tradition of romance, within which Hawthorne's Puritan fable on the wages of love (or sex) is inscribed. There is Hawthorne, the absurd British agent inOur Man in Havana (the inversion of another absurdist, our Havanan in London perhaps?). And also the thorny motif of the "Hawthorne lane" in the English translation of À la Recherche de Temps Perdu, the locus amenus where Marcel first sees Gilberte, which then becomes a nostalgic refrain throughout the volumes: the whore thorns of love is certainly a motif Cabrera Infante shares with Proust.

The following excerpt from Infante's Inferno is another example (any essay on translation can become an infinite list of examples since theory must be subordinated to practice and since one metaphor inevitably leads to another!) of the seeking of the similar in the dissimilar, where wordplay is inscribed in the language of the translation and yet brings to life the language of the original.

Those were the days when Roberto, born Napoleon, Branly, who joined the group as a specialist in vitreous humor, was said to have a friend named Leo Tiparillo, and another called Chinchilla, and we couldn't tell the surnames from the nicknames, doubting that Chinchilla's hide was genuine and wondering how many matches it would take to light Tiparillo. I remember the day Branly became notably noticed by Olga Andreu. He came to see her bowl of brand new goldfish, and asked with almost scientific curiosity: "Are they adults?" But Olga (christened Volgar by Branly) made Branly's game into a set from her settee, a repartee à la Satie:

"Adulterers"—said Olga. "They're fiendish fish."

"What are their names?"—asked double Branly "Daphne and Chloe?"

"No," said Olga, "Debussy and Ravel."

"Oh, I get it," said Branly, approaching the golden bowl but not bowled over. "Debussy must be the one with the flaxen scales."

"Algae."

"Olgae?"

"Vegetal filaments that float, vaguely."

"Are they from the impressionist school of fish?" asked Branly.

"Yes, Debussy even composed La mer, an impression."

"Quite impressive," Branly said. "Though I doubt he did it. Nobody at sea composes La mer and a goldfish wouldn't compose The Fishbowl either, I hasten to add."

Olga wanted to scare Branly:

"The other one, Ravel, a composer of waltzes and boleros, wrote the Pavane for a Dead Punster."

Branly pretended not to feel the hook and had the last word-fish:

"I suppose that one afternoon Debussy will write L'après-midi d'un poisson d'or."

Branly and Olga's pasodoble brings again to your ear's attention this book's alluring alliteration. If the pun was the "lowly form of wit" that permeated Tres tristes tigres, the main "game" here is alliteration (the translator's typewriter alliterates, driven by the text to write wet wag instead of wet rag, for instance!). An early structural principle in poetry, alliteration has mostly been employed as an emphatic or comic device, as in Love's Labours Lost. It is generally considered a lowly device in English poetry and proper prose even more so than in Spanish, a language whose musical exuberance encourages such license. In the baroque esthetics of writers like Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, and Cabrera Infante, alliteration and wordplay are part of a Dionysian destruction of language as transparent communicator: to alliterate is to mock conventions of propriety and to glorify words as mysterious objects: subverting the semantic, putting sound before sense, is a kind of liberation.

Alliteration expresses, frees the impulsive, rhythmic nature of language as music—which it is to the child and to the poet. In poetry, feeling is the meaning. In verbal humor, language's impulsive force is what dominates, moving the speaker to express what is repressed. Since Infante's Inferno is about memory, mostly erotic memories, alliteration—a common mnemonic device for fixing our memories, as in founding fathers and dancing daughters—harmonizes perfectly with its erotic content: alliterating words literally copulate with one another: the repetition of sounds produces a sensual effect, making the reader/translator conscious of an unconscious tendency to use language as music, as children or infantes do.

Music, "the universal language," is what poetic writing aims to be; as Cabrera Infante's narrator says à la Walter Pater at one point, "all writers aim to be musicians." Thus he mentions those "great great" impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel and the avant-garde Satie—Dada's enfant terrible avant la lettre—and thus he pays homage to Ravel's title Pavane pour une infante défuncte. Just as Cabrera Infante, a reveling Ravel of the unraveling word, seeks the music in words, the rumbling rumba rhythm of Havana in his books, so Ravel, a musician, reveals the music in the verbal reality of his title. It was not in homage to any dead Spanish infanta, but was chosen for its lilting alliteration, the sonorous beauty of the title reflecting the nostalgic beauty of the parodical pavana.

