THE FATE OF ULYSSES IN SPANISH (J.

Salas Subirat)

JUAN JOS SAER






One afternoon in 1967, the author of this article was present at the following scene: Borges, who had
traveled to Santa Fe to talk about Joyce, was chatting animatedly in a cafe with a small group of young
writers who had come to interview him before the conference. All of a sudden, he remembered that in the
forties he had been invited to join a committee that wanted to translate Ulysses collectively. Borges said
the committee met weekly to discuss the preliminaries of this monumental task that the best
anglicistas of Buenos Aires planned to undertake. But one day, after almost a year of weekly discussion,
one of the commission members arrived brandishing a huge book and shouted, "a translation of Ulysses,
just published". Borges, laughed heartily at this incident, and even though he had never read it (and
probably neither the original) he concluded: "And the translation was very bad." Then one of the
young writers who were listening said, "Maybe, but if so, then Seor Salas Subirat is the greatest writer in
Spanish language."
This response suggests the position towards translation within the literary circle of young Argentine
writers during the fifties and sixties. The 815 pages book was published in 1945 by the publish house
Santiago Rueda de Buenos Aires, which also published the Portrait of the Artist translated by Alfonso
Donated (read Damaso Alonso). The catalog of the publisher also includes many other big names like
Faulkner, Dos Passos, Svevo, Proust, Nietzsche - not to mention the complete works of Freud in 18
volumes translated by Ortega y Gasset. In the late fifties, these books circulated widely among those who
were interested in literary, philosophical and cultural issues of the twentieth century, and were truly the
indispensable books of any good library.

Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat (an inaccurate initial that gave the name a mysterious connotation) appear all
the time in conversations, scattered amongst their endless spoken discoveries that were unclarified:
anyone with enthusiasm towards narrative, between 18 and 30 year old, in Santa Fe, Paran, Rosario and
Buenos Aires, knew them by heart and could quoted line by line. Many writers of the generation from the
fifties-sixties learned most of their narrative techniques and acquired their resources from this
translation. The reason is very simple: the turbulent river of Joycean prose, to be translated into Spanish
by a man from Buenos Aires, dragging with it the living matter of speech, that no other author -
perhaps apart from Roberto Arlt - had been able to use with such ingenuity, accuracy and freedom. The
lesson from this study is clear: the language of every day was the source of energy that fertilized the most
universal of literature.
Despite being the first, one might not be granted the merit of the feat based on its intrinsic value; however
this act is sure to expose one to the two faces of danger that usually belong to the two sides of the same
coin: biased criticism and pillaging. Such is the fate (that a few, with reluctance, are beginning to amend
some time ago) of the extraordinary work of Salas Subirat. It is unacceptable that the
person who attempted a second translation of Ulysses into Spanish claims to be unaware that the former
exists; and this seems to have been the attitude of Professor Valverde, who pays a (justifiable)
compliment in the 46 pages of his preface to the version reproduced by Damaso Alonso, but does not say
a word about Subirat Salas's translation. Comparing the two versions it is clear that the sole reason for
this decision lies in Valverde's obsession of not wanting to resemble the previous translation. No serious
translator of Ulysses can ignore any longer the first and second translation (this is the honest approach
adopted by the authors of the third, Francisco Garca Tortosa and Mara Luisa Venegas), and
such awareness implies that these translations will always serve as necessary references. However, when
Valverde's version appeared with a kind of contemptuous righteousness, it seems to imply that the
second translation finally arrived to repair the unspeakable ineptness of the first. On the internet, the
natural homeland of the absurd, amongst various aberrations relating to the first version of Ulysses, also
mentioned the epitome of the subject matter, the product of a vulgar commercial transaction [this portion
is translated by Kinquinto 1 ]: the massacre by a man called Chamorro in 1996, who corrected "up to 50
%" of Subirat Salas's version, accusing it of failing, amongst other things, "on the colloquialism of Buenos
Aires spoken by the locals" as if an Englishman from London has pretentiously translated the bulk of
colloquialisms and slangs from Dublin in the original by Joyce, into the language of Oxford. From this act
of piracy, fifty-one years after the book first appeared in Buenos Aires, one cannot help but observed that
"it is in some ways a repetition of the translation of Salas".

A work by the writer Eduardo Lago compares the three authentic translations (the act of Chamorro's
vandalism is wisely discarded) without giving any one of three a perfect and final score - moreover, it
would be rash to judge any of the translation that appears excellent. Impartial and meticulous, comparing
different passages of text, Lago noticed in the three versions what could already be observed in the first
two: the authors had resolved with relative success the difficulties encountered . The purpose of a
translation is not to display the erudition of the author, or knowledge of the original language (which are
certainly necessary but not primary conditions to undertake the work) but to incorporate a living text to
the targeted language. In each epoch, just like in each linguistic field, it is evident that new translations of
classic texts are required, but this does not demand a denigration of the former.
Jose Salas Subirat, neither Catalan nor Chilean (like how certain literary journalism claimed to disclose,
with the usual vagueness, more than once) was born in Buenos Aires on November 23, 1900 and died in
Florida , a local town, on May 29, 1975. He is buried in the cemetery of Olives. He was self-taught and
worked, amongst other things, as an insurance agent, and wrote for his job a book titled Life Insurance:
Theory and Practice. Information Analysis was published in 1944 - a year before he completed the
translation of Ulysses. In the fifties, he published self-help books like The Struggle for Success and The
Secret of Concentration, and an open letter about existentialism that James Wheel included in his catalog.
However, he has also written social novels and articles in anarchist and socialist press of the thirties, and
a book of poems Signaler.


Published in the supplement " Babelia " of El Pais (12 -Jun- 04)
http://elpais.com/diario/2004/06/12/babelia/1086997822_850215.html
and in Trabajos (2005) titled J. Salas Subirat

Translated by Justin Loke
(1 April, 2014)