The Obscene Bird of Night is a cursed book. Its first translator, already a stand-in, disappeared from the project under mysterious circumstances. Its second translator, tapped to finish the job, never translated another book. Its third translator, some fifty years on, has been asked to revise rather than re-translate, grafting excised segments onto a nearly five-hundred page tome.¹ Its author, who meant to knock it out in a few months, got lost in it for seven years, at the end of which he suffered his third bleeding ulcer, received an infected blood transfusion, had an allergic reaction to morphine, and nearly threw himself from a hospital window. Like that other seven-year endeavor, Ulysses, it has kept the professors busy, but the professors (the North American ones) have not kept it in print. It made Bolaño a lazy critic, it made Knopf the CIA, and it made your humble literary servant think that perhaps he should stick to serving ice cream. I’d have missed out. As the novel’s narrator puts it, “Servants accumulate the privileges of misery.”

These privileges reverberate throughout the hallowed halls—in English, a tad dusty—of the Chilean novelist José Donoso’s oeuvre. By his account, he authored his first successful work of fiction in 1937 or 1938, at the age of 13. “In order to stay away from compulsory sports in the school I went to,” he said during a 1981 lecture at Emory, “I invented a stomach pain which, when examined, was diagnosed as the beginning of an ulcer.” This news pleased him, and not just because he got to ride the bench: “I learned the delights of being a person ‘different,’ hors de serie as the French say, and fantasizing that because I was sick—because there was a flaw in me, which to begin with I’d made up—I was superior.” Deceit, fantasy, difference, sickness, control, flagellation, and the occasional lapse into French—Donoso appears to have emerged as fully formed, and as ugly, as a Renaissance baby. Fiction here is not a lie that tells the truth, but a lie that threatens to become it.

Many writers claim to write from the wound; few claim to have “self-inflicted” it. Even if we take Donoso at his word (and why should we?), the question remains: what child believes an ulcer bestows je ne se quois? To accept his invitation to psychoanalyze, the child of a doctor: “I had cheated the grown-ups, especially my father who was a doctor, and this made me superior to him: the theme of the reverse of power.” Donoso’s first fiction might be described as an act of revolt against the in-house biopolitician who regulated his body. His father was ousted, in the end, by his ulcer. The pain, “a cruel beak,” cut him up inside, and cut him apart. He became “an outcast, a derelict.” He became a writer.

The writer—as mask, as ghost, as vampire—preoccupied Donoso. Several of his novels are narrated by one. His 1970 magnum opus, The Obscene Bird of Night, reissued this year in a revised and unabridged translation, is narrated in part by Humberto Peñaloza, a “sensitive prose writer who offers us, in these simple pages . . . a deeply felt and artistic vision of the vanished world of yesterday, when the springtime of innocence blossomed in the wisteria gardens.” This, from a pimp, spy, thief, hag, baby, warden, impotent, predator, monologist, “deaf-mute,” and “fluctuating damp spot on the wall” incapable of writing a simple sentence, let alone page—not unlike his Nabokovian namesake, so far as “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” goes.

Humberto, too, is preoccupied with the figure of the writer, if mostly for its cultural cachet. His father, a teacher in a chalk-covered suit who spends his wife’s sewing money on tasteful magazines—like Donoso, who would go on to write The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria in its style, Humberto has a soft spot for the belle-époque prose of La Esfera—instills in him the importance of becoming a someone, a known person, however soberly he acknowledges the impossibility of his ever becoming a gentleman, an honorific afforded only by birthright. “Wasn’t there a good deal of talk about the rise of the middle class in our country?” asks his father. “Who knows whether, belonging to the Middle Class—[my father] mentioned this class with a reverence exceeded only by the reverence with which he pronounced the word gentleman—I mightn’t become something similar? An attorney, for example, a notary public or something of the sort, or a judge.” Alas, even these titles prove too lofty for Humberto. He becomes a secretary.

