All Roads Lead to Austen (33 page)

Hugo drew us back into the book with a new line of thought. “About this translation,” he began, reaching under his chair to set his copy on his lap.

“I think this is a very good translation,” Susie spoke up.

At the same time that Hugo agreed, Teresa shook her head. “Good? I don't think it's so good.”

“It's horrid!” Cristina concurred. Suddenly everyone was talking at once, with Cristina repeating “Horrid!” while Hugo tried to defend the translation.

“I'm a translator—I know what I'm talking about!” As Cristina cut through the discussion with that declaration, it occurred to me that language and translation were hallmarks of this particular group, just as poets had predominated in Chile. Unlike Cristina, Hugo hadn't published his work, but translation was a long-standing hobby. While his spoken English was weak his reading skills were excellent, and he'd been translating science fiction and Gothic stories from English into Spanish for decades. He'd passed several stories on to me, curious to have my opinion. Teresa didn't publish translations, but she taught Hebrew lessons, which gave her a special sensitivity to language, as well. Susie and I were the amateurs that night.

Hugo and Cristina continued debating the translator's tendency to use a style that apparently comes out as stilted in Spanish. “He says in the introduction,” Hugo said, “that he's trying to maintain the style of the period.”

“You can't reproduce an English style in Spanish,” Cristina declared flatly. “It's impossible.” She offered up several examples of wording she thought was especially bad, including the sentence “
La
indudable
convicción de lo sano que era comer gachas
.”

Susie made a humorous face. “What does ‘
gachas
' mean?”

Cristina threw her hands up in exaggerated confusion, as if to say, “That's my point!”

I'd certainly never heard the word “
gachas
” before, but considering the rest of the sentence, “the firm conviction of the healthfulness of eating
gachas
,” I realized that we must have entered Mr. Woodhouse territory.

“I think it's like porridge,” Hugo speculated, “but that's a Scottish dish.”

Having no idea how to translate “thin gruel” into Spanish, I explained instead that it was a bland dish nobody except a serious hypochondriac would eat voluntarily.

Hugo nodded then cut me off to point out that one shouldn't judge the translation by a few awkward words. Cristina cut him off in turn. “I can find you twenty or thirty like that!” Teresa, Susie, and I fell silent as the two argued on. Hugo asserted that Valverde, the translator, was one of the best currently working in Spain. Cristina conceded that he was better with dialogue than description. In no time they had sidetracked into a new issue, with Cristina claiming that Borges had translated Virginia Woolf's
The
Waves
and Hugo arguing that his mother had done the actual work while Borges took the credit. They talked on simultaneously for several minutes, neither listening to the other, while the rest of us tried to follow along.

“Well, one thing's for sure—it would have been easier to translate from French or Italian,” Cristina said, circling back to Austen. “But if this translation had been a bit freer, if he hadn't tried to reproduce the structure of English sentences, it would be better. It's just too stilted.”

Teresa tried to jump in, but Hugo's voice carried over hers. “That formality is part of the novel,” he insisted. “We're used to much lighter, quicker writing today, but a translation like that of
Emma
would change everything. In Austen's day you'd savor a novel like this, page by page, for a month. But we had to read this quickly to have it done for this evening, and that makes the weightiness of the style more noticeable.”

“Well, that's true,” Cristina agreed, “but—”

“What I was trying to explain,” Teresa interrupted, “is that Austen's formal style is more than a product of her time period. It's a conscious choice. It's her way of creating a specific environment, the slow pace, of that country village. It's deliberate. But her way of balancing that, it seems to me, is her use of short chapters. That really keeps things moving, because—”

Hugo and Cristina both talked over Teresa, Hugo to second her point about the effectiveness of the chapter divisions, Cristina to continue lambasting the translation. Susie and I exchanged glances as Teresa, impatient, weighed back in.

“Look, if we all keep talking at the same time, Amy's never going to understand a word of it!”

Susie took advantage of the brief silence that ensued. “Yes, it's a slow novel, but it's about basic things, about little events, one after another. None are major, but they build on each other, as the days pass for Emma. One day some question arises, some little happening, a new personality surfaces who changes things, and that's how we're hooked.”

Teresa nodded enthusiastically. “And if you're reading carefully, you'll realize that in those little details Austen offers, there are hints of things that will happen down the road.”

On that point, Cristina agreed. “The plot does draw you in.”

“But when it comes down to it, the surprises aren't really surprises in the end,” Susie added. “Mr. Knightley, he's really kind of a Pygmalion type, and when he's always correcting Emma's faults, it's clear how things will turn out between them.”

“But it's interesting how this novel destroys the myth of the fairy tale,” Teresa said. “Nobody marries Prince Charming. Everybody ends up with somebody at their same social level, somebody—”

“Everything in its place,” Hugo agreed. This set off a debate, however, about the Mr. and Mrs. Elton pairing, since she's distinctly more vulgar even though she's the one with more money.

“It's important to clarify what you mean by levels—economics and culture are two different things,” Teresa pointed out. “We still have stratification to this day on both levels.”

No one begged to differ on that point.

“But on the cultural level, things get worse all the time here,” Cristina lamented. “I've got three daughters-in-law, and they never lift a book. They can't understand how I can read all day. There's no culture, no culture anymore…”

I immediately wondered about her sons—how often did they lift a book? As if reading my mind, Hugo said, “Well, the fact is, there are a lot more women than men attending universities here. Just imagine, knowing that before, women couldn't even get in.”

Since we'd shifted so completely from Highbury to Argentina, I asked, “Is it true, historically, that women had better opportunities in Buenos Aires than in other cities in Latin America?”

Susie, typically quiet, didn't hesitate to state, “Buenos Aires has always had a much higher level of culture than other Latin American capitals.”

