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As mentioned, the hero of the Old West
portion of Un martes is the great-grandfather of
two of the novel’s central characters, one
Francisco Videgaray, who flees his wealthy
family’s hacienda in Mexico, ultimately landing
in a ramshackle hotel in a small Western town.
Upon arrival, he heads directly to the hotel’s
bar, the word for which in the parlance of the
time, according to Hendrickson, would have
been “cantina,” not “saloon” or “bar.” This
because of the heavy influence of Spanish in the
territory (“cantina,” in fact, comes from the
Italian.) (Moliner 500). Adams, by comparison,
includes both “cantina” and “saloon” in his
dictionary. The website “Legends of America”
also has an extensive section about “saloons”
and their attributes. 3 In the end, I chose cantina
because I wanted to underscore the presence of
Spanish in the Old West due to its proximity to
Mexico and the overlap of territories before the
Spanish-American War.
The word “whiskey” posed different
problems in that there were so many different
terms for it. My only guidance was a conviction
that most terms wouldn’t be appropriate in that
they contained references to particular Indian
tribes or ingredients. I thus shied away from
words like “firewater,” 4 both because it had a
more specific meaning and because I was saving
the clichéd-sounding language for the action
sequences. In the end, I settled on the more
general “liquor” and “rotgut.” It was for similar
reasons that I gravitated toward more expected
words like “barkeep” and “bartender” instead of
the more garish, if authentic, terms like “bar
dog” (Hendrickson 16). Interestingly, in the
novel Urbina uses “cantinero,” even though the
bar isn’t called a “cantina” but a “barra.”
The terminology of gambling is of course
closely related to that of drinking, because
practitioners of the latter were frequently also
practitioners of the former. Francisco is in fact a
consummate gambler. Indeed, it was his love of
cards, and even more than that cheating at cards,
that drove him from his family’s hacienda in the
first place. He therefore lived in constant fear of
being revealed as a swindler.
16 Translation Review
He was conscious of the fact that his gun
wasn’t just some erotic decoration, that it
had a use. But then if things got ugly, if one
of the rival players that [he] routinely bilked
put up a genuine fuss, what good would that
little thing do [him]? (153)
According to Hendrickson, “bilked” was the
most common term for cheating at the time (22).
Here I rejected the term “fleeced,” which,
although it does date to the late 1500s,
according to the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary,
was not precisely associated with gambling.
“Wrangling” (Hendrickson 250) was one of
the most popular terms to describe informal
barroom fighting at the time. Indeed, Francisco
finds himself confronted by just such a
circumstance when he cheats a notorious
gambler by the name of Four-Aces Jack. This
was a scene replete with opportunities to employ
period language for violence and law
enforcement. Four-Aces Jack challenges
Francisco to a “shoot-out” (Hendrickson 210)
that subsequently attracts the attention of local
law enforcement. Here again there was a great
temptation, especially since this descriptive
language occurred in such close proximity to an
action sequence, to use an authentic term like
“law dog” (Hendrickson 146) or “great seizer”. 5
Yet “sheriff” still seemed the most appropriate,
particularly in that Urbina uses the English word
in the original text. She explained why in one of
our correspondences:
I used sheriff because the equivalent in
Mexico would be (I think) “alguacil,” but
nobody would think of that when picturing a
Western scene; after all, all the images about
the Old West come from films, and the term
“sheriff” just pops up naturally, even in
Spanish. If one were talking about a story of
the West in Spanish, one would say “el
malvado sheriff” or “el valiente sheriff,” but
never anything else (e-mail).
I’m Not Gonna Hit Ya, Pilgrim
In the end, it was the dialogue and action
sequences that allowed, dare I say demanded,
the cliché-ridden language that peppers David’s