Maybe Cabrera Infante is a reincarnation of Ravel, Debussy, and Satie all rolled up in one, or perhaps he is their D'Artagnan: he makes fun of Ravel and Debussy in the corny semi-classical Cuban context, because, like Marx and Engels, they could be confused at times, their musical impressions sounding like one long wave—Debussy's Sea bubbling out of Ravel's fountain pen by mistake or Ravel's Valse being a more strident version of Debussy's La plus que lente. But precisely because their parodies or "translations" of popular forms are both carnivalesque and nostalgic is why they have so much in common with the Infante of this Inferno, who mocks the Latin male's Don Juan past and his Doñas, but is nostalgic for a lost paradise, which the past always is. As the impressionists created, paradoxically, a very artificial art in their imitations of nature and of popular art, so is this book about how real memories become self-conscious memoirs, more reminiscent of Casanova or My Secret Life than of life itself. The repartee à la Satie salutes the wit of Satie, the composer as prankster, the unique and eccentric inventor of strange titles, the musician as writer, or vice versa.

This little repartee, filled with those necessary substitutions of one joke for another, of one play of sounds for another, also sums up the continuous battle of words and wits and, metaphorically, of the sexes that is the process of collaboration which we began in Tres tristes tigres. It is no small coincidence that of all the women in Infante's Inferno, one might identify, as traduttora, with Olga Andreu, practically the only female in the book who gets to reveal a knack for verbal wit. Many of the other women are more than a match for the male hunter on the sexual battlefield, and at least one is infinitely more clever in the art of emotional manipulation, but Olga is the only, as they say, "wise guy." She is a distant dissonant and even dissident observer—and one of the few female characters who are not objects of the narrator's often obscure desire. Thus she is a kind of feminine counterpart of the first-person narrator who is more of a near-sighted voyeur than an active participant in his own history as a Cuban Casanova. But more later.

II. Marginality

"New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms"

                              —Viktor Shklovsky

Since it is at the level of language that the translator can be most creative, inventive, even subversive, I have preferred to translate writers like Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy, who play with language, exposing its infidelity to itself, writers who create a new literature by parodying the old. Translation, another form of parody, is for a writer like Cabrera Infante "a more advanced stage" of the writing of the book, as Jorge Luis Borges once said. Thus, I have had the freedom to exaggerate the parodical elements (such as alliteration) when translating writers like Infante and Puig, particularly because they have been actively involved in the "subversion" of their originals. (Alliteration is also "contaminating" another book I am translating, Sarduy's neobaroque Maitreya, bubbling with courtly curtseys, mortified mourners, stark stages, and impeccable arecas.)

Though writers like Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa seem more obviously dissident because of their political postures, the more marginal writers, like Puig, Infante, Sarduy, and Reinaldo Arenas, are dissident in a more corrosive manner, digging into the root (route) of hypocrisy, into the very matter in which our consciousness is inscribed, that is, language. Like Lewis Carroll, father of the absurd, Infante, especially the Infante of Tres tristes tigres, twists words inside out, revealing their hollow center. Puig exposes our everyday languages, even the language we dream in, as suspect, as concealing what it most intends to reveal. Sarduy renews the avant-garde tradition of poetic prose and obliges us to read a novel as if it were a poem, to surrender to the pleasure of suggestion instead of seeking sense, dancing as he does between the "earthy feast" of prose and the "lyrical voyage" of poetry.

