Explosion in a Cathedral, page 2
Perhaps the somewhat irrational wish that Spanish were his mother tongue led Carpentier to build his astonishing version of that language, which takes on, even for Spanish speakers, a music that is old and new at the same time, one that allows past, present, and future to coexist. Literature, at the end of the day, is a complex form of consciousness, which allows us to imagine what we would be like if we were bilingual, or multilingual. And of course that includes imagining what we would be like had we learned the languages that were wiped out in our own lands and in the territories of neighboring countries, the languages that were savaged and erased to create the illusion of monolingualism. Perhaps if we respond to the challenges raised by this novel, if we undertake the countless discussions it permits and induces, it will help us become more humble, less dumb, less deaf.
alejandro zambra
Translated by Megan McDowell
A Note on the Translation
It’s hard enough to get a book translated into English the first time. Why bother translating it again? One reason might be a lack of recognition; and it’s true that Alejo Carpentier, despite the range and breadth of his body of work, is only barely, or maybe, canonical in English, and most people who do know him have read a single book, 1949’s The Kingdom of This World. But another, more germane reason might be that the book has in some sense not been translated at all. Explosion in a Cathedral, in the version published in 1962, was translated not from Carpentier’s El Siglo de las luces, but from René Durand’s French translation, Le Siècle des Lumières. Such relay translations were common at the time, and more than one author—Witold Gombrowicz comes to mind—has overseen the translation of works from a less-known mother tongue into an international language from which subsequent translations are meant to proceed. I’m probably less of a purist about this than most, but the fact remains that this is now looked down upon and that, as anyone who’s played telephone knows, the further the remove from the original source, the more distortions are likely to creep in.
Let’s start with the title: El Siglo de las luces means “the century of light,” not “explosion in a cathedral.” The Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature says a literal translation would have sounded “totally pedestrian and flat,” and praises translator John Sturrock’s title, taken from a painting that plays an important role in the novel, as capturing “the spirit of the work.” Whether this is true is irrelevant: the title is here to stay, like Kafka’s Amerika or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The change does elide something, though: “el Siglo de las Luces” is a common term in Spanish for the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. That Carpentier chose this for his title is in part ironic, pointing to the ease with which reason may be bent to the ends of barbarism; at the same time, it is an expression of sympathy for the prophecies of the late-eighteenth-century Freemasons, who played a significant role in the diffusion of the Enlightenment past Europe’s shores and who foresaw a century of light (siglo de luces), of superstition cast out by science and reason, but failed to imagine that it would be accompanied by the Reign of Terror, the horrors of colonialism, and the cycles of upheaval and suppression that extended from the Napoleonic Wars through the revolutions of 1848 and onward.
Then there’s the first sentence: “Esta noche he visto alzarse la Máquina nuevamente.” John Sturrock writes, “I saw them erect the guillotine again tonight.” Problem one: to the great frustration of second-language learners, “esta noche” can mean both “tonight” and “last night.” A person who’s slept badly will most likely say, “Esta noche he dormido fatal.” Carpentier’s intention here is uncertain, but scholars and native speakers I’ve consulted concur with my sense that “last night” feels more correct. The them seen erecting the guillotine is an intervention, a typical resort for the translator dealing with Spanish’s often frustrating impersonal reflexives; in Carpentier’s words, the device seems to rise ominously, on its own. Sturrock lets the cat out of the bag when he tells us it’s a guillotine. Carpentier prefers to write “la Máquina,” the Machine—capitalized, to indicate its stature, but with its nature unspecified: a machine among many, cousin of the steam engine, the flying shuttle, and the power loom, a single instance in a far-reaching movement toward the rationalization and mechanization of human endeavors. (It should be mentioned in passing that Guillotin, the machine’s inventor, was a physician and Freemason, founder of a Lodge called La Verité, and lived through the French Revolution and the bloody years that followed it.)
Sturrock’s translation generally makes things easier for readers; Carpentier’s long paragraphs are broken up, his labyrinthine sentences chopped down, his ornate, often antiquated vocabulary brought up to date. Comparatively, I have been more conservative: visually, my text resembles the original, and Carpentier’s flourishes have left me free to indulge that vice which Fowler censures as “the love of the long word.” Still, literalism has its limits. In his exuberance, Carpentier gets the occasional thing wrong: he speaks early on of “black retinas” when he must mean pupils; he has Cazotte’s camel from Le diable amoreaux vomit a greyhound rather than a spaniel, as in the original. Such trivialities I have silently corrected. The question of style is thornier; the author’s peculiarities demand respect, but different languages have different degrees of tolerance for prolixity and ambiguity, and there are bits of bombast I have overruled when I did not think English would well bear them. At one point, Carpentier writes, “horrified at the impossibility of escaping the trial of confronting a storm”; most English speakers will struggle to see how this is superior to the simpler “horrified of the storm.” A tic of writers in Spanish generally is their preference not to say someone did something when they might instead say he began to do it, managed to do it, was able to do it; another is to say something occurred suddenly when it cannot have occurred otherwise (we need not be told that a lightning strike or the explosion of a shell is sudden). In these minor matters, I’ve relied on my judgment.
