SARAH POLLACK

Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives in the United States
When they asked him how he would like to be remembered, he answered: Thats a future battle. To remember someone is to allow him to keep fighting. Juan Villoro, La batalla futura (referring to Roberto Bolao)1

WO EVENTS in the last three months of 2007 are telling indicators of the current status of Latin American literature in English translation in the United States. Although the first is often deprecated by literary critics, its repercussions never fail to impress. On October 5th, Oprah Winfrey announced her latest selection for her book club: Gabriel Garca Mrquezs El amor en los tiempos del clera (1985), translated by Edith Grossman in 1988 as Love in the Time of Cholera. Because the talk-show hosts endorsement has proven to be a foolproof guarantee of a books success (see Farr), Random House quickly announced a new printing of 750,000 copies for the novel, and an additional 30,000 for the original Spanish-language text (AP), a number that probably increased after the release of Mike Newells movie version the same year. The second event occurred on December 9th, when The New York Times published The 10 Best Books of 2007. This list, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction titles and culled from the New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2007, is perhaps the most reliable gauge of the approbation of an author by the U.S. literary establishment. One of the years five ostensibly best novels was The Savage Detectives, Natasha Wimmers English-language translation of Los detectives salvajes (1998) by Chilean author Roberto Bolao (19532003). The significance of these two selections becomes clear if we review the titles chosen during the last ten years by both the television icon and the newspaper. Oprahs club was launched in 1996 and by the end of 2008 had recommended a
1

Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Comparative Literature 61:3 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2009-021 2009 by University of Oregon

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total of 66 books. Love in the Time of Cholera is one of only three novels originally written in Spanish that have appeared on her reading list; the Nobel Laureates iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien aos de soledad, 1967) was featured in 2004, and Isabel Allendes Daughter of Fortune (Hija de la fortuna, 1999) was selected four years earlier. The magnitude of the Timess endorsement of Bolaos novel with respect to Latin American literature in translation is proportionally much greater; since 1997, only three authors from the region have been granted the distinction of having one of their works included among the 100 Notable Books listed each year: Jorge Luis Borges in 1998 (for his Collected Fictions), Mario Vargas Llosa in 1998 and 2003 (for The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto [Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto, 1997] and The Way to Paradise [El paraso en la otra esquina, 2003], respectively), and Roberto Bolao himself in 2006 for Last Evenings on Earth, a selection of his short stories, and again in 2008 for Natasha Wimmers translation of his novel 2666, which was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004. The New York Timess book lists and the selections for Oprahs reading club likely constitute a representative survey of U.S. highbrow and middlebrow literary cultures. It is roughly in the overlap of these two populations that I locate the U.S. reader, a term I will employ here to mean a collective figure of reception and dissemination, a major actor who is also acted upon in determining the perceived parameters, meaning, and value of, in this case, the limited body of works by Latin American authors available in English translation. From the Times and Oprah two conclusions can be drawn: first, the continuing hegemony of the writers grouped under the umbrella of the Latin American boom (authors whose novels gained international acclaim during the 1960s and 1970s), and, second, the U.S. readers insatiable appetite for magical realism, the most popular technique of the boom period. Yet if The Savage Detectives is unquestionably informed by the booms legacy, it also represents a break with its aesthetics. The Timess decision to honor Roberto Bolaos 577page novel with its highest accolade and the rave reviews the work received in other publications across the country thus necessitate a consideration of how the U.S. reader is currently reconfiguring its definition of Latin American literature, and, by extension, how that reader understands the region through literature in English translation. For translation is not merely a practice of linguistic transference; it is also, as Susan Bassnet and Andr Lefevere have argued, a social and political activity that reads, generally from the center, works often of the peripheries, thus actively participating in the formulation and promulgation for the target audience of characteristics and identities that can easily be attached to the cultures in which those works originate. In the following pages I propose first to review briefly the history of the translation of Latin American literature in the United States. This will serve to recall the agendas behind the identification of very restricted aesthetic practices (a fraction of the total literary production of the region) with that which is Latin America as a whole, a trend consolidated with the boom. I will then turn to The Savage Detectives to propose that, although this most recent darling of the publishing industry ostensibly realigns the coordinates of the Latin American novel, it also foments a (pre)conception of alterity that satisfies the fantasies and collective imagination of U.S. cultural consumers.

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I. Latin America Translated and Transmitted The publication of Latin American literature in English translation in the United States began as a sustained project only in the 1930s. Since these early years, the decision to translate certain works and not others has corresponded to various historical, ideological, political, and economic factors as well as literary ones. The consecration of particular Latin American works within the United States has been irregular, raising the question of what hegemonic interests are at stake, and, above all, what conceptions of culture and literature are at play (Perus 165). Pascale Casanovas highly visible The World Republic of Letters is a useful reference for addressing this question in that it attempts to describe in systematic sociological terms following Pierre Bourdieus lead the transnational production of literature. Casanova articulates a conception of the literary field as an autonomous, stratified space in which cultural capital is unevenly awarded to works, authors, national literary traditions, and languages, thus drawing a map of centers and peripheries, the former constituting the republic of letters proper, to which certain peripheral authors gain entry. Literary capital, in her theory, is not accumulated through the adherence to a priori aesthetic or ideological characteristics, but through the interaction of a network of concrete historical, economic, and material factors that measure discursive practices, according them their rank of literariness by means of a standard that Casanova claims is universally recognized as legitimate (17) by all participants. In other words, Casanova envisions a literary bourse regulated by concrete dynamics the publication, distribution, and translation of texts, as well as the role of cultural exchange brokers such as literary agents, scholars, critics, and literary prizes (21) that interact with factors that determine symbolic literary value (the prestige and history of a language and attention from key arbiters of culture such as Oprah and The New York Times). For Casanova, French is the literary language par excellence, and Paris is the geographical capital of the lettered republic, the point through which the Greenwich meridian of literary modernity passes, the aesthetic present against which all literary production is measured and in relation to which Latin American works, in their original languages, are inevitably peripheral (see, also, Steenmeijer and Molloy, La diffusion). When it involves the importation of texts from peripheral languages into a language of the center (such as French or English), translation represents a form of literary recognition that amounts, in fact, to acceding to the status of literature, to obtaining a certificate of literary standing (133, 135).2 Before 1920 only a handful of Latin American books had been translated into English and made available in the United States, and until the late 1960s almost all concerted efforts to promote them were the personal crusades of individuals. During the 1930s, regionalist works such as The Underdogs, Marcela: A Mexican Love Story, Don Segundo Sombra: Shadows in the Pampas, Martn Fierro, The Vortex, and Doa Brbara were published but largely ignored. When given critical attention, they were almost exclusively appreciated in thematic terms, as picturesque, exotic examples that reinforced an image of rural, underdeveloped, culturally
2 For a detailed discussion of the limitations of Casanovas concept of the world republic of letters with respect to Latin American fiction, see Snchez Prado.

