Magical Realism and the Rewriting of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

Translation scholar André Lefevere asserted that translation involves “a rewriting of the original
text” which “reflects a certain ideology and poetics, and as such, manipulates literature to
function in a given society in a given way”. Based on this proposition, the purpose of this article
is to explore how translation can be used to rewrite a literary work in order to insert it into a
genre to which it did not originally belong in the source culture. The specific case analyzed here
is Pedro Páramo by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, which has been defined within the US
literary system as a “precursor” to the genre of magical realism. In my paper I explore how
Rulfo’s novel―written in 1955, several years before the creation of the concept of the genre now
known as “magical realism”―has been rewritten for English-speaking readers since the 1960s,
initially in paratextual commentary (reviews, promotional material), and also endotextually in the
retranslation of the novel itself by Margaret Sayers Peden, published in 1994. In this way, I aim
to demonstrate how Pedro Páramo has been expropriated from its original literary context to be
inserted into the canon of “magical realism”, a literary genre that has been employed in the
United States to define a form of essentialist primitivism that US imperialist ideology attributes
reductively to Latin America. The paper will include both a discussion of the paratextual
commentary that has served to contextualize the novel for English-speaking readers since the
publication of the first translation and a textual analysis of Sayers Peden’s retranslation.

Keywords: Juan Rulfo, magical realism, rewriting, Mexican literature, ideology.

Magical Realism and the Rewriting of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

Introduction: Translation as “Rewriting”

Since the so-called “cultural turn” taken by translation studies some thirty years ago,

many translation scholars have been exploring how the values, preconceptions and ideologies of

the target culture become inscribed in translated texts. These scholars dismiss the traditional

view of translation as a merely linguistic process of meaning transfer from one linguistic code to

another, viewing it instead as a cultural process of forcible appropriation, shaped by the cultural,

political and ideological interests of the target culture. The first exponents of this new paradigm

were the scholars of the so-called “Manipulation School”, whose name was taken from the

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collection of essays compiled by Theo Hermans in 1985 under the title The Manipulation of

Literature. The collection’s title alludes to one of the generally agreed propositions of the

scholars who contributed to the collection that “from the point of view of the target literature, all

translation implies a certain degree of manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose”

(Hermans 11). One of the most prominent members of this school was André Lefevere, who

characterizes literature as a “system, embedded in the environment of a culture or society”

(“Mother Courage” 235). Lefevere defines translation as a “rewriting of the original text” which

reflects “a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate[s] literature to function in a

given society in a given way.” (“Translation” vii).

Based on this proposition, the purpose of this paper is to explore how translation can be

used to rewrite a literary work in order to insert it into a genre to which it did not belong in the

source culture. The specific case I propose to analyze is that of the English translations of Juan

Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, which has been defined, within the US literary system, as a seminal work

of “magical realism”. I want to explore how this short novel of Rulfo’s―first published in

Mexico in 1955, years before the creation of the concept of the “magical realist” genre―has

been rewritten for English-speaking readers since the 1960s, initially in paratextual commentary

(reviews, academic studies, promotional texts), and then endotextually in the re-translation of the

novel by Margaret Sayers Peden, published in 1994. What I seek to demonstrate is how Pedro

Páramo, a post-modernist Gothic ghost story with elements of Mexican social realism, has been

expropriated from its original literary context to be inserted into the canon of “magical realism”,

a literary genre that has been used reductively in the English-speaking world to define a form of

primitive essentialism attributed to Latin America, which appears, conveniently, to justify US

imperialist intervention in the region.

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The Latin American “Boom” and Magical Realism

In the English-speaking world, the so-called “Latin American literary boom” that began

in the 1960s is defined as a sudden increase in literary creation in Latin America, as if Latin

Americans had suddenly found a literary voice. In reality, the literature, or rather, literatures of

Latin American countries were consolidated at least a generation earlier1, and the sudden interest

of English speakers in Latin American writing at that time had less to do with a “boom” in Latin

American literary activity than with the political circumstances of the Cold War, and in

particular, the Cuban Revolution and the strong support it received among Latin American

intellectuals. This situation sparked concern among US political and business leaders, who began

to fear that if they didn’t win over the hearts and minds of their disenchanted neighbors to the

South they might lose their hegemony in the region to Soviet influence (Rostagno 103). In this

context, the sudden wave of translations of Latin American literature appearing in the

1960s―many of which were the result of US government-sponsored initiatives to combat the

cultural programs promoted by Cuba in the region―was the product of an effort of

rapprochement by Washington aimed at keeping Latin America within its sphere of political,

economic and cultural influence. These government-sponsored initiatives included the translation

subsidy program to promote Latin American literature in the US administrated by the

Association of American University Presses (AAUP), which operated from 1960 to 1966, and

the Inter-American Committee established in 1962 (re-named the Inter-American Foundation for

the Arts in 1964), whose mandate was to bring together Latin American and US intellectuals,
1
For example, authors like Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay), César Vallejo (Peru), Alfonso
Reyes (Mexico), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba) and Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) form part of a generation of Latin
American writers who, although largely ignored in their day in the English-speaking world, played an extremely
important role in the development of Latin American literatures in the early 20th century, and had a huge influence
on the so-called “Boom” authors who followed them a generation later.

