The One Before

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Soon after completing the translation you are about to read, I was invited to speak at a conference on Saer in Buenos Aires. The panel was titled, rather provocatively, “Is It Possible to Translate Juan José Saer?”

I leave this question for the reader to judge. What I can say with certainty is that Saer’s writing generally, and The One Before in particular, is deeply concerned with the theme of translation and its limits. This includes, of course, a few examples of straightforward linguistic translation, as in the case of Filipillo, the young indigenous man conscripted as a translator for the Spanish conquistadors in “The Interpreter.” More often, however, Saer’s concern with translation is manifest in larger questions about the possibility of representing human experience in any language. Stories like “On Dry Shore,” “The Lookalike,” and “Friends” speak to his hope that writing would be adequate to the task of preserving a particular moment or a particular perspective on the world. Others suggest profound doubt about the ability of language to capture these moments, and the sneaking suspicion that the coherence imposed on human memory by the narrative form is, at bottom, a mirage.

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