IJ study archive

Infinite translation

source

TL;DR

A close, item-by-item catalogue of translation errors in the Spanish Infinite Jest (La broma infinita, trans. Marcelo Covián, revised by Javier Calvo, Mondadori 2002), posted on the Catalan cultural blog The Daily Avalanche by the Barcelona blogger “Allau”. Written as a reader's exasperated hobby-audit rather than an academic collation, it walks eleven headed sections — literalism and lost commercial connotations (the sponsored years), tone/register lapses, text-vs-endnote inconsistencies, false cognates (falsos amigos), cultural/mathematical/proper-noun blunders (Fourier, Mandelbrot, Gödel, Fritz Lang, the Method actor), untranslated Anglicisms, outright nonsense, and clumsy phrasings — each pinned to a Spanish page number with the English original set against Covián's Spanish. Its crown jewel is in the comments: Javier Calvo himself replies (20 Sept 2012) to clarify his real role — he did not sign or author the translation (“Dios me libre, porque no es mía”); he is credited as revisor only because he was one of several in-house redaction-department editors who, under heavy time pressure, tried to lift Covián's already-finished, years-long draft to a “estándar más o menos riguroso” fit for publication. That is a primary-source statement about how the Spanish IJ was actually produced — and it corrects the record the archive otherwise carries (Esposito's round-up names “Javier Calvo and Marcelo Covián” as co-translators). The page advances no interpretive theory about any IJ plot or ending crux; its value is as a translation-history primary and a dense evidence-trove on the Spanish edition. It lightly touches one design crux (the Year of Glad's commercial-brand connotation, from a translation-loss angle) and one structural observation (the main-text/endnote disociación), both mentions only.

Key claims

(Allau's argument, paraphrased from his Spanish critical prose unless a span is quoted. His firsthand voice carries the piece; the English originals he cites are the NOVEL's own text (authority = the novel); Covián's Spanish renderings are the Spanish edition's text. Glosses are ours, never themselves quoted.)

