+review. jorge franco
rosario tijeras
jorge franco (translated by gregory rabassa)
+ brook stephenson
Seven Stories Press / ISBN 1583226788

It’s a twisted story wrought with Murphy’s law- what can go wrong, will go wrong - and centered around one woman, Rosario. She took the surname Tijeras after having avenged herself of a brutal violation. From there, her story gets worse, and better, then worse again. It entangles a pair of best friends, Emilio and Antonio. They are rich boys from the right families who are not supposed to mix with lower class folks. But that’s neither here nor there. Rosario’s story ends at the beginning and her good friend Antonio agonizingly tells her tale and his story in first person.

She was shot in the head you know.

“Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of love with that of death."

Confusion.

There was a whole lot of that. This story’s angst focuses on a doomed love triangle between the best friends and Rosario. Rosario loved them both equally and for different reasons. One man, Emilio, had her body, the other, Antonio, snared her mind- or was it her soul? As hard as Antonio had fallen, you never quite know the answer to which portion of Rosario he possessed. He never knew it himself. All three had the others’ hearts unfortunately but that was just one problem among a million. The troubles the characters face in the book grow more layered and complex as the novel progresses.

The truth is, this book is filled with lean prose speckled with bursts of poetry. The characters are so real and so pained that it’s hard to tear away from it. But there is something that just isn’t sitting right. The book is obviously amazing in Spanish but it seems like the translation is a bit off for some reason. It seems the text exhibited an odd ebb and flow, in parts amazingly honest and raw but then dry and terse in others. It rides like a roller coaster. Is it a bad translation? Couldn’t be. Gregory Rabassa is an amazing translator. He is a professor of Romance Languages at Queens College and has translated the works of many writers including well-respected authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the Spanish original. So, if it is not the translation then, what is it?

The light began to shine after a few more chapters. What I suspected of being an odd translation was really the purposely stilted pace and flow of the narrator Antonio, a man tormented by the nature of his relationship with the woman he loves and the man she loves. While Emilio enjoys her carnally, Antonio is the cerebral cool side of the coin to his heat. Antonio’s unrequited love is beautiful and colorful at moments yet wracked with terseness, despair and pain. It’s the perfect voice and an excellent translation. Rosario Tijeras is a beautifully arranged storyline that denotes the life, times, choices and consequences of loving and being loved back by a woman who is both the symbiotic poison and antidote for you. Welcome to Antonio’s lament as he walks back through the life of the woman he loves as she lies in the hospital riddled with bullets, barely hanging on to what’s left of her life.

An excellent book, the paperback version is available now and it is also a film from the award winning producer of Before Night Falls.

Brook Stephenson is the literary editor of Nat Creole.