While not so vain as to suppose I’ve done everything right, I am confident this new translation of Explosion in a Cathedral is substantially more correct than its predecessor. Just browsing for errors in the Sturrock translation, I’ve found enough to presume there are many more, not all of them inconsequential. A few examples: the Spanish acabar por, to wind up doing something, is routinely translated as to finish; the War of Palmares, which occurred in the Brazilian Maroon settlement of Quilombo dos Palmares, is translated as the “War of the Palm Trees”; the spiders Sturrock has descend from the ceiling of the magic castle of Gottorp are almost certainly chandeliers; though the sound of drums was common in nineteenth-century skirmishes, in many cases, Carpentier must mean “artillery” when he uses the word batería; and so on and so forth.
Explosion in a Cathedral reappears at a time when the effects of slavery and colonialism and the legacies of nineteenth-century liberalism are being reexamined and reevaluated. Carpentier’s vision of these matters is trenchant, but immune to simplification and dogmatism. In his account of the northward migrations of the Carib people, he underscores the brutality of life in the pre-Columbian Americas, not to excuse the ravages of the conquistadors, but to hint at an inclination to cruelty and plunder universal in the human heart. His portrayal of the corruption of the revolutionary idealists, who abhorred slavery and embraced self-determination only so long as it was politically expedient, is a sour reminder of how easily self-interest eclipses virtue. The chronicle of Maroon settlements and revolts retold in these pages by the Swiss Sieger, who speaks of “a Great Emancipation that began in the sixteenth century,” will be of interest to anyone hungry for counter-narratives that official history tends to overlook.
All this would run the danger of didacticism were it not for Explosion in a Cathedral’s language, its lush sensuality, its attempt to render world-altering events in the tones of private experience, to explain the fervor that ignites revolutions and conquests as fruit of an inalterable human compulsion toward new shores and new feelings. As in Goya’s Disasters of War, which is quoted throughout, reason is the agent of emotion and instinct, and human undertakings are destitute of vision. This is equally true for the broad movements of revolution and reaction that shaped the nineteenth century and for the philosophical and sentimental education of the book’s protagonists. On its own, Carpentier’s sweeping tableau of French colonialism in the Americas would be an accomplishment; but his prose, alternately precise and baroque while unstintingly poetic, makes this a masterpiece. I hope that the present translation will convey to contemporary readers something of its beauty and grandeur.
adrian nathan west
Last night, I saw the Machine rise up again. It stood on the prow like a door opened against the vastness of a sky that was already carrying the scent of land across a sea so placid, so assured in its rhythms, that the ship, slightly elevated, seemed to drift off to sleep as it pressed on, poised between a yesterday and a tomorrow that traveled with us. Time froze between the North Star, Ursa Major, and the Southern Cross. I don’t know, it’s not meant for me to know, if these were indeed the constellations, so copious that their vertices, points of light on orbital paths, grew confused and glissaded over one other, shuffling their allegories around a full moon frosted by the pallor of the Way of Saint James . . . The Door-without-hinges rose up on the prow, a meager frame with a set square, an inverted gable, a black triangle, and fixtures of cold beveled steel. The structure, naked and abrupt, loomed like an apparition over the dreams of men—a warning to each and all. We had left it on deck, far off in the April mistrals, and now it soared up once more on that same prow, at the fore, like a way-finder, like (in its implacable geometry, in the requisite exactness of its parallels) a giant apparatus for navigating the sea. No longer was it encircled by pennants, drums, or rabble; it knew neither excitement, nor furor, nor grief, nor the drunkenness of those who, back then, back there, had closed in on it like the chorus of an ancient tragedy as tumbrils creaked toward the thundering of drums. Here the Door was alone, face turned to the night, vertical over the tutelary figurehead, diagonal blade shimmering in the wooden casing that opened onto a panorama of stars. The waves rose in attendance, sundered and stroked the ship’s flanks, and closed again behind us with a sound so measured and continuous that its permanence soon resembled the silence a man believes to be pure silence when he hears no voices like his own. Living silence throbbing, uniform, not yet resonant with severation and rigidity . . . When the blade dropped, diagonal, with a transitory whistle, and the lintel was painted as scrupulously as a proper threshold should be, the Vested One, whose hand had set the mechanism in motion, murmured through clenched teeth, “We need to protect it from the salt air,” and he sealed the Door with a broad tarpaulin lowered from above. The breeze smelled of earth—humus, manure, resin, ears of grain; of the soil of that island placed centuries before under the protection of a Lady of Guadalupe. Her figure, held aloft by an archangel in Cáceres in Extremadura, and in Tepeyac in the Americas, floated above the arc of the moon.
