Metaglossia: The Translation World

The death of Carlos Fuentes last week brought to mind a book and a photograph. The book is his “Myself with Others” and recounts the many borders he crossed — geographical, linguistic,...

Carlos Fuentes, who died on Tuesday at age 83, left in his wake a sorrowful Mexico, a mass of readers worldwide, and many hard-working translators. Rendering the writer was a complex task.

“The challenges were many and varied.” writes Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Spanish at Barnard College, whose translations of the Mexican literary giant include the novels Christopher Unborn, The Years with Laura Diaz, and The Death of Artemio Cruz.

“Fuentes had a huge vocabulary, spoke several languages fluently, and could concoct wordplay among all those languages,” Mac Adam says in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Sometimes he used Mexican slang (of the 1960s in particular in Christopher Unborn), which made life difficult for his translator. The important thing was to try to replicate the rhythm of his prose.”

Read more: http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/translating-fuentes/30420

Carlos Fuentes was a prolific writer -- penning novels, essays, newspaper articles, even an opera. Recognized as one of Latin America's greatest literary figures, Fuentes brought stories from Mexico to the world stage.