What does it mean to translate the work of a Nobel laureate? That’s a task that writer and translator Adrian Nathan West has had to consider: among his body of work are translations of two novels by the late Mario Vargas Llosa. The two books — Harsh Times and I Give You My Silence — are tonally very different: one is a grim look at an inflection point in Latin American history, while the other follows one musicologist’s Quixotic quest to tell the story of a reclusive instrumentalist. I spoke with West about his experience with both books, and what he learned along the way.
What had your experience with Mario Vargas Llosa’s work as a reader been before your work on Harsh Times? Were there any impressions that you’d had from reading him that were dispelled (or confirmed) by working more closely with his work?
I can’t say I had the most extensive experience of his work. I knew the big books: Conversation in the Cathedral, Feast of the Goat, and I had read a recent book of his essays on classical liberal thought. I don’t generally come to anything I translate with strong impressions — too often you have to disconfirm them when you get down to work, and in fact my preference is not to read a book before I translate it, although I had read Harsh Times because I wrote a reader’s report for it for the publisher. I will say as a late book it came at a point when one might have expected or feared he would be less clear-eyed about the insidious nature of US intervention in Guatemala, but he had apparently not changed his mind about that.
Harsh Times and I Give You My Silence are very different books: one is about the history of a country and a region; the other is about enthusiasts dedicated to a particular style of music. Was your experience translating them similar or did they differ considerably?
They were quite different books. I remember Harsh Times as being easier, but then it’s also true that I translated Harsh Times in a beachfront apartment in Asturias and I Give You My Silence staring at a wall in Philadelphia, so that may have affected my feelings. I would say broadly that Harsh Times was somewhat more familiar territory for Vargas Llosa — he had covered aspects of the story in The Feast of the Goat. So specifically musical a book as I Give You My Silence I think was new for him, but again, I haven’t read everything and so perhaps I’m wrong.
Given the importance of the vals to I Give You My Silence, I’m curious — did you spend time with this genre yourself?
I listened to the artists he mentions in the book. I don’t mind saying I knew nothing about the genre at first, but you always try to familiarize yourself with a book’s topics to the extent you can. I talk often about how fortunate translators are in the age of the internet––all the artists he mentions are easy to find on YouTube. I also looked at Gérard Borras’s exhaustive book on the Peruvian vals, José Lindley’s history of the “canción criolla,” and some historical texts that were put together by the Peruvian government on the subject.
In your notes that conclude I Give You My Silence, you mention some thematic overlap between this book and The Bad Girl. Would you say that there are other areas where these two books compliment one another well?
Vargas Llosa said The Bad Girl was his first love story, and I Give You My Silence is his last one: one that deals with the love between men and women, the love for music, the love for country, the love for life. It is evidently a late text, one suffused with resignation, one written when the author had decided to return to his native Peru after many years living in Madrid.
Vargas Llosa’s commentary on politics in the 2020s drew some negative reactions, with a New Yorker article criticizing some of his endorsements of authoritarian candidates. Both of these novels surprised me in that respect: Harsh Times is very critical of the U.S.’s interventions in Latin America in the 1950s, while I Give You My Silence has a utopian take on art and society. Did working on these books have any bearing on your thoughts on Vargas Llosa’s political legacy?
I have read nothing to indicate that Vargas Llosa rued the positions he took from, I guess, the 1990s onward, but I do think even he would say his fiction was truer than anything he might have written in an editorial or quipped on television. I don’t know his personal life well but people who take a dim view of the rich often feel differently when they become rich themselves; and naturally the brutality of the Shining Path in Peru must have shaped his thinking. He remained attached to the principles of classical liberalism throughout his life, so I’m not surprised that he embraces a message of unity in diversity in I Give You My Silence — the more contemporary critique of classical liberalism as being insufficient to preserve or promote egalitarian goals was what he rejected. Of course, I’m leaving a lot out; politics are complicated, and as someone with a dim view of Bolsonaro, the “rey emérito” Juan Carlos, and many others, I’m not the person to explain what their appeal to him might have been.
Are there other books that you’ve translated that you’ve found to be thematically linked with I Give You My Silence?
It would be an understatement to say my knowledge of music is not my strong point, but it’s a theme that keeps coming back in my work, enough so that I’m trying to remediate this shortcoming. It is the major theme in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps; there are some very tricky passages on music in Hermann Burger’s Brenner; and in Diabelli by the same author, there is a wonderful story that the Baffler has published online, “The Orchestra Minion,” about a deaf man––or maybe he isn’t deaf, in the end it’s not entirely clear––who applies for a job as an orchestra’s assistant.