In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.
In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.
We met every other month, more or less.
We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.
He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”
Bitten by the chisme, I turned to look at him.
“¿En serio?” I said.
El señor presidente, by Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, tells the story of an “egomaniacal dictator [who] schemes to dispose of a political adversary and maintain his grip on power.” Asturias based his novel on the presidency of the Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), and within, we get a glimpse of what life in Guatemala looked like in the early twentieth century: surveillance, espionage, conspiracy, violence, fear, and death. Most of these elements, sadly, remain and are shared across many Latin American countries.
He was hanging by his thumbs, his feet inches above the ground. He kept shouting: “It was Dimwit, I’m telling you! I swear to God it was him! The Dimwit! Dimwit! Dimwit!”
In 1967, Miguel Ángel Asturias won the Nobel Prize in Literature. To this day, Asturias remains one of Latin America’s most exemplary and original writers, often paired with other giants such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. El señor presidente is widely regarded as one of the most impressive and creatively unique novels of Latin American contemporary literature. Asturias’s magnum opus first came out in English in 1964 and was translated by writer Frances Partridge. This year, Penguin Classics will publish a new translation of Asturias’s novel, entitled Mr. President, translated by the Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger.
“En serio,” David went on. “A ver qué pasa.”
Lo que pasó was a faithful rendering of a timeless classic, a bold translation that at times leans heavily on the original text’s musicality, while at the same time adding a contemporary take and fresh idiomatic ideas to a profoundly idiosyncratic novel. Unger was also able to masterfully bring Asturias’s lyrical beauty into English and even adapt much of El señor presidente’s brutality, absurdity, and humor.
“I’ll give the order.”
“Just what I expect from a man who others say shouldn’t be ruling this country.”
The President jumped as if he had just been stung.
“Who says so?”
“I do, Mr. President. Many of us believe that a man of your distinction should govern a country like France or democratic Switzerland or industrious Belgium or marvelous Denmark . . . But France . . . France above all . . . A man of your stature would be perfect to steer the future of a country that produced Gambetta and Victor Hugo!”
An almost imperceptible smile appeared under the President’s moustache.
Additionally, Mr. President (Penguin Classics) is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) and regretfully a timely novel. Unger argues, “Mr. President has more to say to an American in 2022 than it did in 1962 when we knew less about the shenanigans of the CIA and the liaison between the military and the industrial complex.” Yet, he and I agree that there’s plenty of hope in Asturias’s book.
José García Escobar (JGE): I want to go back to the start. Do you remember the first time you read or became aware of El señor presidente, and what did you think of it?
David Unger (DU): Yes, I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts. I had begun reading novels in Spanish and to be honest, I knew I was reading a great novel, but I was hopelessly lost trying to keep up with the narrative.
JGE: In your translator’s note, you point out Frances Partridge’s translation (1963) and its Anglicisms, mistranslations, and occasional paragraph omissions. But do you know what type of impact, if any, did her translation have on the English-speaking market or Asturias’s career, considering that the translation came out four years before Asturias won the Nobel Prize?
DU: Asturias was highly regarded in Europe since he had lived many years in France and been championed by European writers. I don’t think Frances Partridge’s translation really enhanced his reputation in any measurable way, but after he was bestowed the Nobel Prize, his three novels that comprise The Banana Trilogy (Strong Wind, The Green Poppe, and The Eyes of the Interred) were translated by Gregory Rabassa (the translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Cortazar’s Hopscotch). They were published in English in rapid succession in the late sixties and early seventies. These highly political novels put a nail on Asturias’s coffin, as it were: Rabassa rushed through his translations of novels that even in Spanish are not of great quality.
JGE: Can you expand on your thoughts about Frances’s translation?
DU: A translator shouldn’t throw stones at the work of a fellow translator, but her use of “coppers” for “chontes” and interjections like blimey ruin the reading experience. I’m not sure she ever visited Guatemala or heard Guatemalan vernacular, especially that spoken by the indigenous population. Her translation relegated Asturias to the dust heap of pre-Boom novelists, which was a huge injustice to this great writer.
JGE: I still remember the time when you told me you were going to try and translate El señor presidente. But I can’t remember if we ever talked about motivations. So, what inspired you to do it?
