Target in the Night (2 page)

How do you translate
Blanco nocturno
—a novel so rooted in Argentine tradition, a novel where the Argentine landscape and ways of speaking are so important—into English? How does one go from
Blanco nocturno
to
Target in the Night
? One of the most difficult things to translate about
Blanco nocturno
, in fact, is the title itself. In Spanish,
Blanco nocturno
has several meanings, and there is no obvious way to reproduce those multiple meanings in English—
Target in the Night
comes at the end of a complex process that always seems to create as many or more questions as answers.

“
Blanco nocturno
,” translated literally, would be “Nocturnal White,” which does not make much sense in English. White Nocturne was a possibility, and it was never far from Target in the Night. But “
blanco
” in Spanish is not just “white.” The most important meaning of “
blanco
” in the context of the novel is probably “target.” “
Tiro al blanco
” is target shooting; “
dar en el blanco
” is to hit the target. While
blanco
does mean white, it also means blank, as in a blank space. Tony Durán, the mulatto Puerto Rican from New Jersey, the strange foreigner who travels to a small town in the Province of Buenos Aires, is a dark man at the center of a dark mystery. He is also a target from the moment he sets foot in the Argentine town. Or perhaps Durán has gone to the town with a secret target in mind. These possibilities emerge from the title
and from a number of scenes in the novel that work by juxtaposing opposites: black and white, day and night, past and future, presence and absence, tradition and innovation.

I considered a number of titles as I worked on the translation, before arriving at
Target in the Night
. The centrality of the target, as well as the feel of the story, outdid the lyricism of White Nocturne. Nocturnal Target, or Night Target, were not far off. White Night would have overly simplified things, although it would have kept the
blanco
-
nocturno
binomial. Night Blanks, or Blank Night sounded mysterious, but too ambiguous. Night Vision, although intriguing, would have changed the meaning too much. Likewise, I considered A Shot in the Dark, but found it to be off the mark. Conrad Aiken has a lovely poem entitled “White Nocturne,” and while there are some very beautiful passages in Piglia's novel, and while there is definitely something poetic about
Blanco nocturno,
the novel has a jazzy, driving feel to it, a noirish hook much closer to
Target in the Night
.

In many ways,
Blanco nocturno
is the brilliantly untranslatable title of this brilliant novel. There may be better options, but now that the translation is complete and the novel has begun this version of its afterlife,
Target in the Night
is starting to feel very much like the right title in English. With any luck, some readers will be reminded of Fitzgerald's masterful
Tender Is the Night
. Readers, of course, are the ones who will decide what they think of
Target in the Night
, including the title.

Target in the Night
—née
Blanco nocturno
—is the third book of Piglia's that I have translated into English, and there is, I hope, more
to come. From the moment I first read Piglia in Spanish, I felt an almost unexplainable need to say the same (to speak the same voice) that I was reading—but to say it (to speak it) so it could be heard (so it could be read) in English. It is a great honor to be one of Piglia's translators. It is also a great challenge, full of responsibility as well as potential. How does a literary tradition like Argentina's, one influenced by so many travelers and outsiders, a tradition with so many translations and rewritings as part of its own national formation—how does such a tradition travel abroad, beyond its own borders? How do you translate a writer like Ricardo Piglia, who is so immersed in the language and the tradition in which he writes? How to translate
Blanco nocturno
from the Argentine countryside into English in the U.S. and arrive at
Target in the Night
? A lot of hard work and conjecture; in the end, the translation becomes a kind of answer.

The first book I translated by Ricardo Piglia was
Nombre falso
, published in English (by Latin American Literary Review Press) as
Assumed Name
. From the beginning, I liked the play with names, attribution, authorship, and property found in that book, and in translation. When I translated Ricardo Piglia's
La ciudad ausente
(published, by Duke University Press, as
The Absent City
) I felt, at times, as if my work as a translator was a direct and natural projection of the machine at the center of the novel, with its ceaseless output of stories that are reworkings and recombinations of other stories, in turn reproduced and circulated throughout a city somehow composed of the stories themselves. A mechanism of narrating as if projected from the original itself, though clearly of another sort.

With
Blanco nocturno
, I felt transported to the small town in the Argentine pampas, even as I was trying, paradoxically, almost impossibly, to transport the novel to another place, in another tongue:
Target in the Night
. I was submerged in the mystery and the investigation and the various characters and relationships, and then released in the second half of the novel by the lyricism of the narrative and the expanding imagination of Luca (one of the Belladona brothers) working in his factory with the stuff that dreams are made of. As with the other projects, I communicated with Piglia as I worked on the translation, and as always he was extremely generous in his responses. At one point, I had a question about Inspector Croce's dog, which roams around town and sometimes goes out to Luca's factory, as if chasing an invisible trail. Piglia answered my query by e-mail
—
“
[Cuzco] es un perro vagundo de tamaño chico, mutt estaría bien
” [(Cuzco) is a small street dog, mutt would be fine]—and added: “
Sigo imaginariamente tu traducción
” [I am following your translation imaginarily]. As
Blanco nocturno
was becoming
Target in the Night
, changing languages and being reimagined in the North, so to speak, I imagined Piglia following my translation far away in the South, in the dark distance, fading yet always present, leading even as I wrote my version, letting go so others might find the story and take the intrigue where it needed to go.

