Javier Marías’s Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov by Gareth J. Wood (review)

Mr. Wood has written an outstanding book, one I would recommend to every eighteenth-century scholar although Sterne is the only figure discussed from that century. The primary lesson to be garnered from it is that across cultures and centuries, genius talks to genius with far more understanding and usefulness than is produced by the modern critical tendency to belittle past achievements by measuring them against our own considerably better wisdom.

Javier Marías (b. 1951) is a very fine Spanish author who began his literary career as a translator of English literature—a discipline at the heart of his own creative work. In addition to Sterne, Browne, and Nabokov, Marías translated, among others, Conrad, Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, R. L. Stevenson, Faulkner, and Dinesen, but Mr. Wood confines himself to a demonstration of “how Marías’s prose style and imaginative vocabulary were formed in dialogue with Sterne, Browne, and Nabokov as he rewrote their works in his own language. His example offers proof of [George] Steiner’s claim that the translator ‘enriches his tongue by allowing the source language to penetrate and modify it.”’ Marías has often acknowledged this debt to translation, although modestly avoiding its greatest contribution: his own writings fully demonstrate that the best authors are also the best readers of the inherited canon—translation taught him to read with infinite care the authors whose company he keeps.

In a move reminiscent of Pope’s interrupting his own poetic output in order to translate Homer, Marías spent four years (1974–1978) dedicated almost exclusively to his translation of Tristram Shandy, for which he received in 1979 the Premio Nacional de Traducción. The 1980s saw his translation of numerous works by Thomas Browne; indeed, for the first twenty years of his literary career, translation dominated his output. Mr. Wood’s account of these years (beginning under Franco’s rule) is rich with implications for our own era, in that Marías’s initial “aversion to all things Spanish was shaped by a process of official indoctrination” that necessitated political goals in one’s writing. His choice of authors to translate seems to have taken this aversion into account, not only as a linguist avoiding popularization (“his stance on translation is unapologetically elitist”) but in his choice of authors: “I think that what we should try to do is maintain the well-founded idea that not everything is equal, that there are works of art and just works.” For Marías, Sterne was not only a stylistic challenge but as well a writer who defied indoctrination and authority without losing sight of the most important reason for that defiance: a revulsion against certainties about things unknowable and unknown. Others in Spain saw this as well; it is no accident that Shandy was not translated into Spanish until 1975, the year of Franco’s death, and then again in 1976, and finally Marías’s in 1978. Juan Goytisolo’s great satiric fiction, Juan sin tierra, was another 1975 publication; the author has acknowledged Sterne’s obvious influence.

Marías could not do so much translating without developing some theoretical stances, the most interesting of which is the desire to “retain the foreignness of an alien text.” Mr. Wood demonstrates this and other practices by a very careful analysis of specific passages, showing, for example, how Marías forces Spanish syntax in order to imitate Sterne’s own rhythm, or introduces an uncommon grammatical pause, recognizing, as have all those attempting to touch a vein of humor, the importance of timing. Equally difficult for translating Sterne is the double entendre. At times, they are almost impossible to capture, but Marías guides the reader by pointing in his annotations to what might not work; on the other hand, Mr. Wood recounts one moment when “language conspires almost miraculously to help the translator”: when Yorick evokes the “cock and bull” story, Marías...