The Brooklyn Rail

The phrase for brainstorm in Spanish, “lluvia de ideas,” differs slightly from the English and is perhaps a more accurate representation of the process of allowing ideas to rush to mind steadily, if a bit chaotically, like precipitation. I thought of the distinction between the idioms—the English-language one implying a violent disturbance—when reading Blanca Gago and Ignacio Caballero’s Spanish translation of poet and artist Madeline Gins’s essential novel WORD RAIN (1969). WORD RAIN follows a reader in the act of reading, while resisting distractions. Beyond the plot, the book is an innovative book object as much as a doggedly anti-illusionist experiment that dispenses with the novel’s conventional elements in order to track the workings, and trappings, of the act of reading.

From the onset of the novel, Gins plays with the doubling effect of the I by slipping in and out of the pronoun and occasionally distancing herself by using the third person, thereby producing a narrator/protagonist who mirrors the author and, like her, is also engaged in reading. Narrator/protagonist is presumably reading an assortment of books whose language lifts off the page and gathers in the atmosphere like mist. Fully immersed in it, she lets words wash over her. By the end of the book, she’s finished a number of volumes from whose endings she quotes generously: Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Samuel Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and many more. The book’s last page is an illegible wall of superimposed language followed by the claim that “the body is composed 98% of water.” It also claims that the final page contains every word in WORD RAIN. Isolated words and phrases can be read amid the jumble of letter forms: “rostrum,” “platform,” “ropy gas fibers,” “little birthday party.” The translation reproduces the visual composition, making the Spanish words for these terms the only legible ones on the page as well.

The book’s fragmentary, self-reflexive and anti-mimetic nature make it, for the most part, pleasingly translatable, including those delightfully intriguing “ropy gas fibers.” An entire passage, for instance, consists of definitions of words: “A name is the way someone or something is called. A human is an animal which can recognize itself. Being is an alert substance (or a suggestion of this).” Of course, things get tricky with word play. Section A of chapter 9, titled “Mist and Flood / Evaporating Endings,” for example, begins with the sentences: “i entered the m(i)st. i started (i)odine. i filled f(i)ll. i make h(i)m. i am always (i)n. (So what).” It might seem impossible to come up with analogous statements in a language other than English, where each sentence accurately describes the placement of the letter “i” within the verbs in the sequence. The first-person pronoun “yo” only rarely appears as a syllable of Spanish-language words, so the translation instead centers on the letter “e,” replicating the meaning of the original: “en la bruma me ad(e)ntré. el yodo emp(e)cé. lleno rell(e)né. lo hice a (é)l. siempre estoy (e)n. (Y qué)” This solution only partially works, since the slippage between “i,” the letter, and “I” the pronoun—what makes the sentences so punchy in English—is sacrificed.

Needless to say, compromises are inevitable in translation. Gains are much rarer, and when they appear, they more than compensate for losses. In this regard, the elegance with which LLUVIA DE PALABRAS announces itself as the offspring, or the Benjaminian afterlife, of the book object WORD RAIN is exquisite. Take the formulas: in the original, combinations of words are synthesized into complex formulas. In LLUVIA DE PALABRAS, the translators have made the equations applicable to their version of the text, so that, for instance, in the first example that appears in the book, a given paragraph has seventy-three Spanish words instead of the seventy in the original. The translation’s cover offers another proof of the translators’ rigorous handling of the book’s materiality. In the original, it functions almost like a visual koan: it consists of a photographic reproduction of the same book, but with a blank cover, at a smaller scale, as if it were stacked atop it. The text on the spines of the book and its image are identical, both spelling WORD RAIN. I like to think of the book’s double as the one folded into the narrative, as the one the author reads as she is in the process of writing the novel. LLUVIA DE PALABRAS, on the other hand, has not one but two increasingly smaller reproductions of the edition’s otherwise blank book cover. The spines in the image show WORD RAIN at the top of the stacked copies and LLUVIA DE PALABRAS below it, signaling that Gago and Caballero have folded the original as well as the version they produced into their version of Gins’s novel.

I’m left with a question to which I don’t have an answer. As the book’s protagonist approaches the end of her account of reading the many books from whose endings she quotes, it’s unclear if the translators retranslated these passages or sourced them, as Gins did, from existing, published versions. Since the most consistent approach would have been to follow the aim of WORD RAIN, aim to blur the differences between reading and writing by incorporating actual quotations from published Spanish versions of the books in question, I suspect that is what they have done whenever possible. The best translations never just transfer meaning from one language to another, but rather recreate procedures to produce often different, yet equivalent, results. Concrete poet Haroldo de Campos preferred to call these types of works transcreations. Judging by its cover, LLUVIA DE PALABRAS is resoundingly one of them.