His boss, the senator Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía, is also the last hope for his family, “feudal lords since colonial times,” to propagate its name and reassert the dominance of a Chilean gentry in decline. Naturally, Don Jerónimo would rather be in Europe, where he has spent the last five years as a dandy. (His taste for the finer things in life suits Humberto, whom he will not just employ but patronize.) In Europe, Don Jerónimo flirts with the idea of throwing himself into World War I, presumably on behalf of the French, but decides that doing so would amount to nothing more than an “elegant sporting gesture.” (One thinks here of Donoso’s attitude toward the Cuban revolution: a “congenital political indifference in which, as much as I try to the contrary, my feeling always remains critical—I feel this limitation as Borges perhaps must feel his blindness.”) So Don Jerónimo returns to his “crude, primitive, native New World land, in search of obligations that would give nobility to his freedom.” And obligations he finds. Marriage, chiefly, to his distant cousin, Inés, also of Azcoitía blood; and (despite his wishes) to her nurse, Peta Ponce, a witch whose hands are knobbed with warts. Child-rearing proves difficult. When he and Inés finally are able to produce a child—thanks in part to Peta’s sorcery—it is born deformed. The passage describing his first encounter with the child is repeated three times:

When Jerónimo de Azcoitía finally parted the crib’s curtains to look at his long-awaited offspring, he wanted to kill him then and there; the loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping hole in which lips, palate, and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish features, was chaotic, disorder, a different but worse form of death.

The image is fuzzy—I struggle to see the hodgepodge of bone, mouth, lips, nose, and palate in particular—but it does what it sets out to do: disturb. Don Jerónimo doesn’t kill his son outright; to protect his son from being ostracized, he imposes a social death. “Boy,” as Don Jerónimo names him, will be raised in a paradise, or a hell, of Don Jerónimo’s creation. The Azcoitía country estate La Rinconada, presided over by Humberto, is repopulated entirely with “unlikely creatures with twisted noses and jaws and a chaotic growth of yellowed teeth jamming their mouths, acromegalic giants, albino females as transparent as wraiths, girls with the extremities of penguins and ears like bat wings, individuals whose defects surpassed ugliness and raised them to the noble category of monstrous.” In a world of “monsters,” only Humberto is deformed.

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Donoso conceived of the novel as a house—we might think of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, haunted, ill-dimensioned, with stairs leading nowhere, or Kafka’s closet doors, which lead to vast spaces like staircases and courtrooms—but we just as well might think of the novel as a body. Like the bodies it depicts, The Obscene Bird of Night is filthy, overgrown, twisted, yellowed, gnarled. Those bodies are operated on by Doctor Azula, a Swiss surgeon whose harvesting of eyeballs calls to mind Auschwitz’s (and then Argentina’s) Josef Mengele. A Dr. Frankenstein with a business acumen, Doctor Azula is a “master of transplants and grafts” who “tends to squirrel away a piece or two to sell off later.” Mudito himself has been turned into a “creature made up of parts”—including the face—“I don’t recognize.” (His “member,” however, is easily recognizable; it belonged to his boss, who ordered a swap.) This is science fiction; organs are set in containers, placed in “chambers designed by [Azula] to supply the necessary oxygen and pump blood, serum and water, he cut the organs with very delicate scalpels so that the incisions wouldn’t show later on, everything in aseptic cellars lined with porcelain tiles, without life, without death, but full of waiting, ready for the occasion when the organs could be used.”  Without death, without life, full of waiting—sounds like a novel. As for the quack practitioner of nonelective botched cosmetic surgeries—sounds like an editor. And what awaits this text? A different but worse form of death: abridgment.

Too long, too hard, too loose, too crass: these are the problems that abridgment seeks to fix. They are only problems to a writer’s enemies: politicians, skimmers, benefactors, and prudes. (For now we will spare critics, editors, translators, educators, and, naturally, other writers.) Who, then, abridged The Obscene Bird of Night—and what were they trying to fix?

