SOURCE: "Translating Infante's Inferno," in Substance, Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1984, pp. 85-94.

In the following essay, Levine describes the difficulties of translating Cabrera Infante's linguistically complex work from Spanish to English.

A romantic is usually afraid, isn't he, in case reality doesn't come up to expectations.

                  —Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

I. Word Play

"Faithful poetic translation is an exercise of parallel reveries in two languages," it has been said. My collaboration with the Cuban (and now British) writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante as his faithfully unfaithful translator (how else can one translate traduttore traditore?) started out as an exercise of parallel repartees, reparteasing one another in English and Spanish, in a two-faced monologue of compulsive punsters. It all began in London where Cabrera Infante was in the throes of destroying Tres tristes tigres (1965) with his British collaborator in order to create a young Frankenstein, Three Trapped Tigers (1971), a...