  • The two-translator setup, and the surprise that the work is poor. Allau opens on what he calls the infrequent circumstance that the Spanish IJ is signed by one translator (Marcelo Covián) and revised by another (Javier Calvo); he could not learn why the pair was used, nor whether the revision was simultaneous or a later fix for defects in the original translation. Since both are known literary-translation names, he says he was surprised to find their work “francamente mejorable” (frankly there for the bettering — gloss ours). He is explicit about method and its limits: he did not exhaustively collate the Spanish against the English, only noted phrases that struck him as incomprehensible, absurd or suspect while reading, then checked them against the English “para descubrir a menudo que mis reparos eran fundados” (to find, often, that my objections were well founded — gloss ours). His alarming conclusion: if a task this superficial already turned up so many inaccuracies, the full translation must contain many more.
  • Menos es más y más es menos (literalism, both directions). Where the translators sometimes over-literalize (translating subject pronouns Spanish normally drops), elsewhere they under-explain. The novel's sponsored years lose their commercial charge: Year of Glad becomes flatly “AÑO DE GLAD”, with no hint that Glad is a U.S. brand of kitchen cling-film — Allau proposes “AÑO DEL PLÁSTICO ADHERENTE GLAD” to preserve the commercial connotation. He notes the translation does correctly disambiguate the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (chocolate vs. soap) as “Año de la Muestra del Snack de Chocolate Dove”, but renders Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment as adult ropa interior (underwear, sounding like a sex-shop item) rather than pañales (diapers); and turns Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (hemorrhoid pads) into an invented “Año del Parche Transdérmico Tucks” (transdermal patch — from nowhere, gloss ours).
  • El tono lo es todo (register lapses). A run of page-cited colloquialisms Allau finds off-key or too castizo/Iberian: that was it → “sanseacabó” (p. 26); young sir → “señorito” (p. 36); Big Buddy → “Amigo Grandullón” (p. 84); killer apps → “aplicaciones cojonudas” (p. 75); skallycaps → “gorras de gamberretes” (p. 108); one of the kids’ shampoo → “champú de uno de los nenes” (p. 127); $225 U.S. → “225 pavos” (p. 255); and Together with the involuntarily constant smile padded with an idiom absent from the original — “Y, para más inri, estaba la sonrisa involuntariamente constante” (p. 402); the original, as Allau notes, has no inri in it.
  • El misterio de los dos traductores (text vs. endnotes). Reading on, Allau's suspicion is that the endnotes were not translated by the same hand as the main text (or the translator had a poor memory), producing systematic inconsistencies between the novel's body and its apparatus: Big Buddy is “Amigo Grandullón” in the text but “persona importante” in a note; the film Blood Sister: One Tough Nun becomes “Hermana Sangrienta: Una monja dura de pelar” yet note 289 keeps the initials BS:TON (the original is BS:OTN); Choosy Mothers is “Madres Exigentes” in the text but “Choosy Mothers” (untranslated) in note 241; the rien de bonk / “Absolutely no bonking, presumably” endnote joke (where the word bonk recurs from text to note) is broken into “rien de porrazo” / “No joder en absoluto, presumiblemente” (Creativo, Allau notes drily); note 257's parenthetical is over-glossed; and a note meant to identify a “joven ladrón” (young thief) garbles the referent entirely. His rhetorical close: do we need more proof of “disociación entre el corpus de la novela y sus apéndices” (dissociation between the novel's corpus and its appendices — gloss ours)?
  • Malas compañías (false cognates). The densest section: a parade of classic falsos amigos. eventually mistranslated as “eventual” (should be final, p. 99); magnified eyes as if by a lupa/magnifier (p. 91); gym urinals rendered “orinales” (chamber pots) instead of “urinarios” (p. 1376); rheumy eyes as “ojos reumáticos” (rheumatic) rather than “legañosos” (p. 1381); retribution (punishment) as “retribución” (which in Spanish means reward, p. 76); when under the influence as “bajo la influencia” instead of “borracho” (p. 784); abandon (gusto) as “abandono” (p. 865); driving cones in a pine forest as “conos” rather than “piñas” (pine cones, p. 1011); untrue (false) as “incierto” (uncertain — not the same, p. 665); ultimate as “última” instead of “definitiva” (p. 218); mammoth knees literalized as “rodillas de mamut” (p. 603); the invented “idiótico” and “idióticamente” (p. 56) and “Adenoidal” (p. 71) which exist in no Spanish dictionary; obstetrician as “obstetricista” (p. 149); Central Squar (sic) turned into “plaza Square” (p. 162), “tan estúpido como las Hermanas Sisters”; urn (a samovar-like coffee vessel) as “urnas metálicas de café espantoso” (p. 451); and the overused “sustancia” for drug that makes the recovery house sound like a poorly dubbed TV film.
  • Ignorancias diversas (cultural/technical blunders). Errors Allau finds less forgivable because a translator could look them up: the mathematical Fourier transforms invented as “Transformaciones Fourier” (p. 227) instead of “transformadas de Fourier”; “las matemáticas de Mandelbrotian” (p. 1254), mangling Benoît Mandelbrot's name; “teoremas post-Gödelian” (p. 1198) — “Ningún traductor de DFW debiera ignorar la existencia de Kurt Gödel” (no translator of DFW should be ignorant of Kurt Gödel's existence — gloss ours); a pre-Method actor mis-rendered “premetodista” (p. 79) as if a religious Methodist, losing the Lee Strasberg reference; and “a Langesque metaWestern” translated “al estilo de Lange” (p. 899) when it should be Lang — Fritz Lang.