In the translator’s note, Megan McDowell helpfully explains which passages she has restored to Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades’s 1973 translation: long scenes starring the “monsters” at La Rinconada, which focus on the “trappings of place . . . designer clothes, makeup, and expensive furniture . . . footwear, the imported delicacies the monsters eat and drink”; hallucinatory scenes featuring Humberto’s “paranoid ravings about organ transplants and blood transfusions”; and “nearly all references to Castro and the ‘bearded revolutionaries,’ as well as the Swiss chalet and music box.” McDowell speculates—perhaps all that is possible, given our distance from the novel—as to why certain cuts were made. “Perhaps Donoso’s editors thought the focus on brands and fashion was unserious and superficial,” she hazards. She also identifies some of the deleted scenes as “the most grotesque and carnivalesque masks that the novel tries on.” An image emerges of a novel that editors (or perhaps the writer, doubting himself) may have considered fatty, bloated, in need of nip and tuck.

Other cuts are left without comment. What’s the difference between cutting a music box and a commie? We are left to do the math. It isn’t exactly hard math, and maybe that’s the point. But obviousness is a worthwhile risk; knowing the context of the novel’s English-language publication in 1973 helps us fully grasp the significance (to my mind, huge) of McDowell’s revision. That context is the Boom, and the Boom, whatever it was—a scene, a marketing phenomenon, a movement, a pipe dream—was also a product of the Cold War. The Obscene Bird of Night was translated with support from the Center for Inter-American Relations, an organization founded by David Rockefeller in 1965 and funded thereafter by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. During the era of the Boom, the Center for Inter-American Relations operated under the aegis of the Alliance for Progress, a sort of dime-store Marshall Plan launched by JFK in 1961 to destroy communism and secure US influence in Latin America. Cutting Castro—whom, ironically, Donoso had mixed feelings about—gives the original edit a whiff of bowdlerization. Other omissions, unmentioned by McDowell but, to her point, containing parts of the novel’s more provocative scenes, elevate whiff to reek. “The difference between one fattest woman in the world and another is almost nil,” reads one such line cut from the 1973 edition, “they’re all the same, like black or Chinese people.”

We know Donoso had some say in the editorial process. (The editorial process in English, that is—the Spanish-language editorial process, while likely also torturous, is beyond the scope of this review.) McDowell mentions that he refused his editor Carol Janeway’s suggestion to cut certain scenes featuring the monsters at La Rinconada. But it is likely that further edits were made without his knowledge. Janeway, reluctant or unable to send the final proof overseas, asked if he’d give the go-ahead without a once-over, and he said yes, a departure from standard procedure that McDowell describes as “understandable, given that the manuscript would have had to travel across the Atlantic in the mail, and back.” But hadn’t the manuscript already traveled across the Atlantic in the mail and back up to that point? Blame the zoomer in me for not finding it entirely understandable that Donoso couldn’t have been granted a final look.

I don’t know which edits Donoso agreed to, and unlike McDowell, I haven’t seen his papers at Princeton and Iowa. Having studied English literature at the former, where he wrote his first stories—in English—and taught creative writing at the latter, Donoso was unusually well-equipped to participate in the North American editorial process, rather than be subjected to it. However unclear the aesthetic grounds for the removal of all mentions of “bearded leader,” “bearded revolutionaries,” “bearded men,” and, ridiculously, the adjective “bearded” before the word “beggar” from the 1973 edition—as if the mere mention of facial hair would induce fever for Fidel—it is also unclear that Donoso was a mere victim of the editorial scalpel.

If Donoso had reservations about how The Obscene Bird of Night was edited for English-language publication—not unlikely, considering that he never had the cuts implemented in Spanish-language editions—these reservations would have extended an already ambivalent relationship with publishers. With the diplomacy befitting a writer in the middle of his career, he relays his vexations in the memoir-cum-manifesto The Boom in Spanish American Literature, published in Spanish in 1972, one year before Pinochet’s coup (by which point Donoso had already been in self-imposed exile for nearly a decade) and the English-language publication of The Obscene Bird of Night. Contemporary accounts of authors self-marketing pale in comparison to what this guy had to do to get published.