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scholars, journalists and publishers, giving the Latin Americans opportunities to obtain both

contacts and contracts in the United States (Cohn 140).

Within the target culture, the success of Latin American literature at this time was closely

associated with the genre of “magical realism”, depicted in the US as the Latin American literary

mode par excellence. According to Sylvia Molloy, although it bears more of the hallmarks of a

“transculturation” of French symbolism, “magical realism” was “singled out by First World

readerships to signify, as surely as Carmen Miranda’s fruity cornucopias, ‘Latin America’”

(374). The genre was thus turned into “a regional, ethnicized commodity, a form of that

essentialized primitivism” (374) that reinforces pre-existing stereotypes of Latin America as a

magical territory beyond the limits of (US) civilization. As Molloy suggests, magical realism “is

refulgent, amusing, and kitschy […] but it doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, here [in the United

States]” (375). Unfortunately, the fact that only a small proportion of Latin American authors can

be easily framed within the genre of magical realism condemns many Latin American literary

works to the “ever-expanding purgatory of the untranslatable” (375). Unless, of course, the work

can be “rewritten” to fit into the genre, as appears to have occurred in the case of Pedro Páramo.

From the First Translation of Pedro Páramo to its Paratextual Repositioning

The first English translation of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, by Lysander Kemp, was

published in 1959 by the avant-garde publishing house Grove Press in New York City. The novel

initially met with a very lukewarm reception in the US, and by the early 1960s this first

translation was already out of print (Zepeda, 256). However, its fate changed toward the end of

the 1960s, in the context of the Latin American literary “boom” and the emergence of the genre

of magical realism. From that time there was an evident effort within the US literary system to

reposition Rulfo as the author who “launched” the genre. The popularity of magical realism
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obviously provoked a desire among US critics to seek out the “precursors” of the style, and thus

Rulfo’s novel was rediscovered, as it was identified as a big influence on various boom

authors―particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who “knew the whole book by heart, so much did

he admire it and want to be saturated by it” (Sontag ix). As a result, in 1967, George D. Schade’s

English translation of Rulfo’s other work, El llano en llamas (1953), was published by

University of Texas Press under the title The Burning Plain and Other Stories, and in 1969

Grove Press published a new edition of Lysander Kemp’s translation of Pedro Páramo, in

recognition of the new status of the novel as “an important precursor of ‘magical realism’ in

Latin American writing” (as the blurb on the back cover of The Burning Plain describes it). This

new status is made even more patent in the description of the novel on the back cover of the

1994 retranslation by Margaret Sayers Peden, which reveals an obvious intention to frame Pedro

Páramo within the context of the Boom:

Rulfo’s entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent passions, and

inexplicable sorcery―a style that has come to be known as “magical

realism”―has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Latin American

writers, from José Donoso and Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel

García Márquez.

The fact that this blurb lists the four canonical Boom authors makes the intention clear: these

authors are invoked to position Rulfo within the constellation of Latin American writers who

have become the centre of the subsystem of Latin American literature (or “magical realism”,

with which it is often conflated) established in the United States in the preceding decades. The

definition of magical realism as an “entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent

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passions, and inexplicable sorcery” sidesteps the obvious fact that these characteristics are the

essential properties of many classic Gothic tales.

It is important to stress here the ideological purpose of reinforcing an essentialist image

of Latin America that the genre of magical realism has served in the US literary system. In her

analysis of the novel, the historian Leslie Bethell suggests that Pedro Páramo “has been used

time and time again to justify the belief that Latin America is magical, mysterious and irrational

[…] and that its literature celebrates this strange ‘reality’” (176). This belief is analogous to the

construction of Europe’s colonies as “infernal paradises” in European 19th century literature, a

construction that sought to legitimate imperialism and its unbridled exploitation of supposedly

less civilized cultures. The conflation of the Latin American novel with Latin American reality is

evident in reviews of the retranslation of Pedro Páramo in 1994, such as Rockwell Gray’s in the

Chicago Tribune on October 2, 1994, which links Pedro Páramo to the Zapatista uprising

occurring in Mexico at that time, suggesting that “Rulfo’s tragic vision of the fate of Mexico

seems both timeless and timely: the current political struggle in the impoverished southern state

of Chiapas could come from a chapter of the novel” (n.p.). In this way, Pedro Páramo is

characterized as a “realist” depiction of the permanent condition of Mexico, which, according to

another US reviewer writing around the same time, is “a country steeped in tradition and

enigma” (Hughes 240).

