The One Before. Juan José Saer
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Praise for Juan José Saer
“[La Grande] is a daring, idiosyncratic work that examines the idea of an individual person navigating the whirl of random events that helps shape everyone’s lives.”—Kirkus Review (starred)
“The most striking element of Saer’s writing is his prose, at once dynamic and poetic. . . . It is brilliant.”—Harvard Review
“Brilliant. . . . With meticulous prose, rendered by Dolph’s translation into propulsive English, Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington captures the wildness of human experience in all its variety.”—New York Times
“What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters’ attempts to write their own narratives within its excess.”—Bookforum
“A cerebral explorer of the problems of narrative in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, of Borges, of Rulfo and Arlt, Saer is also a stunning poet of place.”—The Nation
“To say that Juan José Saer is the best Argentinian writer of today is to undervalue his work. It would be better to say that Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language.”—Ricardo Piglia
Also by Juan José Saer
The Clouds
The Event
The Investigation
La Grande
Nobody Nothing Never
Scars
The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
The Witness
Copyright © Juan José Saer, 1976
c/o Guillermo Schavelzon & Assoc., Agencia Literaria
Translation copyright © Roanne L. Kantor, 2015
Originally published in Spanish as La mayor, 1976
First edition, 2015
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-13-7
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
For Adolfo Prieto
A pilgrim’s footsteps always wander
—Luis de Góngora, Los soledades
Contents
•
A Layman’s Thoughts on Painting
The Biography of Higinio Gómez
White Hot
A Change of Residence
Veiled
The Mirror
My Name is Pigeon Garay
Memories
The Traveler
Abroad
The Scattering
The Body
On Dry Shore
Letter to the Seer
Half-Erased
The One Before
•
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Soon after completing the translation you are about to read, I was invited to speak at a conference on Saer in Buenos Aires. The panel was titled, rather provocatively, “Is It Possible to Translate Juan José Saer?”
I leave this question for the reader to judge. What I can say with certainty is that Saer’s writing generally, and The One Before in particular, is deeply concerned with the theme of translation and its limits. This includes, of course, a few examples of straightforward linguistic translation, as in the case of Filipillo, the young indigenous man conscripted as a translator for the Spanish conquistadors in “The Interpreter.” More often, however, Saer’s concern with translation is manifest in larger questions about the possibility of representing human experience in any language. Stories like “On Dry Shore,” “The Lookalike,” and “Friends” speak to his hope that writing would be adequate to the task of preserving a particular moment or a particular perspective on the world. Others suggest profound doubt about the ability of language to capture these moments, and the sneaking suspicion