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knowledge of authentic Western language and
customs? The notion was at least plausible, yet
subsequent investigations into the character of
David yielded a range of evidence that he was
no scholar of 19th-century America.
First, there is David’s background. He is a
Mexican man in his late 30s who works as a
paper mill executive. Though it is true that he
spent most of his formative years living in
America, there is nothing in Un martes to
suggest that he passed them poring over Old
West anthropological texts. Rather, his exposure
to the Old West would most likely have come
via movies, television shows, and novels. Then
there is the tale itself, which as previously
mentioned is highly cinematic, festooned with
Western clichés. This strongly indicated that
most of David’s experience of the American Old
West has come to him via popular culture. Thus
was I tempted at one point to swing entirely in
the opposite direction when translating his Old
West tale: toward ultratrite, cliché-riddled
language. Yet there was a mitigating factor that
precluded such crude methodology: David’s
motivations.
David is not setting out to create a comic
epic. He is not trying to be “kitschy.” In fact,
what he is attempting to do is compose a
narrative that could plausibly pass for, and
conceivably become, a permanent piece of
Márgara and Camila’s family history: their
great-grandfather’s “missing years,” about
which no one else in the family has any
information. Thus the previously cited appeal to
his fictional “source,” designed to lend authority
to the story he is preparing to tell. Had David
ever studied or had access to true-to-life details
about the Old West, there is no doubt in my
mind he would have used them, for he is
desperate to give the appearance of authority,
yet all he knows has been mediated by popular
culture. The voice I was tasked with creating for
his tale, then, was one that was neither
rigorously authentic nor wildly exaggerated.
Some midpoint would have to be reached.
In Search of an Inauthentic Authenticity
How then to construct a style of dialogue
that was on the one hand phony, yet had the ring
of truth (or at least a ring that was true enough
to suspend the disbelief of neophytes like
Márgara and Camila)? A rough taxonomy of
language, I decided, was the first order of
business.
In general, I found that the cowboy
language in Un martes como hoy belonged to
four broad categories: saloon jargon, gambling
words, terminology for violence and law
enforcement, and common expressions. All
were rendered in Spanish in the original text
(Urbina chose not to leave them in their original
English, with one exception for the sake of
authenticity), which required that I retranslate
them back into English. Of these four
categories, I determined that the first three were
employed largely in scene-setting: place
descriptions, object descriptions, and to a lesser
extent character descriptions. These were critical
to creating a believable sense of “place” within
which the less plausible aspects of the tale,
primarily the dialogue and action, would occur.
Thus, when it came to “scene-setting” language,
I largely sought out reference tools that stayed
true to the period. Of these, the most helpful
were Robert Hendrickson’s Happy Trails: A
Dictionary of Western Expressions and Western
Words: A Dictionary of the American West by
Ramon Adams.
For the action and dialogue, however, my
primary sources were popular culture. I sought
to glean as much as I could from the language
and customs of such Western films as
Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance. Thus, in the end, I arrived at a
translation methodology that was the direct
inversion of Sanford Meisner’s famous dictum
that good acting is “living truthfully under
imaginary circumstances.” 2 For me, translating
David’s Old West portion of Un martes was an
exercise in creating realistic circumstances in
which imaginary, dare I say even absurd, action
and dialogue would occur. The subsequent text
provides a window into some of my decisionmaking
processes.
Translation Review 15