My first experience reading the shocking, hilarious and ingenious work of Michel Nieva was in 2021, after he was named as one of Granta’s 25 best young Spanish-language novelists. A scout sent me various novels by some of the less renowned authors on the list, and the one called ¿Sueñan los gauchoides con ñandúes eléctricos? immediately caught my attention. Just the title (‘Do gauchoids dream of electric rheas?) distills so much of what is distinctive about Michel’s work: the huge influence of Philip K. Dick and cyber-punk literature (Michel calls his own aesthetic Gaucho-punk), the use of comedy and parody, the fundamental concern with serious questions about technology, human nature and the direction we are headed in as a species.
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In the first story (my translation of which was published in the summer 2023 edition of The Stinging Fly) a depressed author hires a ‘gauchoid’ (an android that resembles a gaucho, the archetypal cowboy of the northern Argentinian plains) to take care of his domestic chores. When the robot arrives, it does everything asked of it, conducting all conversation in perfect, rhyming meter (in the style of the great Gaucho epic Martin Fierro).
Michel’s style is omnivorous, sometimes jarringly so—we can move from cartoonish violence to passages of great lyrical beauty in a very short space of time.
Soon, however, the gauchoid goes the way of Melville’s Bartleby and refuses to work. Translating this story required so many skills—the ability to translate verse with a strict meter and rhyme scheme, an awareness of the various authors being parodied, an ability to work from the highest, most literary registers to the ultraviolent and pornographic—that it felt like a watershed in my journey as a translator. As challenging as it was, I loved every minute of it. In fact, the translation was rejected by magazines so many times (looking back at the violent human-android rape scene, maybe that’s not so surprising!) that by the time it was accepted it had easily become my most polished piece of work as a literary translator, from the sheer number of edits it had been through every time I resubmitted it.
When I was offered the chance to translate La infancia del mundo, I knew that some of the same challenges would await me. Michel’s style is omnivorous, sometimes jarringly so—we can move from cartoonish violence to passages of great lyrical beauty in a very short space of time. The novel’s major influences include SF, Kafka and Borges, but I also got hints of Roald Dahl and even 90s animated classic Ren & Stimpy (remember the gross close-ups of boogers, moldy toes and rotting teeth?)
The eponymous anti-hero changes gender, form and name multiple times. Then there is the narrative voice, at turns empathetic, jokey, piss-taking, sometimes as amazed and bewildered as we are by the events it describes, always eager to vow allegiance to whatever the protagonist’s new form happens to be. In some senses, there were fewer challenges—as Michel’s first book to be published outside Argentina, Dengue Boy makes no mention of the country’s foundational 19th-century president Domingo F. Sarmiento, nor does it feature a single gaucho character. Perhaps someone familiar with the country might snigger at the idea that both the dry and arid pampas and freezing Antarctica are, in the 23rd century in which the novel takes place, not only tropical island holiday destinations, but practically the only livable places left on earth, but readers from anywhere will get the message.
Yet, like all translations, my sense of profound loss was palpable from the outset. I was sad to lose the beautiful Spanish title (The infancy of the world) while acknowledging that Dengue Boy probably has more commercial appeal. One of the many ludic elements of the novel is the way that, as the protagonist changes form and identity, all the names that she/he/it is given have exactly 12 letters, in a way that has a symbolic significance that is only revealed at the end of the Spanish version. My first draft honored this, but in a way that was so convoluted (at one point, the character was being called The Dengue Gal, like a sharp-shooter from a second-rate western) that eventually we made a collective decision to remove this feature from the narrative altogether. Luckily Michel’s work is so multi-layered and engaging that I don’t think any readers will feel its loss, though I forever will.
Then there is the register, perhaps most evident in the dialogue and the narrator’s rhetorical flourishes. In Michel’s world, many of the children are violent, avaricious brutes, yet are simultaneously capable of coming up with insults like “Neutered arthropod!” and “Castrated horsefly!” During the editing process I had to say more than once to my editor that, yes, that’s really what it says in the Spanish too, and yes, it does also sound incongruous in the original. The narrator is given to saying things like “sinister horror of the bitter truth,” employing elevated rhetoric that stands in contrast to the characters he is describing, the practically subhuman underclasses of a brutally unequal society in 23rd-century Argentina. Both examples come from the opening chapter, in which I faced an additional challenge: it had already been translated, and not by anyone, but by the great Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño himself! Can you imagine the temptation I felt to just go onto the Granta website and ‘borrow’ a few choice phrases?
I hope readers see a fundamentally serious novel beneath the playful exterior, and take it as a call to action to do all they can to avoid the hellish world it depicts from becoming a reality.
I was only able to relax once I had got to the second chapter. It’s no secret that the Anglo-Saxon publishing world tends to fetishize a certain type of ‘good’ writing (in the UK this is still in no small part influenced by George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English language”) that is concise, elegant, unrepetitive, cliché-free. Michel’s multi-dimensional writing could be guilty of inelegance, repetitiveness, and occasional use of cliché (at only 200 or so pages in English, my main criticism of the novel is that it’s too concise), and yet there is no sense that these things are employed without a great deal of thought and a tongue placed firmly in cheek.
One line perfectly summarized this for me: “The sun was bleeding out an arpeggio of blood in the bloody sky.” This is not Michel’s lyrical writing, but rather the narrator’s perspective filtered through the language of computer games and perhaps the pre-teen character playing the game’s clumsy attempts at poetry. While I can see why an editor might be horrified by a sentence like this, for me it perfectly encapsulates Michel’s magpie-like genius, his readiness to upset and offend literary orthodoxy, his refusal to sacrifice fun and anarchy for good taste.
I can only hope that the book I have translated for English-language readers is as chaotic, brimming with ideas and invention, and fundamentally alive as Michel’s book in Spanish. May it have a similar effect on readers as the unwitting schoolboys who taunt Dengue Boy with the word ‘eunuch’ of helping them “to discover the wonders of the language some call poetry.” But more importantly, I hope readers see a fundamentally serious novel beneath the playful exterior, and take it as a call to action to do all they can to avoid the hellish world it depicts from becoming a reality.
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Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery, is available from Astra House.