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distant lands.3 During the 1940s Franklin D. Roosevelts Good Neighbor policy encouraged greater interest in Latin America, and in response a small number of publishers, translators, and academics sought to make more works from the region available in English.4 Alfred and Blanche Knopf led this effort, selecting a wide variety of titles for translation without a clear agenda behind their decisions other than author popularity, publisher instincts, and circumstantial awareness of specific works (Mudrovcic 132).5 This heterogeneity, Mara Eugenia Mudrovcic summarizes, suggests that up to the 1950s what was understood as Latin American literature in the United States was varied, if not arbitrary (132). However, it was not until 1962 that a novel published by the Knopfs Brazilian Jorge Amados Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon found a broad audience and even achieved bestseller status. Its humor and romantic plotting appealed to the U.S. reader, and its tropical, exotic, and sensual Cinderella story came to represent the literary flavor of the region. Such widespread success was not repeated until the publication of Amados Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1969 (Rostagno, Searching 33). Official enthusiasm for Latin America began to wane after Roosevelts administration and did not become a cultural or political priority again until the Cuban Revolution, when the federal government and private organizations set aside funds for the creation of Latin American studies programs and provided grants for research and study of the region (Cline 64) as part of Cold War intellectual efforts to counteract the impact of Cubas cultural revolution (Rostagno, Searching 103). It was not until the late 1960s that Latin American literature finally emerged in the U.S. consciousness and literary market as a recognizable field. This was made possible through the translation projects of the Literature Program of the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), which programmatically selected Latin American novels, subsidized their translation, found U.S. publishers, mobilized New York reviewers and critics, and produced its own magazine, Review, under the direction of Uruguayan critic Emir Rodrguez Monegal.6 The CIAR became the clearing-house or symbolic banker of Latin American literature, thus deciding what should be imported from Latin America and how it should be read (Mudrovcic 139). Under its auspices, the boom was born within the U.S. literary establishment, with over sixty authors introduced to the U.S.
3 This, despite the efforts of Waldo Frank, the endorser of many of these translations, to promote them as the natural expression of an organic, tellurian people and their humane social order and sustained spirituality. In his view, these books presented a model for renewing the materialist and mechanist culture of the United States. See Rostagno, Waldo Franks Crusade. 4 Roosevelts policy led to the development of economic incentives for language, cultural, and exchange programs offered by the State Department and private donors such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the creation of the Hispanic Foundation by the Library of Congress, and the formation of the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies (see Cline). 5 Mudrovcic cites books by the following authors: Ricardo Palma, Alfonso Reyes, Mara Luisa Bombal, Eduardo Mallea, Ciro Alegra, Germn Arciniegas, Alejo Carpentier, Ernesto Sbato, Adolfo Costa du Rels, Jos Surez Carreo, Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Joo Guimares Rosa and Gilberto Freyre (13132). Another important arbiter in the selection process for Knopf was translator Harriet de Ons (Rostagno, Searching 34). 6 Established in 1967, the CIAR was a reincarnation of the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts (IAFA) founded by Rodman Rockefeller in 1962. The IAFAs mission was to foster dialogue among writers, critics, and intellectuals from the U.S. and Latin America. See Rostagno, Searching; and Mudrovcic.

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reader Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortzar, Jos Lezama Lima, Jos Donoso, Ernesto Sbato, Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Severo Sarduy, among them. The reading and reception of these authors varied on a case-by-case basis and were affected by literary prizes, political positions and affiliations, translations into other languages, and so on. In broad strokes, however, the field of Latin American literature, under the booms elastic label, has been defined in the United States through two main currents. On the one hand, there is Borges, whose fictions, translated belatedly in the United States,7 revolutionized the practice of modern literature for writers in all languages turning linguistic, narratological, and metaphysical assumptions inside out and redefining the figures of author and reader through their dissolution. On the other hand, there are the novelizations of Latin Americas mythical foundations, history, and contemporary urban reality, often structured through techniques derived from Faulkner, Joyce, and other English-language high modernists. Read alongside Borges are what Rodrguez Monegal terms the novels of language the works of Cortzar, Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy, for example which helped secure the regions literary standing among American intellectuals, but were read by a very limited audience. Through the second current, associated most commonly with Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Garca Mrquez, the character of Latin American literature was defined for and by U.S. readers. Casanova interprets this phenomenon as [t]he emergence of an aesthetically coherent body of writing in Latin America . . . of a genuine literary unity on a continental scale (World Republic 234) with this coherent body most often defined thematically and aesthetically by the ascendance of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the practice of magical realism. II. The Boom, Magical Realism, and the Branding of Latin America Fiction The first work sponsored by the CIAR, Garca Mrquezs novel was published in the English translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970. For the greater public, the novel served as a second introduction, after Jorge Amados success, to what quickly came to be defined as Latin American literature. However, the books universal acclaim (see Payne 2) brought unforeseen consequences: The fabulous reception, unprecedented in America, of his One Hundred Years, situated . . . [Mrquez] in a restricted Parnassus. . . . It was this book that gave structure to the still fluid and undecided boom; it formed and, in a way, froze it (Rama 266). As a result, U.S. readers equipped with almost no critical knowledge about the regions culture and history, much less its literature, approached the novels Macondo as a mini Latin America to consume and interpret. Instead of being viewed as an allegory of universal human experience, the remote and exotic setting, fantastic characters, and magical and violent occurrences came to symbolize what was quintessentially Latin: a world of solitude far removed from U.S. or European experience, one that fulfilled the desire of contemporary societies for meaning, imagination, re7 The two first anthologies of Borgess fictions were published in the U.S. in 1962, whereas his Ficciones inaugurated the French publishing house Gallimards Croix du Sud Latin American series more than ten years earlier, in 1951.

