Reviewed by Marlon Abarno
The summer I read Helen Lane’s translation of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor), Mario Vargas Llosa’s fifth novel in his ample body of work, I read few other books. As I read and tried to understand the deceivingly simple romance, the novel fought back constantly and as such, it took me an embarrassingly long time to finish it. At this time I was uninitiated in the study of translation, but I was aware that the piece of literature I was reading was translated from the Spanish, and naïvely, I attributed my difficulties with comprehension to the fact that it was translated. Whether this was actually the case or not, I was left deeply curious about how the novel read and sounded in its source language. Reading and working with the source text in Spanish, I quickly realized why Helen Lane’s excellent translation of Aunt Julia has remained canonical for over four decades.
Perhaps a more accurate explanation for my difficulty in my first encounter with Aunt Julia is the ambitious and complex structure of the text. Using Lima as its backdrop, the novel simultaneously presents two mostly disjointed pieces of writing. One, a largely autobiographical narrative of a certain Marito’s job as a radio news writer and his clandestine relationship with and later marriage to his aunt (by law, not blood), and the other, a collection of over-the-top radio soap operas written by the Bolivian escribidor Pedro Camacho, which Marito describes aptly as huachafo: pretentious, affected, and lacking in taste. Mimicking on a larger scale the weaving together of distinct but synchronous conversations characteristic of some of Vargas Llosa’s other works, the odd-numbered chapters of the novel progress the narrative of Marito’s romance and his authorial aspirations, while each of the even-numbered chapters constitutes an episode of one of Pedro Camacho’s many serialized radioteatros.
In addition to its complex structure, the novel presents a challenge for the reader (particularly in the sections that pertain to Camacho’s eccentric soaps) with its “patchwork” sentences: long, jumbled collections of clauses, heavily punctuated and rife with prepositions and conjunctions. The following lengthy sentence from a drama concerning a traveling “pharmaceutical detail man” plagued by guilt for the manslaughter of a child in a traffic accident and his subsequent treatment by a renowned psychiatrist illustrates this quality of the writing well:
A superior woman, without complexes, who had reached what science agrees is the ideal age—her fifties—Dr. Acémila—broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, rectitude and goodness itself—was the living negation of her surname (literally, a pack mule; figuratively, a stupid ass) (which she was proud of and paraded like a glorious victory banner before the eyes of mortals on her visiting cards or the plaques outside her office), a person in whom intelligence was a physical attribute, something that her patients (she preferred to call them her “friends”) could see, hear, smell. (178-179)
Ample quantities of commas, nested clauses, generous use of em dashes and parentheses all work to create an ambience of pretentiousness characteristic of the manner in which Camacho’s serials are recounted. Although this sentence is an extreme example (extreme enough to resist attempts to elide the erratic grammar in translation), Lane’s effort to maintain these features of the text throughout all of the even chapters is clear. Rarely are run-on sentences decomposed into smaller, more palatable ones. Commas are allowed free reign and Lane does not use lightly the tools of simplification and concision afforded by the English language. Although these choices may increase the reader’s burden, they contribute to the success of Lane’s translation.
This success manifests not only as the appropriately over-the-top tone of the radioteatros, but as a sort of marriage of form and content. As the novel draws closer to its end, Camacho’s soaps become more and more convoluted and intertwined, and his narratives begin to exhibit inconsistencies within their own imaginary universe. Characters’ names are swapped and events that have occurred in prior episodes are repeated in locations where they are not supposed to. Eventually, the mistakes in Camacho’s scripts are too egregious and too many for his listeners to bear, and with listening numbers through the floor, the station fires him. By the end of the novel, the reader recognizes that the grammatically wonky, self-referential style of the text in fact comprises a microcosm of the singular confused mess of a soap opera that the distinct chapters eventually agglomerate into. In this sense, the formal qualities of the radioteatros foreshadow Camacho’s demise.
As Camacho falls hard from his success, the radio news writer Marito is quickly transformed into a successful novelist. What connection might these two events have to one another? Although Camacho’s shows are mostly disconnected from Marito’s story, save for the fact that their author is a recurring character in Marito’s life, the form of the novel superimposes the two literary universes onto one another, making it difficult to consider each in isolation. What’s more, Camacho’s demise and Marito’s subsequent rise also coincide with the break in the alternating pattern of soap operas and the romance, which is perpetrated by the very last chapter of the novel, the twentieth. Instead of continuing Camacho’s mixed-up soap opera, chapter twenty acts as a sort of epilogue to Marito’s marriage to his aunt and reads just like any other odd-numbered chapter.
In view of Camacho’s pretentiousness and the trashy unrealism of his soap operas, it is easy to see his failure as justified, and even righteous. But this is complicated by the fact that the roles of Camacho and Marito (who we have seen is Camacho’s usurper) are reversed throughout almost the entirety of the novel. Camacho, although his stories certainly do not appear as such, claims that his “writings are firmly rooted in reality” (48), and even dresses up as his characters to “lubricate his imagination,” since, as he remarks, “What better way is there of creating realistic art than materially identifying oneself with reality?” (135). Whether this is true or not, Camacho’s writing is undeniably original and has made him very successful. René Prieto correctly points out that Marito’s character is contrary to Camacho’s on both of these fronts. Marito is unoriginal, not only a plagiarist as a consequence of his job (he paraphrases, redacts and reorganizes news from other stations to be broadcast on his own), but as a literary writer he attempts to adapt others’ anecdotes, failing time and time again to match Camacho’s success (Prieto 16-17). Under this lens, we see that each odd chapter has been nothing more than Marito’s prose retelling of one of Camacho’s scripts. Marito is not just usurping Camacho, but plagiarizing him.
By the end of the novel, the reader is left in a precarious position. That Marito should enjoy such success (remember, Marito is an autobiographical stand-in for a young Mario) as a plagiarist and due to his plagiarism is morally objectionable, but at the same time, why should an obnoxious pseudo-intellectual writer of trashy soap operas such as Camacho deserve success either? This dilemma complicates the traditional notion of authorship and questions the positive value assigned to originality and the negative typically associated with derivative work. Of course, translation is often discussed in this context as a derivative creative act, and it, too, is implicitly given legitimacy by the novel. Lane takes advantage of this and undermines the original even further in her translation by highlighting the irony of Camacho’s purportedly “realistic” scripts and by playing up Camacho’s pretentiousness: referring back to the quotations from the novel used in the last paragraph, “firmly” is an addition of Lane’s, and instead of the more pedestrian “oil” or “grease,” Lane opts for “lubricate.”
In her book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, Karen Emmerich writes that although we may accept and understand that “a translation is in part a product of a particular individual’s (or group of individuals’) interpretation of a work,” nonetheless, in discourse on translation, “we often revert to a rhetoric that suggests that the changes supposedly wrought by translation are inflicted on an otherwise stable source” (Emmerich 1-2). With its layers of rewriting, explicitly acknowledged as a core feature of the text, Aunt Julia actively denounces its own status as a stable original.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Translated by Helen R. Lane. Picador, 2007.
Marlon Abarno studies Mathematics and Spanish at Oberlin College. He translates from Spanish and is interested in the language of mathematics and its relationship to natural language.
Works Cited
Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Prieto, René. “The Two Narrative Voices in Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.’” Latin American Literary Review, vol. 11, no. 22, 1983, pp. 15–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119331.