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Translator’s Note

Soon after completing the translation you are about to read, I was invited to speak at a conference on Saer in Buenos Aires. The panel was titled, rather provocatively, “Is It Possible to Translate Juan José Saer?”

I leave this question for the reader to judge. What I can say with certainty is that Saer’s writing generally, and The One Before in particular, is deeply concerned with the theme of translation and its limits. This includes, of course, a few examples of straightforward linguistic translation, as in the case of Filipillo, the young indigenous man conscripted as a translator for the Spanish conquistadors in “The Interpreter.” More often, however, Saer’s concern with translation is manifest in larger questions about the possibility of representing human experience in any language. Stories like “On Dry Shore,” “The Lookalike,” and “Friends” speak to his hope that writing would be adequate to the task of preserving a particular moment or a particular perspective on the world. Others suggest profound doubt about the ability of language to capture these moments, and the sneaking suspicion that the coherence imposed on human memory by the narrative form is, at bottom, a mirage.

These ideas reach their pinnacle in the titular story, “The One Before.” An unidentified narrator, probably the recurring character Carlos Tomatis, becomes increasingly disoriented as he recalls the same set of events over and over again, gradually losing his faith in the relationship between successive moments in time. Here Saer takes up the challenge he lays out in another story, “Memories.” The task is to create a narrative that is authentic to memory itself—a “circular narrative” in which the “position of the narrator would be like that of a boy who, riding a horse on a merry-go-round, tries at each pass to snatch a steel loop from the ring.” And yet The One Before is also a text that relies on the coherence of memory, citing and even playfully translating others, most notably Marcel Proust and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

We might also understand this collection to refer to translation at its etymological origins—to move from one place to another. The stories “Argument Over the Term ‘Zone’,” “Abroad,” “A Change of Residence,” and others reflect on the dislocation Saer experienced when he moved permanently from Santa Fe to Paris in 1968. “Half-Erased” explores this theme through the perspective of another recurring character in Saer’s oeuvre, Pigeon Garay. In the story, Pigeon spends the last days in the city of his birth searching fruitlessly for his twin brother, Cat, while a catastrophic flood progressively obliterates the familiar landscape around them. Decades later, Pigeon will return to Santa Fe in the novel The Investigation, only to find that the erasures of his initial “translation” can never be undone.

In his famous and oft-cited essay on translation, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin writes, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” Borrowing Saer’s own words from “Letter to the Seer,” I close the introduction to these stories with the hope that I have let his light shine in them, if, indeed, one of the modes of his writing is to shine.