[In the following essay, Corral discusses the reasons why the satire in Ibargüengoitia's Los relámpagos de agosto translates well into English.]

We seldom question the generalization that “humor gets lost in translation,” an idea that seems to suggest some failure on the part of the translator. When a transfer of humor is unsuccessful, the problem is rarely one of deficient interpretation; rather, the reader of the translation—through no fault of his own—is unable to perceive the text on the same terms as the reader in the society that produced it. However, some types of humor are equally appreciated in the cultures of both origin and new access. This article will identify some broad areas of humor and point out those that defy and those that are susceptible to successful translation.

A great deal of human communication is not articulated. Our ability for abstract thought and rapid mental association enables us to understand much more than we read or hear. Consider, for example, the volume of assimilated information evoked by words like Watergate, Michelangelo, Capone, or even Little Orphan Annie. With no conscious command, our brains summon our entire store of facts and impressions and place it at our disposal, in non-verbalized form, to help us grasp the new reference. Communication breaks down when the levels of prior knowledge held by the speaker/writer and by the listener/reader are not similar. While this is true of any communication, the breakdown is particularly obvious in the case of translated humor, whose perception depends directly on the concurrence of facts and impressions available to both speaker/writer and listener/reader.

Our sense of humor is not innate. It is acquired imperceptibly along with the other attitudes taught by each society. Beginning in the earliest childhood, we learn our culture's standards of what is right and what is wrong, of what is beautiful and what is ugly, of what is sad and what is comic. A very young child will coo at a picture of a rabbit while he expresses disgust at a picture of a snake. He has never seen either animal; his reactions are imitations of his parents' attitudes. He is taught to laugh at a fall—his own or another's—and to take pleasure in the victory of the persistent tortoise over the lazy hare and in the clever mouse's resourcefulness in outwitting the stupid, cruel cat. By imitation, he learns when it is considered proper to laugh, and his laughter becomes the result of conditioning, an automatic response to the stimuli accepted as humorous by his society.

As the child grows, his comic vocabulary expands, and he discovers that, in addition to the more or less “universal” comedy of his earliest years, different groups of people develop their own inside jokes. His schoolmates may not understand a funny occurrence at home, and the comic classroom episode falls flat when reported at home. The reasons for this are simple. The children at school do not know that everyone in the household smiles at Grandpa's habit of blinking every time he is about to speak, for example, and the family is unaware of how hilarious the children find Johnny Brown's imitation of Bugs Bunny. In each case, there is a predisposition to amusement, and such predisposition is the very basis of humor. The speaker/writer uses a key phrase or evokes the memory of a shared experience that will trigger a predictable mind-set in the listener/reader. To illustrate further, when we hear a story that begins “there was a man named MacTavish,” we are immediately prepared to understand that it will deal with thrift and that we will find the Scot's thriftiness laughable. Anyone who is unaware of, or for some reason does not share, this traditional perception of the Scot will miss the point of whatever follows.

The individual, then, is aware of universal humor and of the special frames of reference of each group to which he belongs. One such group is his country with its “national” humor and, of course, the one of greatest interest to us as translators. Cultures are not separated merely by linguistic barriers; each is a product of everything that has led to its separate development—its history, its literature, its religion, its politics. A culture's perception of humor reflects all these elements and, at least in this sense, is unique. This national humor, wholly contingent on a collective memory in which those outside the country do not share, cannot be transmitted to the new reader. This is the kind of humor that is indeed irrevocably lost in translation. We might take examples of recent political remarks in our own country and try to imagine what people abroad might make of “You ain't seen nothin' yet,” “Make my day,” or Mr. Mondale's “Where's the beef?” The Englishman, reading the original language, would properly assume that the comments went over his head because he was unaware of the sources of the allusions. The reader of a French or Italian version, on the other hand, would probably promptly blame his bewilderment on a faulty translation.

It might appear from the foregoing that there is little hope for successful translation of any text whose humor is at all more sophisticated than the universal pratfall. Fortunately, European literature has perpetuated numerous traditions of comedy that, through colonization, have become a heritage shared by many cultures. An international common ground has been created where the same elements are considered humorous: the circumvention of social taboos through allusion; veiled political criticism; exaggeration; irony; satire; caricature; stock comic characters like the country oaf, the sympathetic scoundrel, the clever servant/slave/employee who outshines the stupid gentleman/master/boss, the deceived husband (but, interestingly, not the deceived wife); puns and wordplay; transparent hypocrisy; regional idiosyncrasies. All of these can be traced in European literature, some as far back as Aristophanes.

We can only surmise how much more drastically human attitudes toward laughter might have varied were it not for the recorded word. In our own lifetimes each of us has observed how oral humor changes periodically; a certain type of joke becomes fashionable for a time until it is replaced by a new vogue. The continuity of international literary traditions enables us to understand some (not all) of the humor of Molière, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Brecht, García Marquez, Skvorecký. And yes, we understand it in translation.

Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928-1983) began his literary career in Mexico as a playwright, and came to be known as one of the country's finest writers. All his works are humorous, but his special talent was for political satire. His first novel, Los relámpagos de agosto, was awarded the Casa de las Américas prize in the novel category for 1964. The 1910 revolution produced a whole genre, the novela de la revolución, that comprises not only true novels, but autobiographical pieces as well. The 1950s saw the appearance of a great many versions of the “true story” of the Mexican Revolution and the upheaval that continued in its aftermath; each, naturally, presented the author's viewpoint and served as self-justification. Los relámpagos de agosto, translated as The Lightning of August, is a short parody of these accounts. The narrator, José Guadalupe Arroyo, explains his intervention in an attempted coup in 1929. His report becomes a tale of confusion, mishap, stupidity, betrayal and greed, all unwittingly revealed as Arroyo boasts of his patriotic zeal and constant concern with the loftiest, most noble principles of the revolution. In satire there is a direct ratio between humor and criticism; mild humor produces a mild commentary. Ibargüengoitia's condemnation is scathing.

The episode described in the book is factual, and the informed Mexican reader easily identifies many of the characters with their historical counterparts. He also recognizes the political party put together in the novel through Machiavellian intrigue as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the PRI that survives as Mexico's dominant party to this day. He sees the threat of interference by the United States in Mexico's internal affairs as something more than a comic detail. He understands the cristero movement as the culmination of the liberal-conservative, secular-religious conflict that plagued Mexico for more than a century after her independence from Spain.

There is nothing original about the statement that humor is based on enjoyment of an awareness of our superiority. We are wiser than the clown and can anticipate the calamitous results of his stupid actions. We understand a double-entendre because we are clever enough to grasp a word or phrase in more than one sense at the same time. We take pleasure in our ability to identify the allusions of parodies and satire. We are delighted by our astuteness in comprehending what is not spelled out for us, not on the printed page, between the lines.

Since the non-Mexican reader of a translation of Los relámpagos de agosto would be denied some of the satisfactions mentioned above, I was puzzled by my initial impression that the book would nevertheless be humorous in English, particularly since Ibargüengoitia had written in a letter to me that of all his books this was the one he had always considered intelligible to a Mexican readership exclusively. The fact that the first critical acclaim for the book had come not from Mexico, but from Cuba's Casa de las Américas, seemed to lend support to my view.

In evaluating a work of literature as a prospective translation project, the translator must perform a very difficult exercise. While bringing to bear all his knowledge of the language and culture of the original, he must almost simultaneously divorce himself from it and look at the text from the new reader's viewpoint. While performing these mental contortions over the Ibargüengoitia book, I concluded that an interesting phenomenon was taking place and probably often occurs in translated humor. While the native understands the book's national humor, the foreigner perceives its literary humor. In short, both may take pleasure in the same detail for entirely different reasons. Where the Mexican identifies the characters as historic personages, the non-Mexican sees caricatures of less-than-sincere political leaders; where the Mexican sees the narrator as an imitator of other novelas de la revolución, the foreigner sees the sympathetic scoundrel who reveals less about himself by what he says than by the way he says it; both enjoy the word- and language-play in which linguistic level is an index of hypocrisy. In the production notes preceding one of his plays, Ibargüengoitia wrote, “Warning: Any similarity between this play and events in Mexican history is not accidental, but rather a national disgrace.” This same message is conveyed in The Lightning of August and is lost on no one. Mexican and foreigner alike detect the intent of censure.

I reached a second conclusion, and I found it somewhat surprising. The different perspective and perceptions of the two readers have absolutely no effect on the translation process itself. Universal and literary humor present no special problem. As for national humor, it is between the lines in the original and is equally present in—or, perhaps more accurately, absent from—the translation; it is available to those who are prepared to understand it, imperceptible to those who are not.

Most translators, save those who enjoyed the good fortune to be brought up in a bilingual household, translate works from an acquired language into their mother tongue. The last thing we learn in a new language is the exact value of its words. Is a word commonplace or is it elevated? Is it merely strong or insulting? Is it sincere or sarcastic? I know of no dictionary that answers these questions. When a translator cannot detect word values, he/she is unable to reproduce the tone of the original work. A translation may be literally accurate but completely mistaken in tone. This kind of shortcoming is particularly disastrous in a humorous text, in which plot and characterization are frequently subordinated to the effects created through carefully crafted language. The translator must make full use of both his ears: the ear of the knowledgeable reader of the foreign language and the ear of his alter ego, the reader of English.

Awareness of the three broad categories of humor outlined here—universal, national, and literary—may be helpful to the translator considering a new project. He must gauge how much humor will be lost, how much retained, and how much understood in a different way from a different perspective. He will find that some projects are unsuitable, but he may be surprised at how many are feasible. In any case, we need not offhandedly abandon the translation of humor simply because we have traditionally dismissed it as untranslatable. Humor serves an important purpose in human life; it is healthy; it restores self-confidence and relieves tensions. In a world like ours today, it is not only welcome but necessary.