I could imagine readers from my other groups—especially the Chileans—wincing to hear such a bald statement. And Luis, that sharp-tongued lover of literature from Antigua, what would he have said? I suspect he would have been forced to agree—then he would have capped off the point with a nice “arrogant Argentinean” joke (he'd been, in fact, my best source for them). But there were no arguments on that point in the room. Cristina added, “But from here, we've always,
always
been looking to Paris.”

“Always,” Teresa and Susi echoed, while Hugo raised an eyebrow and shrugged. He wasn't disagreeing, but I knew that his cultural preferences lay more with Great Britain than France.

“I recently learned about the British invasion of Buenos Aires,” I said. “It was fascinating to think that the British tried to take over this country.”

“Some people here say the mistake was driving the British out.” Hugo smiled wryly. “Others disagree and are glad we stuck with the Spanish.” That topic got us back in the ballpark of Austen, but since everyone was still talking at the same time, Teresa once again blew the whistle on us. Susie stepped into the momentary quiet to ask about the social status of a governess.

After we spent some time talking about work for women and Jane Fairfax, Hugo asked, “There's been kind of a revival of interest in Austen in the last twenty years, hasn't there?”

“Definitely. It has to do with feminism, as one factor,” I explained. “And it's been fascinating, because she's really the only writer to have a serious literary reputation
and
a huge popular following.”

“That is unusual,” Hugo agreed, and the point sent him off into an anecdote about an episode of an American TV show he'd seen where a boy gives his girlfriend a copy of
Pride
and
Prejudice
as a birthday present.

“I want to get back to the characters again,” Teresa said, giving me a smile. “Emma and her sister. The one is so well delineated and the other is kept in the background.”

“The father definitely likes Emma more, you can see,” Susie added.

“That father is almost sinister, he's so manipulative,” Hugo jumped in. Cristina rolled her eyes and gestured as he spoke, agreeing heartily as he continued: “With his invented sicknesses, he's got Emma trapped, and he even manages to get Mr. Knightley under his own roof when Emma marries him. Anything that hurts the father will hurt Emma, and he knows it.”

As Susie added, “He's an absolute manipulator,” Hugo capped off his own point by saying, “He's so utterly passive that he's
active
.”

“Austen's secondary characters are really a marvel,” Teresa said. Cristina agreed, and the two began simultaneously offering examples that interested them.

“All of her characters, really, are just so well drawn,” Susie finally cut across their talk. “With each one, there's a fine stroke to every line about them.”

Susie's painting metaphor was dead on. Nodding enthusiastically, I explained, “Austen's own vision of what she was doing, according to something she wrote in a letter, was painting on ivory, which was used for miniatures, with a very fine, with a fine—” I waved my hand in the air as if painting.

“Brush?” Teresa offered the word in Spanish.

“That's it. Sir Walter Scott published a very positive review of her work and later wrote that it was a pity a writer with a true gift for fine detail had died so young.” I thought back to the moment I'd experienced in front of the church on the day it had snowed, with the young woman and her child. “Her portrait of Emma is extraordinary. Did you notice that part where Emma has gone to visit the poor, and she's thinking about how moved she is by their plight, but yet, she knows—”

“That in a short while, they'll fade from her mind,” Cristina finished the sentence for me, nodding in admiration for Austen's skill. What a memory Cristina had—but the strength of Austen's characterizations helps them stay with you.

“The portraits of those interactions are so strong in that small town,” Susie agreed.

“There's something I've heard,” I said, “speaking of small towns. ‘
Pueblo
chico
—'”

“
Infierno
grande!
” cried all four in flawless chorus then burst out laughing. Small town, big hell was clearly not just a Paraguayan saying.

“But it's not hell in Austen's vision,” I quickly pointed out, and Susie added, “There's more boredom than anything.”

“What's so striking is how this small town,” Hugo offered, “isn't just one place—it's any small town in rural England. In fact, it could be any small town anywhere. The generosity, the problems, the love, the jealousies, all of these things are what we'll deal with as long as human beings exist.”

“That's one of the reasons the physical descriptions of the houses, of the countryside, are so vague,” I agreed, “because—”

“They're practically nonexistent,” Hugo interrupted. “They don't matter. Austen wasn't interested in sketching the countryside. She was drawing psychological landscapes. It's the opposite of a writer like Emily Brontë. The countryside is so central to what's she's writing about, it's almost—”

“It's a character, really,” I cut in.

“Exactly!” Hugo said. I began to notice, as he and I enthused over Austen's skill on this point, that Teresa and Susie were giving the two of us speculative looks, while Cristina smiled knowingly. I'd certainly hoped that some chemistry was developing between Hugo and me—especially right before the-kiss-that-never-happened. Were the ladies clueing in to something here, or was
that
my imagination, too?

“Just look at the titles,” Hugo continued. “
Wuthering
Heights
. The place is a character, it controls the characters. In
Emma
, it's the woman who's in charge.”

“Speaking of that name and her role, here's something I noticed,” Teresa offered. “Emma actually means ‘mother' in Arabic. And she's really like a mother to people in that village.”

Hugo's eyebrows shot up, and he nodded. “Interesting. But it must be a coincidence. It doesn't seem likely Austen would have known that.” The two debated that issue for several minutes, until Cristina drew us off onto another line of thought.

“Which of the two main women is Jane Austen? Is it Emma or is it Jane Fairfax?” The group wrangled over this subject. I thought back to the women in Guatemala, who'd been so interested in this topic, as well—especially Mercedes, who'd turned out to be the star of that discussion. After listening to their points, I cut in, as I had in Antigua and in Ecuador, as well, to suggest that writers in Austen's time period didn't necessarily have the same relationship modern writers often do with their work.