On a Sentence from “Imminence”

Alice Whitmore

<<Celeste no necesitaba motivación para sus números; era esa otra de las libertades que se tomaba entonces, ningún borracho visto o soñado para el 14, ningún incendio en las hornallas para el 76.>>

“Celeste needed no external or subconscious inspiration when choosing her lottery numbers. This was another of the liberties she took back then. She didn’t have to see (or dream of) a drunk to know today’s bet would be on number 14; she didn’t need the flames on the stovetop to portend a number 76.”

This sentence from Mariana Dimópulos’s short novel Pendiente, translated as Imminence, perplexed me when I first read it. It is one of several sentences in the novel that turns on an intimate understanding of the Quiniela, the Argentinian national lottery. Celeste, the character referenced here, is an older woman living in central Buenos Aires. Like many of her generation, she plays the Quiniela every day, selecting her lottery numbers at one of the hundreds of street vendors scattered throughout the city. Traditionally, Argentinians choose their numbers based on the dreams they remember from the night before. There is a code—known by heart, to many punters—that converts dreamt images into lottery numbers. (If you read Spanish, you can consult it here).

Despite my close relationship with Argentina, I was not fluent enough in the language of the Quiniela to immediately make sense of Dimópulos’s references to it. In early drafts of my translation, every paragraph mentioning Celeste and her mysterious numbers was highlighted in yellow. When I wrote to Dimópulos to ask her what on earth was going in these passages, she very kindly, very patiently, explained the Quiniela code to me. And yet, understanding was only half the battle—I now had to find a way to translate these passages into English.

 In the end, I decided that most English-speaking readers would need some help understanding that Celeste’s “numbers” are, in fact, “lottery numbers.” (The word lotería or Quiniela is not mentioned in the Spanish text, but it is implied—an implication obvious to most Argentinean readers, but likely lost on English-speaking ones.) Adding details made the already long sentence unwieldy, so I decided to chop it into smaller, more digestible pieces. I didn’t want to over-explain things, but I needed to orient the reader a little.

Alice Whitmore is the Pushcart Prize-nominated translator of Guillermo Fadanelli’s See You at Breakfast? and Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes and Imminence, as well as a number of short fiction, poetry and essay collections. She is the translations editor for Cordite Poetry Review and an assistant editor for The AALITRA Review, and lectures in Spanish and Literary Studies at Monash University.