Perpetual Obscurity: On Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo”
Juan Rulfo, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford | Pedro Páramo | Serpent’s Tail and Grove Press | November 2023 |129 Pages
An old adage among translators goes that every generation should have its own version of a classic text to speak to that era’s cultural style. It’s a curious suggestion, since we don’t try to “update” canonical American or English novels. But revisiting an old book in the light of a changed world and through the eyes of a translator who draws on the wisdom of predecessors can be an exciting event. Recent retranslations like Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad have stirred new interest in the classics; re-editions of twentieth-century works have revived excitement for authors of fading renown, like Clarice Lispector or Natalia Ginzburg, casting light simultaneously on issues around canonicity. The tricky thing about lauding a new translation, though, is that this usually involves putting the previous versions on trial—or, to put it in even more cynical terms, condemning them to obsolescence.
Douglas J. Weatherford, the translator of the 2023 edition of Pedro Páramo, demonstrated the extent of this conundrum in a recent LitHub essay, where he insinuated that Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel hasn’t secured much interest from readers in the US because of its “lackluster translations.” It’s an unfortunate accusation—and a bit speculative, since the novel sold over a million copies in the US before his version was published and saw multiple reprintings—because it manufactures a problem and then places culpability on the previous translators. In asking why the book hasn’t been a hit in the way other Latin American novels have in the anglosphere, we could, rather than blame the translators, consider the material conditions surrounding the first two translations, or the cultural reading practices at those times. For example, did Grove Press invest heavily in a marketing campaign, or was Susan Sontag’s intro to Margaret Sayers Peden’s 1994 version enough to draw people in? What writing conventions were doctrine during the rise of the creative writing program—at its height when Lysander Kemp’s version came out in 1959—that might have influenced the style of literature most legible to readers and, therefore, how editors tailored Kemp’s final draft? How do we contend with the fact that Rulfo, though a predecessor of Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa, can’t seem to get out from under the shadow of the Boom?
The question itself of whether the book is sufficiently popular raises suspicion. The metric for measuring the success of a translation—whether it’s canonicity, or sales—is unclear. While some books or authors have faded from the cultural register, Pedro Páramo, though Peden’s version recently went out of print, has a forthcoming Netflix adaptation, and continues to be both celebrated by authors and critics and retranslated, not only in North America. It is the most-translated work of fiction from Mexico; there are versions in German, Bulgarian, Czech, Korean, Danish, Slovenian, Basque, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, Gaelic, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Nahuatl, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, and Turkish. What may in fact be lurking behind Weatherford’s lamentation about popularity is a longing for a different cultural framework for reading a work like Pedro Páramo. Weatherford, in his afterword, tries to emphasize a more expansive historical context (the book takes place leading up to and in the wake of the Mexican Revolution), and yet the marketing materials predominantly advertise that its singular quality is how influential Rulfo was for the authors of the Latin American Boom. From this angle, it’s almost as if the narrative itself—an ethereal ghost story and a cautionary tale about land grabs—is inconsequential to the book’s real currency: its paradoxically prominent underappreciation. A review in Slate published in 2008 made the prescient remark that the novel is “at once so admired and so obscure.” Similarly, Sontag, in her preface to the 1994 version, described Rulfo as “a kind of invisible man” and in the next sentence “extremely famous.” At least for the English-language publishing industry, it’s a book whose value is perpetually generated not by its stylistic innovations but by its rescue from gloomy obscurity. Pedro Páramo doesn’t seem, in short, to be as unpopular as many claim, so much as misread.
But perceived popularity sells retranslations. Weatherford claimed to not want to disparage the other two versions by Kemp (with Grove Press) and Peden (with Grove and Serpent’s Tail), but he does just that. Like a parent searching for something to say about their child’s mediocre work, Weatherford offers a single piteous compliment about Peden before going on to explain why he needed to do a retranslation. It comes across as an obligatory gesture at best, and ignorant of institutional sway over Latin American literature at worst.
