 am. In those quiet hours, it was just me and Ramón Mercader and Sylvia Ageloff and Leon Trotsky. I had been working on Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs since the previous July and the move found me in the middle of the climactic scene in which Mercader murders Trotsky. But the book does not end there. I spent my first months in Paris translating the end of the novel, which included a heart-wrenching chapter about Ramón Mercader’s later years in Moscow, after he had served a long sentence in a Mexican prison for Trotsky’s murder and spent much of that time reflecting on the uselessness of his crime. Here I was, frustrated by the trivial bureaucracies of my new life as a foreigner and by how the farmer’s market vendor didn’t understand me when I asked for thyme—“thym” in French, just one syllable, but so easy to screw up—and there was Ramón, enduring all of the humiliations of being known as a killer by the Spanish Civil War veterans’ community in Moscow and the difficulties of daily life under the Soviets. It was humbling. And like that, he took root in my mind and didn’t leave after I turned in the manuscript to my editor in February.
I lived with Ramón the whole time I lived in Paris, eighteen months, and then some.
The street in Montparnasse where he had had an apartment was not far from me. Logically, I knew I wouldn’t find him there, but I am also the same person who has traveled to Havana looking for ghosts. So I walked to his street, often, finding a way to organize my errands around there. I went to the Ritz, shortly before it closed for renovations, to look at the mirror that makes such an impression on Ramón in Chapter 17. I even traveled to Spain and spent an evening tucked away in a bar talking about the Civil War with my cousins and their boyfriends and wondered what Ramón would make of these Spaniards of today.
It was hard to let go of him, even when another translation project virtually transported me back to Cuba with different characters whose concerns were nothing like Ramón’s. I translated and puzzled over tongue-twisters and puns and played at making little rhymes in my head while I rode the metro, but no character in that new book replaced Ramón as my constant companion. I even picked up a book by Jorge Semprún, La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader, but it didn’t satisfy my longing for more of him. I had to simply wait it out, the way most longings subside.
Featured Image: Detail from the original Spanish edition of Leonardo Padura’s El Hombre que Amaba a los Perros (Tusquets Eds).
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