I clearly recall the day I first became truly aware of myself, I mean of myself as something that everything else was not. As a boy I liked best those dead intervals of the year when one season had ended and the next had not yet begun, and all was grey and hushed and still, and out of the stillness and the hush something would seem to approach me, some small, soft, tentative thing, and offer itself to my attention. This day of which I speak I was walking along the main street of the town. It was November, or March, not cold, but neutral. From a lowering sky fine rain was falling, so fine as to be hardly felt. It was morning, and the housewives were out, with their shopping bags and headscarves. A questing dog trotted busily past me looking neither to right nor left, following a straight line drawn invisibly on the pavement. There was a smell of smoke and butcher’s meat, and a brackish smell of the sea, and, as always in the town in those days, the faint sweet stench of pig-swill. The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past. Taking in all this, I experienced something to which the only name I could give was happiness, although it was not happiness, it was more and less than happiness. What had occurred? What in that commonplace scene before me, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells of the town, had made this unexpected thing, whatever it was, burgeon suddenly inside me like the possibility of an answer to all the nameless yearnings of my life? Everything was the same now as it had been before, the housewives, that busy dog, the same, and yet in some way transfigured. Along with the happiness went a feeling of anxiety. It was as if I were carrying some frail vessel that it was my task to protect, like the boy in the story told to us in religious class who carried the Host through the licentious streets of ancient Rome hidden inside his tunic; in my case, however, it seemed I was myself the precious vessel. Yes, that was it, it was I that was happening here. I did not know exactly what this meant, but surely, I told myself, surely it must mean something. And so I went on, in happy puzzlement, under the small rain, bearing the mystery of myself in my heart.
Was it that same phial of precious ichor, still inside me, that spilled in the cinema that afternoon, and that I carry in me yet, and that yet will overflow at the slightest movement, the slightest misbeat of my heart?
Recuerdo claramente el día que me volví verdaderamente consciente de mí mismo, quiero decir de mí mismo como algo que todo lo demás no era. Cuando niño, prefería esos intervalos muertos del año cuando termina una estación y todavía no empieza la siguiente, y todo está gris y callado y quieto, y desde la quietud y el silencio algo parecía aproximarse a mí, una cosa pequeña, suave, tentativa, y se entregaba a mi atención. El día al que me refiero yo caminaba a lo largo de la calle principal del pueblo. Era noviembre, o marzo, no hacía frío, sino que estaba neutral. Desde un cielo descendiente caía una lluvia fina, tan fina que casi no se sentía. Era de mañana, y las amas de casa estaban fuera, con sus bolsas del súper y sus pañoletas. Un perro en busca de algo me rebasó trotando; no miraba ni a la derecha ni a la izquierda, seguía una línea recta dibujada de forma invisible sobre el pavimento. Había un olor a humo y a carne, y un olor salobre del mar, y, como siempre en el pueblo en esos días, al ligero hedor dulce de la bazofia para los puercos. La puerta abierta de una ferretería me exhaló su aliento castaño al pasar. Al intentar procesar todo esto, experimenté algo que sólo puedo llamar felicidad, a pesar de no ser felicidad, era más y menos que la felicidad. ¿Qué había ocurrido? ¿Qué cosa en esa escena común que se desarrollaba frente a mí, los paisajes y los sonidos y los olores ordinarios del pueblo, había hecho esta cosa inesperada, fuera lo que fuera, brotar de pronto en mi interior como la posibilidad de una respuesta a todos los anhelos sin nombre de mi vida? Todo era como antes, las amas de casa, el perro ocupado, iguales, y sin embargo había sufrido una transformación. Junto con la felicidad había un sentimiento de ansiedad. Era como si llevara una vasija frágil y fuera mi deber protegerla, como el niño en la historia que nos cuentan en la clase de catecismo que cargaba la Forma Consagrada por las calles licenciosas de la antigua Roma oculta debajo de su túnica; en cualquier caso, sin embargo, parecía que yo mismo era la preciada vasija. Sí, eso era, era yo lo que ocurría aquí. No sabía exactamente el significado de esto, pero seguramente, me dije, seguramente debía significar algo. Y así seguí mi camino, en una alegre confusión, bajo la ligera lluvia, cargando el misterio de mí mismo en mi corazón.
¿Acaso era ese mismo frasco de preciado icor, todavía dentro de mí, el que se derramó en el cine esa tarde, y que aún cargo conmigo, y que aún se desbordará al más leve movimiento, al más leve latido errado de mi corazón?
John Banville’s prose has a rhythm that is hard to reproduce; his sentences imitate a thought process, which challenges English grammar and punctuation. Some translations focus on the overall meaning of the text and pay little attention to the rhythm. In the translations I have made, I attempt to recreate in Spanish the sentence structure, the punctuation, and the repetition of words in order to convey the author’s rhythm. Another important aspect that is closely linked to the rhythm of the text is Banville’s use of lexicon. His choice of words and their order invite the readers to defamiliarize themselves with the language and question the structure of the sentences in order to create new ideas and discover subtleties of meaning.
Through his choice of words, structure, and rhythm, as well as the emphasis on the senses and the attention to detail of that which surrounds his characters, Banville transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, almost into the numinous. He extrapolates a particular experience to speak about existence itself. In doing so, he questions established systems like language itself. He is well aware of the limitations language poses; nevertheless, he makes use of its devices to expose its artifice.
In terms of the process of translation, a difficulty one comes across is the impossibility to preserve the alliteration, which gives the prose a poetry of its own. Along the same lines, one encounters complications that surface when a phrase such as “breathing brownly” is to be translated. Banville’s use of synesthesia makes his prose appeal to the senses while referring to abstract concepts; therefore, in order to transmit the reader the same feelings the text in English does, it is essential to convey the general idea of the text without neglecting the play of words as well as the appellation to the senses the author employs.
John Banville