Marginality and dissidence are also words that have been used to define the feminine place in history and culture. Julia Kristeva sees woman's inevitable marginality as an advantage; she aligns woman with the artist, particularly with avant-garde artists. Kristeva claims importance for woman's privileged contact with the mother's body, with the semiotic impulse preceding verbal development and therefore preceding the phase in which, as Lacanians have put it, the phallus becomes the transcendental signifier (in Hitchcockian terms, the Trans-Siberian Express). The term "mothertongue" is a deceptive metaphor: mother may be the first to teach the infant speech, but she is only passing onto him or her the father-tongue. Once in the realm of verbal discourse, whether or not we are dissident (woman, artist, etc.), we all have to use the "matter and methods" of the so-called patriarchal code, even if our intention is to question, to parody, to destroy, and to make it over. But even though the dissident may contradict or compromise her/himself by using the very discourse of oppression, as Domna Stanton has written, the "feminist eye/I can find dissident strands, and combine them in a texture that exposes the phallic intentionality of … texts." To a certain extent, the same could be said for some dissident writing by men: Puig stands out as a writer who exposes the sexual politics implicit in the linguistic code that manipulates us. Kristeva seems to conclude that while some women writers like Hélène Cixous are trying "to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions," the existence of such a discourse is questionable. She finally opts for woman's dissidence, for feminine subversion as process of becoming, of deferring rather than differing: each individual woman must discover the multiplicity of her possible identifications.

Deferral, diffuseness, plurality, openness are some of the terms used to define uniquely feminine (subversive) writing, as in Gertrude Stein's radical re-inventions of literary language or in the Brazilian Clarice Lispector's novelistic portrayals of deferral, of an idealized feminine voice. However, these same terms could apply to the inventions of Laurence Sterne, Macedonio Fernández, Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, and Cabrera Infante. In this sense one could say that the translator of writers like these is producing pluralistic, open, diffuse texts much like the "woman text" of which Cixous has spoken. There is, of course, a difference: Infante's Inferno, for example, is a book in which man speaks while woman merely talks.

III. Men Speak, Women Talk, But Both Chat

In Infante's Inferno, woman is essentially an archetype: the mysterious other, a mirror in which Narcissus reflects himself or a screen upon which he projects himself. The final erotic encounter occurs in the Fausto movie theater, the place of screens, that is, of the silver screen and of "screen women," the phantom women in movie theaters whom throughout the book the narrator is trying to seduce or be seduced by. ("Screen woman" is an expression Shoshana Felman has used to characterize the female character in a Balzac story: the girl is a screen for the male protagonist's narcissistic, incestuous fantasies.) The screen-gazing infante's final encounter is with a woman who suddenly expands—like Alice when she eats the Wonderland biscuit—into a giant. This giant has been foreshadowed in an early chapter by a huge motherly woman whom the skinny adolescent tries to seduce, only to be interrupted by his brother who informs him that "this is where we came in," meaning they had already seen the whole movie. But in this last daydream, which becomes a nightmare, the rite of passage from adolescence to manhood is reversed: the narrator literally enters the vagina, descends into the speculum, crashes through the looking glass, and is swallowed up by this terrifying "sphinx without a sphincter" (to quote Tres tristes tigres). He becomes unborn, a dead infant, to finally be born again upon a "horizontal abyss," into the text, as a writer.

This infinite female is, of course, the mother, the gray eminence ruling over the Inferno. The mother (as Emir Rodriguez Monegal has suggested) is the one who, unlike the apparent austere father (the son finds out, when he's old enough to know better, that the father has a secret sex life), teaches the infante the pleasure of the text, that is, of reading, of movies, music, and conversation. What's more, she gives him his last name, Infante. Just like the mother in Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (also in contrast with an apparently austere father), she is both the source of his language and his introduction to pleasure. If (as Monegal notes) Tres tristes tigres is the adult vision/version of Cabrera Infante's Havana and Inferno is the adolescent vision, then it is also fitting that the silent or absent center of Tres tristes tigres be Laura Díaz, the girl both Arsenio Cue and Silvestre secretly loved, while in Inferno, despite all the visible and naked women, the mother, always in the background, is the unifying chord, the ultimate Beatrice. As irreverent as he may be with himself and the women he desires, he always reveres his mother, his ideal woman in every way (even physically). This adult versus adolescent comparison functions on the level of language as well: while Tres tristes tigres is curiously elliptical in dealing with the actual sex act, Infante's Inferno is unabashedly pornographic, like the language of the adolescent, eager to speak all, less afraid to describe than to experience sex. (One should add, of course, that Tres tristes tigres's elliptical aspect was also the result of Spanish censorship at the time the book was published).