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enchantment (Moretti, Modern Epic 249). Compounding readers desires and assumptions, magical realism, a legitimately revolutionary aesthetic, was decontextualized, divorced from what Jean Franco characterizes as its subversive role as a destabilizer of Western positivism and cultural hegemony (160), and reduced to a whimsical flight of fancy. This aesthetic practice created a horizon of expectation for the regions literature such that magical realism became, in both the popular and academic press, the mark of authentically Latin writing.8 The reception and success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a paradigmatic example of a phenomenon that has been analyzed in sociological, political, and economic terms by Molloy, Rama, and Moretti. All three critics have independently proposed that the taste and expectations of mass audiences, combined with marketing strategies and publishing trends, lead to the emergence of a literary style or defining element that becomes the signature mark of a body of literature, despite the actual literary diversity at any given time. Molloy is categorical: The image might change with the passing of time but there was always a quota: one image. Latin America, in itself a more fluid cultural composite, suffers from readings that are even more reductive, at least when they come from the North (Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary 194). Rama agrees, suggesting from an economic perspective that fixed within the consumer market, a value tends to remain inalterable for a fairly long period of time (depending on the societys structure) and to absorb a maximum number of buyers, in detriment to those possible new ones. A series of tested failures or the violent emergence of an extraordinary novelty is necessary to displace it (249).9 Popular authors such as Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and (to a lesser extent) Rosario Ferr and Carmen Boullosa and/or their promoters have deliberately marketed one image stereotyping in Latin American letters, achieving commercial success in the wake of Garca Mrquez through the magical realism formula. Ferr writes, for example, that a characteristic that helps define Latin American tradition vis--vis North American tradition in literature today has often to do with magical occurrences (36). This practice of a Latin American cultural essentialism both by a handful of authors and by the U.S. literary and publishing establishments contributes to what Molloy terms the fabrication of a Latin American South (Postcolonial Latin America 371), a construction reminiscent of the Orient analyzed by Edward Said. As Molloy suggests, this reductive representation of Latin America is appealing for several reasons: it offers U.S. readers the illusion of an easy familiarity, the
8 Challenging the notion of magical realism as an exclusively Latin American domain, Magical Realism, an anthology edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, traces the international origins of the term, its re-appropriation and re-fashioning by multicultural, postcolonial and/or postmodern narratives (Grass, Morrison, Rushdie, Walcott, etc.), and the socio-political interests of regional communities that magical realism seeks to further. More recently, William Childers has proposed that there is a certain common ground between Cervantine fiction and magical realism, and that the basis for that common ground is their shared confrontation with coloniality of power (45). Nevertheless, the equation of Latin America and magical realism still proves to be entrenched and marketable. 9 A future study may be able to support both of these assertions empirically by using Morettis Darwinian, morphological model of the tree to trace the literary survival (Graphs, Maps, Trees 72) of contemporary Latin American fiction by determining whether magical realism is the decisive factor in the translation and success of certain works. As a case study, Moretti proposes a tree model to explain the overwhelming popularity of Conan Doyles detective fiction in comparison to that of rival authors within the same genre by isolating a particular use of clues in the narrative structure that, he argues, is the literary device that accounted for its success.

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illusion of translatability, and thus create[s] the illusion of [their] cultural competence (Postcolonial Latin America 373); it adds temporal and spatial distance between the United States and Latin America, a region that may be too close for comfort, by relating things that could not happen here (374); it provides an imaginary arena for Western fantasies to play out in a foreign space while at the same time containing and policing . . . cultural representativity (Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary 194). A telling example corroborating Molloys argument is Oprahs pitch for Garca Mrquez:
Read One Hundred Years of Solitude because of its passion. Its a wildly passionate book that brings to life mythical and colorful characters. In Macondo, wonderful, magical, fantastical, unreal things happen every day. They swirl on a canvas as unique and foreign as any you have known yet they evoke basic human truths that are as real as every day.

Publishers, critics, and readers alike have viewed with skepticism works that do not conform to this preconceived notion of the regions literature, and the term magical realism has been applied retroactively to older works to form an artificial genealogy of Latin American literature culminating in Garca Mrquez. Consequently, the Collected Fictions of Borges is described by The New York Times as The first complete English version of all the fictional work of the father of magic realism (Notable Books of 1998), a gross reduction of the authors literary project. In the United States, the mapping of Latin American post-boom and postmodern trends has been underway for over twenty years now and has resulted in the translation into English of works by Manuel Puig, Luisa Valenzuela, Reinaldo Arenas, Ricardo Piglia, Fernando Vallejo, Csar Aira, ngeles Mastretta, and Toms Eloy Martnez, among others. According to a 2007 study, however, the number of new books translated from all languages into English in North America has fallen sharply during the same period from 1,750 translations in 1980 to 1,400 in 1998 (Lowe xivxv); currently, iconic boom novelists continue to be given many of the limited opportunities for translation into English as they produce new works, thus eclipsing in visibility their younger counterparts, a trend evidenced in the 100 Notable Books lists issued by the Times during the last decade. Older works are also (re)translated or relaunched by producers of mass culture years after their original publication, as was the case with Oprahs championing of Garca Mrquez. It should not be surprising, therefore, that mainstream publications are only recently asking, as Newsweek did in 2002, Is Magical Realism Dead? (Margolis; see, also, Laporte and Aviv). The affirmative answer, when given, is most often supported not with reference to the writers listed above but to those of the self-proclaimed McOndo and Mexican Crack groups with Alberto Fuguet, Sergio Gmez, and Edmundo Paz Soldn among the authors associated with the first group, and Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, and Pedro ngel Palou among those typically included in the second. At once savvy media ploys and aesthetic acts of rebellion, the McOndo and Crack manifestos distinguish their signers from the boom generation by distancing themselves from magical realism and Latin American foundational myths.10 They affirm, instead, their affiliation to an expansive Western cosmopolitan tradition
10 Ironically, Crack and McOndo writers enjoy the promotional blessings of Carlos Fuentes, their enthusiastic champion (Laporte). Fuentes even asked Volpi to organize the massive celebrations in Mexico City during November 2008 in honor of his 80th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the publication of La regin ms transparente. See DPA.