  • Traducido (pero no tanto) (untranslated Anglicisms). Terms left in English where Spanish has an equivalent: “a huge rotating Lazy Susan” → “una Lazy Susan giratoria” (p. 318, dropping huge and adding a redundant giratoria); the clock hand marked “EST” (Eastern Standard Time) left unglossed (p. 230); GNP left as GNP where PNB exists; “a tiny mod hipster” → “un pequeño hipstermod” (p. 269); the cinema-name riff on “plex” (Thisoplex/Thatoplex) kept English rather than Estoplex/Aquelloplex (p. 301); and Easter Island left as such where Spanish has “isla de Pascua” (p. 351).
  • Sinsentidos (outright nonsense). The “joya de la corona” (crown jewel — gloss ours) of the piece: renderings that read as pure absurdity. A basting syringe described as one used “para coser un pavo navideño” (to sew a Christmas turkey, p. 60); “pijama color de acetato” (acetate-colored pyjamas) for acetate pajamas (p. 70); Gately searching “los cajones de la vajilla” (the crockery drawers) for silverware drawers (p. 72); Charlotte Treat's knitting needles that context shows are sewing/embroidery needles (p. 348); a before/after reversal that makes a suicide happen “después... ¿O después?” (p. 315); a “w/” (with) read as without, giving a “muda sin ensordecedor sonido Wagner/Sousa” (p. 1241); the “La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin” passage where a half that should “empty” its lungs instead fills the other (p. 1368); “(and then some)” (note 326) rendered “(y entonces algunos)” — meaning nothing in Spanish; a box spring → “colchón de muelles” instead of somier/canapé (p. 637); and a dropped reflexive that has cigarette filters not biodegrading the environment rather than in it (p. 681).
  • Traducciones inventivas / Expresiones torpes / Opinable (invented, clumsy, and debatable). florid fish-lipped guys → “floripondios de labia fácil” (p. 366); innocent younger sister → “inocente hermano” (an innocent brother, not even younger, p. 1348); a wicker wheelchair mis-read as a destrozada (wrecked) one (p. 597); a two-currency price equivalence ($35.00 U.S. / $38.50 ONAN) collapsed into “35/38,50 dólares en la ONAN” (p. 255); stroking their chins → “golpeteándose los mentones” (tapping, p. 267); a powwow (Native American gathering) → “grupo de infantes” (p. 84); her buttons → “sus nalgas” (buttocks, p. 728); blue felt pen → “pluma de fieltro” instead of rotulador (p. 896); “a bag-lady-type older female” → “un vejestorio tipo bruja” (a witch-like old crone, p. 873) which Allau finds offensive; and the Catalan-slang lapse “clapando” (from Catalan clapar, to sleep) for someone dozing on a Boston sofa (p. 778) — acceptable in a Barcelona-set novel, out of place in Boston. He closes on a math objection: “The dates which are in each month prime numbers” is not “Las fechas de cada mes que tienen números primos” but dates that are prime (p. 735) — “22” contains prime factors but is not itself prime.
  • The crown-jewel comment: Javier Calvo clarifies his role (firsthand, 20 Sept 2012). Calvo replies in the thread to disclaim authorship: he did not sign the translation — “Yo no firmé la traducción de La broma infinita, Dios me libre, porque no es mía” (I did not sign the translation of La broma infinita, God forbid, because it is not mine — gloss ours). He appears in the credits as revisor only because he was “una de las (bastantes) personas que trabajamos con las galeradas de la traducción” (one of the (quite a few) people who worked on the galleys of the translation — gloss ours). As he understood it, the translation “fue un proceso bastante tortuoso que duró años” (was a fairly tortuous process that lasted years — gloss ours) which he joined only when everything was already finished; his function, with others from the redaction department and (he supposes) the Mondadori editor himself, was “tratar (con muchas limitaciones de tiempo) de llevar la traducción ya terminada a un estándar más o menos riguroso que permitiera la publicación, eliminando errores de comprensión y mejorando en la medida de lo posible la fidelidad al estilo del autor” (to try — under heavy time constraints — to bring the already-finished translation up to a more or less rigorous standard that would allow publication, eliminating comprehension errors and improving, as far as possible, fidelity to the author's style — gloss ours). Allau thanks him for the clarification about his “revisión”.
  • The comment thread as reception. Beyond Calvo, the thread (38 comments, most on 19-20 Sept 2012, tailing to 2019) is a small reception document in its own right: fellow readers and self-identified translators corroborate the audit, debate whether to complain to Mondadori, and diagnose the industry conditions (a native professional translator “C.” on pay/deadlines; commenter I.R.M. on the Anglophone-publisher quality-control model). One anonymous commenter fires an ad-hominem sneer into the thread (mocking a supposed La Caixa bank employee for moralizing about translators' pay); another reader (Admin, 2017) reports the same Covián producing an equally poor Spanish Anne Rice / Interview with the Vampire.

