Reflections on translating Natalia García Freire’s A Carnival of Atrocities by Victor Meadowcroft, published by World Editions.
A Carnival of Atrocities is the second novel by Ecuadorean author Natalia García Freire. Set high in the Andes Mountains, the opening section of the novel is narrated by a character called Mildred Capa, whose mother has just died and whose father vanishes into the wilderness without explanation. Despite her insistence on remaining in the family home, as her father had instructed before his disappearance, Mildred is eventually forcibly removed by residents of the nearby town of Cocuán, an act spearheaded by the sinister Father Santamaría. Before she can be dragged from her home, Mildred issues an ancestral curse against the town, one learned from her mother, who had always “hated Cocuán.” The chapters that follow take place many years after Mildred’s abduction and are told by eight different narrators, all of whom leave Cocuán to go in search of a group of townspeople who have mysteriously stripped themselves naked, shaved their heads and disappeared into the wilderness, as though compelled by some unknown force.
The Spanish title of García Freire’s novel is Trajiste contigo el viento, which translates literally into English as You Brought the Wind with You. This title refers to a statement from Mildred’s mother, who observed that her daughter had been born during the “veranillo del niño,” a period of warmer weather caused by the El Niño phenomenon, when a tepid wind blows across the mountains. Later, when Mildred’s curse comes to bear on the townspeople of Cocuán, this wind is ever-present, as though enacting justice. However, for the title of the English book, the publisher suggested that we should move away from the original. This was largely due to the sound of the title’s literal translation into English, which comes across as less poetic than the Spanish, with the grammatical laws of the latter making it more acceptable to end on the word “wind” [viento] than on the monosyllabic “you” that we are all but forced to accept in English. Together with the publisher and my editor, we drew up a list of possible alternatives, with the majority of proposals taken directly from my translation of the text. In the end, we settled on A Carnival of Atrocities, which is how Ezequiel, one of our nine narrators, describes the town of Cocuán. García Freire not only gave this choice her blessing, but in a recent interview for the Asymptote Journal Book Club she explained that she likes the fact that the title is different in English and that it places more emphasis on the town itself.
Translating Idioms and Cultural Nuance
A Carnival of Atrocities is a novel of the hidden and the deeply buried. The clearest example of this is the mountain forest into which the characters venture, which is composed entirely of newly-planted trees. As Baltasar, one of the residents of Cocuán, explains to Father Manzi: “Our forest is buried under this one.” Yet it isn’t only the forest that has been buried, but the old Andean religions and cosmology too. This has been supplanted by a Catholicism that the inhabitants of Cocuán can never fully embrace. As Father Manzi observes: “In Cocuán, you will just as soon find people kneeling before a saint as sacrificing chickens outside the church doors.” When I asked García Freire about some of the strange juxtapositions in her novel, she wrote to me about the idea of mestizaje, which can refer to mixing in terms of race or ethnicity, just like “miscegenation,” but also in terms of culture. Like the mestizo Christian art of the “Quito School” that began in the 16th century, in which animals and fruit mentioned in the Bible might be substituted for local flora and fauna more familiar to the artists, García Freire borrows elements from the Bible and weaves them into her own Andean narrative, in which characters can be found resting not under a juniper tree, as in the story of Elijah, but instead a quishuar, the Quichua name for a shrub native to the Andes. As someone raised in a non-religious household, I felt the need to familiarise myself with the Bible to ensure I caught as many of García Freire’s references as possible, and I am grateful to my editor Shimanto Reza for picking up on a few instances that remained undetected in my final draft.
A related issue was the choice of which English translation to use for the Bible passages quoted in the book. I normally prefer to draw all quotations from the same version of the Bible, providing the work with a sense of consistency in English, and I tend to opt for the King James Version, partly because I prefer its rhythms and register and partly because, as a colleague once expressed it, the KJV just sounds like the Bible. However, in this instance I found the New American Standard Bible to be far closer to the Spanish version quoted by García Freire, with precise meaning ultimately outweighing other considerations. For example, one of the novel’s epigraphs (Job, 36:20) is rendered as “Desire not the night, when people are cut off in their place” in the KJV, while in the NASB it appears as “Do not long for the night, when people vanish in their places.” The idea of disappearance is central to the novel and so needed to be maintained in the epigraph at all costs. Later, in the chapter narrated by Hermosina, there are repeated references to Psalm 44, with the NASB translation again coming far closer to the Spanish than other versions. As I have stated, in another situation I might have opted to use the KJV despite these differences, but here it seemed important to maintain the close link between the Bible passages and the events of García Freire’s story.
Imagery and Poetic Tone
As with García Freire’s debut novel, much of the imagery in this book revolves around the natural world, specifically the flora and fauna of the high forests of the Andes and of the páramo, an area of vegetation above the treeline that is characterized by damp tussock grass and bizarre-looking plants called frailejones (Espeletia), which capture water vapour from passing clouds and release it through their roots into the soil, thus irrigating the land.