The early 1990s saw something of a mini-boom in the translation of Mexican literature.

According to data drawn from UNESCO’s database of published translations (Index

Translationum, URL: www.unesco.org/culture/xtrans/), a total of 78 translations or retranslations

of Mexican literary works were published in the US in the period 1990-1995, compared with

only 45 in the whole decade of the 1980s. After 1995, however, the numbers took a sharp

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downturn back toward pre-1990s levels, with just 46 titles published in the period 1996-2001. By

far the most successful Mexican novel published during the “mini-boom” of the early 1990s was

Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, published by Doubleday in 1992, which by 1994

(when Margaret Sayers Peden’s retranslation of Pedro Páramo was published) had sold 780,000

copies in the United States and had spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list (Shaw

37). The popularity of Esquivel’s novel, hailed as an emblematic example of “magical realism”,

made the publication of a new translation of Pedro Páramo especially timely, as demonstrated

by a review published in the Los Angeles Daily News in 1993, which includes the following

extraordinary generalization:

Like Water for Chocolate falls squarely into the Latin American movement

known as “magical realism”, in which seemingly impossible events are accepted

as an integral part of everyday life. Launched a half-century ago by Juan Rulfo’s

Pedro Páramo, and propagated perhaps most widely by the novels of Gabriel

García Márquez, magical realism reflects the spiritualist side of all Latin

American cultures. (Arar L10)

The Retranslation of Pedro Páramo: Endotextual Repositioning as Magical Realism

Lysander Kemp’s original translation of Pedro Páramo is marred by a considerable

number of semantic errors, along with numerous omissions of words, phrases and even whole

sentences in the source text.2 It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Grove Press decided to replace

Kemp’s translation with Sayers Peden’s retranslation when they chose to republish the novel in

1994. Indeed, in her preface to the 1994 publication, Susan Sontag suggests that one of the

2
According to one report, Kemp confessed to Rulfo some years after his translation was published that “when he
didn't understand a passage, he just omitted it” (Pearson 157).

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motivations behind the new version was Rulfo’s desire for an “accurate and uncut translation” of

his novel in English (x). In contrast with Kemp’s seemingly rushed translation, Sayers Peden’s

painstaking version is notable for its diligent effort to represent every word and phrase in Rulfo’s

original text. Indeed, instead of omissions, what characterizes Sayers Peden’s translation is the

significant number of additions and lexical embellishments that result in a markedly florid use of

language that is quite different from Rulfo’s restrained and laconic style. The table below offers

a few illustrative examples of these curious stylistic choices.

TABLE

Sample phrases from Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo

Source Text My literal translation Target Text

Caminábamos cuesta abajo We were walking We were making our way

(TF 66) downhill down the hill (TMB 4)

la luz amarilla del sol (TF 69) The yellow light of the The pale yellow sunlight

sun (TMB 7)

Volaban y caían (TF 69) They flew and fell they swooped and plummeted

(TMB 7)

vi crecer sombras (ST 72) I saw shadows growing I saw shadows looming (TMB

9)

hasta pensó (ST 89) she even thought the thought had even crossed

her mind (TMB 28)

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 In the first example, Sayers Peden translates the single verb “caminar” (lit. “to walk”)

with a more complex phrasal verb (“to make one’s way”), while in the second example she

unnecessarily inserts the qualifier “pale”, absent from the original, into the description of the

colour of the sun. In the third example, her use of the verbs “swooped and plummeted” seem

rather affected compared to Rulfo’s common verbs “volaban y caían” (lit. “they flew and fell”),

as does her choice of “looming” to render the ordinary verb “crecer” (lit. “to grow”). Finally, in

the fifth example the simple phrase “hasta pensó” (lit. “she even thought”) is transformed into a

construction that is both grammatically and semantically more complex: “the thought had even

crossed her mind”.

These choices seem to run counter to Sayers Peden’s own professed translation

philosophy, as in one of her essays on translation she warns novice translators against what she

calls “the sin of improvement” and insists that a translator “does not have the freedom to

‘improve’ a text, a concept that also has a certain inherent arrogance” (77). In light of such an

assertion, why would Sayers Peden have resorted to a strategy that she herself identifies as a sin

in her translation of Rulfo’s novel?

