In the First Soot-Gray Light: Translating Rodolfo Walsh's “Worldly Offices”

Abstract

The process of translating Rodolfo Walsh's short story “Los oficios terrestres” (“Worldly Offices”) into English presents numerous interpretive and stylistic challenges. This essay discusses various strategies used in the translation of Walsh's text into English. It is informed by Antoine Berman's theoretical paradigm, which rejects the Platonic figure of translation as “an embellishing restitution of meaning” in favor of “labor on the letter,” a practice that seeks to go beyond semantic restitution to restore such vehicles of expression as rhythm, linguistic and discursive patterns, idioms, and the underlying signifiers that constitute the subtext. Issues addressed include representations of power and resistance, the ironic use of ecclesiastical language to satirize the oppressive authority of the Catholic Church, and the interplay of oppositions in narrative structure, theme, imagery, register, and language.

Keywords:

• Argentinean literature
• Antoine Berman
• Catholic Church
• Irish in Argentina
• “Los oficios terrestres”
• Ricardo Piglia
• translation
• Rodolfo Walsh

Notes

¹The primary English definition of “office” as workplace or place of business is expressed in Spanish not with oficio, but oficina.

²Pueblo can also mean “small town” or “nation.”

³This sense of “the people” would be expressed with la gente in Spanish.

⁴Berman characterizes expansion as “an unfolding of what, in the original, is ‘folded.’” “Explicitations,” he adds, “may render a text more ‘clear,’ but they actually obscure its own mode of clarity” (290).

⁵For reasons of length, the original text in Spanish, “Los oficios terrestres,” has not been included here. It is available in Walsh, “Los oficios terrestres”; Walsh, Un kilo de oro 53–68; and Walsh, Rodolfo Walsh, cuentos completos 407–18.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cindy Schuster

Cindy Schuster's translations of Latin American writers, including Rodolfo Walsh, José Emilio Pacheco, Ena Lucía Portela, and Mario Bellatin have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is cotranslator, with Dick Cluster, of Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of California, Irvine.