The Underdogs (2 page)

The Underdogs
is deeply intertwined with the historical context in which it is set: the Mexican Revolution, and in particular some of the major events of the revolution in the northern states of Mexico. Demetrio Macías and his revolutionary group are followers of the legendary Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the most important revolutionary leader from northern Mexico. The novel begins at the peak of Villa's popularity and ends two years later, when Villa has begun to suffer a series of decisive defeats in the fighting between the different factions of revolutionaries.
¹
Part of the route that Macías and his men take in the course of the novel parallels that of another leader of a Villista revolutionary band: Julián Medina, a historical figure mentioned in passing early on in the novel, who became one of Villa's generals during this time.
²
The relevance here is that Mariano Azuela joined Medina's group and served as its medical officer during almost exactly the same period covered in the novel.
³
The author of
The Underdogs
is thus able to write a novel—Azuela actually began composing the novel while he was with Medina's group—that draws directly on his own experiences of many of the very events that we find when we read the text.

Azuela finished writing the first version of
The Underdogs
in El Paso, Texas, where he took refuge in 1915, and the first edition of the novel was published there.
⁴
Though it would take nearly ten years—during which time Azuela returned to Mexico and undertook several important rewrites of the novel—and a new publication of the work in Mexico City for
The Underdogs
to begin receiving the kind of critical and popular acclaim it now holds, this cultural connection between Mexico and the United States should not be overlooked. On the one hand, it reminds us of the repeated U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs. On the other, it points to the close, nearly inextricable cultural and social connections that have existed between the two countries at nearly all levels and during almost all moments in modern history. This connection was most certainly present during the Mexican Revolution, and it persisted through much of the twentieth century, remaining very much alive today.

Although they are protagonists in some of the key (and at times bloodiest) events of the Mexican Revolution, the characters of Azuela's novel are in many ways swept up in something they do not quite comprehend. In addition, as Carlos Fuentes points out in his Foreword, if
The Underdogs
can be thought of as an epic—in that it follows Demetrio Macías's travels and battles, from humble beginnings through periods of intense fighting and much glory, and finally back to Macías's original point of departure—then it is certainly a failed epic. I would add that, paradoxically, this constitutes one of the strengths of the novel, as it highlights the fact that
The Underdogs
is replete with ambiguities. Is the novel revolutionary—in the way it underscores the poverty and ignorance of Mexico's peasants and lower classes, and the injustices separating their condition from that of the few land-owning elite? Or is it counterrevolutionary, in the ways it reveals the barbarism and banditry of those who fought on both sides of the revolution, thus suggesting that the objectives of the revolutionaries were personal in nature, as opposed to ideological? Is the novel about the early dreams of the revolution, or about the eventual and perhaps inevitable disillusionment with the original objectives of the revolutionary movement? Is the novel meant to be realistic, and is it trying to chronicle the revolution in a way analogous to how the printed media and the new technology of the radio were doing at the time? Or does the novel seek a different aesthetic altogether, one still rooted in the late nineteenth century, with its naturalistic and at times
Modernista
descriptions?
⁵
Or is the novel perhaps already a harbinger of an avant-garde type of narrative, the first modern Mexican novel in the line of fiction that Fuentes would famously call “the new narrative” of Latin America?

Not only is it impossible to resolve these ambiguities, it is also in fact not desirable to do so. For these ambiguities are part of what lends
The Underdogs
its importance and its role as a classic of Latin American fiction.
The Underdogs
is a foundational text that has helped to shape Mexican identity and Mexican and Latin American literature for nearly a century, not only influencing subsequent historical novels but also serving as a model because of some of its narrative techniques.
The Underdogs
forms part of what has come to be known as the subgenre of the novels of the Mexican Revolution. (The other, most important, early representatives of this subgenre are Martín Luis Guzmán's 1928
El águila y la serpiente
[
The Eagle and the Serpent
] and Nellie Campobello's 1931
Cartucho
[Cartucho].) Meanwhile, marks of the influence of Azuela's
The Underdogs
can be seen in writers from Juan Rulfo to Carlos Fuentes, to name just two of the most prominent figures of modern Mexican letters.

The overarching challenge for the translator, then, is to figure out how to re-create a masterpiece that carries such weight in its original culture. And the first challenge that the translator encounters is how to translate the title itself. In Spanish,
Los de abajo
literally means “those from below.” The novel was translated as
The Underdogs
by E. Munguía Jr. in 1929, and it immediately became known in English, and has remained in print, by this title since that date. But “the underdogs” may not be the best translation of the title. On the one hand, it has a strong sports resonance that seems somewhat out of place for such a story. On the other, although Demetrio Macías and his men are unquestionably those from below—at the most basic level, in an economic and social sense—it is not clear that the English expression “the underdogs” captures this same meaning. Macías and his men are peasants, subjects from the lower classes; they are in many ways archetypal characters representing the mostly rural masses who had been excluded from the gains and benefits of Porfirio Díaz's modernizations, and the very classes who rose up in the revolution—first against Díaz, then against Madero, and finally against Huerta (see “Chronology of the Mexican Revolution,” p. xxi).

