El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente

A translation of this work at first appears impossible, unwise to attempt. In a bar in Brooklyn, one friend tells another about this piece: “They didn’t do anything. Neither did Pablo. They just moved words around.”

Another conversation, at a café in Buenos Aires. Pablo and Viki and I discussing how one could translate this text. “This text” is originally El Gaucho Martín Fierro. An epic poem, the epic poem, of Argentina, a foundational text of the Argentine gaucho myth, of a toughened outlaw, who fights and wins and overcomes, over and over. This is a text that schoolchildren across Argentina know and have memorized, a fact attested to by every Argentine I meet who can recite verses of it at will. In 2009, Pablo Katchadjian created a work, in which he reordered the verses alphabetically. About this book, César Aira has said, “the move seems to be just a gesture: to alphabetically reorder the verses of a poem; but in reality there is something more: . . . The narrator’s voice remains, dislocated from beyond the grave, at the same time as it disappears, and we notice with surprise that we’ve been freed from exactly that which bothers us most: from the insistence of a voice to tell us something, make us understand, convince us.” We recognize the verses, the cadence, the rhymes, but are lost in the order.

So how to translate it? Our first thought: order an equivalent USAmerican text alphabetically. What would the foundational USAmerican epic poem text be? The absence of an answer made it obvious this couldn’t be the case (sure, Song of Hiawatha maybe, or Whitman, but actually: what average USAmerican can recite line upon line of either?). That the text is so known in Argentina is what makes it powerful. We, in the US, don’t have that, I don’t think. Some people might be able to recite some of this or that, but there is no foundational text that most will have read. Instead we chose to translate the intention, the concept. In English, Viki and I did what Pablo did in Spanish: we ordered, alphabetically, an existing text. We, too, appropriate. If we’d translated the text, from Pablo’s, or from the original, it wouldn’t have been a translation, we felt, of El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente. The English excerpt, then, is not exactly a translation of the Spanish you see. At times they meet and overlap, but most often not. In this version, we lose the recognizability of the original, but gain a new original, for us, in English. So this text, in its beauty of rhythm and newfound meaning, is what we have. I recommend reading it aloud, with friends.

—Rebekah Boudon