The original text for this translation was the proof pages for the first edition, in Spain,' of Fidel Castro: Biografia a dos voces, supplemented with corrections to the book as it went to press. These corrections were not substantive; they were the usual changes associated with spelling errors, awkward phrasings, small errors of fact or date and so on, found by tbe copy-editor and author in proof pages before book publication. My English translation of that edition was completed and delivered to the English publisher. Penguin UK, in early February 2007.
In May 2007 a new set of proof pages was sent me, and I was informed that they belonged to a new, completely revised and restructured edition, which Penguin wished to use as a basis for the English-language version. This second Spanish-language edition was some too pages longer than the first. As Ignacio Ramonet indicates in his introduction, a new chapter had been added, as had some comments on Castro’s mother, letters dealing with the Cuban missile crisis, new information on Cuba’s response to tbe coup in Venezuela in 2002, an extension to the Chronology and so on, and the introduction had been expanded to address Castro’s fall and his recent more severe health problems. But those additions accounted for only some fifty to sixty pages; the other forty to fifty pages were scattered throughout the book, in snippets here and there. I learned, in response to queries made to Ramonet and Pedro Alvarez Tabio, the Cuban editor of the book and one of Castro’s closest associates, that the pages sent to the press with these additions and changes, in both Spanish and French, were not available. Given that we had nothing to go on, my editor and 1 consulted as to how to set about revising and expanding my already existing translation, and we decided that what was needed was a full set of second-edition pages marked up with every change (from the minutiae of punctuation and the transposition of words and phrases, to additions and cuts, to the macro-changes involved in chapter rearrangement and restructuring) that had been introduced into the first edition.
To produce that set of pages, I turned to Waldemar Burgos, Romina Iglesias and Olga Uribe, who, over a period of about three weeks and hundreds of hours, compared the published first edition with the final but unbound pages of the second Spanish edition and marked up those unbound pages. I then took those marked-up pages and proceeded to revise my translation. Ramonet says that the book was ‘totally revised [and] amended’; in my view, the key word there is ‘totally’. Every page was covered with markings; as I’ve told people, the annotations looked like ants at a picnic. Tens of thousands of changes had been made to the book, and although not all of them produced parallel changes to the translation (for instance, the word-order of a sentence in Spanish might already have been recast to conform to English usage, making any change to the word-order in English unnecessary), most did. Thus, the English translation that the reader is now holding parallels, insofar as humanly possible given the scope and number of modifications, the second and definitive Spanish edition of the book.
But for me as the translator, this total revision presented a problem of what might be seen
Either as fidelity to the book or loyalty to the end-reader. Consider; the first Spanish edition was ‘out there’. It had been extensively reviewed and commented on, not to mention that judging by book sales it had been read by tens of thousands of readers. Thus, especially with regard to the cuts made to the first edition, there were two clear and distinct versions available in Spanish and able to be compared. Readers of the English translation, however, would have only the revised and amended version, and for English-speaking Cuba-watchers and Castro-watchers and other interested but monolingual readers, no comparison between the two editions would be possible. Why was this problematic? In dozens of cases Castro made subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle changes whose effect was not, of course, to cens<ir anything he might have said, in the sense of to suppress a truth, but rather to soften a judgement, or to avoid a ‘politically incorrect’ statement, or to be more diplomatic. Castro will often be seen in these pages to be surprisingly, I think, outspoken; for the second edition, some of his more direct and uninhibited statements wound up on the cutting-room floor. Of course many of the cuts made were clearly intended to reduce repetitions, a quite understandable (even, perhaps, laudable) goal in a book of this size and complexity, but many, too, seemed to have been made only in order to present a less ‘outspoken’ or ‘unbuttoned’ image. Those changes, 1 thought, were ‘interesting’; historically interesting, that is, because they were words spoken by Castro and recorded for posterity; but also interesting in that they revealed Castro’s mind at work during moments before the super-ego of hindsight and counsel kicked in. I thought it important that readers in English have some of the ‘bi-ocular’ experience that readers in Spanish, comparing the two versions, might have, and so, by way of example, I have left some cuts with the indication ‘(in ist ed.)’. I have not wished, and do not now wish, to categorize these changes - that task is one for historians and social scientists - but I have wished to allow interested readers to see the pentimenti of a fascinating mind.
