Following on from Anna MacDonald’s review of Southerly by Jorge Consiglio, published earlier this month at Splice, I spoke to Consiglio’s translator, Cherilyn Elston, about the pleasures and challenges of bringing his work into English:
What challenges did you face as a translator in retaining this quality of the stories, rendering so much of their power only through implication? Or are there features of Consiglio’s style that made it not so great a challenge?
This was one of the features that attracted me to the stories, but it was also a real challenge. The language of the stories is very delicate, yet at the same it expertly builds this tension and underlying violence without resorting to conventional narrative techniques. Gabriela Cabezón Cámera, one of Consiglio’s contemporaries (and also now published in translation by Charco Press) has referred to this as the Consiglian narrative logic, a logic which goes against the tide and challenges the conventional sequential logic of a story. As Consiglio himself says, he constructs his narratives through careful attention to syntax and sound as generators of meaning. Therefore, the sense of each sentence, each paragraph, is constructed via a complex logic related more to imagery or qualities that we would consider poetic or lyrical.
And then, following on from David Hebblethwaite’s review of Chris Power’s Mothers, which went up this week at Splice, I put a few questions to Power about the art of the short story, both in theory and in practice:
I’m very interested in close third [person voice], this voice that is separate from the character, but so close that it never reveals anything that the character himself or herself isn’t aware of; in fact so close that the character’s perception and manner even tints the neutrality of the narrative voice. The calibration of that voice was very important to me when I was writing these stories. Get it right and you’re with the character, but as you say you’ve got some crucial distance there too, which kind of gives you a front-row seat on these moments of psychic disaster. I wouldn’t be so interested in being within Liam’s stream of consciousness in the final scenes of ‘Above the Wedding’, when he’s completely wrecked, but by tracking him at one remove, the writing can reflect a degree of his disorder while still remaining coherent.
I hadn’t thought of the prose style establishing a kind of tragic distance between the characters’ disorder and the writing’s order, but I think it’s an interesting idea. What you say about the limits of self-knowledge, and our knowledge of others, is certainly true; it’s there throughout the book and is something that fascinates and sometimes terrifies me, depending on how robust I’m feeling on a particular day. That’s why Eva’s arc is the reverse of a traditional one. She becomes less known to us as the book goes on, and the individual chapters in her story move from first person to close third to, in the final piece, close third on her husband.
Infinite Patience 