In Infante's Inferno the final manipulation of reality (and women) is through language. Like the mythic Narcissus who rejects Echo's caresses, this modern Narcissus only wishes to listen to his Echo. In this sense Cabrera Infante is explicitly exposing the sterility of the archetypal relationship between man and woman: the narrator is a supremely solitary figure, like the pavo real, the peacock from which the pavane, a courtly and often solo dance, originates. He is enclosed in his book, in his lonely hall of mirrors like King Christophe; the greatest moment of love, or, rather, orgasm, he experiences, as he says, is through masturbation.

Woman's absence, or silence, and man's speech, however, takes us back to the difference between speech and talk. The metaphoric mother-tongue, the language the mother teaches the infant, is actually a "screen" for the father-tongue (just as, on another plane, the father's austerity is a screen for his sexuality, the mother may just be all talk): certainly the Cuban relajo which threads through Infante's Inferno is a proto-male speech. As Hélène Cixous has suggested, man, out of a double fear of his mother, the fear of losing her and the fear of being castrated by her, has relegated woman to silence, metaphorically decapitating her. She has been consigned to being a mystery, a Sphinx; Cixous writes: "Chienne chanteuse ("Watchbitch") the Sphinx was called: she's an animal and she sings out. She sings out because women do … they do utter a little, but they don't speak. Always keep in mind the distinction between speaking and talking. It is said, in philosophical texts, that women's weapon is the word, because they talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound …: but they don't actually speak, they have nothing to say" (p. 49). Though the narrator in Infante's Inferno insists that he prefers the talk of women (beginning with his mother's sewing circle chatter), it is clear that it is women's talk and not speech he prefers. Indeed, those who do sometimes speak, like Olga, are too terrifying for words.

As to that other alternative, singing, it is interesting that the most significant female character in Tres tristes tigres is a singer, La Estrella, just as Sarduy's star transvestite is La Tremenda, an opera singer, a Cuban chienne chanteuse. Maitreya swings rhythmically between two poles: singing and "zingando" (fornication in Cuban slang). La Tremenda is either singing hysterically (or being hysterically silent—silence is the mark of hysteria, says Cixous—because her enemies have silenced her) or seeking the great transcendental signifier. Though for both Sarduy and Cabrera Infante the singer and singing are positive signs of the artist and of music as writing, they both satirize the feminine in the form of a singer. The Inferno's Infante mocks women and their words by satirizing, by reversing the archaic mother in the figure of the fatal Faustine who swallows up the infante in the Faust cinema, he perhaps triumphs over his fear of her: the rebirth of the infante as a writer is certainly a resolution of sorts. The word is my apparatus belly (sic) is what the umbilical narrator might be finally saying.

Where does this leave a woman as translator of such a book? Is she not a double betrayer, to play Echo to this Narcissus, repeating the archetype once again? All who use the mother's father-tongue, who echo the ideas and discourse of great men are, in a sense, betrayers: this is the contradiction and compromise of dissidence. Just as Cabrera Infante must use the father-tongue to expose it, to parody it. And … just as he must learn speech to talk. Because more than anything, Infante's Inferno is a chatty, gossipy book. A bumbling Don Juan's jaded talk, the verbal fireworks of Cuban male relajo is silly chatter, defying the codes of formal speech. The narrator of this book—which is really a chain of anecdotes—reincarnates finally his mother, the story teller, the digresser, the pleasure seeker seeking pleasure only in the telling.

IV. Traduttora Traditora

If the metaphor "mother-tongue" is deceptive, so is the myth of the Ursprach, the original speech (explored by George Steiner in After Babel). And just as the existence of that original language is highly problematic, so is the concept of the original text. At least this is what Borges seems to be saying again and again in his fictions, particularly in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote." Cabrera Infante confirms this in his Tres tristes tigres: there are no originals, only translations. Memory is a text translated into another text. If the sign of translation, of betrayal, ruled over Tres tristes tigres, the sign of passage, and therefore translation in a very concrete sense, marks his Inferno. Havana is the past, that is, "another country"; the infant is dead (or there never was one, as in Ravel's Pavane); what remains is the telling or the translating.