Theories & evidence

(This is translation-criticism, not literary interpretation; it advances no theory about any IJ plot or ending crux. The two blocks below record the only two archive cruxes the page genuinely, and lightly, touches — both mentions.)

CONNECTION: The Year of Glad's commercial-brand connotation — Glad as a U.S. cling-film brand, whose meaning the flat Spanish “AÑO DE GLAD” strips out

  • Crux: glad-naming
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — ES] Allau explains the brand for a Spanish readership: “Glad para el consumidor americano es una conocida marca de plástico adherente usado en cocina para envolver alimentos” (Glad, to the American consumer, is a well-known brand of cling-film used in the kitchen to wrap food — gloss ours), and asks whether “AÑO DEL PLÁSTICO ADHERENTE GLAD” would not have given the Spanish reader “un indicio de las connotaciones comerciales del título” (a hint of the title's commercial connotations — gloss ours). [Menos es más section]
  • Notes: A mentions-grade sighting from the translation-loss angle only. Allau names the commercial-brand connotation that the glad-naming crux depends on (Glad = a consumer brand), but he does NOT touch the crux's actual argument — the AA/sobriety reading (the Year of Glad as the sober endpoint working recovery attains) or the Man-from-Glad / Incandenza-family leg. His point is that the Spanish flattening “AÑO DE GLAD” erases the brand charge. Consonant with the crux's brand-connotation premise; do NOT upgrade past mention.

CONNECTION: Dissociation between the novel's body and its endnotes — the Spanish edition renders the same term differently in text and note, a structural inconsistency Allau reads as two hands or one forgetful one

  • Crux: endnotes-function (adjacency only — see Notes)
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — ES] Allau's structural suspicion: “las notas no han sido traducidas por la misma persona que el texto principal” (the notes were not translated by the same person as the main text — gloss ours), evidenced by term-level text/note mismatches (Amigo Grandullón/persona importante; BS:TON vs BS:OTN; Madres Exigentes/Choosy Mothers; rien de bonk/rien de porrazo), closing on “disociación entre el corpus de la novela y sus apéndices” (dissociation between the novel's corpus and its appendices — gloss ours). [El misterio de los dos traductores]
  • Notes: An adjacency, not a recorded reading. The endnotes-function crux is about what Wallace's endnote apparatus is for (its designed function in the novel). Allau touches the endnote apparatus only as a locus of translation inconsistency — the Spanish edition's body and notes disagree with each other — and advances no claim about the apparatus's authorial function. It is a translation-production observation (two hands, or one forgetful one) about the Mondadori edition, not an argument about Wallace's design. Mention-grade adjacency; do NOT open a fold or upgrade.

Themes

Translation criticism as close reading (the reader's exasperated hobby-audit; the “escrupuloso peinado” a full collation would require); the two-translator credit (Covián signs, Calvo revises) and its production history (Calvo's comment: a years-long “proceso bastante tortuoso”, an in-house editorial rescue under time pressure); false cognates / falsos amigos as the mark of the weak translator; lost commercial and cultural connotations (the sponsored years; Glad; Depend; Tucks; Lazy Susan; EST/GNP); the main-text/endnote disociación; register and casticismo (the over-Iberian colloquialisms; the Catalan-slang clapar slip); technical/proper-noun ignorance (Fourier, Mandelbrot, Gödel, Fritz Lang, the Method actor); the publishing industry's conditions (comment-thread testimony on pay, deadlines, native-reviser quality control); and translation quality as a consumer/reception grievance rather than an academic exercise.

