‘Translation,’ Anthony Burgess once said, ‘is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.’ It is a much-quoted bromide but one that has never seemed more pertinent than in attempting to recreate the strange hermetic world of Andrés Caicedo.
All novels are distant from us in time or in place; they introduce us to worlds – whether real or imagined – that only the author truly inhabits. In one sense, Liveforever takes place in the real world, Cali, Colombia, circa 1977, and consequently I knew I would have to wrangle with the mysterious slang of the city at that time. But the novel also takes place inside the mind of its narrator, María del Carmen Huerta, whose thoughts are so suffused with the music she adores that as the book progresses, her voice and her tale become shot through with song titles and lyrics, especially from the classic salsa of the period by perhaps the most famous salsa duo, Richie Ray & Bobby Cruz. In the original, these musical references are not signalled to the reader in any way; they simply weave through the narrative as bizarre images and curious non-sequiturs. Using his narrator’s unique voice, Caicedo creates a shimmering, shifting, increasingly hallucinatory pattern of words and images.
Few Colombian readers would recognize all or even most of these allusions since Caicedo wrote down lyrics as he heard them, often paraphrasing or misquoting them in the process. Salsa lyrics are not immediately comprehensible even to those who wrote them: in an interview with Sandro Romero, Ray and Cruz confessed that even they did not know precisely what they were singing, nor the exact meaning of their lyrics.* To further complicate matters, the lyrics combine Spanish with Yoruba and ñáñiga dialects and are suffused with images of the gods and the myths of Santería. (Also known as La Religión, this is an amalgam of Afro-Cuban beliefs with Catholicism.) The hallucinatory style of Caicedo’s novel and the fleeting nature of his allusions means it is almost inevitable that I will have missed some of the references.
Since few English-language readers are likely to have an in-depth knowledge of salsa and the many related styles of Afro-Cuban music (cumbia, guaguancó, bembé, bugalú, salsa brava), I have decided to italicize the musical allusions in the novel to highlight this thread that runs through its pages. I was keen to avoid annotation here, but those interested in following up references will find a ‘List of Song Lyrics’ at the end of the book, giving the song title in each case, and an alphabetical ‘List of Songs’, giving the singers too. Otherwise, I have done my best to preserve the curiously poetic voice of María del Carmen Huerta, drawing on ’70s slang in the hope of conjuring the period, but electing to keep some Spanish words to preserve a sense of place (while pelada (‘little girl’) might be translated as ‘chick’, for instance, it sounds too ‘California Girls’). I have done my utmost to follow Caicedo’s sinuous, free-flowing sentence structure, the tumbling torrent of words that are María del Carmen’s own song.
None of this would have been possible without the help of Luis Ospina and Sandro Romero, friends of the author whose films and books have been indispensable in teasing out the delicate harmonies of the novel. I would also like to express my gratitude to Bernard Cohen and Lulu Norman for their support and encouragement and to the Santa Maddalena Foundation, where I spent some time working on the translation.
Frank Wynne, 2014