Julio Ramón Ribeyro

[Bubba]

All right, I've mentioned Ribeyro (1929-1994) before but hadn't wanted to start a thread on him. Although he is not widely known outside of his native Peru, he is, I think, the finest Spanish-language storyteller of the second half of the twentieth century (I haven't read them all, course). His stories are easy to read--even for a learner of Spanish--but they are only outwardly simple.

Two of his three novels (Cambio de guardia, though readable, is the unfortunate exception) are also very good, as are his diaries, several of his plays, and a handful of what he called his ULOs (unidentified literary objects).

This spring alone a translation of Ribeyro's second novel, Los geniecillos dominicales, was published in Italy (I genietti della domenica), and his book of ULOs, Prosas apátridas, was published in translation in both France (Proses apatrides) and Brazil. Brazil! And the Brazilians, I might add, had published a large collection of his stories only months earlier. In the United States, apart from a handful of stories, most of them appearing in the Antioch Review and translated by un servidor, there's been nothing for years. The University of Texas Press edition of a selection of Ribeyro's stories is very well done, but Silvio in the Rose Garden, the first collection of Ribeyro stories to appear in English, is truly execrable. Here is the critic W. Luchting on the volume:

It is unfortunate that Peruvian Ribeyro's works should have their English premiere (there have been a few acceptable rehearsals over the years, but punishably few) on such an inadequate stage. And yet, what a pleasure it is to read these stories, even in this inadequate translation!

It astounds me--no, it infuriates me, and has done so for years--that Ribeyro's superb work should continue to go largely unread in English. That he should be overshadowed by a countryman, MVLL, whose work, for the most part, pales in comparison. You may not have heard of Ribeyro, but one day he will be more widely read than Vargas Llosa.

Here's a bit from one of his ULOs, a book called Dichos de Luder ("Things Luder Said"):

"All my work is an indictment of life," says Luder. "I’ve done nothing to better the human condition. If my books survive it will be because of the perversity of my readers."

 

[Daniel del Real]

Even in Mexico it's an author not easy to find. In 1994 he was awared with the Premio Juan Rulfo, which is now known as Premio FIL, given by the Guadalajara Book Fair. You've been so persistent with him that know I really want to read him. I'll try some short stories, so any recommendation is welcome.

 

[Mirabell]

All right, I've mentioned Ribeyro (1929-1994) before but hadn't wanted to start a thread on him. Although he is not widely known outside of his native Peru, he is, I think, the finest Spanish-language storyteller of the second half of the twentieth century (I haven't read them all, course). His stories are easy to read--even for a learner of Spanish--but they are only outwardly simple.

Two of his three novels (Cambio de guardia, though readable, is the unfortunate exception) are also very good, as are his diaries, several of his plays, and a handful of what he called his ULOs (unidentified literary objects).

This spring alone a translation of Ribeyro's second novel, Los geniecillos dominicales, was published in Italy (I genietti della domenica), and his book of ULOs, Prosas apátridas, was published in translation in both France (Proses apatrides) and Brazil. Brazil! And the Brazilians, I might add, had published a large collection of his stories only months earlier. In the United States, apart from a handful of stories, most of them appearing in the Antioch Review and translated by un servidor, there's been nothing for years. The University of Texas Press edition of a selection of Ribeyro's stories is very well done, but Silvio in the Rose Garden, the first collection of Ribeyro stories to appear in English, is truly execrable. Here is the critic W. Luchting on the volume:

It astounds me--no, it infuriates me, and has done so for years--that Ribeyro's superb work should continue to go largely unread in English. That he should be overshadowed by a countryman, MVLL, whose work, for the most part, pales in comparison. You may not have heard of Ribeyro, but one day he will be more widely read than Vargas Llosa.

Here's a bit from one of his ULOs, a book called Dichos de Luder ("Things Luder Said"):

I located Crónica de San Gabriel in German translation. You're saying it's good?

 

[Stiffelio]

In the United States, apart from a handful of stories, most of them appearing in the Antioch Review and translated by un servidor, there's been nothing for years.

It astounds me--no, it infuriates me, and has done so for years--that Ribeyro's superb work should continue to go largely unread in English. That he should be overshadowed by a countryman, MVLL, whose work, for the most part, pales in comparison. You may not have heard of Ribeyro, but one day he will be more widely read than Vargas Llosa.

No wonder you are promoting him so keenly! I don't doubt he may be a great writer and, unfortunatelly, there are many cases of brilliant but unrecognized writers worldwide (you sure know the likes of Lamborghini, Levrero, Di Benedetto, etc., just to stay in South America). But take it easy; you don't need to disparage VLL in order to make the case for Ribeyro. Wouldn't it be nicer if Perú had two literary giants? There's room for both.

Btw, which novels or stories by Ribeyro do you recommend the most and/or are more easily obtained (in Spanish, I mean)?

