I was introduced to Julio Cortazar in a class I didn't really want to take entitled "Latin American Literature." It wasn't that I necessarily didn't want to take the class since it contained a number of modern Latin American works of literature that I have come to appreciate and laud, but mostly because a schedule conflict kept me from taking the Medieval Language and Literature class (sometimes I feel like I would have decided to be a medievalist much earlier. Drat). I will fess up to the fact that I have only read one story out of this collection but it leads me to a very interesting issue in teaching literature.
The text assigned for the class was Cortazar's story "Blow Up" which is a postmodern foray into the concept of our perception of time as understood through a photograph (really, that's the best I can do to sum it up). This story was one of those that I'm sure we've all encountered where we read it through a few times yet it still doesn't seem to make sense. The ensuing class discussion subsequently revealed an interpretation that I hadn't even considered and probably wouldn't have if not for the professor's suggestions. After class I went back to read the story again and still found that the consensus at which the class had arrived still presented some problems. It was not until recently, ironically after a great deal of experience with the varied presentations of language in Medieval Literature that I have arrived at some explanation for my confusion.
It is a common oversight in English classrooms to ignore the linguistic heritage of a text. This is not always an intentional oversight and is often simply done as a result of time or contextual constraints. Cortazar, obviously, wrote his original text in Spanish but since Latin American Lit. was essentially an English class we worked exclusively with translations. I find it somewhat interesting that despite our professor being mainly teacher of Spanish classes (she taught this class since she was still connected with the rather broad Department of Literature, Journalism, and Modern Languages) she had a tendency to present the texts read for the class as authoritative and unfortunately ignored the idea that despite the editor's best efforts there is no one-to-one transmission of a text from a different language and the class, especially in light of our postmodern course canon, may have suffered from this oversight.
As a medievalist I must be constantly aware of the effects of translation upon our reading of the text. I've read multiple translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and each offers a very different reading. Thinking in terms of texts which I will be teaching this coming fall I am quite aware of the undergraduate students difference in response to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (or 'Heaneywulf' as it is known in some medieval circles) and other more academic translations. As an undergraduate I read Heaney's version and must admit that despite its anachronism, Heaney's translation does do significantly more to excite the literary tastes of the medieval novice.
To bring the discussion back to Cortazar I find that, in retrospect, the language and imagery that I may have seen as lofty artistic flourishes or intentional ambiguities may actually be confusions caused by the shift from Spanish to English rather than deficiencies in my own understanding. In either case Cortazar's short fiction is challengingly abstract but I feel that, had my classroom context been cognizant of translation issues I may have felt a bit less belittled by the text. Hopefully such a mindset will help in my own classrooms.
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Cortazar, Julio. Blow Up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: Pantheon, 1967.
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