It happened with great simplicity, without affectation.

— Virgilio Piñera

One early May afternoon at a café on Rue Scribe, a strange man presented himself to the university students as France’s greatest translator. Yet when these students looked into the name this man had given, they could find no trace of either him or his work. The stranger lingered a half an hour or so and, finding the students more interested in drinking with their young friends than in theorizing translation with some old and unknown quantity, went on his way.

The following week on the same day, at the same time, this translator turned up at the students’ café of choice on Rue Scribe. This time, he said, he bore proof of his mastery. Setting a hideous briefcase on the table, he presented the students with a hardcover copy of Cuentos fríos by Virgilio Piñera, as well as what seemed to be a translation manuscript in a folder labeled Contes froids, which, even on quick inspection, the students determined was a complete hand- written copy of Piñera’s same book in Spanish.

“All you did was write out the original, you hack!” the twenty-year-olds protested, slamming their half-liters of Carlsberg on the table.

“In this you’re mistaken, my fledgling scholars. What you’re holding in your hands is a perfect translation.”

The students, not knowing if he meant this as a joke, talked forbiddingly amongst themselves until the translator, unpossessed of the social graces needed to pierce the bubble of their conversation, left the café again, not bothering to take with him either his book or his manuscript.

Over the course of the following week, the three students who didn’t consider the situation entirely ridiculous met to scrutinize the manuscript for divergences from Piñera’s Spanish. But no, what they were holding did, as the others had said, appear to be a complete and faithful transcription. They puzzled over this artifact, and two even claimed to write off this self-proclaimed translator as a talentless psycho. But it would be unfair to his memory to say that all three displayed no sign of disappointment when, the following week, he failed to appear at the awaited hour.

These three students—and a couple poet friends who had nothing better to do with their lives—could all be found waiting patiently at one, at two, at three-thirty and four, but by five their listless crowd began to thin out, mocked  by the liquored-up boasts of those who had called him  a lowlife from the outset. And by nine, only one student remained, leafing through the manuscript to find some trace of a reason to continue waiting, some piece of contact information beyond a name which she might use to track  the translator down, when, much to her surprise, she found herself perfectly capable of reading Piñera’s Spanish in the translator’s hand, as if he had written the tales out in French. Yo persisted as yo, and yet it read to her like je; caída like chute; mandíbula like mâchoire. Full sentences in this language, which moments before had been entirely without sense, now blossomed before her in all their complexity. The lone difficulty—or tedium, really, because what she wanted was to read on at full speed, without hindrance—derived from the messiness of the translator’s hand.

Spellbound, this student turned to the first edition of Piñera’s tales, bound and distributed in Buenos Aires in 1956—really a gorgeous copy, a testament to the translator’s  lust for collecting the finest editions of the books he worked with—and yet, looking at the printed Spanish, the student felt she may as well have been gazing at equations not even a well-educated physicist could have solved without great sacrifice to his domestic life or personal health.

Had she imagined this sudden impression of fluency? Looking back at the translator’s manuscript, she felt once again the pure, transparent ease of comprehension which, momentarily, she had feared was a fabrication of some early stage of dementia or drunkenness. And glancing back reluctantly at the copy of Cuentos fríos, she found Piñera’s Spanish had resumed its frustrating opacity, like a smile whose teeth are covered in blood.

Now, the following day, this student spoke of her expe- rience with her friends who, although they understand- ably doubted her at first, one by one experienced the same phenomenon of sudden understanding of the translator’s handwritten manuscript and ongoing puzzlement before Piñera’s ostensibly identical printed text. And although he became the stuff of legend at the literature department of the University, the strange man had drowned himself the previous evening, around nine, in some sorry Parisian canal, believing himself a failure.

“Parable of the Perfect Translator” will appear in Cartoons, to be published by City Lights on May 21. Kit Schluter’s recent work has appeared in Boston Review, BOMB, and Brooklyn Rail. He is author of the poetry collection Pierrot’s Fingernails (Canarium Books) as well as numerous chapbooks and artist editions of poems and stories. Schluter is included in the latest edition of Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan UP, 2020). He has translated widely from the French and Spanish, including works by Rafael Bernal (New Directions), Copi (Inpatient Press, New Directions), bruno darío (Ugly Duckling Press(e)), Mario Levrero (& Other Stories), Marcel Schwob (Wakefield Press), and Olivia Tapiero (Nightboat Books). He lives in Mexico City.