I had left behind an adolescence whose family landscapes, after three years, had grown as remote to me as the wounded, prostrate self I had been before Someone came to us on an evening ringed by a racket of door knockers—as remote as the witness was remote from me now; the guide, the illuminator of days past, predecessor to the sullen Sovereign who, reclining on the gunwale, was meditating—beside the black rectangle in its inquisitory envelope, quivering like a balance to the rocking of every wave. Now and then, the water flashed with the gleam of scales or an errant wreath of gulfweed.
Chapter One
I.
Behind him, in mournful diapason, the Executor turned once more to his reckoning of the exequys, cross-bearer, oblations, vestments and tapers, cloths and flowers, requiem, registration of the death—and who had come in pomp, and who had wept, and who had said that we were nothing . . . And yet the idea of death seemed not quite so glum aboard that ship that crossed the bay beneath a torrid midafternoon sun, the light of which, nourished by foam and bubbles, reflected off of the waves and flared under the awning, penetrating eyes and pores, tormenting the hands seeking rest on the gunwales. Draped in makeshift mourning, smelling of old dye, the adolescent looked at the city, which bore, at that hour of reverberations and long shadows, a strange resemblance to an immense baroque candelabrum; its windows—green, orange, and red—shed their colors on a motley rocaille of balconies, archways, spires, belvederes, and glassed-in galleries with drawn blinds—all of it resting on scaffolds, crossbeams, gallows, and poles, from the days when building fever had overtaken the residents, grown rich after the recent war in Europe. It was a country indentured to the air that swept through it, thirsty for the winds that blew from sea to land and back, shutters, shades, jalousies, hollows all open for the first cool draft. Then came the clink of chandeliers and girandoles, fringed lamps, bead curtains, unruly weathercocks, announcing the occasion. The fans—of palm, painted paper, Chinese silk—would suddenly fall still. But at the end of this momentary respite, the people would return to the task of thrashing the inert air, dormant again inside the rooms’ high walls. Here, light congealed into heat, the hasty sunrise thrust it into even the remotest bedchamber, where it seeped through curtains and mosquito nets; even more so now that the rainy season had come, and the brutal midday showers—a veritable deluge, with thunder and lightning—hurriedly voided their clouds, soaking the roads, which fumed when the torrid heat returned. However much the palaces flaunted their incomparable columns and blazons sculpted in stone, in those months they abided in mud that clung to their bodies like an incurable illness. If a carriage should pass, they were immediately soiled, doors and barred windows spattered from the puddles sinking all round, washing away the dirt beneath the pavement and emitting new fetors as one drained into another. Though adorned with precious marble, mosaics, coffered ceilings with rosettes—with grillwork so distinct from crude bars, it was as if lucid iron vegetation were clinging to the windows—not even the mansions of the wealthy could escape the silt that rose from the former marshlands no sooner than the roofs began to drip. Many of the attendees, Carlos thought, would have had to cross at the street corners on boards laid in the mud, or jump over large stones to keep their shoes from sinking into the hollows and getting stuck there. Foreigners praised the color and good humor of the population, after spending three days at their dances, gambling dens, and bars, where the bands enlivened the spendthrift sailors and set the women’s hips aflame; but those who suffered life there for a year knew how the dust and grime and saline breezes left a verdigris sheen on the doorknockers, ate into the iron, made the silver sweat, spread mildew on old engravings, and clouded the panes of glass in frames over drawings and aquatints at whose centers the figures, warped by humidity, seemed swathed in fog brought in by the north wind. On the San Francisco wharf, a North American vessel had just moored, and Carlos spelled its name out mechanically: the Arrow . . . And the Executor went on painting his picture of the funeral, which had been magnificent, no doubt, fit for a gentleman of such virtues—with plentiful sacristans and acolytes, finery, solemnity; and the workers from the warehouse had wept discreetly, manfully, doing honor to their sex, from the psalms of the Vigil to the Mass for the deceased . . . but the son remained as though absent, vexed and fatigued, after riding since dawn over royal roads and shortcuts that never seemed to end. No sooner had he reached the estate, where solitude gave him the illusion of independence—there, he could play his sonatas till daybreak, by candlelight, bothering no one—than he heard the news that forced him to turn around, pushing his horse to extenuation and still arriving too late to attend the burial. (“I don’t want to enter into embarrassing details,” the other man says, “but we couldn’t wait any longer. Your blessed sister and I kept vigil, and we were so close to the coffin . . .”) And he thought about mourning; about that mourning that would, for a year, condemn his new flute, purchased where the finest instruments were manufactured, to lie still in its case lined with black oilcloth, while he was forced to respect, in