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and assert their prerogative to write about any topic or geographical location. Furthermore, when their novels address Latin America, the backdrops are usually gritty urban centers in the throes of hypercapitalism, neoliberalism, and violence. Although critics familiar with the broad spectrum and history of Latin American letters have correctly rebuffed the originality of these precepts (see Domnguez Michael), the international commercial success of Volpi, Padilla, Fuguet, and Paz Soldn their literary prizes, record-breaking contracts, and prominence in government and academic positions has propelled their claims of a new Latin American mode of expression into the public perception. Collectively, the authors assembled around the McOndo and Crack projects have been successful in loosening the stranglehold of magical realism on the U.S. conception of Latin American fiction, and individual novelists such as Volpi have achieved moments of stardom.11 Nevertheless, neither the McOndo aesthetics of virtual realism, pop culture, and globalization, nor the Cracks penchant for historical thrillers set outside of Latin America seem to have filled Garca Mrquezs shoes. One could conjecture that the former portrays a world too close to U.S. experience (wheres the exoticism and local color in ipods, McDonalds, and media/ drug-consuming youth?), while the latter competes within an entrenched subgenre dominated by best-selling professional writers in English (is the new domain of Latin American authors the Nazi spy novel?). It is true that there are other established writers with highly original projects unrelated to magical realism, Crack, or McOndo, but many Daniel Sada, Sergio Pitol, and Juan Villoro, to name a few just in Mexico have yet to see their work translated into English, and others Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), Alan Pauls (Argentina), Eduardo Antonio Parra (Mexico), and Jos Manuel Prieto (Cuba), for example whose work has been translated, have largely been ignored. U.S. publishers, critics, and readers seemed to be awaiting the appearance of the successor to Garca Mrquez, a new author-figure around whose persona and work the terms of a new breed of Latin American fiction can be fixed. As Rama has observed, the modern literary market seeks authors whose names can become brands (278) and whose lives are of equal or greater interest than the works they produce (285). I would venture that in 2007, with the English-language release of The Savage Detectives by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, all bets were on Roberto Bolao. III. The New Literary Paradigm: Visceral (Not Magical) Realism Bolaos meteoric rise from obscurity to celebrity within the U.S. market can fully be appreciated only in the context of the status of literary translation in this country during the years immediately preceding the publication of The Savage Detectives. However, determining that status is complicated by the lack of consistency in data reported by the publishing industry, nonprofit organizations, and university programs that study and teach translation. In compiling their statistics,
11 For example, Volpis novel In Search of Klingsor received the 1999 Biblioteca Breve prize given by the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral, an award that had been suspended since 1973. The story of a U.S. physicist charged with discovering the identity of the mastermind of the Nazi atomic project, Klingsor was lauded as a German novel written in Spanish. Translation rights were sold for over half a million dollars and the novel became an international bestseller, opening the door to major Spanish publishers for other young Latin American writers (see Villena).

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each source deals differently with certain relevant variables: how to define fiction and literature; how to categorize translations (by language, nationality, genre); whether or not to include retranslations, reprints, and anthologies; and how often to compile data. Esther Allen, in the course of editing and authoring sections of To Be Translated or Not to Be, International PENs 2007 report, gathered revelatory information from leading sources. She cites Bowker, the foremost provider of bibliographic information in North America, which reported the often-quoted rough number of 3% as the percentage of all new books in all genres published in English that are translations (including titles published in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) (24).12 Allen also cites an earlier National Endowment for the Arts report that suggests that this percentage is high for works of literature, at least in 1999, the year of the study: of 12,828 poetry and fiction titles published in the United States, only 297 were translations (including retranslations), that is, a little over 2% (25). Chad W. Post, the director of Open Letter, the University of Rochesters literary publishing house and its online website Three Percent, also reports that 3% of all books (hence the name of the website) published in the U.S. are translations and 0.7% (of all books published) are translations of literary fiction and poetry. For the year 2008, the website tallied a total of 277 adult fiction and 79 poetry titles in English translation (excluding graphic novels, retranslations, and reprints), of which 39 are from Latin America. If we apply Posts 0.7% number to the Bowker Reports total of 59, 867 new fiction and new literature titles published in the United States in 2007 (see Bowker Reports),13 then hypothetically there would have been 491 new literary translations published that year. However, Post counted a total of only 356 literary titles in translation for 2008.14 These discrepancies only reinforce for me, as they do for Eliot Weinberger,15 the impossibility of obtaining accurate numbers or corroborating numbers from different sources. Even if the highest figure (3%) is accurate, it is a deplorably low level of translated titles, especially when compared to the percentage of translated titles published in Spain (25%) and Italy (22%), to name just two examples for which numbers are available.16
12 This percentage, from an October 2005 news release, is based on figures from 2004. Of 375,000 new books published in English, approximately 14,440 were new translations. See Bowker. 13 Bowker reports as follows: There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002. Similarly, there was a 19% rise in new literature books last year, to 9,796, which followed a 31% increase in new literature titles in 2006 (Bowker Reports). 14 I recognize that Bowkers numbers are from 2007 and the University of Rochesters are from 2008; Bowker, however, reports a long-term increase in literary works published in the U.S. That the University of Rochesters website only tallied 356 literary titles in translation for 2008, despite Posts claim of 9798% accuracy, opens to question the completeness of his database and/or his estimate that .7% of all books published in the U.S. are literary translations, a percentage that may, in fact, be high. 15 See Posts response to Eliot Weinberger on just this point at <http://www.rochester.edu/College/ translation/threepercent/?s=tag&t=state-of-translations>. 16 Hoffman cites further comparative national statistics from 2005 such as the following: the number of French novels bought by American publishers was 42; the number of American novels bought by French publishers was 153; the number of Chinese books bought by American publishers was 16; and the number of American books bought by Chinese publishers was 3,932. Alas, no numbers were available for Latin American countries.

