Carlos Fuentes, who died on Tuesday at age 83, left in his wake a sorrowful Mexico, a mass of readers worldwide, and many hard-working translators. Rendering the writer was a complex task.
“The challenges were many and varied.” writes Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Spanish at Barnard College, whose translations of the Mexican literary giant include the novels Christopher Unborn, The Years with Laura Diaz, and The Death of Artemio Cruz.
“Fuentes had a huge vocabulary, spoke several languages fluently, and could concoct wordplay among all those languages,” Mac Adam says in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Sometimes he used Mexican slang (of the 1960s in particular in Christopher Unborn), which made life difficult for his translator. The important thing was to try to replicate the rhythm of his prose.”
As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose influence went far beyond the literary. “Carlos’s significance for Mexico is huge: he admonished Mexicans to take charge of their history and their culture as early as 1962,” writes Mac Adam. “He was always a constructive critic, both of Mexico, the United States, and any other country he felt was acting against his idea of civilization. Carlos was a great advocate of human rights and equality before the law for all. That stance is an important one, now and forever.”
In 1981, the Paris Review ran an interview with Fuentes by Mac Adam and Charles Ruas, who met the author one wintery day in Princeton, N.J. “That interview helped Carlos map out his writing, see where he’d been, and to plan for the future,” says Mac Adam. “It was in a way the nucleus of the memoir or autobiography we all knew he would never write.”
“The last time I spoke with him, about three months ago, he outlined a memoir that would cover his early years. Whether he finished it or not I can’t say,” the scholar adds.
“Carlos Fuentes was a loyal friend. He was a human being with all the faults we humans have, but he was a glowing mind and a man who could never stop writing.”
That continual writing—novels, plays, short stories, criticism, more—has created quite a translation market. For what may be the newest Fuentes translation, readers can turn to the Dalkey Archive Press, a non-profit publisher that is housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In July Dalkey will issue the first English version of Vlad, a vampire-themed novel that Fuentes first published in Spanish in 2010. Vlad was translated by Ethan Shaskan Bumas, a professor at New Jersey City University, and Alejandro Branger, a writer and filmmaker.
“It’s a terrific book—not, interestingly enough, a “postmodern” vampire novel (as one might expect from Fuentes) so much as just a really well written . . . vampire novel,” says Martin Riker, Dalkey’s associate director.
Fuentes’s legacy “is first of all the work itself, the immense intellectual and artistic scope of it. We have this amazing body of work that managed to remain vital over his entire career—that’s the real legacy.” Beyond that, “Fuentes was an extremely cosmopolitan writer, and his work resists all the easy classifications that American readers tend to assign to Mexican literature or art,” Riker says in an e-mail.
“We have a pretty narrow view, from this country, of what sort of art the country of Mexico produces. Magical realism, for example. If you try to say that Fuentes was a magical realist, you are faced with the gross inadequacy of that term to define the sophistication and richness of what this man was doing, and by extension what many other Mexican writers are up to.”
Dalkey Archive Press, which has issued reprinted translations of Fuentes as well, has plans for two more first-time English translations along with Vlad. Adam in Eden will be released in the late fall of 2012. In addition, a collection of Fuentes’s essays, The Great American Novel, will debut sometime in 2013.
Fuentes “came to us with his new books because he liked that we’d supported his work and kept it in print and alive in the culture. It says something about us but also says something about the changing priorities of publishing,” says Riker.
“That Fuentes came to us with these three books is of course very gratifying.”