others’ presence, the idiotic notion that where there was pain, there should be no music of any kind. His father’s death would deprive him of much that he loved, alter his plans, expel him from his dreams. He would be condemned to administer the firm—he who understood not the first thing about numbers—in a black suit behind an ink-stained desk, surrounded by bookkeepers and wretched underlings too well acquainted to bother uttering a word. And he bemoaned his fate, swearing he would escape in the coming days, without qualms or valedictions, on any vessel fit for a fugitive. Amid his lamentations, the ship moored by a bollard where Remigio was waiting for him crestfallen, a mourning ribbon on the brim of his hat. When the carriage turned onto the first street, throwing mud to the left and right, the scent of the sea vanished, swept away by the breath of vast buildings filled with leather, salted meat and fish, wax and brown sugar in cakes, and onions left so long in the cellar that they sprouted in dark corners beside green coffee and cocoa that had spilled from the scales. A clangor of cowbells filled the afternoon, accompanied by the usual migration of the newly milked cows to the pastures outside the city walls. Everything smelled powerfully at that hour, on the edge of a twilight that would brighten the sky for a few brief minutes before dissolving into night: the poorly lit firewood, the trampled manure, the wet canvas of the awnings, the saddlers’ leather, and the birdseed in the canaries’ cages hanging in the windows. The damp roofs smelled of clay, the still-moist walls of moss, the corner stalls of fritters and French toast, of boiled oil left too long in the fryer; the coffee roaster smelled of bonfires in the Spice Islands, giving off dun smoke that wheezed and belched toward the austerely classical cornices, lingering between wall and wall before dissolving like a warm mist around some saint on a bell tower. The salt beef, though, smelled unmistakably of salt beef; stored in every basement and backroom, its acrid stench reigned over the city, invading palaces, impregnating curtains, overpowering the church’s incense, seeping into the opera halls. The salt beef, mud, and flies were the curse of that emporium, visited by ships from across the globe, a place where—Carlos thought—only the statues could be at ease, immobile on their pedestals splashed with russet mud. As though an antidote to that stench, there suddenly emerged, over a dead-end street, the noble aroma of tobacco piled in lean-tos—bound, packed, bruised by the knots that cinched the bales in their palm bark wrappings, tender bits of green still in the dense leaves, bright gold eyes in the supple layers, still live and vegetal amid the meat. Breathing an odor that for once he welcomed, that alternated with the smoke from a new coffee roaster nestled in the sloping walls of a chapel, Carlos thought with anguish of the routine life that awaited him—doomed to live in that city across the sea, an isle on an isle, his music stilled, the closed ocean holding any possible adventure at bay. He would find himself enveloped, a corpse in its death shroud, in the reek of salt beef, onions, and brine, the victim of a father he reproached—however monstrous it was to do so—with the crime of having died prematurely. In that moment, the young man suffered as never before from the sense of captivity borne of living on an island; of being in a land without roads to other lands a man could reach on wheels, on horseback, on foot, crossing borders, sleeping every night in a different inn, wandering with no sense of north beyond one’s inclinations, the fascination felt for a mountain scorned once you’ve caught sight of another mountain—or for the body of an actress encountered in a city you’d never heard of the day before, then followed for months from stage to stage, sharing the desultory life of the entertainer . . . After tilting to round a corner presided over by a cross stained green by the sea breeze, the carriage stopped before a studded door with a black ribbon hanging from its knocker. The alcove, the vestibule, the courtyard were carpeted in jasmine, spikenard, white carnations, and houseleeks with sagging crowns and stems. In the great room, haggard, twisted—draped in mourning clothes a size larger than her own that seemed to immure her like a paper prison—waited Sofía, surrounded by Clarist nuns filling decanters with water scented with lemon balm, orange blossom, salts, herb infusions, in a sudden show of industry for the new arrivals. The chorus raised its voice, commending valor, obedience, resignation to those left below while others came to know a Glory that never failed nor ceased. “Now I will be your father,” the Executor moaned from the corner where the family portraits hung. The bell of the Church of the Holy Spirit struck seven. Sofía took leave with a gesture that all present understood, withdrawing to the vestibule in rueful silence. “If you need anything . . .” Don Cosme said. “If you need anything . . .” the nuns chanted in turn. Every latch on the main door was locked. Crossing the courtyard where, in the midst of the eddo, the trunks of two palm trees rose like columns, clashing with the architecture surrounding them, crests mingling in the incipient night, Carlos and Sofía walked to the room by the stables, the darkest and dankest in the house, perhaps, and yet the only one where Esteban could manage to sleep a full night now and then without suffering one of his crises.
