This week’s prompt for Women in Translation Month is the Americas, so naturally I am starting with Argentina’s Angélica Gorodischer. Small Beer press have her Trafalgar, translated by Amalia Gladhart, and next year they will be publishing Prodigies, translated by Sue Burke. However, they first book of hers that they published was Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Here is my review, first published in Emerald City #107 (July 2004).

One of the problems with translating books from foreign languages is that you often tend to only get the hard jobs. There are doubtless lots of novelists in Argentina, but some of them are exceedingly famous, and they are the ones that people in non-Spanish-speaking countries want to read. One of those famous Argentinean writers is Angélica Gorodischer. She has written 17 novels, has won numerous awards, is compared to Borges, Calvino and Kafka by the Buenos Aires press, and has none of her work available in English, until now. Fortunately for us, the person who has chosen to translate Gorodischer’s work is a brilliant writer in her own right, and a person whose interests in fiction seem to map well with Gorodischer’s own: Ursula Le Guin.

The book in question, Kalpa Imperial, is a strange beast. It is a collection of short stories about a mythical empire. The material was first published in Argentina in 1983 as two separate volumes. It was re-printed in Barcelona in 2000 as a single-volume collection, and it is that format that Small Beer Press has chosen for the first English-language edition. You will see the book referred to as a novel, presumably on the grounds that it is a fix-up of sorts. Certainly all of the stories seem to be set in the same mythical empire. But aside from that there is little to connect them and I think I’d classify it as a collection.

All these works of the imaginative inventions unfortunately got into chronicles, which were made into books which everybody respected and believed, principally because they were thick, hard to hold, tedious, and old. And they got into legends, those tales that everybody says they don’t believe in because they can’t take them seriously, and that everyone believes in precisely because they can’t take them seriously. And they were sung in ballads, which are insidious because they pass to easily about town squares and the ports and the dance halls. And none of it was true, none of it, none of the romantic origins, none of the melodious and fantastical names.

As to the stories, they are all fables. There is little attempt at world building, but equally very little in the way of magic or other traditional fantasy tropes. What we get are legends out of the history of the empire, which seems to stretch back thousands of years. There are good emperors and bad emperors, wise empresses and vacuous ones. Much of the book is to do with meditation on government and how to undertake it wisely.

This is where things get kind of interesting, because the back cover contains blurbs from reviews written in Argentina and Spain. The Argentinean review says, “not once is there an attempt to pass judgment on the real world from fiction,” whereas the Spanish one specifically says that the book is allegorical. That could just be two reviewers reading the book differently. But it occurs to me that the first publication of the book was only a year after a couple of wannbe imperial despots called Galtieri and Thatcher fought a stupid war over a small collection of barren islands in the South Atlantic. Could Gorodischer perhaps be commenting on this? Does the fact that one of the stories has a character called Magareta’Acher have anything to do with this? Is the fact that the Emperors live in the northern hemisphere of their world and the brave and independent rebels live in the south significant?

Maybe, but for the most part the stories have rather less obvious political content. They are much more the sort of thing that Le Guin writes: interesting little fables that deride the power-hungry and promote a small-is-beautiful view of the world. There is a worry with translation that translators will impose their own style and prejudice on the work, and the similarity to Le Guin’s own work could raise suspicions of that here. But having read all of the book I suspect that Le Guin would have had to undertake a major re-write to achieve that because there are just so many places where the style and attitudes some through. I suspect rather that Le Guin and Gorodischer have fairly similar attitudes and preferences, and that therefore Le Guin is an ideal person to translate Gorodischer’s work.

As for recommendations, if you like Le Guin then you will like this book as well. On the other hand, it is certainly not traditional SF or fantasy as we English-speakers understand it. There certainly are some fun stories there. I particularly enjoyed the odd versions of Greek myths retold by the caravan master in “The Old Incense Road”. And I certainly wish that more of Gorodischer’s work were available in English.