Just a few years before Rulfo would publish Pedro Páramo in Mexico, the American translator and literary scout Harriet de Onís had written to editors at Knopf recommending that they publish a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, who at the time was mostly unknown to US readers. The editor Herbert Weinstock wrote back saying that sales of Latin American literature were dismal, and he couldn’t recommend they publish it. (This was the same editor who told Alejo Carpentier—an author many believe would have won the Nobel had he lived longer—that Faulkner’s complicated prose style wasn’t doing him any favors.) When Lysander Kemp took on Pedro Páramo, it was a time of minimal (if any) interest in literature from the region. It was one of Kemp’s first major projects; he eventually went on to run University of Texas Press (from 1966 to 1975), which partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation in the early sixties to boost publications of Latin American literature in English, and he worked extensively with Octavio Paz throughout his life. At the time, he primarily published his own poetry and the occasional science fiction story; perhaps this is why his name was also printed on the cover of the novel—a still hotly contested issue for publishers.
The years that followed the book’s publication in English—to little fanfare until García Márquez cited it as an influence—saw an increase in interest in Latin American literature in the US. Along with this increase came an influx of funding programs with covert political and economic interests. Among the recipients of these programs was the above-mentioned University of Texas Press, which published Rulfo’s story collection El llano en llamas in George D. Schade’s translation in 1967, and Grove, which reprinted Kemp’s Pedro Páramo in 1969, this time labeling it as a precursor to magical realism. These funding programs had been active since the end of World War II: the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA front formed in 1950 with the intention of promoting democratic values and defeating communism, had struck up a partnership with the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME), which the Rockefeller Foundation (the philanthropic face of Standard Oil) had also been working with. The CME provided yearlong grants to writers and was responsible for Rulfo’s output, giving him the funding to write Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas. Though it took four years to sell the first 1,000 copies of Pedro Páramo in Mexico, Rulfo’s work began to see more success in its home country, and the CCF and CME hired him to mentor young writers in Mexico. The CCF eventually stopped giving money to the CME for various reasons, but the CIA was still for all intents and purposes footing the bill of Rulfo’s work: the Farfield Foundation, another CIA front run by then-infamous yeast magnate Julius Fleischmann, helped Rulfo purchase a plot of land in the 1960s with the hopes that he would write another book. (He never did.)
Kemp’s translation has been fairly criticized for making liberal cuts to the novel and for disregarding localized or linguistically complex details in the Spanish. But it’s important to consider the extent to which culture in the late fifties was an ideological battleground wherein moral virtue was equated with certain literary forms. Writers whose works had no history, whose stories told no collective past, were preferred by institutions like the CCF and Rockefeller Foundation, in part because so-called apolitical literature engendered an international “understanding” that was conducive to stable markets (and, of course, defeating communism). Mid-century US engagement with Latin American authors was, in effect, an extension of the Good Neighbor Policy. And thanks to the New Critics and their doctrine of American plain style—a venture also supported by the CCF and Rockefeller Foundation, among other public-private networks—publishers were persuaded to align with the Cold War push for “neutrality” in both form and content. It wasn’t until Peden’s era in the ’90s that this literary moralism began to be questioned for its detachment from social and political reality. If Rulfo’s dreamy, largely plotless novel wasn’t overwhelmingly popular with US readers either during the height of New Criticism or the second wave of magical realism fervor—when writers like Laura Esquivel and Isabel Allende (also translated by Peden) became bestsellers—and despite the generous covert support of US institutions—to blame the translators strikes me as not only an individualistic way of thinking, but downright lazy.
In the event of a retranslation like that of Pedro Páramo, there is something a bit disingenuous about the way we discuss it, and maybe even dissonant with broader pressure points for translators. It gives off a paternalistic advocacy that implicitly derides the act of translation itself: the text deserved to be translated again (according to what rubric is this merit evaluated?), the reader deserves to have a less obviously mediated version (this one promises to be more neutral, more true, more faithful). There’s an occasional whiff of self-hatred I’ve found puzzling in some fellow translators—why read the translation when you can read the original? why read this version that so quickly fell into obsolescence?—that’s counterproductive to dogged pleas to critics, publishers, agents, and other figures of power in the industry to please, please engage with the art of translation more holistically.
Weatherford, like many before him, falls right into this trap, sabotaging Peden with a devastating, almost cruel efficiency: “a misstep in the first line of Peden’s translation has undermined that work since it was released nearly thirty years ago,” he writes. Weatherford is concerned about just one word: where Peden wrote “there,” Weatherford corrected it (his word choice) to “here.” While calling this a “misstep” is a nice, vaguely polite euphemism, the suggestion therein is much more insidious. Peden’s entire translation has been “undermined” because of this choice—it has haunted, nay, spoiled, desecrated, Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece all these terrible years. To be fair (maybe), as Weatherford explains, this singular preposition does influence the narrator’s orientation to the fictional ghost town of the novel, Comalá. But if you’re going to make the argument that the way the narrator perceives and interacts with Comalá is a crucial element of Rulfo’s novel, it would be prudent to explain how that manifests through more complicated grammatical structures.
