Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

whippingpost (231: poste de flagelación [281]);
wickercovered (31: con tapa de mibre [42]);
and yessir (234: Sí señor [284]).
Usually Murillo’s solution is to translate
away neologistic compound words into the
conventions of the Spanish language, which
after all is now Blood Meridian’s alter language,
the language and culture into which the novel is
being adopted and reared. The translation
technique becomes one of explicitation —
definitions and descriptions — such that the
interlingual translator now doubles back to
perform the work of the intralingual readertranslator
described earlier. A longbarreled
sixshot (82) is rendered as “de cañón largo y
seis disparos” (106: BT, having a long barrel
and six shots), a onestringed fiddle (148) is
trans-explained as being “de una sola cuerda”
(182: BT, having a single string), and
sunchalked (317) is translated as “blanqueados
por el sol” (383:BT, bleached/whitewashed by
the sun). At times, Spanish trumps the
limitations of English — and does for Murillo
what conventional English was unable to do for
McCarthy — by officially providing a single
word to express what the English-language
compound was created to convey:
ambercolored (303: ambarinas [365], a perfect
word in Spanish, which expresses orangish
amber/orangey amber); benchvise (267: torno
[323]); clackdish (72: tablilla [92]); claywalled
(227: tapiado [276]); deadman (253:
desembarcadero [308]); deathsheads (191:
calaveras [233], BT “skulls,” the traditional
Mexican candy treat on the Día de Los Muertos
[Day of the Dead], which is the context in the
novel); footlamps (276: candilejas [333]);
legflung (55: espatarrados [71]); melonpatch
(227: melonar [276]); pistolfire (174: tiroteo
[213]); pugmill (231: machacadera [281]);
ribtines (290: costillares); shotpouch (280:
cartuchera [339]); and tavernkeeper (4:
tabernero [11]).
At other times, Murillo resorts to different
translation tactics in which the unit of
translation analysis becomes the phrase or
sentence. Deadeye (281), defined by the Oxford
Spanish Dictionary as a “tirador con buena
puntería” (tirofijo in slang), is how Toadvine
refers to the kid’s marksmanship: “He’s a
deadeye aint he?” (281). This is wonderfully
rendered by Murillo in idiomatic, proverbialsounding
Spanish: “Donde pone el ojo pone la
bala, ¿eh?” (339: BT, Where he puts his eye he
puts the bullet / The bullet goes right where he
aims). In a similar example, the judge says of
Tobin that “The priest also would be no
godserver but a god himself” (250), translated
as “El cura prefiere ser un dios él mismo que
servir a ese Dios” (304: BT, The priest would
rather be a god himself than serve that God”).
Murillo’s rendition contains no replacement
neologism for “godserver.” It is lost, translated
away. But he has retained a McCarthyish style,
tone, and syntax in his Spanish, such that
McCarthy is still very much alive and well in
Meridiano de sangre, despite the permutations.
Perhaps the most enduring feature of Blood
Meridian is its lyricism — streaming
alliteration, unanticipated images, similes and
metaphors, syntactic surprises, lexicon and
structures that stretch our ability to read,
imagine, and assimilate — the sheer poetry that
permeates the prose that portrays the historically
based gore and its setting. 39 Page after page, the
prose of Blood Meridian lends itself to being
recast in verse form:
The flames
sawed in the wind
and the embers
paled and deepened
and paled and deepened
like the bloodbeat
of some living thing
eviscerate upon the ground
before them
and they watched
the fire
which does contain within it
something
of men themselves
inasmuch as they are less without it
and are divided from their origins
and are exiles.
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