Cross-references

  • esposito-ij-around-the-world — the direct companion, and the note this source corrects. Esposito's cross-language translation round-up names the Spanish edition's translators as “Javier Calvo and Marcelo Covián” (Spain, 2002). Calvo's firsthand comment here refines that attribution: he did not translate or sign the book — Covián signed it; Calvo was one of several in-house revisores who worked the galleys. Wire as the translation-history correction/companion for the Spanish edition.
  • letraslibres-no-necrologica-2008 — the Spanish-language sibling and nearest neighbour: Fresán's 2008 death-week profile is the Spanish reception primary (it cites La broma infinita only in its bibliography, Mondadori 2002, and does not discuss the translation as translation); this Allau page is the Spanish translation-criticism primary on the same edition. Together they are the archive's two Spanish-language IJ primaries.
  • The translator-testimony cluster — blumenbach-trashpool-2011, nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista, kerline-books-2015 — adjacency. Those are translators speaking about their own finished translations; this is a reader's forensic critique of someone else's translation, with the reviser (Calvo) surfacing only in a comment. Related by subject (the labor and pitfalls of translating IJ), not by form. Calvo's comment is the one point of overlap — a translator/editor's firsthand account of the Spanish edition's production.

Notable passages

Allau's words (his firsthand critical prose) unless marked. Spanish is the verbatim anchor; the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). Voice keys: [A] = Allau firsthand; [C] = Javier Calvo's comment (firsthand); [S] = Covián's Spanish rendering as printed (the Spanish edition's text — never Wallace's English); [E] = the NOVEL's English as printed on the page (authority = the novel). Typography reproduced byte-true (curly “ ” dominant; a few straight " spans; « » around «plex»; em-dashes in Allau's parentheticals).

  • [A] The setup: the Spanish IJ “presenta la infrecuente circunstancia de venir firmada por un autor (Marcelo Covián) y revisada por otro (Javier Calvo)” (presents the infrequent circumstance of being signed by one author and revised by another — gloss ours); their work proved “francamente mejorable” (frankly there for the bettering — gloss ours).
  • [A] Method and its limits: he noted phrases “por incomprensibles, por absurdas o por sospechosas” and checked them against the English “para descubrir a menudo que mis reparos eran fundados” (to discover, often, that my objections were well founded — gloss ours); if so superficial a task revealed “tantas inexactitudes”, the full translation must hold many more.
  • [A] The Glad connotation: “Glad para el consumidor americano es una conocida marca de plástico adherente usado en cocina para envolver alimentos” (Glad, to the American consumer, is a well-known brand of cling-film used in the kitchen to wrap food — gloss ours).
  • [A] The endnote dissociation: “¿Hacen falta más muestras de disociación entre el corpus de la novela y sus apéndices?” (Are more samples needed of the dissociation between the novel's corpus and its appendices? — gloss ours).
  • [A] On the false friends: “Una de las enseñas del mal traductor son los llamados falsos amigos” (one of the hallmarks of the bad translator is the so-called false friends — gloss ours), into which the La broma infinita translators “parecen caer en la mayoría de sospechosos habituales” (seem to fall for most of the usual suspects — gloss ours).
  • [A] On Gödel: “Ningún traductor de DFW debiera ignorar la existencia de Kurt Gödel” (no translator of DFW should be ignorant of the existence of Kurt Gödel — gloss ours).
  • [A] The framing of the worst cases: “la joya de la corona, los errores más graciosos son aquellos en los que el texto tal como aparece en la página es un puro absurdo” (the crown jewel, the funniest errors, are those in which the text as it appears on the page is pure absurdity — gloss ours).
  • [C] Javier Calvo (firsthand comment, 20 Sept 2012): “Yo no firmé la traducción de La broma infinita, Dios me libre, porque no es mía” (I did not sign the translation of La broma infinita, God forbid, because it is not mine — gloss ours).
  • [C] Javier Calvo: he appears in the credits as revisor because he was “una de las (bastantes) personas que trabajamos con las galeradas de la traducción” (one of the (quite a few) people who worked on the galleys of the translation — gloss ours); the translation “fue un proceso bastante tortuoso que duró años, y al que yo llegué cuando todo ya estaba terminado” (was a fairly tortuous process that lasted years, and which I joined when everything was already finished — gloss ours).
  • [C] Javier Calvo: his function was “tratar (con muchas limitaciones de tiempo) de llevar la traducción ya terminada a un estándar más o menos riguroso que permitiera la publicación, eliminando errores de comprensión y mejorando en la medida de lo posible la fidelidad al estilo del autor” (to try — under heavy time constraints — to bring the already-finished translation up to a more or less rigorous standard that would allow publication, removing comprehension errors and improving, as far as possible, fidelity to the author's style — gloss ours).
  • [S / E] paired example (sponsored year): the novel's [E] Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar is disambiguated in the Spanish as [S] “Año de la Muestra del Snack de Chocolate Dove” (Allau approves this one); but [E] Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment becomes [S] adult “ropa interior” (underwear) where “pañales” (diapers) would be clearer.