Regardless of cuts or ‘self-censorship’, to my mind there is no question that the second edition of the book is superior to the first, in both fullness of historical detail and accutacy of transcription - that is, fidelity to Castro’s words. In the first Spanish edition, there were many ellipses, those three editorial dots that say ‘something’s not here’, and in his introduction Ramonet says early on that ‘Fidel answered [questions] calmly, sometimes in a voice so low that it was just a whisper, almost inaudible.’ As I came upon instance after instance of uncompleted sentences, hanging verbs, uncertain direction of the thought in the first edition, I believed that at those moments Castro’s voice had tapered off and become inaudible, or that he had simply become vague, or lost his train of thought. Now I think how little credit I gave his eighty-year-old mind, for in the second edition, someone has either gone back to the recordings and listened more carefully and retranscribed many passages (and that, 1 think, is the most probable scenario), or has reconstructed the words spoken by Castro (this, I think, would probably have been done by Castro himself) and inserted them. For this, all readers of the book can be grateful, and I count myself among the first in gratitude, because I now see that my guesses as to where the thought was going were sometimes mildly, sometimes wildly off, and thus misleading to my readers. Since often a clause in Spanish can begin with a verb, with the subject coming later, I would try to guess at where that hanging verb was headed and what the grammatically plural or singular subject was — where 1 thought Castro was going. Now that I see what he was actually saying, I can report that the results of my guesswork were not always what I might have wished. So now, all those ellipses have been filled in, no one need any longer trust the translator’s mind-reading skills, and Castro’s thought is completed in a way that will leave no one in any doubt as to his lucidity and strength of reasoning and ability to craft a complete thought. In addition, misunderstandings on the part of the original transcriher(s) have been corrected in several instances. Anyone who has ever transcribed a deposition knows how difficult that work is; in the haste to publish the first edition, it may be that not enough time was budgeted for rechecking the recordings, but now those lacunae and mishearings have been corrected.
I would like to address that issue of ‘transcribing oral discourse’ for a moment. From the first, given that this book consisted of one long interview with Fidel Castro, I translated it as though it were, in fact, a legal deposition. By that I don’t mean that I tried to produce a word-for-word, ‘literal’ translation; such a creature is a figment of the imagination, impossible in art or nature. Rather, I did not put words in Castro’s mouth; I let him speak for himself. What this has meant in practice is that where Castro used pronouns rather than nouns or names, and where the Spanish was clear but, due to differing rules as to the pronoun-antecedent relationship, the resulting pronoun (he, they) would not be clear in English, I have specified the noun or name in brackets. Likewise, where an assumption or subtext in a Spanish speaker’s or interlocutor’s mind was implicit but clear, yet would not be clear to an English reader, I inserted that assumption or subtext in brackets in the text. Third, where the words were clear but might be misinterpreted by an English reader, due to differences between English and Spanish in the conventions of ‘shorthand’ expressions, I sometimes inserted an ‘i. e.’ explanation in brackets. Thus, throughout the text, brackets will always indicate to the reader those places where I have taken ‘editorial licence’. Less often, I have used [sic], generally for numbers, where there is a clear contradiction with a verified footnote figure or previous figure in the text itself.
Not a few of the changes made to the original Spanish version of this book were aimed at reducing some of the orality of the text, taking out some of the ‘filler’ words and hemming and hawing that we all use as we form our thoughts and speak. There again, I perceived a problem; at the point where letters exchanged between Castro and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis were inserted, Castro is made to say, roughly, ‘Let me read you these letters.’ Thus, some attempt was made to preserve the illusion that this book is a straightforward interview, when in fact Ramonet has told readers in his introduction that those letters were inserted long after the hook had gone to print, and that Castro never actually read them to him. That is, we know from the introduction that the text has been ‘edited’, yet it is still presented as an uninterrupted interview. Taking my cue from the addition of the letters and other similar sections, I decided not to limit the orality of the text so greatly as the editor’s (or Castro’s) cuts might have led me to; instead, I have tried to maintain some sense of Castro’s eloquent speech patterns and expressiveness, including those introductory words and phrases that all Cubans use. This is the only place I have been wilfully, and silently, ‘unfaithful’ to the cuts of the first edition, and it was in the service of a higher loyalty - to Castro’s speaking voice.