In the mid-’50s, Chilean houses wouldn’t publish his first book of stories, Veraneo, so he asked ten of his friends to sell ten “subscriptions” each, and with the funds he paid for the first print run from Editorial Universitaria. “I stood on street corners to offer the book to passing acquaintances while my friends did the same in other sections of the city,” he writes, “until I got enough together to pay the full printing cost.” The book sold all one thousand copies of its print run, received a national prize, and was championed by Alone.² It still wouldn’t be reprinted for another ten years.

In 1957, his debut novel, Coronation, was roundly rejected by Chilean publishers—“too big an investment for a ‘difficult book,’” said one publisher; another advised “much pruning, much slicing”—until one finally agreed to run it under the following conditions: “they would print three thousand copies of which I would receive seven hundred in exchange for giving up my right to an advance and to remainders. I had to sell my seven hundred copies privately and on my own.” All three thousand copies sold and still the publisher wouldn’t keep it in print: “If ‘everyone’ had read it—in Chile, in those years, there still was an ‘everyone’—why bother to reprint it?” As for The Obscene Bird of Night, the very forces that brought Donoso to prominence with a major US publisher appear to have also shaped the terms on which he rose to fame—and, by extension, to have cramped his style.

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The Obscene Bird of Night makes use of “uncentered polyphonous narrat[ion],” to borrow McDowell’s term. It is narrated in first and second and third person, roaming freely, perhaps manically, between the psyches of its characters. To indulge in a list, a form Donoso himself is master of: our central narrator, Mudito (possibly Humberto), the “deaf-mute” groundskeeper of a convent-turned-rest-home called La Casa de Encarnación; the elderly women, former servants, who live there in Suspiria-esque dereliction; the orphans, including Iris/Gina Mateluna, impregnated (perhaps by Mudito/Humberto) after being lured into sex work, which she calls “yumyum”; her fetus, of indeterminate gestation, which the ladies believe will be born a messiah and imbunche, a Chilean folk-creature whose orifices have been sewn shut (they will do the sewing); Don Jerónimo, whom we know; Misía Inés, Jerónimo’s wife and the possible reincarnation of the Blessed Inés, a saint who martyred herself (or was killed on grounds of witchcraft) at the convent in the 19th century (in the femicide depicted here, and in Hell Has No Limits, a novella written while the author was on a break from The Obscene Bird of Night, we see Donoso’s influence on Fernanda Melchor); Peta Ponce, Misía Inés’s nurse, a witch who wedges herself between Jerónimo and Inés (and, by extension, between Humberto and Inés, whom Humberto stalks); Jerónimo and Inés’s deformed son, “Boy”; and the assorted grotesques who wander the rooms and gardens of La Rinconada. The cast is dizzying but smaller than it looks. A group of freaks, an outsider, and the object of his desire—these are the novel’s types, the knot it ties repeatedly.

Much of the novel is narrated via interior monologue, but Donoso’s characters narrate both their actions and their thoughts in real time. In a scene of escalating conflict between a group of men, for instance, one finds a mixture of action, speech and narration in the first-person plural: “Gabriel squares up to him. We all get into the argument, this isn’t going to stop here, things are starting to heat up . . . Don’t be a bastard, Romualdo, all of us around this neighborhood know what you do with Gina and with the Giant’s head, using the kid because she’s not all there . . . Romualdo should just get out of here, we say, no one will miss him” (ellipses not mine). Extensive summary, relayed in unimaginative language (“we all get into the argument . . . things are starting to heat up”), makes some of The Obscene Bird a slog. “Uneven” is a word Donoso’s champions (Alejandro Zambra, who introduces this edition) and critics (Bolaño, who couldn’t even be bothered to reread Donoso while writing about him) can agree on. The latter wrote a short, shit-stirring essay that the publisher miraculously gleaned a blurb from: “To say that he’s the best Chilean novelist of the century is to insult him. I don’t think Donoso had such paltry aspirations.” The following sentence clarifies that “To say that he’s among the century’s best writers in Spanish is an exaggeration, no matter how you look at it.” Whatever the truth of Zambra’s defense—that Bolaño’s 2666, like any big ambitious novel, is also uneven—it is hardly redemptive. Rather, like Dostoevsky, Donoso induces awe almost in spite of his clunky prose.