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Such statistics as these explain Allens (and others)17 grim assessment: its clear that the odds against being translated into English that confront individual writers in flourishing literary cultures such as Argentina are almost hopeless (25). Allen adds that those selected few who do get published generally face difficulty getting publicized and marketed (30) because, as the title of an article in The New York Times reads, America Yawns at Foreign Fiction (Kinzer). In addition to the alleged difficulty of interesting American readers in translated literature (Kinzer), the consolidation and acquisition of smaller presses by international conglomerates over the last three decades have made profit margins the deciding factor behind most publications. As a result, editors are less willing to take a gamble on a challenging book or a new author (Schiffrin 107), particularly one in translation, preferring instead to publish a narrow selection of titles they believe to be marketable. Given these conditions, Bolaos appearance on The New York Timess list of best books of 2007 and 2008 is remarkable but not inexplicable. Indeed, a number of perceived economic values and marketing strategies combined and coalesced the actors, institutions, and concrete practices that determine literary value, in Casanovas terms. Bolaos creative genius, compelling biography, personal experience of the Pinochet coup, and untimely death from liver failure at the age of fifty, on July 15, 2003, as well as the labeling of some of his works as Southern Cone dictatorship novels, all contributed to produce a Bolao well suited for U.S. reception and consumption and, in doing so, anticipated the reading of his work that has been propagated in this country. Before reaching the United States, his trajectory runs through regional centers of literary value, the first being Barcelona. Bolao was virtually unknown, like most Latin American authors, until his novels were accepted by a prominent publisher in Spain. After six books were released by small presses, Seix Barral edited La literatura nazi en Amrica in 1996, and, subsequently, the publishing house Anagrama, under the leadership of Jorge Herralde, became his official publisher, with thirteen Bolao titles to its credit. Because both Seix Barral and Anagrama produce books that are widely distributed in Spain and Latin America, Bolaos inclusion in their lists gave him visibility throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The publication of Los detectives salvajes in 1998 brought Bolao international recognition, earning him two of the most important prizes for Spanish-language fiction: the sixteenth Herralde prize, one of the most highly regarded awards in Spain for an unpublished novel, and the Rmulo Gallegos prize, Latin Americas most prestigious award in the same category.18 In the following years, with his name resonating in Spanish-speaking literary spheres on both sides of the Atlantic,
17 John OBrien, the founder of Dalkey Archive Press of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, tracked the number of fiction titles published in translation in the United States between 2000 and 2006, excluding anthologies, retranslations, romance and detective fiction. He counted only 45 Latin American titles in English translation during the sixyear span. 18 Since its creation in 1983, only two Latin American authors had been awarded the Herralde before Bolao: Sergio Pitol for El desfile del amor (1984) and Jaime Bayly for La noche es virgen (1997); all other previous winners were Spanish. Previous award-winning works of the Rmulo Gallegos prize include canonical boom classics: Vargas Llosas La casa verde (1967), Garca Mrquezs Cien aos de soledad (1972), and Fuentess Terra Nostra (1977).

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Bolao signed contracts in ten countries (not including the United States) for the translation of his works (Herralde 19). His standing among young writers, many of them associated with the McOndo and Crack groups, also grew to monumental proportions. Less than a month before his death, Bolao was invited to the first Encuentro de escritores latinoamericanos, sponsored by Seix Barral in Seville, an event that served publicly to position Bolao in the words of Jorge Volpi (Europa Press) as the hermano mayor of many of these same writers.19 Although Bolao viewed this role with skepticism (see Sevilla me mata), it further cemented his centrality within the younger post-boom generations. With his tragic demise at the peak of his literary career and the publication of his posthumous novel, 2666, Bolaos celebrity status in the Spanish-speaking world was secured. It is interesting to observe how this trajectory got translated in the United States. Before Bolaos death, his only works available in English were stories appearing in The New Yorker, Bomb, Grand Street, and Tin House. The year he died New Directions began to publish Chris Andrewss careful translations of Bolaos shorter narratives. Founded in 1936, New Directions is an independent publisher that has historically published experimental fiction and poetry and has had a longstanding commitment to translation. Latin American authors in its catalogue include Csar Aira, Homero Aridjis, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, Coral Bracho, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Julio Cortzar, Felisberto Hernndez, Vicente Huidobro, Enrique Lihn, Pablo Neruda, Jos Emilio Pacheco, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa. Its website advertises that New Directions has been largely responsible for Americas interest in . . . Roberto Bolao (New Directions), a reasonable assertion given its early and continued investment in the author and his fiction. By the time The Savage Detectives was published, New Directions had already published four Bolao books Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile, 2003), Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004), Amuleto (Amulet, 2006), and stories taken from Llamadas telefnicas (Phone Calls) and Putas asesinas (Killer Whores), which were given the title Last Evenings on Earth (2006) a number that continues to grow.20 These first translations garnered acclaim from celebrity authors including Benjamin Lytal, Francisco Goldman, and Susan Sontag, whose words of admiration The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world now appear on the back of most Bolao books. After New Directions had tested the U.S. literary market with its Bolao translations and buzz about the author had grown in the national media, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (FSG) acquired the rights to publish in translation his two longer works, Los detectives salvajes and 2666. FSG, owned by the transnational multimedia Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, is part of the Macmillan group, one of the largest international publishing houses in the world. As a commercial press traditionally known for editing well-established international authors,21 FSG could pro19 In attendance were Jorge Franco, Rodrigo Fresn, Santiago Gamboa, Gonzalo Garcs, Fernando Iwasaki, Mario Mendoza, Ignacio Padilla, Edmundo Paz Soldn, Cristina Rivera Garza, Ivn Thays, and Jorge Volpi. 20 Since the appearance of The Savage Detectives New Directions has released Nazi Literature in the Americas (2008) and the first English translation of Bolaos poetry, The Romantic Dogs (2008). 21 The Latin American authors included in their catalogue are Roberto Bolao, Mara Luisa Bombal, Machado de Assis, Jorge Franco, Rodrigo Fresn, Carlos Fuentes, Mayra Montero, Pablo Neruda, Ignacio Padilla, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