DU: In 2014, I received Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize for lifetime achievement. I felt a calling to bring into English the one novel with many of the best elements included in the works of the Boom novelists (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende, and Alvaro Mutis): politics, deception, love, romance, and history. I felt Asturias’s contributions to the Latin American novel had been forgotten, certainly eclipsed, by other more contemporary authors.
JGE: El señor presidente has one of the most memorable beginnings in Latin American literature, and one could argue that its lyrical beauty and vivid imagery sets the tone for the rest of the novel. How difficult was it to tackle that paragraph?
DU: Well, I decided that I would be better off hinting at the musicality of Asturias’s language by giving the monolingual reader my own poetic riff, infused with the Song of the Witches from Macbeth, and then ending that paragraph with Asturias’s own words. I wanted to avoid turning off the English reader who might’ve been put off by a musicality that can’t really be duplicated. Mr. President is Shakespearean, and I wanted the reader to know what they were getting into.
. . . lluminate, light of aluminum, Light of alighted Stone! Like ears humming, the buzzing of the bells beckoning to prayers persisted, doubletroublestar of light in the shadow, of shadow in the light. ¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre, sobre lapodredumbre! ¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, sobre la podredumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! ¡Alumbra, alumbra, lumbre de alumbre . . . alumbre . . . alumbra . . . alumbra, lumbre de alumbre . . . alumbre . . . alumbra . . . alumbra, lumbre de alumbre . . .
JGE: I want to pose now an age-old question about translation. For your take on El señor presidente, how did you decide between authenticity and readability? I feel like you went in and out. You translated Patahueca as Pegleg, and Pelele as Dimwit—though you also call him Pelele. Instead of keeping Las Cien Puertas you used Hundred Doors. Masacuata in your translation is Masacuata. Did you decide to generally favor one of the two, or did you choose to tackle each case individually?
DU: Well, as you point out, I was notoriously inconsistent. I tried using English idioms and vernacular whenever possible but also wanted to maintain Asturias’s inventiveness. Las Cien Puertas is a very specific Guatemalan reference (although Asturias never mentions Guatemala in the novel), and a masacuata is an anaconda, a boa constrictor. This is the name Asturias gives to the proprietor of the Two Step, and unlike what I did with Pelele/Dimwit, there was no reason to go back and forth with her name in Spanish and a translation. I also believe readers can look up words in a Spanish dictionary to understand a meaning that isn’t readily available. I was not willing to forego readability to achieve “authenticity” and then have the monolingual reader fall into the ravine between two languages. Both my daughters speak and read in Spanish, but both struggled to read El señor presidente in Spanish and eventually surrendered. My challenge was to come up with a translation that would “impress” the reader with Asturias’s brilliance and power by making the text and the narrative accessible. I mean: what’s the point in saying that a book is great in the original if it fails to work in the translation?
JGE: There’s a lot of humor in the novel. Sometimes, it’s the result of Asturias’s flawless use of Guatemalan vernacular. Other times, it is because of the interactions between the characters and the situations they face. I feel like you did a good job translating that humor, though I might have been biased—maybe I understood the references because I’m Guatemalan. So, I’m curious to know, how did you tackle the humor in the novel?
DU: Well, you have just paid me the greatest compliment a translator could receive: “you did a good job translating the humor.” A translator can never achieve what a writer achieves in the original; all you can do is come up with a suitable version. Sometimes, I couldn’t come up with a solution: for example, towards the end of the novel, in the chapter Gallina Ciega, which I render as Blind Man’s Bluff, Asturias says: “Le aconsejaron que se valiera de aquel curita que parecía tener ranas, no almorranas.” I wasn’t able to get across the wordplay between the powerful priest who had toads but not hemorrhoids. I could have pulled it off, but the reader would have said: “Whhhhaattt?” I didn’t want that! So, I suppose that I surrendered to the impossibility of pulling off the pun there.
JGE: Going back to the Guatemalan vernacular. You mentioned in your note that “two Guatemalan aficionados of Asturias” helped you with this and that you sent them over 250 queries. Do you remember some of the words, some of the guatemaltequismos that stumped you and the aficionados?
