Running just 120-odd pages in its most recent English translation by Douglas J. Weatherford, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is as dense as it is short. The novel revolves around its titular character, don Pedro Páramo, as he maneuvers his way to the heights of regional, ranchero power in Comala, a remote town in the arid parts of West-Central Mexico. Its plot, though, defies the bounds of perspective and narrative coherency. Jumbled up and interspersed with flashes of the future and past, Pedro’s life connects to the lives of his predatory family, his brass-knuckle employees, his precarious hometown, and his tumultuous nation as he steadily exploits each of them in turn for personal gain. The life of Pedro Páramo thus becomes the backdrop against which successive narratives play out: the life of don Pedro’s crazed lover, Susana San Juan; the death and afterlife of one of his unrecognized sons, Juan Preciado; and the experiences of various other characters. The sheer amount of information presented to the reader, along with its scattered, nonlinear arrangement, often piles up into a rather confusing mess.
This mess, in its anglicized form, is what greets readers of Grove Press’ new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. In the hands of Weatherford, the qualities that define this perennial classic of Mexican literature – its jarring landscape of characters and events, its confusing narrative twists, its pungent ambiguity – are once again made legible for English-speaking readers. And what a challenge these readers have before them! As Weatherford, a scholar with years of experience thinking and writing about Juan Rulfo’s oeuvre, the Mexican author’s “writing is defined by a faith in the ability of diligent readers to discover interpretive possibilities hidden within the disintegration of the novel” (Literary Hub). In the mix of voices and moments, it can often be hard to piece together a coherent flow of narrative time, or even, in many cases, the perspective from which Rulfo writes. Take the following statement from midway into the novel, an exclamation that comes out of nowhere, a complete non sequitur:
I’m lying in the same bed where my mother died years ago, on the same mattress…
…
– Was that you saying all that, Dorotea?
– Who, me? I fell asleep for a while…It must be the one who talks to herself. The woman in the large sepulcher. Doña Susanita. She’s buried here beside us. (74-7).
A first reading might assign that initial quote to the most frequent narrator, Juan Preciado; however, not until the following page is it revealed, through conversation, that the first section is not only spoken aloud (yet unmarkedly so) but also spoken by an as-of-yet-to-be-introduced character. We also come to realize that these speakers, who are having a rather banal conversation about their surroundings, are dead. The speaking dead. Rulfo’s structure subverts immediate, reactive assumptions about the text and thereby forces the task of interpretation upon its reader.
Weatherford’s particular contribution here, and throughout the novel, lies in its punctuation. In contrast to prior English versions, this translation conserves the styling of Rulfo’s Spanish, including practices (in this case, the em dash marking dialogue, in other cases, the use of guillemets) unfamiliar to English-language publishing. To piece together the scenes that scatter before them – full of reported dialogue, absent grammatical subjects, and untagged speech – readers of Weatherford’s translation must be willing to reread, reevaluate, and negotiate with the text itself. And, in some cases, the text gives way. The punctuation, and thereby the form, of the text molds the experience of reading it. It also orients the reader, pointing them along – though not always forwards – through a narrative world built on hearsay, reporting, and vagueness.
These final notions come to define Pedro Páramo as a literary endeavor, and, perhaps, the time, place, and person that produced it. Juan Rulfo came of age in a rather unstable period of Mexican history, at a time when his patria went through waves of conflict to define its own identity and design its future. Although first appearing in its complete form in 1955, the plot of Pedro Páramo is set roughly in the period following the loosely outlined Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and continues through to “that thing they called the Cristero War,” a religious conflict that would be waged in wide swaths of the country in the latter half of the 1920s (80). That thing they called. Even historical events, moments which seem so fixed and imminently real, are brought into question. Weatherford’s choice to include these words infuses them with a notion of second handedness, as though they had been passed through a chain of speakers.
And they appear repeatedly throughout the English text: “those things everyone calls ‘culebras de agua’” (14), “those birds they call ‘ugly beaks’” (95). The kind of “reporting” exercised here becomes an attempt to replicate the nebulous and imprecise nature of Rulfo’s environment. These moments stand out as evidence of a lost, oral culture, one in which the world and its happenings are most reflective of the people that populate them.
They also seem to suggest that cultural shifts have occurred around the novel (and around the Spanish language, in general). Weatherford’s translation is peppered with Spanish words, kept in their original form. These entries – “petates” (4), “buenas noches” (6), “culebras de agua” (14), “milpa” (91), among others – point to a much broader familiarity and acceptance of the language and its culture among speakers of English; especially, in the U.S. market where Grove Press primarily operates. Or, they are encouragement for such changes to occur, as Weatherford remains keen that his work is meant to once more stimulate interest in this hyper-canonical Mexican novel (Literary Hub). To allow English speakers to take on the challenge of Pedro Páramo and to give them the chance to do so as authentically as possible are the motivations that drive Weatherford’s translation. With this edition, those who seek to take it on have much to gain from his efforts.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Translated by Douglas J. Weatherford, Grove Press, 2023.
Harrison Betz is a master’s student of Spanish Literature and Linguistics at Florida State University. Working in both Spanish and Italian, his research interests include film and visual culture, adaptation studies, and global literatures.
I am so glad this new translation of Pedro Páramo is out, especially under the prestigious Grove Press label. The timelessness that characterizes the novel’s place in Mexican literary history and the structure of the book itself, is the point. Disorientation in time and space is central to the reading, as the reviewer correctly points out, because it comes from a country where the permeable membrane between past and present, life and death, is an inherent part of reality. Let’s hope that this new edition of one of the most important novels ever written on the American continent makes readers in general, and acquisitions editors in particular, wiser about this touchstone of contemporary fiction and more able to see how other, newer literary works are the grandchildren of the great Juan Rulfo.