LATIN AMERICA TRANSLATED (AGAIN) / 357

vide strong financial backing for the promotion and massive distribution of The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer and released in March 2007, nine years after its original publication in Spanish. FSG was greatly assisted when, in May of that year, online editors at Amazon chose the novel for its Significant Seven list, propelling it to best-seller status. As The New York Times reported, Amazon was responsible for more than fifty percent of all copies sold (Bick), a fact that suggests that Seattle, where Amazon has its headquarters, should be considered a new center of literary capital. The opinions of prominent critics disseminated in major publications across the country a sampling of which I will later address added cultural capital to the book, fueling Bolaos own boom. Encomiums were chorused, with one of the most telling penned by the prominent academic Ilan Stavans in The Washington Post: Not since Gabriel Garca Mrquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolao. I believe that Stavanss comparison of the success of The Savage Detectives with that of One Hundred Years of Solitude is apt for several reasons, but perhaps not those intended by the critic. In referring to world literature, Stavans subscribes to an understanding of the literary field similar to Casanovas, an understanding that has been succinctly critiqued by Pedro ngel Palou: world literature is an effect of reading, its an effect today more than ever of the market (313). Just as the broad appeal of Garca Mrquezs novel can be largely attributed to a particular (mis)reading that is highly marketable, and that has overshadowed other appreciations of his work, so a similar process appears to be in effect with The Savage Detectives. FSGs packaging of Bolaos novel sets the stage for its consumption in the U.S. On the dust jacket designed specifically for the U.S. edition blurbs run together from the back flap to the back cover, a design that is visually reminiscent of the newly released original scroll version of Jack Kerouacs On the Road on the fiftieth anniversary of that books original publication in 1957. The front flap of The Savage Detectives offers a picture of Bolao, but not the image of the novelist at forty-something with cropped hair, a black jacket, round glasses, and a cigarette in hand that is already iconic in the Spanish-speaking world and has been employed by New Directions for its Bolao titles. Rather, FSGs Bolao is a young man with long locks and a faint mustache, a nostalgic memento that for U.S. readers evokes the rebellious counterculture of the sixties and seventies.22 (Fig. 1) This second photograph, reproduced and/or stylized to accompany certain reviews, including one by Richard Eder for The New York Times, has provided the basis for a widely disseminated verbal description of the author as well as Arturo Belano, his alter-ego in The Savage Detectives. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bolaos personal story features prominently in professional and amateur reviews of his novel, particularly episodes from his youth: his decision to drop out of school and become a poet; his land odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was detained, arrested, and released from jail after the Pinochet coup in 1973; the formation in Mexico City of the infrarealist poetry movement with Mexican poet Mario Santiago, the inspiration for the fictional Ulises Lima, and their failed literary
22 FSG chose a more contemporary photograph of Bolao for its translation of 2666 by Mathieu Bourgois.

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Figure 1. Roberto Bolao at 20. Photograph used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

revolution; Bolaos itinerant existence in Europe; his odd jobs (night watchman in a summer campground, seasonal laborer, dishwasher, longshoreman), drug habits and dental problems; his uncompromising commitment to the poetry of living and the living of poetry.23 When coupled with Bolaos death at fifty, these iconoclastic episodes proved too tempting to narrate as anything other than a tragedy of mythical proportions: here is someone who actually saw his youthful ideals through to their ultimate consequences. Meet the Kurt Cobain of LatinAmerican Literature reads the title of one review (Crimmins), while Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas laments the trend of confusing Bolao with James Dean (Garca). Never mind that The Savage Detectives and all his major prose
23 Several reviews in the United States have alleged, despite refutations by his family and closest friends, that Bolao used heroin and that as a result he contracted hepatitis C, the disease that apparently caused his death. For a more elaborate discussion of this controversy, see Bolao and Heroin?

