In 1967, at the Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger introduced me to José Martí. This was via his version of Guantanamera (learned in turn from a Cuban adapter who had put the stanzas of Martí’s Versos Sencillos to the melody of the popular song). At Newport, Seeger sang the lyrics in Spanish, but he also spoke Martí’s lines in English translation and explained something about Martí’s life and work.
All this came as news to me, in spite of my being a student of “American history” at an elite U.S. university. I didn’t read Spanish, and precisely what I needed to understand something as fundamental to Cuba as Martí was a translator, who needed to do three things: 1) to translate language, 2) to translate culture, and 3) to find a way to bring that translation to a public that needed it, whether they knew it or not. Seeger did all three, and thus fulfilled the duty of a literary translator, which is to say — as I once heard someone, somewhere do — “I have met a beautiful stranger whom I want to introduce to you.”
A particular problem in accomplishing these tasks in regard to Cuban writing, for both readers and editors in the United States, is that the Cuban writing often runs counter to what they think they know. The Cuba they think they know may be communist Cuba, or the Cuba of music and nightlife, or the Cuba of nostalgia (for the Fifties, generally, or sometimes for the Sixties in the case of the Left), or the Cuba of third world poverty. In this piece I won’t discuss how this impacts task #3 (which has to do with the publishing industry’s blinders), but I will talk about #1 and #2.
A literary translation example involves something I encountered in Mylene Fernández’s novel La esquina del mundo, where there’s a complicated pun that involves an image of a hawker in the streets of Baghdad with a basket of Cuban boniatos on his head. I resolved the pun via a substitute pun that works in English, but I kept the boniato in Spanish because it says to the reader: this is Cuba, and if you don’t know what type of vegetable that is, then maybe there are other things you don’t know as well — and because a boniato does not feel or look or taste like a North American sweet potato, no matter how often it’s translated that way.
In social science translation, let’s consider any reference to salaries and prices. How to communicate that, foreign to any U.S. reader’s experience, two dozen bananas can cost the same as a month’s utility bill for gas, while a bottle of cooking oil can cost an infinite multiple of a visit to the doctor? Or that a Cuban professional salary — translated via exchange rates — might be about twenty dollars a month, but this does not mean that living on such a wage, difficult as that is, can be anything like living on twenty dollars a month in the U.S.? Or, in referring to the state and private or self-employment sectors of the economy, how to communicate what every Cuban reader knows in her bones — that within a given family there are likely to be people immersed in both sectors (officially or underground), and they may be the same person, in fact? Or let’s consider, in a study of social mobility, the occupational category dirigentes. These are not usually executives in the sense of suit, tie, and stock options; nor, often, are they middle managers of the sort that serve executives, nor are they necessarily administrators, and sometimes they may be politicians.
The solutions to these problems, in one way or another, usually involve making the translation more specific than the original — that is, filling in a bit of the assumed knowledge possessed by readers of the original. That process, on the other hand, runs up against the limits of what the translator should or should not do, even in consultation with the author. To return to literature, there’s a story in Aida Bahr’s Ofelias where a woman in a bus station confronts a crisis which — going more or less word for word from Spanish to English — “would not have happened if someone had been with her, if her mother or sister-in-law had come to get her at the hospital instead of telling her to catch a machine,” followed by a line of remembered dialogue from the mother: “I can’t come, anyway it costs more, so go to the Terminal and catch a machine.”
That translation conveys almost nothing, leaving the reader not in Cuba but, as the Cuban expression would have it, “en China” instead. My solution: “This never would have happened if someone had been with her, if her mother or her sister-in-law had come from Barajagua to pick her up at the hospital instead of telling her to squeeze into one of the ancient American cars that ferried passengers from the bus station to nearby towns. I can’t come. Anyway the round trip would cost more, so go to the bus station.”
That is, I decided to specify that the “machines” (cars) run along fixed routes from the city bus station to nearby communities. And I decided to take advantage of the fact that one of the few things readers do know about Cuba from the mass media — the old American cars (to which the term máquina specifically refers, among other terms like almendrón, i.e. big-ass almond) — but to locate these, as they are in this story, someplace very far from Havana’s Malecón where they are usually depicted. All this, of course, if it can be done without violating the interior monologue and making the character explain to herself things she doesn’t need to explain — like the location of Barajagua, which will remain unknown to the reader unless she looks it up, another indication that there’s a lot about Cuba she still has to learn.
A translator of Cuban writing for a U.S. audience needs to take on a particular cultural burden when introducing that “beautiful stranger.”
So, in sum, a translator of Cuban writing for a U.S. audience needs to take on a particular cultural burden when introducing that “beautiful stranger” — one of helping to dispel possible false preconceptions or about-to-be-misunderstandings, toward the end of allowing the stranger to speak for herself or himself, which is what U.S. audiences very much need to hear.
Postscript: A corollary of all this, for editors looking to publish Cuban scholarly or other nonfiction in English translation, is that they need translators who are knowledgeable about the country and/or willing to ask questions and not leap to judgments, and also who are well-aware of what U.S. readers know or don’t know. I was once hired to review translations of encyclopedia entries on Cuba, written by Cubans. Problems included “the interventionist government of 1908” (U.S. readers need to know the author means “U.S.-installed administration”), “creole baseball players” (baseball players born in Cuba, not mixed-raced ones), criollo translated in a different article as “indigenous” (seeming to make it refer to the pre-conquest inhabitants, rather than to traditions made-in-Cuba), and “wounded servant” rather than “wounded deer,” as per the lyrics to the song Guantánamera (because the original author of the entry had misspelled ciervo as siervo, turning the deer into a servant).
Cover Photo: Pete Seeger at Yorktown Heights High School (NY) in 1967. Library of Congress New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection