Ten – Juan Emar

[New Directions; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

The writer’s life can be a lonely one in many respects. One of these is the loneliness of having work published but no one bothering to read or engage with it. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that a writer must be willing to “work always without applause.” Yet what happens when a writer’s output is ignored by the critical crowd, and what does this “silence” indicate about the value of their art? In Juan Emar’s case, not a damn thing.

Chilean novelist and critic Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi (1893–1964) wrote novels, travelogs, short stories, and sketches under the pen name Juan Emar, a play on the French phrase j’en ai marre—“I’m fed up.” Fed up with what, exactly? If it is with being ignored (forgotten?) by a larger audience, then Megan McDowell’s latest translation makes it difficult for that to happen again.

In an introduction to the 1971 edition of Emar’s Diez (Ten), Nobel Laureate and poet Pablo Neruda described Juan Emar as a “lazy man who worked all his life.” The timeline of Emar’s output certainly suggests this to be the case: He published four books in three years (1935–37), managing to condense decades of work, if not a lifetime, into this small window, then seemingly fell off the face of the earth. His final book, Diez, or Ten, was met with silence. In the 1980s, Chilean scholars pored over more than one hundred articles and found no mention of Emar’s final published work, a collection of very odd short stories. The silence may have provoked feelings of failure similar to those of Franz Kafka, another “minor” writer whose work went unrecognized while he was alive.

Thankfully, Emar was reevaluated at the turn of the last century—much to our benefit today. His funky, surreal, and flat-out weird stories were given their critical due, though for the most part only in Spanish. Up until October 2024, only a few of his stories—along with McDowell’s translation of Emar’s novel Yesterday—existed in English. With a new release by New Directions, Emar’s short story collection Ten now appears in English in its entirety for the first time since its publication in Chile in 1937. Though his work is steeped in surrealism and modernism, Emar is seldom discussed within their respective contexts or within the larger discussion of world literature, the latter of which does include other Chilean writers influenced by Emar’s work: Pablo Neruda, César Aira, Alejandro Zambra. McDowell’s translations of Emar into English are the bridge connecting the Anglophone world to the surreal Latin America of Juan Emar.

In “On the Problem of Translation,” Friedrich Nietzsche observes that the Romans viewed translation as a means of conquering, appropriating, or co-opting a text. In this same essay, Nietzsche declares that even well-meaning translations amount to nothing but “forgeries.” We do well to ask ourselves about the politics of translation, and whether translation is in fact a form of violence or degradation. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the old Italian adage traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor) rings true in most cases, but it certainly does not apply to McDowell. McDowell strikes a delicate balance between faithfulness to the source material and the inherently creative act of translation, a process which Octavio Paz believed created a work of art that was similar—not identical—to the original. McDowell’s rendition of Emar’s prose reflects the surreal quality of his stories without stifling them. Though I will admit that reading in the original language almost always provides a better experience, McDowell’s translation of Ten brings the reader as close as possible to the Spanish, only moving away to “follow it more closely,” as Paz suggests in “Translation: Literature and Letters.” A good translator must be willing to engage not only with the intended meaning of a particular word or phrase, but also with its potential for many meanings and which meanings may need to be sacrificed in order to transpose a text into a new language.

McDowell demonstrates this mastery in the first sentence of “The Green Bird,” a story about a dead parrot coming to life to murder the narrator’s uncle. Emar’s opening sentence reads this way:

Alla por el año de 1847, un grupo de sabios franceses llegaba en la goleta La Gosse a la desembocadura del Amazonas.

McDowell renders this sentence thus:

Back in the year of 1847, a group of French scholars sailed aboard the schooner La Gosse to the mouth of the Amazon River.

My interest is in Emar’s use of the word sabios. A more literal translation of this word would be to render sabios as wisemen. However, this “faithful” translation of sabios does not work from a stylistic standpoint, nor does it capture what Emar means by sabios. The context surrounding the sabios’ project (a study of tropical flora and fauna) and their eventual presentation of research at a French university suggest that sabios is perhaps best translated as scholars, which is precisely the move that McDowell makes in her translation. Some may criticize her choice of scholars, arguing it is too far a move away from Emar’s sabios, which might also be translated as sages, a word with mythical and mystical connotations that may enrich a reading of “The Green Bird.” However, such a choice would obscure the tension between reason and madness inherent in Emar’s story. A logical, reasonable, scientific man finds the parrot who, in turn, is the source of madness, incoherence, and incommensurability for its second owner. Beneath the veil of reason placed delicately over “The Green Bird,” we find things that cannot and will not be explained. McDowell defies the reality of translation and aptly presents the sur-reality of Juan Emar to a new generation of readers.

Juan Emar’s Ten cannot be described as anything except odd. Ten is divided into four sections of varied length (“Four Animals,” “Three Women,” “Two Places,” “One Vice”), and each story is weirder than the last. Undead parrots, stodgy uncles, sex-crazed tyrants, and murderous gorgonic cats are the protagonists and antagonists of Emar’s stories. Even Emar’s prose illustrates this idiosyncrasy—the narrator of “Damned Cat” is prone to rambling and interjections, aware that he is writing, and we are reading. He interjects descriptions of the environment with sentences like: “And I think that’s enough about the temperature of that splendorous morning,” and spends as much time telling the story as he does explaining it, both to himself and to us. All the stories are written in the first person, and many of them read like impressionistic journal entries, with Emar inserting himself into the narrative, blurring the line between reality and sur-reality, echoing in many ways the work of another towering South American: Jorge Luis Borges.

It is interesting to note that Ten begins and ends with alcohol: The events of the first story, “The Green Bird,” only transpire because of heavy drinking, and the final story is titled quite simply “The Vice of Alcohol,” in which, through poetic, repetitive prose, Emar explores bottomless appetites for alcohol and sex. In “The Green Bird,” the characters’ obsession with the color green calls to mind images of absinthe—that seductive, allegedly hallucinatory drink that Emar must have enjoyed while in the company of the Parisian dadaists and surrealists that informed his work. Alcohol got Emar and his readers into this mess. Surely, it can also get them out.

My personal favorite, if it has not become apparent, is the opening story, “The Green Bird,” in which Emar treats time as fluid, malleable, and distorted. The first pages of “The Green Bird” cover 113 years, one month, and one week between the birth of the titular parrot and the fictional Juan Emar’s recollections of the God-forsaken bird. In that time, the parrot is born, adopted by a French academic, moved to Europe and, after its death, taxidermied, purchased by Emar’s drunken friends and gifted to him, who takes the parrot back to South America to live on the wall of his private study. He condenses more than a century into a little less than three pages, and yet later stretches the climax, which happens in an instant, over four pages. For both the fictional and “real” Emar, the “one minute and eight seconds” that it takes the undead parrot to batter uncle José Pedro is as significant as the century between himself and the green bird’s birth. Emar shrinks lifetimes into mere sentences in a manner similar to Marcel Proust. His prose—at once lively, erudite, and violent—mirrors the subject matter of his stories and makes him one of the most interesting writers that Latin America has produced.

What makes him most remarkable to me, however, is his synthesis of European aesthetics within a Latin American context. It is well-known that European surrealism and modernism appropriated elements of African art and the art of the Americas. I appreciate Emar’s writing—and McDowell’s wonderful translation—because it is in his work that we can discover the possibilities of a literature that both resists and reconciles the European tradition with the rest of the world. It is in writers like Emar that we can find what Goethe called a Weltliteratur—a World Literature–and a Latin American tradition which, like Emar’s parrot, has vigorously and defiantly come back to life.

The oddity of his prose and the accident of his recovery beg the following question: Who the hell is Juan Emar for? Answer: for those enamored with the grotesque and surreal; for readers interested in other flavors of modernism; and anyone who, like Juan Emar—j’en ai marre—is “fed up” with the same old stories about Latin American fiction and is looking for something new.

Alex Ramirez-Amaya is a writer and doctoral student in the Department of English at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta with his wife.