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works were written when Bolao was a sober family man, during the intensive seven-year countdown to his impending death. In effect, Bolao becomes even before one crosses the novels threshold a cross between the beats and Arthur Rimbaud (another reference for his alter ego Arturo Belano), his life already the stuff of legend. The simplest of the multiple readings of The Savage Detectives only furthers this superficial appreciation of Bolao and his work and is based principally on the diary entries of Juan Garca Madero that comprise the first and third sections of the novel. A seventeen-year-old law student, Garca Madero drops out of school to join the cadre of visceral realists, young avant-garde poets who peddle drugs to bankroll their publications, disrupt readings by the literary establishment, and impetuously defy bourgeois social, political, and literary mores. This first-person account chronicles Garca Maderos experiences in Mexico City as he steals and devours books, passionately writes poems that the reader never sees, and has exuberant sexual encounters with a number of women. Eventually he flees the capital in a Chevy Impala in the company of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and a prostitute named Lupe. The escape has the dual mission of eluding Lupes violent pimp and tracking down Cesrea Tinajero, the founder of visceral realism, who lives forgotten somewhere in the Sonoran desert. These events, which occupy less than a third of the novel, constitute its closest approximation of a plot and seem to be the aspect of the book that holds the greatest appeal for most U.S. readers. The entire novel, and Garca Maderos diary in particular, has been categorized by many reviewers as a road story in the same vein as that of the recent popular Latin American films Por la libre (Dust to Dust, Juan Carlos de Llaca, 2000), Y tu mam tambin (And Your Mother, Too, Alfonso Cuarn, 2001), and Los diarios de la motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles, 2004) a comparison that could gain even greater currency if a movie (directed by Carlos Sama) based on the first and third parts of the novel is released in 2009, especially since the actor who is slated to play Belano is Mexican superstar Gael Garca Bernal, who also portrayed the young Che Guevara in Salless hit (Garca).24 In The Savage Detectives, as in these films, the journey is full of mishaps and memorable escapades: the travels culminate in a desert showdown that results in the accidental deaths of the elephant-sized Cesrea, the pimp, and a crooked cop; Belano and Lima depart with the three corpses; and Lupe and Garca Madero are hopping from pueblo to pueblo when the diary abruptly ends. Although the scenario borders on the preposterous, I suspect that the U.S. reader feels little need to avail himself of Bolaos ever-lurking irony. This is Latin America, after all, a space in which to satisfy ones desires for rebellions and adventures of all stripes: political, sexual, spiritual, substance-induced, literary. As one critic opines, The Savage Detectives is undeniably a very Latin book, and giving oneself over to its pleasures is akin to treating oneself to a slow-paced holiday south of the border (Weibezahl). This geographical demarcation is of utmost importance in sustaining the road-trip mythology already in full throttle in 1950s beat writing about Mexico for example Kerouacs vision of Latin America from On the Road: It was no longer east-west, but magic SOUTH. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing
24 Bolaos widow, Carolina Lpez, alleges that Samas rights to adapt the book have expired. Both are taking legal action, although no decision has been reached (see Gabrielli).

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clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. Man, this will finally take us to IT! (366). South of the border is an exotic stomping ground for the U.S. readers imagination, a destination where such extraordinary IT happenings are not fictional but quotidian. This space, the critic I have just quoted implies, is appropriate for holidays, for a break from the serious, conventional business of real life in the north. The yellow butterflies and floating beauties of Garca Mrquezs fiction form no part of the scenery in Bolaos novel or the films I have mentioned. I would argue, however, that from them a new and equally reductive image of Latin America is emerging in the U.S. collective imagination, one that The Savage Detectives unintentionally feeds. An extravagant cast of characters populates its pages: a bisexual poet named Luscious Skin, a Uruguayan exile who hides for a week in a bathroom stall during the 1968 police occupation of Mexico Citys national university, an institutionalized architect who communes with a dead poet, a pimp who regularly measures his phallus with his knife. These personages may not be born with pigs tails, but for many U.S. readers they certainly feel exotic and belong to a reality far removed from their own. In a sense they are perhaps even more fantastic than Garca Mrquezs inventions. After all, readers have been warned, by critics and marketers alike, this is a thinly disguised autobiography (see Boullosa). When asked in interviews, Usted es chileno, espaol o mexicano? Bolao would answer Soy latinoamericano (Maristain 62). This response situates the author, his novel, and its characters in the context of a continental identity, a concept that some Crack and McOndo writers share in their movement away from national labels and their claim to deterritorialize literature. In the case of The Savage Detectives, this identification facilitates a reading of the novel as representative of an entire region. The long middle section, in which Garca Madero is pointedly absent, expands the geographic scope even further; it indirectly documents Arturo Belanos and Ulises Limas peripatetic wanderings in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa during the two decades (19761996) following the fateful Sonoran road trip. Despite the vastness of the physical space covered by Belano and Lima a two-person diaspora their lifestyle in places as diverse as Paris and Luanda, Tel Aviv and Berlin is always the same: non-conformist, impulsive, bohemian, and stubbornly intent upon attaining some elusive, indeterminate goal or state, with little regard for the consequences. As one of Belanos girlfriends recalls: he named countries like Libya, Ethiopia, Zaire, and cities like Barcelona, Florence, Avignon, . . . And then he said: I dont plan to see them, I plan to live in them the same way Ive lived in Mexico (Detectives 19394). This existential attitude, Bolao seems to suggest, is quintessentially Latin American a generalization that finds an oft-cited canonical antecedent in Julio Cortzars 1963 Rayuela (Hopscotch), with its displaced bohemian Argentines in Paris. Interestingly, while Latin Americans find the collective label of magical realism an anathema (too kitschy, too folksy, too limiting), the new regional identification a continent of literary Che Guevaras who have not capitulated to conformity has been more readily embraced. The Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarra observes that Bolao has rapidly become the bard of Latin America in whose books there is a recurring motive: the hallucinatory vision of an interminable procession of young Latin Americans

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tumbling into the abyss (441), a vision with which Latin American readers, especially young ones, readily identify.25 Why does this new packaging of Latin America also work with U.S. readers? I conjecture that they can fashion from The Savage Detectives two complementary messages that are appealing to their sensibilities and expectations. On the one hand, their buried adolescent idealism is indulged as they discover in Latin America and the Latin American the prospect of an adventure undertaken in the earnest belief of the saving power and transcendental meaning of action and poetry. A character in the novel, the Spanish translator Joaqun Vzquez Amaral, expresses what many U.S. readers may feel while peering into the lives of the visceral realists: all I saw were those kids, those eager, idealistic kids, you understand? And that, as a foreigner, I appreciated (Detectives 186; my emphasis). This is the charm of Garca Maderos truncated bildungsroman: its precipitous ending leaves his ardent, irrepressible youth and belief relatively intact, a state associated in the U.S. psyche with a bygone generational experience. Thanks to Bolao, U.S. readers can vicariously relive the best of the seventies, fascinated with the notion of a Latin America still latent with such possibilities. On the other hand, Bolaos novel may be read as a cautionary moral tale that demonstrates the consequences of taking such rebellions too seriously and too far. The twenty years Belano and Lima spend wandering the globe bring only disillusionment, hardship, and loss. The two poets produce almost no literature, their reputations are often maligned by many of the fifty-odd characters who narrate the middle section, and they end up alone, with no apparent epiphany as a result of their efforts. Jacobo Urenda, a photographer who accompanies Belano on the last leg of his journey through several war-torn African nations, remarks: I got the sense that life meant nothing to him, that hed taken the job so he could die a picturesque death, a death that was out of the ordinary, the usual bullshit. My generation all overdosed on Marx and Rimbaud (Detectives 498). It is as if Bolao were confirming what U.S. cultural norms tout as truth: its fine, even expected, to be rebellious and full of chutzpah at seventeen, but if you dont grow up, get serious, and settle down, the results are often tragic or pathetic. And, in fact, the most consistent observations about the novel revolve around the idea of loss as the consequence of youthful abandon. Francisco Goldmans comments in The New York Review of Books are characteristic: Bolao shows how time punishes us for the rebellious dreams of youth, bringing disappointment, painfully modest accomplishments, broken lives, illness, even violent death and, simply, the end of youth (Goldman). This impression parallels the way critics are now reassessing On the Road, fifty years after its publication, a trend that David Brooks has characterized as the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment (Brooks). A certain generational and cultural paternalism also bleeds through these critical perspectives: thus Goldman writes of caring deeply about the characters, almost like a parent, wanting happiness for them (Goldman), inadvertently making a convincing case for societal conformity and, grudgingly, the superiority of Protestant work ethics and values.
25 Thus Volpi asserts that Bolao is the one author that all writers under 40 enthusiastically agree upon as representing Latin American fiction today.

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Bolao seems to have anticipated and ironically encouraged this reading, embedding in the novel the perspective of Barbara Patterson, a gringa who goes to Mexico City to study the works of Juan Rulfo, where she becomes friends with the visceral realists and falls in love with one of them, Rafael Barrios. She summarizes her initial impression of the poets in the same positive language U.S. reviewers have used to describe their own impressions of the novel: I liked them. They reminded me of the beats. . . . I wanted to have a good time, and around them things were always lively (Detectives 16263). Her opinion is modified, however, once they move to Los Angeles. The good time the Latin Americans offer translates poorly within the practice and grind of daily living, and Barbaras accounts of her cohabitation with Rafael reflect her growing frustration in pointedly cultural terms:
One day I said things cant go on like this. Rafael wasnt doing anything. He didnt work, he didnt write, he didnt help me clean the house, he didnt do the shopping, all he did was take showers (because if nothing else, Rafael is clean, like practically all fucking Mexicans) and watch TV until dawn or go out for beers or play soccer with the fucking Chicanos in the neighborhood . . . who called him Poet Man (which he didnt seem to mind). (Detectives 324)

Unwittingly or perhaps with provocative deliberation The Savage Detectives plays on a series of opposing characteristics that the United States has historically employed in defining itself vis--vis its neighbors to the south: hardworking vs. lazy, mature vs. adolescent, responsible vs. reckless, upstanding vs. delinquent. In a nutshell, Sarmientos dichotomy, as old as Latin America itself: civilization vs. barbarism. Regarded from this standpoint, The Savage Detectives is a comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized. These statements of course represent a gross reduction of both The Savage Detectives and U.S. readers comprehension of it. Expert appreciations of the novel highlight other interpretations, some of which have also been developed by Spanishlanguage critics: the uneasy relationship between literature and violence in Bolaos fiction and his direct engagement with political subject matter (Valdes); the novels intertextual dialogues with the authors other works (Wood); Bolaos metaliterary interplay with Latin American, European, and U.S. authors and literary traditions; the works structural innovation, particularly the kaleidoscopic and fugue-like middle section. My analysis simply considers how the United States is translating Latin American literature and the region through Bolaos novel. This is a reading of a reading, the type of literary mirror game dear to Bolao and to Borges, the author he most urgently read and recommended to others as the starting point for the future renewal of Latin American letters (Entre parntesis 30). Like Borges, Bolao theorizes the literary text in terms of its readers and readings:
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and its the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. (Detectives 456)

Readers comprise, Bolao knows, an infinite number of Pierre Menards who, even in the most faithful exercise of reading or translation, reveal the Work as something perpetually other. Some readings or translations (however justifiable

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these may be) curtail (at least temporarily) the scope of the text due to their widespread currency a currency often inextricable from political, social, and economic factors. This has been the case with the dominant U.S. reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it appears to be the case with the current reading of The Savage Detectives. With the release in 2008 of an English translation of Bolaos 2666 the novel regarded as his chef-doeuvre by Spanish-language readers and critics it will be fascinating to see whether Bolaos work is reassessed and, more generally, how contemporary Latin American literature is translated and understood in the U.S. as a result. Whatever the immediate outcome, Bolao, like Borges before him, professed his faith in the prevailing integrity of the Work. As Borges wrote about the translations and misreadings of Don Quijote: the page that aspires to immortality can traverse the fire of errata, approximate versions, distracted readings, incomprehension without losing its soul in the process (204). We may rest assured that The Savage Detectives likewise will survive this and other future battles. College of Staten Island, City University of New York Works Cited
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1 Comparative Literature 61.3 Abstract (Article)

SARAH POLLACK

Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives in the United States

This essay addresses the cultural and political agendas that influence the selection of Latin American novels to be translated by U.S. publishers and the reception of these novels by U.S. readers. Focusing on two Latin American writers who have had enormous success in the U.S., the author traces the shift from the magical realism of Gabriel Garca Mrquez in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, to the gritty realism of Roberto Bolao, and asks what these different paradigms can tell us about stereotypical U.S. notions of Latin American cultural and political realities. Although Bolaos work ostensibly realigns the coordinates of the Latin American novel, breaking with the model of magical realism, it too foments a (pre)conception of alterity that satisfies the fantasies and collective imagination of U.S. cultural consumers. Citing the extremely low numbers of Latin American works translated and published in the U.S. yearly, she attributes this (pre)conception in part to the very small list of Latin American works available to U.S. readers a list that comprises only a fraction of the total literary production of the region.