ad astra

So I read a lot in Spanish, and often times I wish people who didn’t speak Spanish could read some of the same stuff.  There are probably translations that exist somewhere, but to make things easy I’m going to start translating some excerpts from things I read that I think people might enjoy.  Or at least stuff that I enjoy.  I am by no means a translator, and cannot promise that any of this will sound good or be even mildly interesting, but I thought I’d give it a try all the same.  So here goes the first one.

Cortázar was one of my favorite authors from school and right now I’m working through a three volume set of all of his short stories.  He can be hard to understand, even for fluent Spanish speakers from what I understand, but I really like him because he’s different.  This comes from a collection called “Instruction Manual.”

***

“Preamble to ‘Instructions for Winding a Watch’” by Julio Cortázar

     Think about it: when they give you a watch they give you a florid inferno, a chain of roses, a dungeon of air.  They don’t only give you the watch, “Happy Birthday and we hope it lasts because it’s an expensive brand, Swiss with a ruby escapement;” they don’t just give you that tiny stonemason which you’ll fasten to your wrist and bring with you everywhere.  They give you - they don’t know, what’s terrible is that they don’t know - they give you a precariously fragile new piece of yourself, something that is yours but isn’t of your body, which you have to fasten to your body with its band like a tiny desperate arm hanging from your wrist.  They give you the necessity to wind it everyday, the obligation to wind it so that it keeps being a watch; they give you the obsession of checking the time in the showcases of the jewelry stores, while you listen to the radio, in the phone booth.  They give you the fear of losing it, that someone will steal it from you, that it will fall to the ground and shatter.  They give you the brand, and the assurance that it’s a better brand than the rest, they give you the tendency to compare your watch with all other watches.  They don’t offer up a watch to you, you are the gift, you are offered up to the watch for its birthday.

***

If you feel like it, let me know what you think.