How I Wrote Wild Horses by Tiago Miller
It’s impossible for me to write about how I translated Jordi Cussà’s Cavalls salvatges without thinking of The Fall’s ‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’. At the end of the day, did I translate Cavalls salvatges? Did I write Wild Horses? Was it a combination of the two? Does anyone even give a shit? The Fall reference is not coincidental as this band has informed my entire approach to translation: DIY, from the outside, heart on sleeve and taking it as far as possible, whatever ‘it’ might actually be. The band’s lead singer Mark E. Smith was convinced that their 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour would be their last, and he went hard. Repetitive, distorted, drums that pound you into a mash, wailing keys and, furthermore (and then further and more), Smith’s aggressively rhythmic vocals. Likewise, I was convinced this would be my last book, for reasons any human being trying to pay their modest way with literary translation will understand. And following The Fall’s example, I went hard. So, here’s How I Wrote Wild Horses.
The novel begins in medias res, immediately catapulting the reader into the pleasure/pain of the funeral of one of the book’s central characters: Lluïsa, Llisa, Tigerlily, Lilypad, Golden Girl, Justine, the name depending on the time, place, company and soul state. A history of shooting and slamming, dealing and debauchery (‘a perfect three-way anarchy amounting to almost all the stars in the Milky Way’) links the three characters that at times are central and at others peripheral. Cavalls salvatges was unique, ground-breaking, and (dare I say it) revolutionary when it was published, but it was also uncomfortable, like limited leg room or a hard seat must be for the political classes whiling away the hours at Barcelona’s Liceu. Because, senyors i senyores, Cussà’s undiluted truths refuted Jordi Pujol’s centre-right, Christian Catalonia that was pushing a hallucinogenic post-Olympic Utopia via a coercive marriage of convenience with Madrid. But the difference between Cavalls salvatges and any feeble, preceding attempts at ‘drug lit’ was that not only did Cussà know what he was talking about but that he was a master of storytelling.
It’s precisely the art of storytelling that struck me hardest as I went deeper into my versioning of Cussà’s great cult novel. Cussà was an epic narrator in the classical sense, drawing as he did on Greek literature and Shakespeare, but also Kurosawa and Bob Dylan, and the characters’ sailing upon the high seas of existence and their serial succumbing to the fatally sweet song of the sirens of addiction has much more to do with Homer than Howl or On the Road.
Yet, the lines between translation and versioning begin to blur when it came to translating the unending linguistic invention employed by Cussà throughout the novel. Being so full of corrupted idioms, puns, portmanteaus and cultural references, the translator is obliged not only to possess a good eye and ear, but the mettle to recreate them with equal intensity and imagination. (Switch: Cussà died on 11th July 2022, just as I was beginning Wild Horses. Not wanting to sound like a mandala painting modern mystic, I imagined him by my side shouting ‘more, more, more!’) Yet where the lines between translation and creative writing are blurred is where I see most clearly and feel most comfortable. Hence, the Glaswegian English teacher from Cavalls salvatges is, in fact, from Boston in Wild Horses, allowing the translator-writer to make her say how she ‘feels skanky’ so that the chapter’s intrepid narrator can return (with a fresh pack of needles in his pocket) to his ‘skankydoodle’. Likewise, in her transformation she becomes the ‘newenglishteacher’ and the ‘rushing east coaster’, and acquires the monikers ‘mainline Caroline’ and ‘sweet Caroline’. It’s the same person, but then again it isn’t.
These sorts of games abound in Cavalls salvatges, but they don’t always appear in the same places in Wild Horses: Cussà’s wit and invention had to seem natural, as a result the novel’s humour could never be obvious, its intellectualism pedantic, or its linguistic inventiveness banal. As such, Wild Horses is peppered with irreverent and scatological comments, such as ‘a pure fermenting turd curd on legs’, ‘however faecal the treacle’, off-the-cuff guff’ and ‘getting into the knickers of the night’, that don’t necessarily correspond with Cavalls salvatges. But it’s fine, Cussà was there telling me ‘do it! do it!’
Likewise, musical references permeate Cavalls salvatges, but the ones I employ in Wild Horses have an independent life of their own. The creative licence that a Catalan novel citing UK and US groups gives a translator into English is mind-blowing, to say the least. Hence, we read, ‘I was in a hurry to get the hell out of there and feel the happiness of a warm gun’ (The Beatles), ‘running off with Ruthella’s gram was killing the goose that laid the golden-brown eggs’ (The Stranglers), ‘and then the starman himself greets me with a beep as though everything were hunky dory’ (David Bowie), or ‘I take a swig like a boss just as the Springsteen tape finishes’ (Bruce Springsteen).
To end, I will leave you with an extract that combines Cussà’s (back)street-wise prose with his deep knowledge of Poe, Valle-Inclán and Virgil:
‘We didn’t find Mín anywhere that night and no one had seen or heard from him in days. We were told he had two or three places to crash, all free of charge, but where exactly he spent the night depended on the motivation and meaning of the moment. However, the most frequent of the three was a squatted factory to the east of the city which fashioned an even more aggressive scenography than any of those I’d seen, either close up or at a distance, in all the down-and-out alleys of Barcelona and Tarragona: on a dead-end street decapitated by a motorway lay a dark domino line of derelict factories and warehouses, all as looming as they were grotesque, all exhaling deep nocturnal despair. There were lines of whores of all three sexes beside the motorway access ramp and yet more countercultural offers near the velodrome opposite that labyrinth of industrial decay. No doubt during daylight hours it was slightly less gloomy but I swear I wouldn’t have dared go anywhere near the place if not in the company of Sandro and Claudio, an ex-junkie pal of his who played the role of Charon. No doubt sobriety was starting to soften my underbelly but then the shadows overseas always appear deeper, denser, more dangerous. When you’re an addict and you need your drug, you don’t see or consider the peril you’re walking into. Not that you care, of course, because in that moment there’s only one concept that has any value: getting what you need and getting it quick. But on that particular trip to Italy, having gone there with a couple of years of almost total abstinence as perspective, when I looked into the eyes of all those sad addicts, so abandoned to themselves in both essence and existence, I was incapable of recognising myself in their image, not even in the past. I remember telling Claudio the same and he understood me perfectly because after six years of not touching the stuff he still sometimes had the same absurd sensation. I thought a lot about it over the following days, believing the affirmation to be the result of a paradox until finally realising it wasn’t, because the only true reality is the present.’