Weatherford does attempt to offer some explanation, and admirably aspires to appropriately handle the sense of disorientation, but the tactics he describes are quite nebulous. As stated in his afterword to the new edition, his main priority was to “reflect more accurately both the letter and the spirit of Rulfo’s fictional universe.” Presumably the restoration of Rulfo’s idiosyncratic punctuation used in his original manuscript—em-dashes, single and double quotation marks, and guillemets were all used as dialogic markers—is the “letter” that is being updated in this version. These updates are based on a definitive edition that the Juan Rulfo Foundation, which was funded after Rulfo’s death in 1986, released in 2010. The previous Spanish versions also removed these markers, so this restoration is not rectifying any translation error, but adapting to the publishing practices that informed the original work.
In terms of the “spirit,” Weatherford seems to stop short before the grammatical minutiae that more meticulously construct the novel’s characteristically spectral atmosphere. The emotional and environmental landscapes of the novel are so intertwined that the affective tenor of memory becomes an almost physical experience. Rulfo’s prose, though quiet, is often overflowing with smells, textures, and sensations; the characters emerge and fade, like the border between life and death. Maybe this unconventional—and at times hard to make sense of—writing that Rulfo has been celebrated for in Latin America is part of why Grove Press has leaned so heavily on the Boom aspect. It’s writing that emulates the disintegration of the hushed and neglected town, including verbless sentences—Weatherford identifies this as a “laconic or even staccato style”—as well as the subjunctive mood—this primarily includes the use of similes and the phrase “as if.” Maybe this laconicism, where a sense of reality is hazy, and which could have turned off readers looking for the satisfaction of a sweeping narrative like One Hundred Years of Solitude in Gregory Rabassa’s baroque translation, was nagging at Weatherford as he sought to create a newly accessible Pedro Páramo. He confesses that he occasionally undermined Rulfo’s style in favor of readability, noting that “a careful analysis of this translation will find some places where I added a verb to improve flow in English.” This abstraction (“flow”), much like “letter” and “spirit,” is a clever obfuscation of process: it preempts criticism by enhancing the mystifying aura of the original work while also fetishizing the position of the newest translator.
Take, for instance, this scene (in two translations) in the middle of the novel, where the narrator, Juan Preciado, wakes up from the stifling heat:
MSP:
The heat woke me just before midnight. And the sweat. The woman’s body was made of earth, layered in crusts of earth; it was crumbling, melting into a pool of mud. I felt myself swimming in the sweat streaming from her body, and I couldn’t get enough air to breathe. I got out of bed. She was sleeping. From her mouth bubbled a sound very like a death rattle.
I went outside for air, but I could not escape the heat that followed wherever I went.
There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August.
Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time . . . until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever.
I mean, forever.
DJW:
The heat woke me right about midnight. And the sweat. The body of that woman, formed out of dirt, wrapped in layers of earth, was breaking apart as if it were melting into a puddle of mud. I felt myself swimming in the sweat that poured off her, and I couldn’t find any air to breathe. So I got up. The woman was still asleep. A gurgling sound was coming from her mouth, quite like a death rattle.
I headed out onto the street looking for air, but the heat chased after me and wouldn’t leave me alone.
And it’s because there wasn’t any air, just a silent, listless night smoldering in the dog days of August.
There wasn’t any air. I had to gulp down the same air that was trying to leave my mouth, grabbing it with both hands before it could escape. I could feel it flowing out and in, each time a bit thinner, until it became so fine that it seeped through my fingers and disappeared forever.
And I do mean forever.