Left, a frailejón among the tussock grass; right, row upon row of frailejonesThis páramo landscape, stretching out like a muted-green desert, is often shrouded in low-hanging cloud and may be punctuated by pools of water, runnels and small lakes. While I don’t believe it is necessary to have visited a particular place in order to translate descriptions of it effectively, I certainly derived confidence from having previously spent time in the páramo.
One element of the landscape that was less familiar to me was the term “peñasco,” a rocky outcrop that becomes the ultimate destination for the townspeople of Cocuán. When it comes to geographical features, I clearly have some gaps in my English vocabulary and I frequently find myself having to look up exact definitions for terms like “bluff,” “promontory,” or “escarpment.” I was initially reluctant to use the word “crag” to describe the rock formation where the final scenes of this novel take place, in part due to the harsh sound of the term itself, but further research suggested that the word is featured in the Bible and thus carries religious connotations. For example, the NASB version of Jeremiah 48:28 reads: “Leave the cities and dwell among the crags, O inhabitants of Moab, And be like a dove that nests Beyond the mouth of the chasm.” In the context of this novel, “crag” now felt like the obvious choice. (Also, in an example of the synchronicity that often seems to occur during the translation process, I was watching some climbing videos on YouTube shortly before my deadline and was reassured to hear the climbers discuss “heading to the crag,” with their destination looking very much as I had pictured the peñasco in the novel).
Physical and Psychological Violence
The violence in Cocuán is largely perpetrated by the townspeople against one another, and particularly against their own family members. For example, we have Ezequiel’s savage attack on his twin brother Víctor, provoked by Víctor’s desire to track down their drunkard of a father, part of the group that ran off into the wilderness. We also have Germán, who, unable to restrain his daughter Carmen when she tries to join the naked people and her beloved Tadeo, caves her head in with a rock. Although it may have been Mildred Capa’s curse that caused some in the town to seemingly take leave of their senses and flee Cocuán, actual physical punishment is meted out by the same humans who they sought to escape. As with the buried primary forest discussed earlier, there is also a buried history of sexual abuse in Cocuán, most notably in the case of Father Santamaría and the imprisoned Mildred Capa, but also carried out by other men. Young Zaida, who we will eventually learn is pregnant, is referred to by Agustina as “rolling around in secret with who knows which old man with a sickly cough who’s pursuing you.” The physical and sexual violence in this novel is shocking and yet somehow seems unremarkable to the characters, and one of the challenges of this translation was to ensure I maintained the steady tone of a myth or a folktale, literary forms in which violence often flares up without causing the story to become unbalanced by it.
Narrative Voice
When I first read A Carnival of Atrocities in Spanish, I was reminded of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which also adopts multiple narrators to tell its story. (My decision to follow Faulkner’s lead and not capitalize the terms “ma” and “pa” in Mildred Capa’s chapter is a subtle nod to this association) What I remember marvelling at the first time I encountered Faulkner’s novel was the sense that significant events were taking place in between the accounts provided by our unreliable narrators – Jewel, Darl, Cora, Vardaman, etc – and I had this same feeling with García Freire’s narrators; it was as if they either would not or could not reveal everything that had unfolded in the lead up to their journey to the crag or about their complicated relationships with the other characters. One of the most important tasks that fell to me as the translator was to ensure that the nine different voices that narrate this story each felt as distinctive as they do in the Spanish. A few of these voices were already somewhat familiar to me from having worked on other texts by García Freira – there is more than an echo of Lucas, the protagonist of This World Does Not Belong to Us, in the deranged ingenuousness of Ezequiel – while others needed to be teased out or refined in my translation. Much of the work had already been accomplished by the author through the rhythms and vocabulary adopted by each character, but there were options available to me in English that could help differentiate these voices still further. For example, I decided early on in my drafting process that I should take pains to avoid contractions in the section narrated by Father Manzi, a priest who came to Cocuán as an outsider. Given his status and his role in the community, I decided that he would be more likely to say “I am” than “I’m” and “I had” than “I’d,” and this approach helped me to home in on a voice that felt appropriate for this character. Spanish doesn’t use contractions in exactly the same way as English, but there was something about Manzi’s tone and utterances in the original text that seemed to call for a subtly different register to the other narrators. Another character with a very distinctive voice was Baltasar, the town’s abusive moneylender who addresses his section to a dispassionate Filatelio as he dies. Baltasar has a much gruffer tone than many of the other characters, and refers to Filatelio as guambra – a common Ecuadorean term for a “baby,” “child” or “kid” – and guambrito, it’s diminutive form. I knew that I wanted to retain this term in the text somehow, as it appeared central to Baltasar’s voice, but I also suspected that, without context, it would be difficult for an English-language reader to understand the meaning of either form of the utterance. In the end, I opted to replace guambra with the word “kid” and keep guambrito in the text, thus forming a connection between the two words Baltasar uses to address Filatelio which I hoped would shed light on the meaning of the latter.
Read: Cory Oldweiler, LA Review of Books
Read: René Esaú Sánchez, Asymptote Journal
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