On Translating Pola Oloixarac

by Roy Kesey

At last, at last: I finally get to speak to you directly about Pola Oloixarac and her magnificent debut novel, Savage Theories. Please know that I’ve been wanting to this whole time. Wanting to explain jokes of hers that have no English equivalent I could find. Wanting to explain the four layers of meaning she managed to fold into a given sentence where I was only able to fit two. Wanting.

That kind of explanation—of apology, really—has no place in the text, of course. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t quite help myself. In those cases, there are endnotes, which I tried to keep to the barest minimum, and failed. Ah, the endnotes. Should you happen to be in the market for information on the punning titles of Argentine porn, or clues to the historical-geographic curiosities of modern-day Buenos Aires and environs, or long loose translations of Montonero cadence calls, you are very much in luck.

Fortunately, the sense of displacement that many readers feel moving from text to endnote and back again has its parallel in the work itself: the experience of reading Oloixarac in Spanish is an immensely rich one precisely in spite and because of the sense of displacement one feels on a regular basis. At times this is a function of the novel’s jumps in time: the impossible but right meld of the ancient and the contemporary, with all manner of bridges built between. In other moments it is a function of jumps in space: we are whisked with little warning from New Guinea to Buenos Aires to the long-vanished African kingdom of Dahomey, with detours to, among other places, Paris and Zimbabwe and upstate New York, Crete and Athens and Rome in their respective A.C. heydays, and, in the end, back to Buenos Aires in our current era of MMOGs and DNS cache poisoning.

In fact, most of the action in Savage Theories takes place in the Argentine capital, and most of the main characters might best be described as children of the Years of Lead—the sons and daughters of those who survived the Dirty War, the twelve years (give or take) of state-sponsored terrorism in Argentina during which the military government and its right-wing death squad allies hunted down left-wing dissidents, guerrillas, students, journalists, and trade unionists, among others. This recent savagery darkens the novel’s present, but it is hardly the book’s only spilled blood. Savage Theories can be read as a history of a very specific sort of violence: the kind that is formative, for individuals, for cultures, and for our very species. One of its main through-lines theorizes as to how the relationship between predator and prey evolved across millennia, how it was transmitted across generations, and how it helps us to identify the very moment in which the human race began.

Savage Theories also creates a series of displacements through the arts and sciences. Marine biology gets a turn on stage, as do psychology, biochemistry, and linguistics; there is an obsession with film, with pop music, with painting and photography. Mostly, though, the novel sprouts from ground fertilized with anthropology and political philosophy, with nods to, among others, Sun Tzu, Hobbes and Montaigne, Marx and Freud, Spinoza and Leibniz, Wittgenstein, McLuhan and Althusser.

Occasionally, however, those nods are head-fakes, passages purposefully and pointedly misquoted, which brings us to the matters of voice and tone. The novel works primarily in a satiric key, and everyone comes in for their licks, but even the characters who live mainly for the pleasure of feeding their own bitterness and jealousy—which is to say, most of them—eventually find some measure of grace. Moreover, it is a satire shot through with a certain big-hearted love (and, let it be said, with sex that runs the gamut from pleasantly disturbing to delightedly transgressive.) And it resides in language that ranges fluidly from transparent to scientific to philosophical and back again, with occasional plunges into the darkest depths of poker-faced academic doublespeak.

If I were going to include a paragraph about “the greatest challenges I faced as the translator of this work,” this is where it would go, but I suspect you’re already getting the picture.

It is a great privilege to be writing this note, much as it was a privilege to spend so much time inside Oloixarac’s work, and, even more so, to be the first translator to bring her into English at book-length. I hope I have carried the novel’s displacements in successfully, because they are the heart of her project here. I hope her humor comes across, no matter how dark its contexts. I hope I have done right by her explorations of the many, many ways love can go wrong, and the few ways it can go right.

Oloixarac’s second novel, Las constelaciones oscuras, has already been published. It is every bit as rich and enfoldingly complex as Savage Theories, and there is, I am certain, still more to come. We are witnessing the birth of something special, and I am proud and grateful to have played a role in widening the world of readers who can look forward to losing themselves in her work.