Peden’s version manages to be thirty words shorter than Weatherford’s. You can feel the tautness of the narrator’s struggle to take in air. One of the key aspects of Juan Preciado’s sensation of suffocating in the heat is the use of gerunds. In a town where the past and present comingle, verb tense is crucial: Rulfo often uses the imperfect, enacting an ongoingness set in the past. This is the essence of Comalá, where finite actions emerge sharp and disjointed from the fog of memory. Peden wields the gerund more carefully than Weatherford, making the first moment of this scene fully immersive, almost slippery. A few lines later, her version embodies Juan’s stertorous movements: “Not a breath. . . . I felt it, in and out, less each time.” Meanwhile Weatherford can’t seem to quit the exacting wordiness of an academic: “There wasn’t any air. . . . I could feel it flowing out and in, each time a bit thinner.” He pads each clause with phrases that add overgrowth to Rulfo’s swift descriptions (noted in italics): “the same air that was trying to leave,” “each time a bit thinner,” “so fine that it seeped through my fingers and disappeared forever.” Notice the actions become disembodied, (over)thought rather than felt, while Peden’s is unmediated by thought, immediately experienced in the body.
Peden has been criticized—almost relentlessly—for making Rulfo too florid in English, but careful comparison of passages such as the one above suggests Weatherford may be the one who is translating with flourish. This is particularly interesting to consider alongside Weatherford’s own admission that there was at least one instance where Peden’s choice was so good he struggled to come up with an alternative—suggesting that the choice could have been more motivated by the sake of difference than an ear for language.
This can all feel a bit pedantic. My point here is not to needle Weatherford’s version—although maybe it is, at least a little—but to ask what we want to get out of reading a new translation, especially when it is either overzealously specific or else not dramatically different, and the last one is not much older. I wonder about coyly condemning Peden’s version like Weatherford does. I wonder, when a translation defines itself as superior on vague grounds, how that limits the ways we can read the novel.
I get the sense that Peden possessed this peculiar mania characteristic to translators moved by a perverse, possibly spiritual, need to keep translating, against all odds—or, as she put it, masochism. What I mean to say is if you read her version closely, you can see how intuitively she manipulates the English language—she understands dialogue in a way that is harmonious with Rulfo’s colloquial, strange mannerisms. Her fluency with syntax reveals her years of working in the craft.
It’s hard not to feel endeared to Peden when you see the wit and adoration with which she wrote about translation. She once joked, in a talk published in 2002, that she was a lot of fun at cocktail parties: “At my own university people now turn and run the opposite way when they see me coming, because I always have something I need to learn from somebody. How do you say so and so? what is that? and so on.” She elaborated on her extroversion with a sort of deranged charisma: “If I come to a passage in Neruda that has to do with birds, I have to know first of all what that bird looks like. I call over to the biology department, and I say, ‘Let me speak to your bird man.’” She described her introversion, too: how she loved to spend long hours working alone surrounded only by dictionaries. She also cultivated close friendships with authors she worked with over many years, such as Carlos Fuentes—one of his favorite stories to tell was about a time he went to Columbia, Missouri, where Peden lived and taught, and they got caught in a snowstorm on the drive from the train station (Fuentes was an extremely nervous traveler).
There is something that stinks about erasing her life’s work with a narrow dismissal of her methods for a notoriously challenging novel of now-mythic stature, especially just a few years after her death (she passed away in 2020). Ultimately, Weatherford’s approach sounds less like a celebration of the book and all its permutations, and more like a dubious desire to elevate the novel’s cultural status: “to secure a loftier position among English-language readers,” he writes (my emphasis). I’m reminded, again, of the yoking of the cultural status of books to their existence as commodities.
Which brings us back to the question of how to read Pedro Páramo in the twenty-first century. What is this third version within sixty-five years offering us? The reinstatement of original punctuation and the de-italicization of Spanish loan words notwithstanding, I’m not sure any critical discussion is being advanced, or reading perspective being recalibrated, to reflect on this generation’s cultural and stylistic conventions. Unless, of course, we read the whole thing—the paratexts, the marketing copy, the reviews—as a reflection of the tenuous ground translation continues to be read on. This is not to say we can’t or shouldn’t have multiple versions and retranslations—though I wonder how things might have played out had Grove offered Peden, before her death, to take part in a reissue?—but to suggest that a new version need not involve this compulsory, almost predatory, grab at relevancy. I’d even argue that it detracts from appreciation of the book itself. In any case, in this version of things, it's hard not to see translation as becoming first and foremost a means to a marketable end, an endeavor which doesn’t advance the craft but reifies its disreputable status: if a translation can so quickly fall out of favor, the craft is disposable. I’d like to think we’ve made some advances in the field since the editors at Knopf first turned away Borges because translations weren’t selling; as it stands, though, this way of promoting translation is a sort of perpetual self-annihilation, presenting readers with the very terms that will dictate its eventual fall from grace.