Both Spanish versions of this book have many endnotes, most providing biographical and historical information on figures mentioned by Castro. I was struck as 1 began translating, however, that many figures who were part of the modern history of Spain (the country of original publication) or France (Ramonet’s country of residence and the book’s second publication venue) were not noted - Ramonet’s assumption being, 1 imagined, that readers would be familiar enough with the figures as to need no footnoted explanations - and so 1 began to add notes for those personages, under the complementary assumption that my own English-speaking readers would not be so familiar with them as their European counterparts would be. I have also added notes for virtually every other figure mentioned but unnoted in the original, in an attempt at simple thoroughness and so as not to presume too much on my readers’ familiarity with all of the dozens of figures that Castro mentions. In the case of culturally grounded facts, objects, dates, etc., I have added explanatory notes, thereby, 1 hope, ‘cross-culturing’ the text. All the notes added by me, as well as my expansions of existing notes, are bracketed and bear the annotation ‘-Trans.’
The reader will note one word in particular used throughout in untranslated Spanish; the word companero. It is clear from the context surrounding virtually every use of this word in the Spanish that Castro has a clear meaning in mind. It is not the Russian Communists’ ‘comrade’ (or ‘Comrade’, capitalized), although it shares some nuances with that word. Rather, it indicates those closest to Castro; most often it refers to a member of his group of advisers today; sometimes it refers to a member of that original group that made the attack on the Moncada military barracks complex; sometimes it refers to one of the original members of the z6th of July Movement. In every case where I have left the word untranslated, the reader may be sure that the context makes clear that this is one of the ‘in-group’ with Castro at the time he is speaking about, his closest and most trusted associates and colleagues and advisers. Often, one senses great affection when Castro uses this word.
When I was approached about my availability to do this translation, I thought it only fair that Ignacio Ramonet and Fidel Castro be apprised of who their translator-to-be might be. Over the more than twenty-five years of my career as a translator, I have translated books by quite a number of anti-Castro figures or personae non gratae, including Armando Valladares, Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas and Jorge Edwards. But my ideology as a translator has never had anything to do with anti-Castroism. Rather, I believe that translators have the duty and obligation to translate voices that would otherwise not be beard, simply on tbe basis of language. I believe that while popular voices, voices that ratify our beliefs and worldviews should be heard, it may in the long run be more important that unpopular or unexpected or challenging, defiant voices, voices that have a viewpoint wholly different from our own, be heard - especially by our often complacent and self-centred English-language (and more especially, in that regard, American) society, and thus in my work I take somewhat the position of a defence lawyer: 1 commit myself first of all to the authors and cultures 1 translate, rather than to my readers’ or my ‘home culture’s’ comfort, so that I may give those authors a voice and secure for them a fair hearing. In the case at hand, I saw, and see, Fidel Castro as one of the most ‘censored’ world figures in English-language publishing, English-language society. Spanish-language readers can access his thoughts and words online and in print, but in English Castro is ‘represented’, as Ramonet himself says, almost invariably by his enemies. I explained my career and my position to my editor and asked him to take it to Ramonet and Castro, and I see it as a mark of their self-assurance and sense of realpolitik that neither of them objected to my taking on their project and this once being a conduit for the words and thoughts of ‘the great devil’, as Castro admits his adversaries think of him. I hope I have proved myself deserving of their trust as I have tried to let Castro speak his own mind in his own words, though translated.
I want to make public my deep gratitude to Waldemar Burgos, Romina Iglesias and Olga Uribe for their painstaking and eye-crossing work comparing the first and second versions of this book, and for the excellence of the pages they produced. I literally could not have done this without them. I am indebted, too, to my brother, John Hurley, lifelong hunter, for help with the nomenclature and functioning of firearms, about which I know very little. And I thank my editor at Penguin UK, Will Goodlad, for his constant advocacy fot publishing the best book we possibly could - with all the delays, redoings, postponements and frustrations that entailed; he was always perfectly steadfast, and I’m grateful. My wife, Isabel, was particularly understanding throughout this project - more, even, than she usually is, which is a lot - and 1 am almost inexpressibly grateful to her for that.
World History
