The Translated Library

by Ivan Parra Garcia

When I was a kid in Bogotá, I liked to look up at the sky whenever an aircraft was flying over our house and wondered where it was flying to and if the passengers could see me gazing at them. My father and I lived with many people in a small house close to the airport. My aunts and uncles also lived there. My father and I slept in the same room, and every night I’d lie awake in my bed reading the German tales of Janosch in Spanish translation. They might have been the first translated stories that I read. From all the stories and conversations between Little Tiger and Little Bear, I still remember a Letter for Tiger when Little Bear and Little Tiger invented the letter post, the airmail, and the telephone. 

My bed was behind my father’s desk chair. He’d sit at his desk writing, trying to figure out a mathematical problem, or perhaps, preparing his math lesson for the next day. That’s what he’d do until late at night—just a glass of water and a metal lamp on his work desk. The rest of the wood surface would be filled with yellow papers, notes, and some books scattered here and there. Our room would be silent, and the light faint. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles would be already asleep, for they woke up early, left to go to work, and returned home late at night. The shadows of my father’s head and body would protrude amorphously from the walls. Once in a while, he’d turn his back, direct his gaze towards me and say, “It’s too late, close the book and go to sleep.”

Maybe, because our house was a few miles away from the international airport, I developed this fascination with airplanes. They were part of our daily life. When I woke up, the first sound I heard was the engine of a plane getting ready to land or perhaps starting its ascent into the sky. Every night there was an 11pm departure to a distant place; I knew it was a distant place because it was a massive plane, and I liked to look at it through my window. The sound of the plane didn’t bother my father. He would keep working on his mathematical problems. My grandmother used to be afraid that a plane could crash into our roof. Her fear wasn’t unfounded. The neighborhood had seen a few small planes crash in the past. In 2015 a small plane crashed a few blocks away from our house, killing five people. Nonetheless, my grandmother still lives in the same place, and I can only imagine she will die in her house.

The first time I saw an international airplane taking off, I might have been twelve or thirteen years old, when my best friend and I decided to ride our bikes to the airport. We knew about a pasture close to one of the airstrips from where we could see big 747s taking off. We returned there on weekends for many years and imagined ourselves traveling to unknown places far from home, places like Australia, Argentina, China or Japan. There is something mysterious about travelers. Looking at people walking across the halls of airports ignites my imagination. That might be the reason why I so relish spending time in airport lounges. We are in transit. Anything can happen. A delay, an upgrade, an encounter. An opportunity to hear a story from an unknown place or culture, to hear people talking in other languages.

On a few occasions, I’ve found myself immersed in conversations with travelers. On an overnight layover in Ciampino, in Rome, I met a woman from Brno who told me about her life in Galicia as a student, her doubts about marrying her Spanish boyfriend, and her family’s disapproval of their relationship. I listened. As time passed, I became more interested in her life in Brno. She told me about the Špilberk Castle built in the 13th century, which later would become a prison in the Austrian Empire; and about the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul - a national monument of which her family is proud. She recommended I try the pork, cabbage, and dumplings if I ever visited Brno. She translated a small portion of her life and her culture. Our conversation was ephemeral. However, sometimes I still wonder if she got married, remained in Santiago de Compostela, or returned to her hometown, following her family wishes.

I may remember this conversation for a reason, and it’s my father’s fascination with Central and Eastern European literature. Her story about her family in Brno reminded me of Bohumil Hrabal, who was born in Brno and became one of our favorite writers. Hrabal's books had a special place in our translated library at home. The first book my father bought from Hrabal was I Served the King of England from 1971, and I can’t remember how many times he had read it before he recommended it to me. I recall witnessing my father leaving the house every morning with this book under his arm. It became some sort of bible for us. Maybe it was because of the advice that Ditie, the main character, receives from a salami scale sales clerk, the same direction that my father would repeat to me before I left Colombia: “Just remember…if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful.” We collected all of Hrabal’s translated books and became fascinated with his stories. He is considered a novelist, but today I read him as an essayist who writes fiction, like Borges, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, or Yoko Tawada. One of my most cherished books was Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, which tells Milos Hrma’s story of a train dispatcher in the Czech Republic during the Nazi occupation. With wit and fantasy, he tries to make sense of the brutality of his times as he witnesses trains coming and going, and it’s the only book from our library that I took with me when I left Colombia for the United States.

From all the German-speaking authors that we had in our translated library, maybe it’s Stefan Zweig who had the most lasting impact on my vision of the transnational status of many writers. The contradictions in his career have always fascinated me. He was loved by readers and loathed by critics. Zweig was the most translated European author in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. According to the translator Benjamin Moser, "By the 1920s, millions of copies of his books had been published in Europe and America, and he became the most translated author in the world." However, Zweig was always considered a second-class author without the philosophical or artistic shrewdness of other German-speaking writers such as Thomas Mann. A critic called his books "railway carriage reading." Even Zweig seems to repeat this disdain when talking about the burning of his books in the Babelplatz in 1933. Zweig was honored to be "permitted to share this fate of the destruction of literary existence in German with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own." Throughout his keen understanding of the psychology of his characters and his experience of two world wars, Zweig developed a commitment to cosmopolitanism, respect for the multiplicity of worldviews, and loathing of racism and nationalism.

One year ago, I read his unfinished biography, Michele de Montaigne. Written in Brazil after fleeing Nazi Germany, Zweig explores and feels connected to the way Montaigne experienced and resisted the religious intolerance of the XVI century. Both Montaigne and Zweig shared a constant preoccupation with the growth of fanaticism and lack of dialogue. They wanted to escape the cycle of violence and hatred generated by an overconfident attitude towards ideas and beliefs. For the film director, Maria Schrader, the problem for Zweig came from the fact that he was a “master of all the different shades of gray” and found himself living in an era in “which only black and white existed, in which differentiation was becoming increasingly impossible.” The same might be said of Montaigne who found in the complexity of the world and the self the material to write his essays. Witnessing religious wars and a plague, Montaigne retired from public life and started to write his Essays. Witnessing a different kind of war, Stefan Zweig escaped to Brazil but committed suicide before finishing his biography on Montaigne.

Susan Bassnett says the translator-as-traveler brings news from faraway places to us. I like to think of translated libraries as airports for decentering us both culturally and geographically. That might be our greatest debt to our translated libraries. Airports can be threatening places, depending on our passport, origin, or destination. But, in airports we are confronted with the unknown, and the more we engage with that which we don’t know the more our worldview might be challenged and honed. Along with our beloved Latin American authors, my father and I liked to escape to farther geographies and historical times whose authors’ world views were utterly different from ours. Airports, as translated libraries, can become liberating spaces, a way to let loose from certainties and loyalties. They challenge us. They tell us that the world is complex, heterogeneous and marvelous despite what ideologues and sectarians make us want to believe.