 

[Bubba]

Crónica de San Gabriel is a fine novel, a very enjoyable novel (I've translated it into English), but neither it nor Los geniecillos dominicales, a flawed novel with several excellent chapters, including the opening one, has quite the magic of the short stories. I'm partial to Ribeyro's middle-period and late stories ("Silvio en El Rosedal," "El ropero, los viejos y la muerte," "El polvo del saber," "Sólo para fumadores," Relatos santacrucinos--too many to list, really); his first collection, Los gallinazos sin plumas, has a slight undertone of social commitment that, to my mind, doesn't suit Ribeyro's particular genius (ironic, skeptical) all that well, although every piece in the collection is recognizably Ribeyro, and the title story is his most widely anthologized piece. I also admire Ribeyro's diaries and the little book Dichos de Luder, the contents of which are available on the Interwebz.

Another thing about Ribeyro is that he is seemingly about the only Latin American writer of his generation with a sense of humor. Here he is as Luder:

People ask him why he sometimes gets drunk in low-class bars. "As a precaution," says Luder. "I occasionally wake up with the vague feeling that I'm becoming a respectable person."

And, Stiffelio, I'm not really pushing Ribeyro because I've translated his work; rather, I've translated it because I think it's so good. I don't think many people who have read both Ribeyro and MVLL (those partial to long novels may be an exception) would prefer MVLL (I certainly don't, even though on political matters I find myself in broad agreement with him). But Ribeyro will never be, as you put it, a "literary giant." He is more as he describes his creation Luder:

"The difference between French and North American writers," says Luder, "is that the former merely cultivate a garden, whereas the latter rush out to break up a forest."

"And you?"

"Ah, I just water a potted plant."

 

[Stevie B]

Bubba, what can you tell me about Silvio in the Rose Garden?

 

[Bubba]

Bubba, what can you tell me about Silvio in the Rose Garden?

I presume you're referring to the book of that title published in the US some years ago (titles of books go in italics, titles of stories in quotation marks) rather than to the story of that title. If so, I can't say much more about it than I did in my first post: it's truly execrable. It's a slim book (maybe only five stories), attractively made, but it reads very much as if it were translated by a non-native speaker of English (it was). It's also very badly proofread. The whole undertaking was almost criminally negligent. Yet, as the review I quoted in my first post suggests, you still get swept up. On the whole, the Texas edition is the better choice, although the selection is more heavily weighted to what, in my view, are Ribeyro's less successful early stories, which some people seem to prefer.

P.S.: Ribeyro is better than Lorrie Moore!

 

[Stevie B]

Thanks for details, Bubba. I'll not only avoid this book because of the reasons you noted, but also because copies of it are selling for $100+ on the net. Looks like the Ribeyro book you translated is still in print - though Amazon is down to its last two copies. Does that mean royalty checks will be dwindling? By the way, do translators get royalty checks or is that determined on a case by case basis?

P.S.: Ribeyro is better than Lorrie Moore!

I was wondering if you'd recall that exchange. For the record, I would classify myself more as a person who has read Lorrie Moore (one book years ago) than I would as a Lorrie Moore fan. Then again, I read about 20 novels for every short story collection, so I'm not usually drawn to shorter works. Island by Canada's Alistair MacLeod would probably top my list as my favorite short story collection.

 

[Bubba]

Looks like the Ribeyro book you translated is still in print - though Amazon is down to its last two copies. Does that mean royalty checks will be dwindling? By the way, do translators get royalty checks or is that determined on a case by case basis?

That Amazon is down to its last two copies of the book means only that Amazon has probably never sold more than a copy of the book every couple of months or so since it was first published, and has thus never had more than a couple of copies in stock. If Amazon is out of stock, and if it looks like the book is still trickling out, it will simply place an order with the distributor or publisher for a couple more copies; otherwise, it will lose sales to the third-party sellers who hawk their wares on Amazon. Naturally, Amazon will always have hundreds or even thousands of copies of bestsellers in stock.

As far as I know, translators are either paid a lump sum for work for hire or, like authors, given an advance on royalties. The "royalty check," I think, is a bit of a myth (I've certainly never seen hide nor hair of one, and don't expect I ever will). Few authors or translators earn back the advances they are paid, and a lot of the time they aren't really expected to, either (and, no, you don't have to make up the difference to the publisher out of your own pocket).

Once, when I was bored, and feeling vaguely Scrooge-like, I took my royalty rate and the sale price for this book and tried to figure at what point I would be due a "royalty check." It turned out that even if the publisher had sold every copy of the book she had had printed (fewer than a thousand, but I can't remember exactly how many), I still wouldn't have earned back the advance, which, I can assure you, was no princely sum, not by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[Stevie B]

I wrote to Jeffrey Eugenides years ago when I was living in Japan. I was thinking of teaching Middlesex, but only if it had been translated into Japanese. Eugenides wrote back and said it indeed had been translated and that he'd be "thrilled" when royalty checks arrived twice a year from Japan for about $200 each. Hope he got a decent advance and that they didn't forget about the translator. I would have expected Eugenides to earn more in royalties since the book was a fairly popular award winner and people in Japan still read. Just as many actors work in restaurants to pay the bills, I suppose most literary translators have other jobs that provide a steadier income. Does it often happen that someone new to translating takes less for a project in order to establish themselves in the business?