Accuracy notes

Cite-as-written throughout (orthography and the source's own typos preserved as printed; the English spans are the page's own renderings — the novel's text is the authority for what Wallace wrote).

  • Mixed quote typography (byte-true). The body is dominated by curly “ ” pairs but prints a handful of spans in straight ASCII " — “Amigo Grandullón”, “Big Buddy”, “persona importante” (lines 100-101); “La broma infinita” (lines 136-137); “urna” (line 176); “tíos floridos con labios de pez” (lines 274-275). Reproduced as printed; the ledger records the exact wrapper per span.
  • Curly single-quote as a closing double-quote (source typo). Note 257's Spanish gloss opens with “ but closes with a curly ’ — “...poniéndose inquieto)’” (line 116). Reproduced byte-true as the source's mismatched close.
  • “Central Squar” (sic). Allau flags the Spanish edition's own typo: “Central Squar” (sic) turned into “plaza Square” (line 173-174). The (sic) flag is Allau's own.
  • BS:TON vs BS:OTN. Allau states the note keeps “BS:TON” where the correct initials of Blood Sister: One Tough Nun are “BS:OTN” (line 104-106). Both strings reproduced as printed.
  • “immensas” (double-m). Allau writes “unas ganas immensas de hincharle un ojo al traductor” (line 290) with a Catalan-influenced double-m spelling; reproduced byte-true.
  • Comment-thread orthography. The Catalan comments carry byte-true Catalan spellings and one accent slip (“áltament” for altament, line 645); a Spanish comment types “qu podría” for que podría (line 514). Comment #9's “qu” and the ad-hominem comments are reproduced as printed, first-name/handle-initial only.
  • Page-number citations are to the SPANISH edition. Every pág. NNN citation is a La broma infinita (Mondadori 2002) page, NOT an English-edition page.
  • Four of the page's English quotations diverge slightly from the novel's text. Checked against the English edition: the novel prints “This latest attempt a straightforward meds O.D. Admitted via the E.R. three nights past” (the page has “The latest attempt…O. D.…E. R.…”, with spaced initials); the bonk endnote prints ‘Absolutely no bonking,’ presumably — with presumably outside the quotation marks the page omits; the Lung-raising armies are “14- and 16-year-olds” (the page has “16-years-olds”); and the two-currency price prints “$35.00 U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N.” (no spaces, dotted acronym — the page spaces the slash and un-dots ONAN). The page's variants are reproduced as printed; the novel's bytes are authority for every English span. The other thirteen English quotations locate in the novel exactly as the page prints them — including the deliberately joke-phrased “she had this condition where each leg was shorter than the other”, which is Wallace's own wording, faithfully transcribed.
  • Screenshot filenames from 2010. The page embeds screenshots named (macOS default) “Captura de pantalla 2010-09-24…” and “2010-10-29…” — the author's source captures from his 2010 reading, not the date the page was published.