And yet, “the underdogs” is not entirely an incorrect translation, either—and besides, as is often the case in literary translation, it is not exactly a matter of “correct” or “incorrect. ” A better translation may have been “those from below” or “those from the lower depths,” but neither of these sounds that great, and it would be extremely disconcerting to English-speaking readers who already know this novel as
The Underdogs
. In addition, and perhaps most interestingly, although prior to being translated as “the underdogs” this term did not have the same meaning in Spanish as
los de abajo,
now that it has been translated as such, it seemingly does have the same—or at least a parallel—meaning. In other words, translation has not only brought a new work of literature into our culture, it has also affected our language. “The underdogs” now means what it has always meant in English, but it also
connotes
what
los de abajo
denotes and connotes in Spanish—at least in the context of the novel in question. For these reasons, Azuela's classic of the Mexican Revolution remains, in my translation in the pages that follow, as
The Underdogs
.

Furthermore, the novel not only has a title that refers to the economic and social condition of its main characters, it also develops a vertical (up/down) metaphor throughout the text that repeatedly plays off of the title. The reader sees this in a number of scenes in which different characters are literally above or below each other—a physical representation meant to reflect or contrast with their economic and social standing. Therefore, I have made every effort, through several details in the translation itself, to re-create the key moments in which the vertical metaphor is operating as a defining subtext of the novel. Similarly, I have sought some new ways, again through specific details of the translation, to make “the underdogs” function as an appropriate title in English.

After the title, the largest challenge the translator faces is that the majority of the novel is written in dialogue, as Azuela has his characters use a variety of regional and colloquial expressions and idioms, and speak in idiosyncratic accents, all of which reflect their different economic and social classes—in addition to their individual personalities. It is crucial that the translator try to re-create at least some of this orality, as it constitutes a defining element of the style. Thus, the manner in which the characters speak is also meant to give the reader a sense of Azuela's characters themselves, and more broadly of the kinds of participants in the Mexican Revolution. In particular, the peasants and the poor in
The Underdogs
are marginal, characters who have not traditionally had a voice—not in history, not in politics, not in literature. The author's careful use of dialogue reflects his intention of having different characters speak for themselves and having the reader hear a variety of voices, some perhaps for the first time. This intention, this oral element of the novel must somehow be re-created by the translator. As the reader will see, I have sought to re-imagine and re-create in English the voices of Azuela's characters, who speak in a very specific kind of Mexican Spanish.

A related challenge for the translator is that most of the characters in the novel are referred to by some sort of nickname, while very few are addressed by their given names. These nicknames—sometimes monikers, other times epithets— often provide the reader a mental image of the characters, of their looks, their personalities, and of how they are seen by those around them. For this reason I have opted, wherever possible within the flow of my version, to render the majority of these nicknames into English. Although translators are usually advised to avoid translating proper names, I believe my decision will give English-speaking readers a more immediate sense of the importance of these nicknames in context. For those interested, each time a nickname first appears in the text, an endnote informs the reader what that nickname was in Spanish. Finally, one nickname simply does not translate well: that of the
curro
Luis Cervantes. In this case, not only is there no direct English equivalent available, but I actually deemed it important to maintain the term
curro
—a derogatory label applied to someone from the upper classes precisely because this individual thinks too highly of himself and looks down with contempt at poor, rural, mestizo, and/or indigenous Mexicans. In addition, as the reader will see, the meaning and the various connotations of
curro
begin to emerge from the text itself, whether one reads the novel in Spanish or in English.

Along these lines, another issue the translator faces is the extent to which certain words should be left in Spanish, perhaps to gain a foreign flavor. In this regard, I have chosen to leave relatively few words in Spanish—and have always provided the definition and my reasoning in the endnote accompanying each such word. On the other hand, I have opted to leave untranslated some words that come from the Spanish but have already been incorporated into English (e.g., “rancho, ” “señor,” “muchacho”). In these cases, I use these specific terms not only because they allow the reader to get a bit closer to the original text, but also because these words are somehow more descriptive, and at times more accurate, than their English equivalents. A good example of this is the word
sombrero.
A sombrero in Spanish is a hat, but within the context of the Mexican Revolution, and of the pages of
The Underdogs,
readers may get a better image of a Mexican character wearing a sombrero—those wide-brimmed palm-leaf hats made famous by Villa and Zapata and their followers during this period—than if they read simply “hat.”

As is often the case, the main challenges a translator faces when seeking to bring a literary text from one language and culture (and, in the case of
The Underdogs,
from one historical period) into another are the very elements that make that text important, worthwhile, and pleasurable to read. In other words, it is the very features that make a literary text a classic where a translator encounters the toughest challenges to translating it. It may very well reside in that text's translatability, in the obstacles and challenges to the translation itself, the most prominent of which in
The Underdogs
I have described here. It may also reside in the fact that a defining characteristic of a classic seems to be that it is translated repeatedly through time, as if each new generation required its own new version of that classic, or as if the work itself were constantly calling out for translation. Thus, translation can be said to contribute to the making of a classic— not only by exporting the work into other languages and traditions and by assuring that text's “afterlife,” as Walter Benjamin might say, but also by underscoring many of the most fascinating elements of the text, which almost inevitably arise as challenges to the craft of translation. These, then, are some of the central elements that make
The Underdogs
a classic of Mexican—and Latin American—literature. What follows is my attempt to re-create this classic in a new version in English.

—SERGIO WAISMAN

Suggestions for Further Reading

Azuela, Mariano.
Los de abajo: Novela de la Revolucion Mexicana.
Edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Vocabulary by John E. Englekirk. New York, London: Appleton-Century -Crofts, 1939.