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268 The Translator’s InvisibilityThe translation, by Paul Blackburn, is properly colloquial, elegantand eloquent, and is flavored with just enough touches of Spanishand French phrases to spice the narrative. At this point in thedevelopment of a freer form for prose writing, Cortázar isindispensable.(Stern 1967:248)Yet perhaps this passage should read “Blackburn’s translation ofCortázar is indispensable” to innovative prose. In the regime oftransparent discourse, where fluency routinely makes thetranslator invisible, even reviewers who praise the translator byname are likely to reduce the translation to the foreign author.Blackburn’s translation, although fluent, is inevitably free atpoints, departing from “Cortázar,” inscribing the Spanish textswith different linguistic and cultural values, enabling them toproduce effects that work only in English. A closer look atBlackburn’s discursive moves will reveal the effectiveness of hisCortázar translations.“Continuity of Parks” (“Continuidad de los Parques”) is a brief butcharacteristic text from End of the Game that seamlessly shifts betweentwo realistic narratives, finally provoking a metaphysical uncertaintyabout which is the text, which reality. A businessman sitting in anarmchair at his estate reads a novel about an unfaithful wife whoselover goes to kill her husband; when the crime is about to beperformed, the victim is revealed as the businessman sitting in thearmchair at the opening. At the climactic end, the “real” man readinga novel suddenly becomes a character in that novel, just as thecharacters suddenly become “real” to end the man’s life. Cortázarinvolves the Spanish-language reader in this conundrum by, first,constructing the businessman as the narrative point of view and then,without warning, abruptly shifting to the lovers. The rapid conclusionis a bit jolting, not only because the text ends just before the murderoccurs, but because the reader was earlier positioned in the victim’spoint of view, assuming it to be reality.Blackburn’s fluent translation enables this positioning mostobviously by using consistent pronouns. The subject of everysentence at the opening is “he,” maintaining the realist distinctionbetween the man’s reality and the fictiveness of the novel he isreading:He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put itdown because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again