Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots Charles Hatfield (bio) Alicia Borinsky , Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots. Trans. Cola Franzen with the author. Foreword by Michael Wood. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 195 pp. Alicia Borinsky's Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots is a tour de force. First published in Spanish in Argentina in 1999, Low Blows is now available to English-language readers in a beautiful bilingual edition, translated by Cola Franzen in collaboration with the author, with a new Foreword by Michael Wood. Borinsky, an Argentine poet, novelist, and professor of Latin American literature at Boston University, has already established a following among readers of English for her novels Mean Woman (Nebraska, 1993), Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer (Nebraska, 1998), and All Night Movie (Northwestern, 2002). The translations are the product of a collaboration between the author and Cambridge-based translator Cola Franzen, who has developed a distinguished reputation for her translations of Spanish and Latin American writers such as Claudio Guillén, Saúl Yurkievich, and Juan Cameron. Franzen, a recipient of PEN's Gregory Kolovakos Award for her translations, has long been Borinsky's co-translator, and since the early 1990s they have produced English versions of three of Borinsky's novels. Franzen's keen understanding of Borinsky's styles and themes (already evident in her highly perceptive introduction to Mean Woman in 1993) has surely helped make possible her excellent translations of Low Blows —translations which deliberately oscillate between trying to reproduce the original and playfully riffing on it. [End Page 503] In the Prologue to Low Blows, Borinsky explains that she and Franzen worked to produce "a language as easy and flowing as the Spanish original," which means that they sometimes chose to leave aside "the most obvious and literal translation" in favor of an English text that creates some of the "same effects." In a book that plays so heavily off colloquial Spanish, literal translation would hardly ever have been an option. Franzen's gifts as a translator are on full display throughout this book as she renders expressions such as "en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo" (literally: "in a blacksmith's house, a wooden knife") as "que será, sera" for the title of a story about a fortune-teller who can't predict whether or not she will have a job next year. But rather than striving on the whole to produce a fluent, invisible, or domesticated translation, Borinsky and Franzen took advantage of the opportunity of a bilingual edition to explore "what lies in between languages," and Borinsky in her Prologue invites readers who speak both Spanish and English to approach the bilingual edition of Low Blows as a Spanish-English "hide-and-seek." Low Blows is a collection of 88 "snapshots"—short, sometimes darkly ironic, and often highly amusing satirical prose pieces about next-door neighbors, lovers, diets, jealousy, and television in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. At first the object of Borinsky's satire seems to be worn-out language and cliché, and expressions ranging from "you never know when you'll need a favor" to "Shipping Included" are the victims of Borinsky's (sometimes painfully) hilarious prose. A piece with the title "irreconcilable differences" tells the story of a "mandarin" stalking a washerwoman who secretly wanted to "caress his pointy, straight, and shiny black goatee" but feared that "he would ask her to wash his kimono and as we all know silk must be dry-cleaned." A piece titled "Mismatch" is about a woman who perfects her Italian only to weep when she discovers that her lover only likes to sing arias in German; and "love that kills" is a story about a masochist begging her lover, who is a whip-maker by trade, to give it to her just a little bit "harder please." And what is without doubt one of the most familiar lines from Latin American literature, Martí's "yo soy un hombre sincero" (literally: "I'm an honest man") turns out to be the title to a story about a man whose honesty leads him to ask his girlfriend to wipe his ass ("it wasn...