I can't actually remember what prompted me to go back to this translation, but the reason I started it, a year and a half ago while I was in Mexico for 6 weeks training as a dive instructor, was that I read the story (in Spanish), wanted to recommend it to someone, and when I started looking for an English translation, couldn't find one. In fact, my searches since have also failed to find one; could it be that no published translation exists? This would be the erstwhile translator's equivalent of discovering a new species and I highly doubt it could really be the case, for such a well-known author; but at any rate, no other translation of this work was readily available.
I translated almost all of this "free-hand", without consulting a dictionary, while sitting in various of Playa de Carmen's many enjoyable bars on a series of warm August nights. When I got to the last few paragraphs, the imagery became just a bit too surreal and there were a few too many words of which I was uncertain for me to be able to piece together a convincing reconstruction (for that, after all, is what translation is) of the text, and I put it aside, meaning to come back with a dictionary at some point. A year passed, and I didn't. Then in September last year, an unfortunate incident with a 10-year old child resulted in the iPad on which I'd typed the translation being completely wiped. I lost some photos, which was a bit sad, but it was with a feeling of horror that I realised the loss of my Notes file included this, as well as a number of other pieces of writing. My joy on discovering that the contents had somehow been backed up and transferred to the Notes on my iPhone was considerable, and I told myself that, having miraculously escaped destruction, the translation really deserved to be finished off.
And then I did nothing with it for another 4 months.
But, for some reason -- now that I come to think on it more deeply, I believe it was the unique feeling of walking on a thin layer of fresh, soft, newly-fallen snow, for which there should be a word but is not; and from there thinking about the compound imaginary nouns of Tlön (it's always Borges); and from there being reminded of my adventures in translation, which brought me to it -- a few days ago I remembered this, and went back to it.
Well, enough from me; time for Fuentes. A note on the title: "El que inventó la pólvora" has usually been translated, where I've seen it referred to in English texts, as "He Who Invented Gunpowder", or slightly more ambiguously "Who Invented Gunpowder". I like neither the personification of the mysterious "He" in the former, nor the apparent incompleteness of the latter, a question without a question mark or a relative clause without a context. I am not sure my version succeeds any better in capturing the essence of the original, but at least it's my own failed attempt at doing so.
Without further apology, here it is:
The Invention of Gunpowder
Carlos Fuentes (from Los días enmascarados, 1954)
Translated by me, 2014-2016
One of the few intellectuals who still existed in the days prior to the catastrophe opined that perhaps it was all Aldous Huxley's fault. That intellectual – titular of that same faculty of sociology, during that famous year in which all of humanity granted him a Doctorate Honoris Causa, and all the universities closed their doors – still remembered something of Music at Night; the snobberies of our era were that of ignorance and of the very latest mode, and thanks to this, progress, industry and civilised activities were maintained. Huxley, my friend recalled, included this sentence from a North American engineer: "Whoever constructs a skyscraper lasting more than forty years, is a traitor to the construction industry." Had I had the time necessary to reflect upon this reflection of my friend, perhaps I might have laughed, cried, before his futile attempt to pursue the complicated game of cause and effect: ideas that lead to action, action that nourishes ideas. But in those days, time, ideas, action were on the verge of death.
The situation, intrinsically, was not new. Except that, until now, it had been we, the humans, who had driven it. It was this that justified it, endowed it with humour, made it intelligible. It was we who exchanged an old automobile for this year's model. We who threw unserviceable things into the trash. We who decided between the various brands of a product. At times the circumstances were comic: I remember that a young friend of mind changed her deodorant just because the advertisements assured her that the new product was something like a guarantee of love at first sight. Others were sad: one came to be fond of a pipe, comfortable shoes, vinyl records that had become tinged with nostalgia; and to have to dispose of them, offering them up to the anonymity of the rag-and-bone man or the trash, was an occasion of a certain melancholy.
There was never time to question what diabolical plan one obeyed, or if everything was the accelerated eruption of a natural phenomenon we believed we had mastered. Nor where the rebellion, punishment, destiny – we did not know what to call it – began. The fact is that one day, the spoon with which I was eating breakfast, of genuine Christoph silver, melted in my hands. I gave no particular thought to the matter and replaced the useless utensil with another similar, of the same design, so as not to leave my dinner service incomplete and to continue to be able to host, with a certain elegance, up to twelve persons. The new spoon survived a week; with it, a knife also disintegrated. The new replacements lasted not 72 hours before turning to jelly. And clearly, I had to open my cupboards and check: all the cutlery reposed in the bottom of the drawers, a thick mass of grey goo.