Let’s move away from stylistics and into the nuts and bolts of “style.” The Spanish-language edition of The Obscene Bird of Night, like its precursor, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, takes an unusual approach to dialogue. There are em-dashes preceding some lines of speech, in the continental style common to Spanish (and familiar in English to readers of Joyce or William Gaddis, Donoso’s contemporary). Other scenes of dialogue are unmarked, in service of the novel’s polyphonous structure. The elderly women of La Casa, the monsters of La Rinconada—these choruses, and others, speak through a paratactic cacophony of vaguely distinguishable voices separated only by commas. Speech is not always clearly speech; it slips into and out of unstable narration. Hard to read, harder still to translate—harder still (pity your servant) to find an illustrative quotation of reasonable length (perks of online-only). Here is a stab at one, from the same scene, chosen at random, in which a group of men destroys a papier-mâché mask, or “head,” that a minor character rents out to other men who pay to have sex with the orphan Gina, who thinks she’s having sex with the same man (or papier-mâché monster) each time:

In answer, Aniceto kicks me right in the face, his foot sticks in my torn flesh, which clings to the foot that’s destroying me, now, once again, I have no face, my features have started to vanish. I can see out of my crumbling eyes, I’m going to lose my sight and yet I won’t be sightless because none of me will be left, Anselmo begins to walk around with his foot jammed in my face, he tramples my insides, he drags his foot, the rest of us split our sides laughing . . . hey, wow, that’s hilarious, this Aniceto’s funny as hell and that moron Romualdo chasing him on all fours all over the floor to catch the head . . . as if it weren’t just a pile of papier-mâché strips now, as if he could still save it, dented and scraped as it is, its paint peeled off, and silly Iris chasing after Romualdo

(En respuesta, Aniceto me da una patada en medio de la cara, su pie se incrusta en mi carne desgarrada que apresa ese pie que me está deshaciendo, ya no tengo rostro otra vez, mis facciones han comenzado a disolverse, van a desaparecer, apenas veo con mis ojos trizados, voy a quedar ciego, pero no ciego, porque nada de mí va a quedar, Aniceto comienza a andar con su pata metida adentro de mi cara, me pisotea por dentro, cojea, los demás nos retorcemos de la risa, oye, puchas qué estruje, qué divertido ese huevón de Aniceto y el tonto de Romualdo persiguiéndolo en cuatro patas por el suelo para pescar la cabeza, como si fuera otra cosa que un montón de jirones de cartonpiedra ahora, como si pudiera salvarla, abollada, raspada, despintada y la tonta de la Iris persiguiendo a Romualdo)

In Spanish, the above passage, variously of the perspective of the mask and the groundskeeper Mudito, slips between dialogue and narration over the course of a single sentence (“oye, puchas qué estruje, que divertido ese huevón de Aniceto y el tonto de Romualdo persiguiéndolo en cuatro patas por el suelo para pescar la cabeza”). In English, the dialogue is bracketed with ellipses—“ . . . hey, wow, that’s hilarious, this Aniceto’s funny as hell and that moron Romualdo chasing him on all fours all over the floor to catch the head . . .”—and the passage is broken into multiple sentences. A few lines later, the number of ellipses increases:

in trying to get it away from Aniceto she cracks it open even more and screams with terror . . . look . . . she was left with the hat in her hand . . . put it on, Gina, it’s too big for you . . . dance with the Giant’s hat on, Gina, dance, like that, that’s the way I like it, baby . . . give me the hat so I can put it on . . . me . . . no, me, I want it