 

[Bubba]

Stevie, it's my understanding that publishers make assumptions to calculate advances (and I would expect Eugenides got one) in such a way as to avoid having to issue royalty checks or eat a big "loss," so Eugenides's $200 checks would in fact represent royalties on sales in excess of those that the publisher assumed, giving him every reason to be pleasantly surprised, if not thrilled. If, for example, a writer has a 10% royalty and the publisher assumes that 80% of the 1,000 copies of the book will sell at $10 each, it will give the writer an advance of $800; if only 70% of the books sell, the writer has "made off" with $100; it's not this chump change that's going to cause the publisher to go broke. If, on the other hand, 90% of the books sell, the writer should get $100 in royalties on top of the $800 advance.

Keep in mind that an author's royalty rate on foreign sales is probably less than 10% (and calculated on the highly discounted wholesale price rather than on the retail price); the takings, after all, have to be shared by the writer, the translator, the agent (it's unlikely Eugenides sold the rights to a Japanese publisher himself), the local distributor, the retailer, the target-language publisher, and perhaps the English-language publisher. In this scenario, then, that $400 a year Eugenides was getting could actually represent a fairly large number of sales. And remember that these sales are just the sales in excess of those that earned back the advance I'm assuming he got. So, yes, he has every right to be thrilled. But all this, which was perhaps too obvious for me to have spent so much time explaining it, also shows how hard it is to make a living as a writer or, worse, as a literary translator, who, by definition, will not really make any money from selling foreign rights to his work (at one time it was common to divide up the English-language rights pie into North American and UK/Commonwealth pieces; English-language publishers of translations now usually seek world English rights, I think).

People who are just entering a field always work for less, but I don't know if there are a lot of low-ballers out there; in any case, the difference between a low-ball bid for a job and a highish bid isn't likely to be a very large percentage of the total cost of publishing a translation (and I don't even know if literary translation jobs are bid for), so I wouldn't expect this difference to figure into a reputable publisher's decision to assign a translation as much as the translator's experience, reputation for reliability, name recognition, and so on. But I could be wrong.

 

[gesbor]

Hello There, I agree. Julio Ramón Ribeyro is one of the finest Latin American writer, it is a shame that "The Academia" didn't include him as part of THE BOOM LATINOAMERICANO. Many people say that it is because he wrote mainly " Short stories". It would have been very different if he would have written more NOVELS.... I don't know..
Also very sad that you can no find works of Ribeyro in English, French or German. There is also a good young peruvian writer called Gunter Silva, who writes short stories. " Crónicas de Londres" is a great collection of short-stories.

 

[tiganeasca]

Not sure how I missed this, but since Ribeyro has so little available in English (two books to the best of my knowledge: a novel, Chronicle of San Gabriel, reviewed here, and Marginal Voices, a collection of short stories), it's definitely worth noting the appearance of a new collection of stories from this Peruvian master: The Word of the Speechless published in 2019 or 2020 by NYRB Books. (You can find a collection of excerpts from the major reviews here.) It is a collection of 19 stories drawn from various collections in Spanish, and it includes an introduction by Alejandro Zambra. Sadly, there is some overlap with Marginal Voices (at least three stories, though it's sometimes impossible to know from titles alone) but since he has so little otherwise available in English, this volume still strikes me as a good purchase for those who are interested.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Not sure how I missed this, but since Ribeyro has so little available in English (two books to the best of my knowledge: a novel, Chronicle of San Gabriel, reviewed here, and Marginal Voices, a collection of short stories), it's definitely worth noting the appearance of a new collection of stories from this Peruvian master: The Word of the Speechless published in 2019 or 2020 by NYRB Books. (You can find a collection of excerpts from the major reviews here.) It is a collection of 19 stories drawn from various collections in Spanish, and it includes an introduction by Alejandro Zambra. Sadly, there is some overlap with Marginal Voices (at least three stories, though it's sometimes impossible to know from titles alone) but since he has so little otherwise available in English, this volume still strikes me as a good purchase for those who are interested.

It is a great purchase Dave, do not hesitate. A few years ago I had the chance to read his complete short stories at 1038 pp and he is just a true master in this field.
I've only read a couple of his novels, Crónica de San Gabriel & Los Geniecillos Dominicales and they're just OK, nothing compared with his short stories. I have pending his diaries which I've heard they're great.

 

[tiganeasca]

1038 pages! I knew he was known for his stories, which I have a sort of love/hate relationship with (based, of course, on a single book). But I did not realize that he had written so many. Wow! Too bad so little of his work is available in English. The selection of things translated into English never ceases to amaze me. You would think that this would be a no-brainer. ?