Bonsai came to me, as most books do these days, in the mail, this one courtesy of my subscription to Fitzcarraldo Editions. Bonsai (Bonsái in the original Spanish) is Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, but I previously read his more recent Chilean Poet (Poeta chileno) a few months back when it came out over the summer in a splashy edition from Viking. Chilean Poet had almost turned me off Zambra entirely – more on that below – but Zambra has an enviable reputation as a literary stylist, particularly for his earlier work. Bonsai is also, attractively, 74 pages – the perfect length for a novel, in my book – and so I was willing to give it a go.
Zambra’s reputation, of course, is more than as an enviable literary stylist. He’s one of those writers people love to hate. Everyone seems to have their own critique of Zambra but, I suspect, Zambra’s reputation is largely a function of the way he has managed to straddle the line between literary and commercial fiction, praised by critics while simultaneously enjoying international commercial success.
My trepidation with Zambra is probably due to the fact that Chilean Poet was the first book of his that I’d read. By the time Poeta chileno was published in 2020, Zambra already had four novels under his belt, two of his works had seen film adaptations, and he clearly enjoys a sterling reputation among critics. Poeta chileno was rapidly translated into English by Megan McDowell and published in the U.S. by Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and displayed on the front table of bookstores nationwide. That’s as close to a red carpet rollout as translated fiction is ever going to see in North America.
Alas, there was nothing innovative or interesting about the 350+ page Chilean Poet. It’s overlong and bulky, and clearly Zambra’s effort to go mainstream. The joke is that Zambra wrote it because he had a mortgage to pay. It reminded me a bit of Sally Rooney’s work – a novel very much of the here and now, focused on hetero relationships stripped of idealism and romanticism, and popular with the type of young adults who read novels on public transit. It was also self-satisfied and willing to break the fourth wall, albeit in a way that turned me off rather than pulled me in.
Bonsai, though, is where Zambra’s reputation began. Bonsái was published in 2006 and only came to English in 2008 through the then-unknown Carolina De Robertis and indie press Melville House Publishing. The opening paragraph (below in the new McDowell translation) tells us everything we need to know about the story and is quintessential Zambra:
In the end she dies and he is alone, although really he had been alone for some years before her death, before Emilia’s death. Let’s say her name is or was Emilia and that his name is, was, and will be Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio
does not. The rest is literature[.]
I say this is quintessential Zambra because it has so many of his hallmarks. It is about a hetero relationship. It is willing to upend convention in the opening sentence, informing us Emilia dies in the end. It is also smug and self-aggrandizing, telling us that what follows – his first novel! – is literature.
If what follows is literature, then it’s a rather bourgeois type of literature and not at all the kind I like to read. Emilia and Julio are, at the start, young lovers who are very much in love with each other, themselves, and books. Marcel Proust is name-dropped in the first chapter, and before we reach the end of the second chapter, we’ve also been treated to Rubén Darío, Marcel Schwob, Yukio Mishima, Georges Perec, Juan Carlos Onetti, Raymond Carver, Ted Hughes, Tomas Tranströmer, Armando
Uribe, Kurt Folch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emil Cioran, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Macedonio Fernández. I stopped keeping track after page 27.
There’s more to Bonsai than a litany of writers, of course. We also learn the ins and outs of the sex lives of our teenage protagonists, a subject I found more than a bit banal. I’d like to think it picks up from there, and in a way it does. On page 65 we get a drawing of a bonsai tree.
De Robertis was an interesting choice to bring Bonsai into English in 2008. These days she is a celebrated author in her own right, but in 2008 she had yet to publish her first novel. I see from her wikipedia page that she has translated a handful of works since Bonsai, but I suspect it may have been the first long-form work of fiction that she translated.
The rest of Zambra’s novels – The Private Life of Trees, Ways of Going Home, Multiple Choice, and Chilean Poet – have been translated by Megan McDowell. McDowell, in contrast to De Robertis, is a highly sought after career translator, an American who lives in Chile. McDowell has not only translated the bulk of Zambra’s output, she has also translated most of Samanta Schweblin’s work and plenty of other contemporary South American writers.
The version of Bonsai I have from Fitzcarraldo is a new translation courtesy of McDowell. It’s a bit odd to see two competing English translations to a work of contemporary fiction, as the De Robertis remains very much in print. I suppose McDowell wants to be a Zambra completist, which isn’t what I’d choose to do with my life, but hardly the worst thing I suppose.
Snarkiness aside, the McDowell translation is a winner. Critic Paul Fulcher has compared the translations of one of the more challenging paragraphs, which yields startlingly different results.
The original passage:
Poco antes de enredarse con Julio, Emilia había decidido que en adelante follaría, como los españoles, ya no haría el amor con nadie, ya no tiraría o se metería con alguien, ni mucho menos culearía o culiaría. Este es un problema chileno, dijo Emilia, entonces, a Julio, con una soltura que solo le nada en la oscuridad, y en voz muy baja, desde luego: Este es un problema de los chilenos jóvenes, somos demasiado jóvenes para hacer el amor, y en Chile si no haces el amor solo puedes culear o culiar, pero a mí no me gustaría culiar o culear contigo, preferiría que folláramos, como en España.
DeRobertis:
Shortly before getting involved with Julio, Emilia had decided that from now on she would follar, as the Spanish do, she would no longer make love with anyone, she would not screw or bone anybody, and much less would she fuck. This is a Chilean problem, Emilia said, then, to Julio, with an ease that only came to her in the darkness, and in a very low voice, of course: This is a problem for Chilean youth, we're too young to make love, and in Chile if you don't make love you can only fuck, but it would be disagreeable to fuck you, I'd prefer it if we shagged, si follaramos, as they do in Spain.
McDowell:
Not long before she got mixed up with Julio, Emilia had decided that from then on she was going to fuck — what the Spanish call 'foliar' — and she would no longer make love with anyone or hook up with anyone, much less would she screw, or 'culiar', as a Chilean would say. This is a Chilean problem, Emilia said to Julio, with a boldness she only displayed in the dark — though in a very low voice, of course: This is the problem with young Chileans. We're too young to make love, and in Chile, if you don't make love you can only culiar, but I don't want to screw you, I'd rather follar, I'd rather fuck you like they do in Spain.
To my ear, I like the McDowell translation because it captures the cadence and tone of the original. It also makes the most sense of the competing words for “fuck.” It’s interesting that both translators choose to leave one or two words untranslated, perhaps a nod to multilingual readers who can be trusted to form their own conclusions about the passage.
All this is interesting enough and these nuances held my attention for 74 pages. I can’t say that I’m a Zambra fan now. In fact, the experience of reading Bonsai irretrievably cemented my dislike of his output. Part of me hopes that his effort to go mainstream with Chilean Poet is a flop and he returns to the style of his earlier, more innovative work. But in a world where I have many other books I want to read, I probably won’t read any more Zambra so it really doesn’t matter to me what he does next.