(tratando de quitársela a Aniceto la raja más todavía y chilla de terror, mira, se quedó con el sombrero en la mano, póntelo, Gina, te queda grande, baila, Gina, con el sombrero del Gigante puesto, baila, así, así me gusta, mijita, dame el sombrero para ponérmelo yo, a mí, no, a mí, yo quiero)

The paragraph ends with a transition into conventionally marked dialogue:

. . . that stupid Gina was a good dancer, yeah . . . she may be stupid but, when it comes to dancing, the kid’s real sexy . . . Romualdo crawls as far as the door. Nobody gives him a thought now. He gets up, breathing heavily. Only then does Gabriel notice him.
“Don’t you leave.”
“Give back the money, Romualdo.”
“Thief.”
“Degenerate.”
“Corruptor of minors.”

(bailaba bien la tonta de la Gina, eso sí, tonta será pero de bailar, baila con harta tinca la cabra. Romualdo se arrastra hasta la puerta. Ya nadie se acuerda de él. Se levanta acezando. Sólo entonces lo ve Gabriel:
—No te vai a ir.
—Devuelve la plata, Romualdo.
—Ladrón.
—Degenerado.
—Pervertidor de menores.)

A reader of novels in English—of New Directions, no less, which also publishes Laszlo Krasznahorkai—can handle shifts in perspective and dialogue without the insertion of ellipses, which wear on the reader (this reader) over the course of the novel. When this usage of ellipses is combined with the insertion of quotation marks throughout, one feels that one has mixed alcohol and opioids. Certain extended paragraphs are bracketed by a single opening and closing quotation mark, though they contain the speech of many characters and shift into the private thoughts of the narrator. If the em-dash is an on-ramp into quoted speech that allows a writer to jump off into description at any point, the opening quotation mark (like the parenthetical) asks for off-ramping by means of closing quotation mark. The closing quotation mark of such paragraphs (I will spare you further examples) gives a jolt.

This is all to express a minor gripe (one that the translator Alejandro López raised in an article while this essay was undergoing edits): McDowell maintains the ellipses and quotation marks that one imagines were suggested to Donoso for clarity. Perhaps these choices are necessary translations of Spanish-language punctuation for an Anglophone reader. But we might also read the stylistic insertions—and the aforementioned “pruning”—as stemming from misalignments in the values of the various parties (editors, translators, and the writer, if we take Donoso at his word when he speaks of masks) that worked together, and against each other, to bring this text into being.

McDowell gestures at her values—or at those she imagines a reader might bring to an intimidating novel—when she assures us that The Obscene Bird of Night is “complex but not confusing” and “eminently readable.” I encountered these words part-way through the novel when I turned to the translator’s note, which I usually save for last, in eminent confusion, and felt eminently gaslit. The things that make for “readability,” which I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) meant something like ease—that is, simplicity of diction, linearity of narration, lightness of subject matter, consistency of perspective, smallness of cast, taggedness of dialogue, and brevity—Donoso forgoes. Stated positively: long, labyrinthine sentences; a mash-up of arch-formality and street talk; alinear narration; heavy subject matter, including rape, pedophilia, physical deformity, genital mutilation, and a “maggoty vagina”; unmarked dialogue; frequent perspectival shifts; and all strewn across nearly five hundred pages—this is a hard book. Just as well. I like a hard book. Not this one, quite. But that’s beside the point.

Donoso liked hard books too. Few writers took José Lezama Lima’s modernist ethos—“Only difficulty is stimulating”—so deeply to heart; few writers, otherwise lacking political conviction, considered difficulty so serious an ethical imperative. Donoso resented the praise he received from the Chilean public for his first novel, Coronation—its “naturalness,” its “light style,” “the familiar, the quotidian, the creditable, the dialogues which reproduced with an ‘almost photographic’ simplicity the speech of different social classes”—as well as the criticism (“pretentious”) that he received for its antirealist second half (“for Chilean taste there is no anathema worse than not being ‘simple’”). He knew that “simplicity, verisimilitude, social criticism, and irony” were not the only criteria of aesthetic excellence; “on the contrary, the baroque, the distorted, the excessive could all increase the possibilities of the novel.” The Obscene Bird of Night is a novel of those increased possibilities. It should be translated in that spirit.