DU: I could go back over my notes and find examples. For sure I could, but I won’t! Keep in mind that this novel was written over one hundred years ago, and it depicts a president and a regime that was in power over 120 years ago. Guatemalan Spanish has changed quite a bit, but I believe I was able to find solutions by understanding the context of elements and sayings that were somewhat obscure or translucent. Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.
JGE: This may be a predictable question—and you also mentioned it in your note—but did it strike you just how current the novel is even today, seventy-six years after it first came out? The violence, political oppression, racism, misogyny, military governments, and dictatorships are all too familiar, not just in Latin America.
DU: Mr. President has more to say to an American in 2022 than it did in 1962, when we knew less about the shenanigans of the CIA and the liaison between the military and the industrial complex. Of course, the U.S. has had some awful presidents—Reagan and W. Bush come to mind—but none as dishonest and insurrectionist as Donald Trump or exhibiting the bald-face mendacity of a Putin. Sure, we can compare the dictator in El señor presidente to Guatemala’s Ubico or Rios Montt, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Somoza, and now Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, but we have so many wolves today dressed in lamb’s clothing that it does make one pause . . .
JGE: Asturias’s El señor presidente was written between 1922 and 1932, twelve years before the Guatemalan Revolution, which saw the end of another tyrannical dictatorship in Guatemala (not the one Asturias wrote about in the book). Despite the grim reality depicted in the novel, did you also find hope?
DU: The partnership between military henchmen, narcotraficantes, industrialists, and landowners in Latin America make me sick to my stomach. The lack of transparency and the greed are appalling. Still, in Guatemala, Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide—the only sitting or former ruler to be judged by a jury of peers—and Guatemalans rose in 2015 and forced the imprisonment of President Otto Pérez Molina and Roxanna Baldetti for fraud and corruption. These things can happen, there is always hope, but yes, there are times when I feel we are moving towards a dark and a darker age. Witness the recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that have erased the separation between Church and State, which was fundamental to the establishment of this country.
JGE: Can we talk about the legacy of this novel? In his introduction, Mario Vargas Llosa says that “Mr. President is qualitatively better than all previous Spanish language novels” and “one of the most original Latin American texts ever written.” Do you agree? You go on to say that without Asturias, “there would be no García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Laura Restrepo, Laura Esquivel, José Lezama Lima, or Roberto Bolaño.” Just how important is Asturias and El señor presidente to Latin American Literature?
DU: Modesty aside, it is my hope that my translation will awaken interest in the Anglo world to the enduring legacy of Asturias’s writing. He was the first to include elements of automatic writing, stream of consciousness, and magical realism in the Latin American novel. To be sure, Mr. President is the most important and most influential Latin American novel of the twentieth century—it may not be the best, but it certainly was the springboard for many other great novels that came afterwards.
JGE: Are you looking to translate into English more of Asturias’s work?
DU: It’s important for a writer and a translator to recognize their limitations. I don’t think I have the skills to successfully render many of Asturias’s more complex and indigenous novels into English. It can be done, but not by me. If I have contributed to the reassessment of Asturias in the Anglo world, then I will be pleased. But I think I will stop here when I am, hopefully, ahead of the game—Claire Messud said in Harper’s that my translation was “brilliant.” I’ll savor that compliment for now and evermore!
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He writes in English and Spanish. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region.
David Unger Yarhi was bestowed Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 2014 for lifetime achievement—the first author writing exclusively in English to win a major Latin American literature award. He is the author of Mole Mole/Topo Pecoso (Green Seeds, 2021), Sleeping With the Light On (Groundwood Books, 2020), Vivir en el maldito tropico (F y G Editores, Guatemala, 2016), The Mastermind (Akashic Books, 2016), El precio de la fuga (F y G Editores, Guatemala, 2013), La Casita (CIDCLI, Mexico, 2012), The Price of Escape (Akashic Books, 2011), Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha, ni limonada (F & G Editores, Guatemala, 2019, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010), Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, Plaza y Janes (Mexico, 2004), Locus Press (Taiwan, 2007), and In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful. He has translated sixteen books into English, including the work of Nicanor Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara Jacobs, Mario Benedetti, and Rigoberta Menchu. In 2022, his translation of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr. President will be published by Penguin Classics. La Casita is also available as a download through iTunes. He lives in New York City.
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