That Infante's Inferno is a version, a subversion, is already apparent in the title. What is alive in La habana para un infante difunto would become truly dead in the literal Havana for a Dead Infant. Because of what is lost and can be gained in crossing the language barrier, because of the inevitable rereading that occurs in transposing a text from one context to another, a translation must subvert the original. When the Havana narrator makes the jaded statement "no one man can rape a women," the infernal translator undermines this popular myth with the book's own corrosive mechanism of alliteration and writes; "no wee man can rape a woman." Since La habana para un infante difunto mocks popular sexual mythology, subverts traditional narrative, and sets verbal reality above all others, the more subversive Infante's Inferno is, the better. Verbal logic supplants fidelity when "fines de siglo" is translated not as "turn of the century" but as the "gay nineties," or when "Amor Propio" (the title initiating a chapter in praise of masturbation) is translated not as amour-propre, self-esteem or self-love, but as "Love Thyself." (After all, the Bible is the book of books!) And the text continues to metamorphose blasphemously into another text when the following chapter (about the narrator's pursuit of women in movie theaters) is titled "Love Thy Neighbor" instead of false love, a literal translation of the Spanish saying "Amor trompero" (the original chapter title).

A final example of this crafty craft of transferring metaphors from the Cuban to American English is the translation of the chapter title "Mi último fracaso" ("My Last Failure") into "You Always Can Tell." This section deals with the common theme of an adolescent's sexual initiation, in this case the narrator's misadventures in strip-tease joints and brothels and his final quasi-successful intercourse with a streetwalker. As he takes leave of this girl, she is saying to him that she didn't think she'd have any customers that night, and he answers "you see?" so that she can complete the phrase with the line from a song (in Spanish): "You never know," and then he thinks an answer to her answer, but doesn't say it: it's another line from another bolero: "You will be my last failure." In the Spanish, "My Last Failure," corresponding to the popular theme of the chapter, is the perfect title. In English, however, "My Last Failure" does not have the same resonance, does not evoke a song or singer (in this case, Olga Guillot) that the Cuban reader would immediately recognize in the Spanish version. A literal translation would betray the intention of these words. "Better Late Than Never" was considered since it is a cliché, a popular saying which could epitomize the character's final participation in sexual intercourse after talking about it for 300 pages. "This Is Where I Came In" could also have been a double entendre with a single sense, but neither worked as a casual phrase at the end of the chapter, thus serving as a leitmotive that would give unity to the chapter. Then came the possibility of "You Never Can Tell," which works well as the phrase the girl utters at the end (changing "You never know" to "You never can tell"). But since the final phrase has to be the character's mental repartee, "you always can tell" works well as an ironic echo, the narrator being a constant Echo of his own narcissistic obsessions. Again, "You Always Can Tell" covers a multitude of sins: the character automatically approaches the streetwalker not knowing, but somehow instinctively knowing, that she is a streetwalker, thus, "you always can tell." Second, "Mi último fracaso" is an ironic title because his encounter with her is and is not a failure; like "Mi.último fracaso," "You Always Can Tell" is an affirmation which counterpoints the negative "You Never Can Tell" and the uncertainties of sexual initiation. Finally, "Mi último fracaso" recalls another text, a song, just as the title of La habana recalls the Ravel title, thus asserting the precedence of the verbal, of the literary, over a reality being described. You always can tell, a mis-quotation from the lexicon of clichés, very much emphasizes the telling of this story of sexual initiation in which the narrator tells all he can, and he can always tell (even when he cannot always do): the verbal precedes, substitutes, is the action.

Renato Poggioli expressed most aptly the reason for translating modern works when he remarked that "the modern translator, like the modern artist, strives after self-expression, although the self-expression may well be a not too literal expression of the self." Infante's Inferno, a book whose content is oppressively male, could never be a literal expression of this translator's self. However, translation—an activity caught between the scholarly and the creative, between the rational and the irrational—is a route, a voyage if you like, through which a writer/translator may seek to reconcile fragments: fragments of texts, of language, of oneself. More than a moment of interpretation, translation is an act of passage.