Easier said than done, of course. In a review of Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle (which features a translator’s note that disparages his precursors—a gesture that McDowell, in writing on St. Martin and Mades, nobly refrains from), J. M. Coetzee writes that Harman “would do well to recognize that, if a striving toward elegance—fluency is a better term—marks the Muir translation as of its time, then, in its very striving toward strangeness and denseness, his own work—welcome though it is today—may, as history moves on and tastes change, be pointed toward obsolescence too.”

With regard to The Obscene Bird of Night, while the process and aims of the first translation remain something of a mystery, Donoso left a record, in his critical writings, and in the formal choices he made—their own argument—of his tastes. In his “biography” of The Obscene Bird of Night, Donoso defended denseness: “Personally I prefer those novels which press upon me the reality of the author’s effort to reach the outer limits of lucidity, where he sets free the wild beast of metaphor on an uncharted path.” McDowell, a translator of remarkable fluency, has, in taking on Donoso, also taken on the Donosian spirit of contradiction. She has simultaneously made Donoso readable and combatted an editorial hand that marred the first translation in an attempt to do just that.

And yet, it seems to me, from my position in the peanut gallery, it should be said, that the editorial hand, in this instance, may be the upper one. Perhaps this much is evident from the start, in the publisher’s choice of McDowell, who generally translates a different kind of writer. Samanta Schweblin and Alejandro Zambra, to name two of the most famous, are writers I admire in part for their lean, unadorned prose, which McDowell elegantly renders. (In a 2022 pan of Zambra’s Chilean Poet, Dustin Illingworth describes that novel, perhaps ironically—it is also possible that McDowell’s usage of the phrase here is retributively ironic—as “eminently readable” and McDowell’s translation as “clean.”) But Donoso is, at the level of the sentence, a baroque. There is brilliance in McDowell’s translation, but it is the slant glint that comes from the meeting of disparate sensibilities—as with, say, the slash-happy Gordon Lish editing the maximalist Garielle Lutz. One wonders whether a translator generally drawn to difficult prose (say, Fernanda Melchor’s translator Sophie Hughes) might have finally tipped the scales in Donoso’s favor.

Anyway, even in his desire for difficulty, Donoso was difficult. He wrote art and pulp, tragedy and comedy, parody and melodrama. If ever he was inhibited by his editors, it is possible that he found enjoyment in that inhibition—that, like Mudito, imbunche, sealed ever more tightly in asphyxiating layers of burlap by the women of La Casa, he enjoyed freedom from freedom: “I don’t have to do anything, I don’t feel, I don’t hear, I don’t see anything, because nothing exists except this hole I’m in . . . if there were some other form of existence there’d also have to be a past and a future, and I don’t remember the past and I know nothing about the future, hidden as I am here in the blissful repose of oblivion.”

1. Megan McDowell details the novel’s translation history in her note: José Donoso wanted Gregory Rabassa, but Rabassa was tied up. Hardie St. Martin embarked on the translation while the novel was still in manuscript, which got messy, and he either quit or was ousted. Leonard Mades, a professor of comparative literature at Hunter College, revised St. Martin’s nearly finished work, and they were credited as co-translators for the first edition of the novel. McDowell has revised their translation for the new and unabridged edition. ↩

2. Hernan Díaz Arrieta (pen name “Alone”) was a stately midcentury Chilean critic who loved God, literature, and Pinochet. Donoso’s book on the boom (Historia personal del boom, in the original) is a riff on Alone’s account of Chilean letters, Historia personal de la literatura chilena. In By Night in Chile, Bolaño would draw inspiration from him for the character Farwell, whom he depicts “wearing a grey suit of fine English cloth, hand-made shoes, a silk tie, a white shirt as immaculate as my hopes, gold cufflinks, a tie-pin bearing insignia I did not wish to interpret but whose meaning by no means escaped me.” ↩

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