<![CDATA[The Savage Detectives]]>

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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation, but his novel The Savage Detectives is a lot closer to Y Tu Mamá También than it is to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati that you don't have to understand to enjoy, The Savage Detectives is a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It's the first of Bolaño's two giant masterpieces to be translated into English (the second, 2666, is due out next year), and you can see how he's influenced an era. --Tom Nissley Questions for Translator Natasha Wimmer Natasha Wimmer translated books by Mario Vargas Llosa and Bolaño's good friend Rodrigo Fresán, among others, before tackling Bolaño's two long novels, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666, which have had an immeasurable impact on modern Latin American fiction (and perhaps now on Anglo American writing as well). We asked her a few questions about the process of bringing such a vast and vital book into English. Amazon.com: How did you come to literary translation, and to translating a work of such prestige? Is the community of Spanish-to-English literary translators small, given Americans' famous lack of interest in translated work? <img src="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/blog/Wimmer_Natasha_300_buffer._V20857164_.jpg" border="0" padding="2" align="right">Wimmer: Luck, really. I lived in Spain when I was little, which is where I learned Spanish, and then I studied Spanish literature in college, but it was a job in publishing--at FSG, the publisher of The Savage Detectives--that made me realize that literary translation was something I could try. I've been translating now for eight years. My first project was a novel by the Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy, and since then I've worked on books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Zaid, Rodrigo Fresán, and Laura Restrepo. When I read The Savage Detectives, I thought it was one of the best novels I had read in any language in years, but I was sure there was no chance I would get to translate it. Bolaño already had a great translator--Chris Andrews. But Andrews couldn't do it, and I was the extremely fortunate runner-up. The community of full-time translators is definitely small--it's hard to make a living. But there are many great occasional translators--professors, editors, writers. Amazon.com: We're told that Bolaño towers over his generation of writers (and I can believe it). What did he do that was new? What has his influence been? Wimmer: Bolaño was (is) the first to make a true break from the legacy of the Boom. Many other writers of his generation, and younger writers, too, have tried and are still trying to make a literature of their own, one that doesn't languish in the long shadow of García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the other novelists who exploded on the world scene in the 1960s. Bolaño made the leap seem effortless. The writers of the Boom put Latin America on the map. Bolaño creates a Latin America of the mind, a post-nationalist Latin America filtered through a rootless, restless, uncompromising literary sensibility. Amazon.com: Could you describe Bolaño's style and his sentences? (I love his parentheses.) How did you handle the dozens of voices in The Savage Detectives? <img src="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/blog/Bolano_Roberto_250_buffer._V20857165_.jpg" border="0" align="left">Wimmer: Bolaño is both a maximalist and a classicist. He loves to play with excess, with the notion of reckless abandon, but beneath that there is a very careful sense of balance. He was a poet for many years before he became a novelist, and he is an endlessly inventive stylist. But--more rarely for a poet--he also has an unerring sense of character and a palpable fondness for his characters. The Savage Detectives could never have worked otherwise. There are very few writers who could write a novel from the perspective of fifty-odd characters and make each character's story seem urgent and intimate. From the translator's perspective, some voices were definitely more difficult than others, but I rarely felt that I had to strain to make them distinct from each other. Mostly, it just involved following Bolaño's cues. The hardest thing, oddly enough, was getting the rhythm of his sentences right. There is something syncopated and unpredictable about them that would have been all too easy to smooth over as a translator, and I made a concerted effort not to do that. Amazon.com: All of his books are full of references to, and appearances by, Latin American writers both fictional and real and I'm sure as a clueless American reader I'm missing hundreds of inside jokes. What's it like to read his work when you actually know the people he's referring to? Wimmer: It adds a little something, but not as much as you might think. And many of his references are obscure even to Spanish-language readers. There is something cultish and purposefully arcane about the literary world that Bolaño's protagonist, García Madero, yearns to join, and like García Madero, the reader is entranced by authors' names and book titles without knowing exactly where they come from. Amazon.com: You are working on translating his other giant masterpiece, 2666, the even larger novel that he completed just before his death. How is it going? What can we expect from 2666? Wimmer: It's an extremely long novel (1100 pages in the Spanish edition ), so it's a test of stamina, but it's going very well. Like The Savage Detectives, it revolves around a lost writer (Cesárea Tinajero in TSD and Benno von Archimboldi in 2666), and the crucial episodes take place in the north of Mexico, but it is a darker book. The lurking sense of dread that many of the characters feel in TSD becomes something more palpable and sharply defined in 2666, and is linked to the killings of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Juárez) and the legacy of the wars of the 20th century, particularly World War II.