Because the scene of translation almost always remains invisible, the processes that take place in that scene often remain unknown. Somewhere between creative writing and scholarly research, between invention and investigation, the scene of translation emerges as a third space, mysterious and unexplored, in between
languages and texts, suspected—and suspect. Something happens in the scene of translation; there is a potential found there and few places else that deserves to be unveiled. A movement between reading and writing as much as it is a movement between languages and cultures, translation offers insights into all manner of questions about authorship and originality, voice and identity, communication and understanding, cultural borders and linguistic movement. Translating a text is an odd experience: you produce an entire text that is yours,
you
write it, you put it down on paper, you undertake your stylistic and syntactic decisions—but when you are done, you sign
someone else's name
to it instead of your own. Or equally startling, you sign your name
in addition to
someone else's; thus the text gains a double, or a phantom authorship. By signing your words over to someone else, by putting another's name to your language, you willingly sacrifice yourself. Handing over your identity card, if you will, it is as if you were making yourself invisible. Many say that such self-erasure is the necessary duty of the translator, whose task it is—allegedly—to serve the original at all costs.

But translation is also always at least partially selfish, because translation is a mode of reading that is by definition one of appropriation. Translation may be an attempt at careful reproduction, translation may involve a hermeneutic motion the end goal of which may be to restitute signification so that the target might successfully recreate the meaning of the source in an analogous text, but we know that translation always distorts and transforms, as it seeks to say the same in another language. Literary translation requires humility, and also daring, and passion. Somewhere
between performance and copying, between building bridges and destroying originals; somewhere between theft and plagiarism, on the one hand, and altruism and empathy, on the other.

Is it possible to speak the same voice in another tongue? A nearly impossible task, in which one ends up remaining nearly invisible. For some, the less one sees of the translator in the text, the better. And yet the translation we read is written by the translator—rewritten by the translator, I should say. When we read a translation, we know that we are reading a text that is actually two texts: the version we have in our hands, and the version that came before, both there somehow, encoded in the same book. Seeking to speak the same voice in another tongue.

In the end, the original we so covet (
Blanco nocturno
, in this case) is perceived—heard, felt, intuited—in the translation itself, reflected and distorted, refracted, literally reworded, in an attempt to say the same (to speak the same voice) in the target language (
Target in the Night
, now). What is found in the scene of translation? Fleeting glances of the other in the same, sliding mirrors and shifting floors, moving targets in darkened spaces. Almost enough to make us think of alchemy, forbidden formulas, melodies forgotten yet not entirely lost, a deceptive shape hovering in the fog—like the distant horizon fading in the Argentine countryside at dawn.

On the relationship between translation and the novel, Piglia has said: “
Habría que reflexionar sobre qué quiere decir leer mal; qué tipo de efecto puede producir una lectura que se desvía de lo que en principio pueden ser los sentidos dados del texto…La traducción es el espacio de los grandes intercambios y de las circulaciones secretas.
” [We should think about what it means to mis-read. What kind of effect is produced
by a reading that deviates from what may have been, at first, the assumed meanings of the text…Translation is the space of great exchanges and secret circulations.]

A space of great exchanges and secret circulations. An organic machine that reads in one language and writes in another. What's in a name? What meanings and implications are hidden in the town where Croce and Renzi pursue their investigations? A paranoid fiction, full of potential. What is
Target in the Night
? I leave it to the reader.

Sergio Waisman

Kensington, MD, July 2015

PART I

1

Tony Durán was an adventurer and a professional gambler who saw his opportunity to win the big casino when he met the Belladona sisters. It was a ménage à trois that scandalized the town and stayed on everyone's mind for months. He'd show up with one of the two sisters at the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel, but no one could ever tell with which because the twins were so alike that even their handwriting was indistinguishable. Tony was almost never seen with both at the same time; that was something he kept private. What really shocked everyone was the thought of the twins sleeping together. Not so much that they would share the same man, but that they would share each other.

Soon the rumors turned into stories and elaborate tales, and before long no one could talk about anything else. People went on about it throughout the day—in their homes, or at the Social Club, or at Madariaga's Store and Tavern. Everyone had a detail to add, commenting as easily as if they were talking about the weather.

In that town, like in all the towns in the Province of Buenos Aires, more news was batted around in a single day than in any large city in a week. The difference between regional and national news was so vast that the residents could retain the illusion that
they lived an interesting life. Durán had come to enrich that mythology, and his figure reached legendary heights long before the time of his death.

You could take Tony's comings and goings through the town and draw a map from them. An outsider's ramblings along the elevated sidewalks, his walks to the outskirts of the abandoned factory and the deserted fields. He deciphered the order and hierarchies of the place in short order. The dwellings and houses stand clearly divided according to the social level of the inhabitants. The territory seems to have been drawn by a snobbish cartographer. The wealthy live at the top of the hill, and in a circle of about eight blocks is the so-called historical center of town,
¹
which includes the square, the town hall, the church, and the main street with the stores and the two-story houses. Finally, sloping down on the other side of the railroad tracks, are the poorer neighborhoods where over half of the darker-skinned population lives and dies.