Translating in high fidelity/Traducir en alta fidelidad: with unfalling respect for the original text, Rolando Costa Ricazo has produced definitive Spanish editions of works by some of the greatest British and U.S. writers.

Pasajeros en los trenes de America The Old Patagonian Express

"That night I went to a party with a man who had translated by books into Spanish.... He earned my admiration by finding the source of a quotation I had mischievously left unattributed in the text of one. It was two lines from Thomas Moore's "Intercepted Letters." But then, Rolando Costa Picazo had taught in Ohio and Michigan, were such things were common knowledge."

--Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

Rolando Costa Picazo has spent a lifetime bringing the Spanish--and the English-speaking worlds together, primarily through literature. Like Gregory Rabassa, through whom U.S. readers have come to know outstanding authors writing in Spanish and Portuguese, Costa Picazo translates the creme de la creme.

The British and American works he has put into Spanish stand at the literary forefront. Among them are nonfiction by Daniel Boorstin and Jonas Salk; the short stories of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway; novels by John Updike, E. M. Forster, and Vladimir Nabokov; and poetry. In 2000, the Argentine publishing industry lost some of its best U.S. writers to Spain, and Costa Picazo thought his bibliography might end there. But when Colihue, a textbook publisher, decided to branch into the classics, he vaulted from contemporary heavyweights to time-tested works of genius. Over the past two years, he has produced definitive annotated Spanish editions of Walt Whitman's complete poems, William Shakespeare's tragedies, and Henry James's novels. The tales of Edgar Allan Poe, sixty-nine in all, roll take him through 2007, and then he moves on to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and James Joyce's Ulysses.

Asked about the old Italian adage traduttore, traditore, Costa Picazo confronts it head on: "'Translator, traitor' is sheer stupidity," he insists. "A real translation is a work of love, and no one betrays what one loves."

Truman Capote, like Paul Theroux, knew Spanish well enough to appreciate Costa Picazo's excellent rendering of The Dogs Bark. Capote not only insisted Costa Picazo do his Music for Chameleons, but also recommended him to Norman Mailer, whose Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost he translated. Absolute fidelity to the text is his rule. He types only one draft, speaking aloud as his fingers run over the keyboard; descriptions and narratives, he maintains, must have the same perfect oral ring as dialogues. Although he has enjoyed meeting his authors, he doesn't want them around while he is working. A book belongs as much to the reader as to its author, he maintains, and the translator is a privileged reader, an obsessive reader. Capote, he recalls, wanted to supervise a translation, something Costa Picazo had never before experienced, and he nearly rejected The Dogs Bark over the issue. "Generally I like my authors far away," he says. "Some people like them dead."

By now Costa Picazo has won every honor available. He was selected twice, in 1994 and in 2004, for Argentina's prestigious Platinum Konex Prize, awarded every ten years to the decade's twenty most outstanding literary figures in twenty categories. Recently he was inducted into the Argentine Academy of Letters, bringing him into the ranks of such intellectuals as Ernesto Sabato and the late Jorge Luis Borges. Beyond this acclaim, many scholars would agree with Michael Rockland, professor of American studies at Rutgers University and a novelist, who calls Costa Picazo "the go-to-guy in Argentina for any inter-American cultural matter." Says Rockland, who met Costa Picazo during the latter's twenty-year stint directing Fulbright exchanges, "His name is legion among North Americans who look South and South Americans who look North."

Born in 1932, Costa Picazo may wear his tweeds like an Oxford don, but his aristocratic roots reach deep into Santa Fe, a colonial city in Argentina's heartland. His English nanny, a treasure passed on by affluent relatives, taught him not just to speak her language, but to love it. As for translation, Costa Picazo says, "There is a given point where one starts. In my case, my father, who spoke no English, was fond of horse races, and many horses had English names. He was constantly asking me for the Spanish equivalent. Then, whenever I read something I liked or that impressed me, I felt like sharing it. So I translated, preferably poems. Eventually I started publishing poems in translation." To please his parents, Costa Picazo studied law and then diplomacy at the University of Cordoba, but his vocation won out and he graduated in English literature. After a year at the University of Nottingham and five years immersed in American literature at the University of Michigan, he was equally at home in the queen's and American English as well as the hybrid he normally uses.

Married and the father of three small children he returned from his studies abroad in 1970 to an economically devastated Argentina with little to offer him except as a translator. Literary translation was, and remains, a lopsided business, with far more works traveling south. Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Barcelona were then hubs of a publishing industry that kept up with the consumer demand by following the New York Times bestseller list and buying translation rights immediately. Costa Picazo translated constantly, sometimes from uncorrected proofs not yet published in the United States. The work paid poorly then and still does; honoraria range between $700 and $3,000 a book and a translator willing to put in eight or ten hours a day can manage one book a month. Royalties are common for a successful translation, but not in Argentina. Costa Picazo's 1978 version of Alex Haley's Roots sold millions of copies, but he never received more than his initial modest fee. Fortunately, by then he was no longer dependent on translation for an income. Why then did he continue to translate?