For a time, I thought these events were of a singular nature. The happy owners of such valuable objects took good care not to let on about what, one later had to realise, was already a universal fact. When the yellowed spoons, knives and forks made from aluminium and tin, used by the hospitals, the poor, the taverns and barracks, also began to disintegrate, it was no longer possible to hide the disgrace that afflicted us. An outcry was raised; the factories responded that they were able to keep up with the demand, via a huge effort, to the extent of being able to replace the tableware of a hundred thousand homes, every 24 hours.
The calculus was exact. Every day after breakfast, my teaspoon – I was reduced to this, the cheapest of objects, for all culinary uses – turned to dust. Hurriedly, we all went out and lined up to get a new one. As I might have known, the first few people bought the lot; though we suspected that 100 spoons acquired today would be paste tomorrow, perhaps our hope that they would survive 24 hours was so great it surpassed all. Social graces suffered a complete deterioration: nobody could invite friends over, and the misunderstood and nostalgic movement to revert to the customs of the Vikings was a short-lived one.
This situation, up to a certain amiable point, lasted barely six months. One morning, I was finishing the everyday act of brushing my teeth. I felt the toothbrush, still in my mouth, transform into a plastic snake; I spat it out in little pieces. This type of calamity began to repeat itself almost without interruption. I remember that the same day, when I went into my boss's office at the bank, the writing desk disintegrated into lumps of steel, while the banker’s cigars coughed and shredded themselves, and even the cheques showed strange signs of restlessness. Returning to my house, my shoes opened up like flowers of leather, and I had to continue barefoot. I arrived almost naked: my clothes had fallen into rags, the colours of my cravat separated and took wing as a flight of butterflies. Then I realised another thing: the automobiles passing in the streets had stopped suddenly, and while their drivers got out, their jackets turning to dust on their backs, exuding a collective odour of dry-cleaning and armpits, the vehicles trembled, enveloped in a cloud of red gases. In an attempt to recover my composure, I fixed my gaze on the bodies of the cars themselves. The street heaved in a confusion of caricatures: Model T Fords, old bombs from 1909, Tin Lizzies, square caterpillars, cars long since out of fashion.
The results of that afternoon's invasion, of the clothes stores and furniture shops, of the car salesyards, were indescribable. The car salesmen – this might have awakened suspicions – already had in readiness the Model Of The Future, that in a few hours was sold to thousands. (The following day, all the agencies announced the release of a Newer Model Of The Future; the city was filled with outmoded announcements about the Model Of The Future of the day before – that already, of course, gave off a slightly moth-eaten air – and a new avalanche of buyers descended upon the salesyards.)
Here I must insert a disclaimer. The series of events to which I come to refer, the final effects of which were never appreciated, far from provoking astonishment or disgust, were welcomed with joy, even delirium, by the population of our countries. The factories toiled at full steam, ending the problem of unemployment. Loudspeakers installed on every corner blared out the message of this new industrial revolution: the benefits of free enterprise were with us today as never before, in an ever-expanding market; surmounting this challenge to progress, private industry responded to the individual demands of each day in an unparalleled escalation; the diversification of a market characterised by the constant replacement of consumable goods assured us of a life that was rich, hygienic and free. "Charles the Great died with his old socks on," declared one poster, "you can die with your Elasto-Plastex fresh from the factory." The bonanza was incredible: everyone was working in manufacturing, earning enormous salaries, and they spent them daily to change their old things for new products. It was calculated that within my village alone, in cash and equivalent value, there was something in excess of two hundred thousand million dollars in circulation every 18 hours.
Agricultural labour was supplanted, abandoned in favour of the chemical, motor and electrical industries. Now we ate vitamin pills, capsules and powders, with the strict medical warning that it was necessary to prepare them on the stove and eat them with knife and fork (the pills, coated with electrical wax, would slip from between the diner's fingers).
I, it is fair to say, adapted to the situation with complete calm. The first twinge of terror I experienced one night, on entering my library. Scattered upon the floor, like inky larvae, lay the letters from all my books. Frantically I scanned various tomes: their pages were blank. A sad music, slow, despairing, enveloped me; I tried to distinguish the voices of the letters; in that moment they died away. They were ashes. I went out onto the street, anxious to know what new events this heralded. Through the air, like a crazed flock of vampires, swarmed clouds of letters; sometimes, with electric sparks, they would join together... 'love', 'rose' 'word', shone for an instant in the sky before dissolving into sobs. By the light of these glows, I saw something else: our grand edifices were beginning to crumble; in one, I could make out a ladder of cracked veins opening up within its cement body. The same was happening with the sidewalks, the trees, perhaps even the air. Morning showed us a skin brilliant with wounds. A good proportion of workers had to abandon the factories in order to attend to the material repair of the city; in vain, since every patch soon sprouted new cracks.
