Freedom Through Structure: On Translating Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa

When I first read Centroeuropa in Spanish, in late 2020, I came to it with no expectations. I had never heard of the author, Vicente Luis Mora, nor the Spanish literary prize his latest novel had just won. If I was arrested by the very first image of the narrator, Austrian would-be farmer Redo Hauptshammer, unearthing a hussar soldier, then I was completely hooked by what followed—dozens of soldiers from the distant past and future, impermeable to any kind of decay, standing like scarecrows in the arable land that Redo is keen to turn into a profitable sugar beet farm.

In a novel that might appear to be historical in nature (Vicente vehemently denies this label, instead calling it an archaeological novel), one that seems in every other respect to faithfully recreate rural life in post-feudal Prussia in the 1820s, this inexplicable mystery got its hooks into me and has barely let go since. It reminded me of the literature that most attracted me as a student—novels by authors like Beckett and Kafka, imbued with profound mysteries, which as a reader you knew no one, not even the authors, could fully understand or decode.

These restrictions and games, which I endeavored to recreate in my English translation, made the whole process extra challenging, but also rewarding and, dare I say it, fun.

My initial impression that there was something more to this book than first met the eye was confirmed when I read a blog post Vicente had written about the novel (Vicente is still an inveterate blogger!) called “How I wrote Centroeuropa,” in which he revealed the many hidden, almost mathematical procedures and rules he had used to write the novel, as well as many smaller “Easter eggs” (my words, not his). While I initially felt the novel to be a revival of the mid-twentieth-century experimentalism of artists like John Cage, Georges Perec, and Raymond Roussel, Vicente vociferously denies their influence, pointing instead to the mathematical structures that poets of the Spanish Golden Age, such as Quevedo and Gongora, used to aid composition.

Some of the restrictions Vicente imposed upon himself and which he divides into three categories (compositional, linguistic, and structural) are quite obvious—the number of bodies Redo uncovers doubles in each chapter, and to reflect this each chapter is longer than the previous one. Others are relatively superficial, clever without being essential to the novel itself—Redo’s name, as well as literally describing the character’s attempt to “Re-do” their life, is the name of the River Oder backwards, while the late Odra’s surname Churbredo is simply “Oderbruch,” the region in which most of the action takes place, backwards. Others, which I shall leave to readers to figure out, are fundamental to the novel’s structure and plot (see if you can spot the one in the long first paragraph of chapter two). There is also a huge catch, which, in the Spanish, is ultimately revealed by use of a grammatical device that English cannot employ, and which we have had to convey in less elegant and more obvious terms—another one of those great sacrifices that can make translation so uniquely painful.

Suffice to say, these restrictions and games, which I endeavored to recreate in my English translation, made the whole process extra challenging, but also rewarding and, dare I say it, fun. For example, while not wanting to write a historical novel or write a novel in an old-world-y register, Vicente was keen to avoid anachronisms and therefore attempted not to include a single word or phrase that was not being used in Spanish two centuries ago. I accepted the same challenge for myself—though like Vicente I accept the possibility of oversight or omission (and I must thank one of my editors, Will Rees, for pointing out that the word narcissist was not recorded until the early twentieth century!). Another restriction was the word count for each chapter, which increases according to an exact proportion which I shall leave to readers to guess. This meant that my translation had to match the word count of the original, both as a whole and in each chapter; quite the task when you consider that Spanish language books are nearly always longer in English. (In fact, Vicente told me the word count didn’t matter as long as the proportion was preserved, but I accepted the greater challenge).

Initially, this was a nightmare. I would look at the word counts of each draft, sometimes over by 500 words or more, and wonder how I could ever get to the desired number without butchering Vicente’s finely wrought work of art. The pain didn’t end there—though the draft I sent to my editors at Peninsula Press (the original UK publisher) did have the correct word counts, subsequent edits, proofreads, and so on all subtly altered these figures, requiring endless tinkering. Gradually, though, I realized two things: firstly, that I would have to take seriously the notion that a translation is always, in some sense, an entirely new work of art, related but not tied to its source text; and secondly, that the need to be, frankly, brutal with editing would only improve my translation. Especially now, since the translation was revised for this new edition from Bellevue Literary Press, I can safely say that this is the most refined, polished translation ever published in my name.

In Vicente’s blog post from 2020, he wrote: “These restrictions…made the novel’s composition as enjoyable as it was arduous, turning successive rounds of edits into an infernal chore, one further complicated by the fact that each change or substitution could provoke unwelcome chain reactions.” To a lesser degree, these chain reactions, this exquisite balance between heaven and hell, was recreated in the translation. To be honest, I have always struggled with too much freedom, which may be why I am a literary translator and not a writer, still traumatized from the time when, at thirteen, I got my lowest mark for English composition when my teacher told us that, for that week’s homework, we could write about anything we liked.

The real victory of Centroeuropa is that it is at once a formally challenging work of experimentalism, and a profound, moving novel about the fundamental mysteries of life.

What liberated me during the translation was understanding that by reapplying Vicente’s compositional rules, I was actually just creating another piece of ludic, experimental art. Of course, you could say this about all literary translation: Like any form of fiction, it is created within a set of rules, conventions and structures, only more so. On the nature of our trade, my esteemed colleague Daniel Hahn has written: “I create a new thing, one that’s identical to the original book, except for all the words.” Our art is to create something that’s identical and yet utterly different. Sounds pretty radical to me, in the general and etymological sense of the word, and Centroeuropa made me feel this truth on both an intellectual and a deeper, intuitive level. By adding an extra layer of restrictions to the ones every translator faces when they take on a novel, I think I found some kind of liberation.

Vicente, too, sought to liberate himself through restrictions: “All that matters is that the procedures employed work; if they don’t, they lack meaning. As Pablo Katchadjian has explained, ‘you use a procedure to make the writing appear. Once it has appeared, the procedure is no longer important, although it continues to exist and give structure to the text. The important thing is […] anything that makes the writing forget itself while it’s taking place, and you forget yourself while you’re writing.’” Brilliant advice for anyone struggling with their own writing, and perhaps a philosophy for life: freedom through structure, through narrowing down the choices that can overwhelm us in this late capitalist world.

Indeed, the real victory of Centroeuropa is that it is at once a formally challenging work of experimentalism, and a profound, moving novel about the fundamental mysteries of life, which it exhorts us not to take for granted. I did the bulk of the work in early 2023, as I was emerging from easily the worst period of my life, a time when I dreaded the thought of the future and desperately wished that I could travel to the past. Fittingly, what saved me were the restrictions that had by that point long been placed on my own life—work, family, routine—and the small adjustments which, like moving from a first draft to publication, can make things better, easier to live with. Working on Centroeuropa every day was one of those things. And as much as I marveled at Vicente’s multi-layered genius, both wild and methodical in nature, what really spoke to me back then were the words that the frozen corpses seem to call out to Redo, impelling him, and the reader, to “live now while you have time, don’t resign yourself to a lesser life than the one you desire.”

__________________________________

Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery, is available from Bellevue Literary Press.