"It's exciting to make a writer from another culture available to one's own culture. It's always a thrill to walk into a bookstore and see books one has translated," he responds. "I'm comfortable with everything I do because I only do what I like. There was a time when I translated for a living, so I've done mysteries and best-sellers I wouldn't do today." Best-sellers, he says, are the least challenging work for a translator. "They are written according to a formula and translate automatically, except where they may incorporate technical or scientific terms," he explains. "The translator must remain invisible, and the translation must sound as if it had been written originally in the target language. However, when a work of great literary value is put into another language, it may sound like a translation. Hemingway may sound funny in Spanish to a reader not acquainted with his terse, telegraphic style. Faulkner also, with his convolutions and odd lexical usage. But this does not matter. They are masters and their slightest artistic whims must be respected. You may have to transgress your own language and let the reader know, 'You're on your own; if you don't understand, tough; this is how the book is.' If the book is worth it, the reader will make the effort."

Beyond probing complex texts and sorting out unattributed allusions, such as those strewn by Theroux throughout his accounts of his travels by train, Costa Picazo has to convey idioms, slang, jargon, dialects, and all the incredibly nuanced highbrow and lowbrow registers of British English. To this must be added the problems posed by profanity, insults, expletives, and taboos, which, when translated literally, may amuse or confound rather than offend. "Words are loaded with meaning not found in the dictionary," he emphasizes.

Often, equivalents do not even exist. Nonetheless, he says translators should never use footnotes to explain the untranslatable, even if it means resorting to an explanation inside the text. (He himself broke this rule and used a footnote when he felt the double entendre of the fencing and acting terms in Hamlet didn't come across.) He personally refuses to enhance bad writing, and he says he cannot improve upon a good writer. He knows of colleagues, though, who have used gimmicks to help their authors in other respects. Well-intentioned translators, for example, have tried to conceal Walt Whitman's

A lawyer and a dancer, Paula Durbin is a past contributor to Americas on dance subjects. She first met Rolando Costa Picazo in the 1970s, when they both worked on Fulbright exchanges between the US. and Argentina. homosexuality. They can disguise references to a male lover because the word for "his" and "her" in Spanish is the invariable su, and the subject pronoun, "he" or "she" is not required for a sentence to be grammatically correct.

Poetry is the genre that Costa Picazo prefers. Professionally, he began with the British poets of World War I, continued through Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the beat generation, and then went on to T.S. Eliot, Charles Bukowski, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott. "Poets must read other poets whose language they don't know but who should be read because they are first rate," he says. "I believe, first, that it is very important to translate poetry; second, that it is perfectly possible to translate the invariant core, the theme and the tone, as well as find the equivalents on a lexical level." Brodsky's poems, which went into Spanish from Russian by way of English, make a point. "Translating one language on top of the other works if the text is very good," Costa Picazo explains. "Brodsky has a way with words. The translation of his poem is always another poem. The Russian poem is different from the English poem, which is different from the Spanish. But you have three poems, and they stand side by side on their own as complete and autonomous."

But what about rhyme, alliteration, and other phenomena that make poetry inseparable from a given language?

"The phonological level is difficult to keep; there must always be some kind of loss. Or gain," he shrugs. "My poetry versions are semantically dependent, but rhythmically independent. Languages have different cadences. I seldom bother to keep rhyme because it may sound like doggerel or jingle. But I strive hard to keep the poetry, that intangible essence. I know when I have succeeded, because the result is a triumph." With characteristic modesty he adds, "It does not happen often. The translator is doomed to interpretation. If I cannot echo the ambiguity of meaning, then I have to choose, hopefully not too often. Fidelity to the original text is still the law. In the preface to the [Auden] book, I say that in my scale of loyalties, I place Auden first, the Spanish language second, and the reader last."

At an age when most professionals have long since slowed down, Costa Pieazo is on a staggering schedule. His retirement from the National University of Buenos Aires in 1993 only means he collects no paycheck for his annual American literature course that attracted four hundred students last year. Midweek he jets to Cordoba for classes in comparative literature and translation criticism; Saturdays he gives an all-day seminar at the University of Belgrano, where he directs the graduate program in translation. "I think it's my duty," he says of his teaching. Recently, Maria Kodama, Borges's widow, named him to the editorial board of Prisma and Proa, two journals on poetry and prose that her husband founded in the 1920s and that the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation is reviving under her direction. "We always try to publish translations," says Costa Picazo, without admitting they are his. And he doesn't even mention his own bibliography, which includes a book on Borges; another on W.H. Auden; a dozen Spanish-to-English translations, including two operas by Alberto Ginastera; and more than a hundred articles.

Costa Picazo won't be pinned down as to a favorite author, although he cites Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf as the greatest novelists in the English language. He has never translated anything by Woolf, he says, "So I content myself with teaching her." He claims the best U.S. writers are Whitman, Melville, Ezra Pound, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot. His enthusiasm for his current projects with Colihue triggers quotes from Pound, Borges, and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, all of whom believed fresh translations brought familiar texts to life. He calls Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare's most perfect plot and his own toughest job because the rhyme had to be kept along with the register, including that of the young couple whose language matures as they grow up. His translation of Shakespeare's genius might have been a fine finish to a sterling career were Costa Picazo not booked well into the next decade. "I'm not interested in money, only in the quality of the works I translate," he says. "I do this as a way of life, and I'm busy and happy."