Here ended the period that seemed to have been ruled by the 24-hour cycle. From that moment, our utensils began to decompose in less time; sometimes in ten, sometimes in three or four hours. The streets filled up with mountains of shoes and papers, forests of broken plates, false teeth, worn-out overcoats, of the shells of books, buildings and furs, of furniture and dead flowers and chewing gum and television remotes and batteries. Some tried to exert dominion over their things, maltreating them, forcing them to continue performing their services; soon we came to hear of various strange deaths of men and women pierced through by spoons and brooms, suffocated by their pillows, strangled by their neckties. Anything that was not consigned to the garbage after having fulfilled the strict terms of its service revenged itself thus upon the reticent consumer.
The accumulation of rubbish in the streets made them impassable. With the flight of the alphabet, we were already unable to write street directories; the loudspeakers ceased to function every five minutes and all day were being replaced by new ones. Need I point out that garbage collectors became a socially privileged profession, and that the Secret Brotherhood of Verrere was, de facto, the active power behind our republican institutions? A lively voice carried the message: social interests demand that to salvage the situation, we must use and consume things at a faster pace every day. The workers no longer left the factories; in these was concentrated the life of the city, abandoning buildings, plazas and homes alike to their own fate. In the factories, I have heard, a worker mounted a bicycle, rode out of the yard upon it; the bicycle collapsed and was thrown onto the procession of garbage that, piled higher each day, wound its way like a paralytic artery through the city; immediately, the same worker returned to mount another bicycle, and the process repeated itself without end. The same happened with the remaining products: a shirt was used immediately by the worker who made it, and thrown away a minute later; alcoholic drinks had to be drunk by those who bottled them, and hangover relief treatments likewise taken by their manufacturers, who never had the opportunity to become drunk; thus it happened with every activity.
My work in the Bank no longer made sense. Money had ceased to circulate since producers and consumers, locked away in their factories, had made the two acts one. I was assigned a weapons factory as my new place of work. I knew that the weapons were carried to deserted locations and used there; an airlift was charged with transporting the bombs quickly, before they could explode, and laying them, black eggs, amongst the sands of those mysterious places.
Now that a year has passed since my first spoon became dust, I climb the branches of a tree and try to make out, between the smoke and the sirens, something of the scabbed crust of the world. Sound, that has become substance, howls amid the valleys of despair; I fear – as betrayed by my last encounters with the few usable objects I find – that the useful lifespan of things has reduced to fractions of a second. The planes explode in the air, filled with bombs; but a permanent messenger flies in a helicopter above the city, broadcasting the old signal: "Use, use, consume, consume, everything, everything!" What is left to use? Few things, no doubt.
Here, for the last month, I have lived hidden, amongst the ruins of my old house. I fled the arms factory when I realised that everyone, workers and owners, had lost not only their memories of the past but their sense of the future... They lived for each day, walled in by the seconds. And soon I felt the pressing need to return to this house, to try and record something, these sparse notes that I jot down urgently and that say nothing of a year’s worth of dates – and formulate a plan.
Ah, what delight! in my cellar, I found a book with printed letters: it is Treasure Island, and thanks to it I have recovered the memory of myself, the rhythm of many things. I finish the book (“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”) and look at my surroundings. The dorsal spine of discarded objects, its cloak of pestilence. The lovers, the children, those who know how to sing, where are they, why did I forget them, why did we forget them for all this time? What became of them, while we thought only (and I alone have written) of the deterioration and creation of our worldly things? I lifted up my eyes to the mountains of filth. The gummy opacity trickled down through a thousand gashes; the tyres and the rags, the malodorous obesity, the inflamed flesh of detritus, all stretched out, buried by the runnels of asphalt; and here and there I could see scars that were embracing corpses, corded hands, open mouths; and I knew them.
I cannot begin to describe the allegorical monuments that have been constructed upon the wasteland, in honour of the economists of the past. That dedicated to the Harmonies of Bastiat is especially grotesque.
Between the pages of Stevenson, a packet of vegetable seeds. I have been putting them in the ground, with such loving care! … There it goes again, the messenger:
“USE EVERYTHING… EVERYTHING… EVERYTHING”
Now, now, a blue mushroom that blooms plumes of shadow, and drowns me in the clamour of broken windows…
I am seated on a beach that before – if I remember anything of geography – was not lapped by any sea. There are no things in the universe except two stars, the waves and sand. I have taken two dry sticks; I rub them together, for a long time… ah, the first spark…
Carlos Fuentes' story is extremely difficult to translate, but you did a wonderful job. Thank you for sharing, Foxe!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for your excellent translation; I've had to read the story for my Spanish class and your translation is extremely helpful, and well written.
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