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1998

The Savage Detectives

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5 63 false false Fri Jun 20 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 18 19:11:23 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 22 09:25:52 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 23 false false Sun Apr 06 18:31:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 06 21:52:27 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 11 false false Sun Dec 14 21:55:16 -0800 2008 Thu Nov 13 21:06:13 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 14 21:55:16 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 11 false false Wed Jul 09 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 16 10:50:35 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 09 13:39:00 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 12 false false Sat Jul 07 20:17:46 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 09 21:11:26 -0700 2008 like this book, really. I certainly didn't not like it. I just... just... I dunno, I guess I just didn't get it like everyone else seems to've. As I said somewhere else, given that everyone really lost their sh...more...]]> 4 8 false false Wed Jul 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Jun 21 16:12:26 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 23 18:01:19 -0700 2008 The Savage Detectives is so different: it's a diary, then an oral history, then a diary. It is linear and non-linear (if I say it's so, it is!). It's about hundreds of people, but really about three: Arturo Bela...more...]]> 1 14 false false Sat Mar 28 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 18 09:48:51 -0700 2009 Mon Mar 30 05:03:40 -0700 2009
I walked around Mexico City for a while. And then I sat in a coffee shop and wrote poetry for seven hours. And then I saw a crazy poet I know and we argued about Octavio Paz. And then I read (name drop about 30 La...more...]]> 5 10 false false Fri Aug 28 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 08 17:33:48 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 09 09:57:53 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 5 false false Tue Mar 03 05:00:48 -0800 2009 Thu Mar 12 07:08:19 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 10 false false Mon Feb 04 09:29:23 -0800 2008 Mon Feb 04 09:49:40 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 7 false false Thu May 22 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 25 14:53:50 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 02 13:21:17 -0700 2008
The largest section of the book, the first person testimonials, is by far the most successful. I fell in love ...more...]]> 5 4 false false Tue Apr 15 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 07 14:20:04 -0700 2008 Tue Apr 15 18:01:22 -0700 2008 The Savage Detectives is the type of book that gets better after you finish it. It is an artistic statement, best appreciated as a whole. You have to commit yourself to either the whole thing, or nothing, and it's not for everyone:

There is little plot, the characters a...more...]]> 1 4 false false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Mar 11 13:00:46 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 21 18:42:29 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 4 false false Wed Jun 20 09:12:35 -0700 2007 Wed Aug 01 17:34:30 -0700 2007 more...]]> 2 3 false false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Feb 13 20:08:09 -0800 2008 Mon Apr 07 14:20:50 -0700 2008
The Savage Detectives is one of those titles I couldn't seem to avoid. When it was originally released in 1998 it won a slew of awards I had never heard of, and upon the release of its 2007 English language translation it was met with a loads of new praise. The New York Ti...more...]]> 5 3 false false Tue Nov 06 22:04:52 -0800 2007 Fri Oct 31 08:59:38 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 3 false false Fri Oct 31 20:03:49 -0700 2008 Sun Nov 02 10:40:35 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 2 false false Mon Dec 08 17:09:18 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 09 19:43:52 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Feb 13 09:01:59 -0800 2009 Mon Apr 20 02:31:57 -0700 2009 What can you say about this book which seems – for me at least – to be more than just a book. It is written in the same pseudo-easy language as the novels by Franz Kafka or Haruki Murakami, it shows or quotes – like John’s Wife by Robert Coover – in the same kaleidoscopic way hundred...more...]]> 5 2 false false Wed Mar 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Feb 03 09:27:45 -0800 2009 Wed Mar 11 08:20:05 -0700 2009 more...]]>