In light of the repositioning of Pedro Páramo within the canon of “magical realism”,

Sayers Peden’s apparent attempts to dress up Rulfo’s style may reflect an effort to reframe the

novel in accordance with the expectations of the US reader in relation to magical realist

literature, which is associated with a “Baroque” style that employs a language replete with “rich

detail and ornamentation” (Bowers 36). It is also worth noting that prior to taking on the

retranslation of Pedro Páramo, Sayers Peden had just finished her fourth translation for Chilean

novelist Isabel Allende, one of the authors most widely recognized for having popularized the

“magical realist” genre in the United States in the 1980s. It is possible that her recent translation

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work had an effect on her approach in translating Rulfo’s text, leading her to attribute a style to

him more in keeping with “exuberant magical realist narratives” (45).

Conclusion: Conscious Rewriting or “Lexical Priming”?

My purpose in this article has been to identify how Juan Rulfo’s classic masterpiece

Pedro Páramo has been rewritten as a precursor to “magical realism”. This rewriting has taken

place both paratextually―in reviews and promotional material―and, as I have suggested,

endotextually, in the text of the retranslation. What cannot be determined from this analysis is

the degree to which Sayers Peden’s rewriting of Pedro Páramo may reflect a conscious strategy

adopted in an effort to bring the retranslation into line with US expectations of a supposed

precursor of “magical realism”, or the unconscious product of her previous translating

experience with popular novels of the genre. In the latter case, the additions and embellishments

that mark her translation could constitute a case of “lexical priming”, a concept developed by

Michael Hoey and introduced to translation studies by Jeremy Munday, who defines it as the

features of a translator’s particular style that “depend on their individual lexical experience” (48).

Whichever of these two factors may have predominated in Sayers Peden’s translation process, it

seems undeniable that many of her stylistic choices in this translation contribute to the

repositioning of Pedro Páramo within the genre of “magical realism” as this literary category is

understood in the target culture.

Works Cited

Arar, Yardena. “Like Water for Chocolate’s Success is the Cream.” Los Angeles Daily News 28

June 1993: L10. Print.

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Bethell, Leslie. A Cultural History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1998. Print.

Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Cohn, Deborah. “A Tale of Two Translation Programs: Politics, the Market and Rockefeller

Funding for Latin American Literature in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.”

Latin American Research Review. 41.2 (2006): 139-164. JSTOR. PDF File.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997. Print.

Gray, Rockwell. “In the Underworld of the Dead with Juan Rulfo.” Chicago Tribune. 2 Oct.

1994. Chicago Tribune Archives. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.

Hermans, Theo. “Introduction: Translation Studies and a New Paradigm.” The Manipulation of

Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. Ed. Theo Hermans. London: Routledge, 1985.

7-15. Print.

Hughes, Kathleen. “Review: General Fiction: Pyramids of Glass: Short Fiction from Modern

Mexico edited by David Bowen and Juan A. Ascencio.” The Booklist. 91.3 (1994): 240.

Print.

Lefevere, Andre. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London:

Routledge, 1992. Print.

-----. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.”

Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000: 233-247.

Print.

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Molloy, Sylvia. “Postcolonial Latin America and the Magic Realist Imperative: A Report to an

Academy.” Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation. Eds. Sandra Bermann and

Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 370-379. Print.

Munday, Jeremy. Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English, New

York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Pearson, Lon. “Review Essay: Juan Rulfo (1917-1986).” Chasqui 34.1 (2005): 150-161. JSTOR.

PDF File.

Rostagno, Irene. Searching for Recognition: The Promotion of Latin American Literature in the

United States. Abingdon: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.

Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. 1955. 20th ed. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2007. Print.

---. Pedro Páramo. Trans. Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Print.

---. The Burning Plain and Other Stories. Trans. George D. Schade. Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1967. Print.

---. Pedro Páramo. Trans. M. Sayers Peden. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Print.

Sayers Peden, Margaret. “A Conversation on Translation with Margaret Sayers Peden.” Voice-

Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature. Binghamton: SUNY Press, 2002. 71-

83. Print.

Shaw, Deborah. Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten Key Films. New York:

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Preface.” Pedro Páramo. By Juan Rulfo. Trans. M. Sayers Peden. New York:

Grove Press, 1994. i-x. Print.

Zepeda, Jorge. La recepción inicial de Pedro Páramo. Mexico: Ediciones RM, Fundación Juan

Rulfo, 2005. Print.

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