Most people who dedicate themselves to being an editor do it to earn a living and not as a vocation, but how could paranoia be a vocation anyway?
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 30 June 2024 – Burgos, the city where El Cid and Miguelón are buried, is two and a half hours by train from Salamanca. It’s a cold place. To enjoy it well you should eat some hot beans in one of the taverns on Calle San Lorenzo, but not before devouring at top speed a couple of cojonudas – bread, sausage, peppers and quail’s eggs. Then, all prepared and wearing a scarf, one should head for the Museum of Human Evolution, where there are human remains more than 400,000 years old. It can change your life seeing the sharpened stone axe which they’ve named ’Excalibur’, or the ’pelvis Elvis’ (bones), both thousands of years old.
Having completed this part of the journey, one follows the course of the river Arlanzón as far as Las Huelgas monastery. There have been nuns living there since the eleventh century. Very powerful nuns actually, who used to own a large part of the land surrounding the convent. The king had to travel to one of their chapels, where a strange automaton that represented the apostle Saint James brandished a sword and declared him a knight.
To earn some income the nuns opened up part of the monastery to visitors. The floor is solid oak, the tombs are white and in one room hangs an enormous Muslim banner – supposedly used by the Arabs in the battle of the Tolosa flatlands in 1212. And in one of the galleries, under very dim light, hangs the picture of … the character I’m looking for.
You have to imagine Titivilo as a cat which prowls around the scriptorium, wets his paws in ink and climbs up onto the desk where the monks are working
Black and furry paws, tight pants, hunched, shirtless, a bundle of books on his back, he doesn’t have wings but he does still have his horns. He’s a bignose, he smiles – or grimaces. This is Titivilo, the patron demon of editors, writers, librarians and others whose business is in paper. Next to him is a devil with miniature wings attached to his arms, which gives him the airs of a reveller. Both are trying to torment the nuns and the royal family, protected by the Virgin’s cloak. It’s one of the few times that Titivilo, invisible lowlife bastard, has let himself be caught.
You have to imagine Titivilo as a cat which prowls around the scriptorium, wets his paws in ink and climbs up onto the desk where the monks are working. Today, the same mischievous animal trips over ballpoint pens and two-tone pencils – crucifixes against errors – and passes his tail over the keyboard, introducing malware into the autocorrect of the computer. ’Titivillus in culpa est!’ pleaded the monk when his manuscript contained errors. And the excuse has passed from generation to generation, right down to today’s editors.
One will never have enough indulgence in that profession. An editor is payed – almost always badly – to develop textual paranoia to pathological limits. Victims of professional deformation, they look for ’erratas’ in the TV’s scrolling-news summary, in the adverts, in the words of politicians – those producers of verbal inanity – and they can’t bear to be around when a child is speaking.
The Academy defines ’errata’ as ’material equivocation in the final print or in the manuscript’. Nothing more than that. An ’errata’, for the obsessive editor, is a mental sin whose echo goes on multiplying in the walls of the brain. ’Errata’ is the title of George Steiner’s wonderful autobiography, and also the name of an odd Spanish publisher. There are ’erratas’ that are notorious milestones among the editors of our language [Spanish] – ’el coño fruncido’ (the furrowed pussy – ’coño’ instead of ’ceño’, ie ’brow’), ’the fire behind’, ’the multiplication of penises and fish’ – traumatic erratas, erratas of ETA, bitch erratas, of burials, of thieves.
How does one learn to edit? There isn’t a school for it, although someone did charge for teaching the craft in my university faculty
How does one learn to edit? There isn’t a school for it, although someone did charge for teaching the craft in my university faculty. The classes turned into a delicious war against time, because there was no way to fill up the term time exhausting variations on one single theme: make sure the other guy writes well, be your brother’s guardian or they’ll punish you. The other, second patron demon of editors, after Titivilo, is the author himself.
There are so few authors who deliver their manuscript with even the minimum of honesty, that, for the reader, there will always remain some suspicion about who is the real, true person responsible for the book. Herralde or Bolaño? Divinski or Quino? De Maura or Kundera? ’Paradiso’ is famous for its linguistic bloopers (it actually starts with “Paradiso 1″ instead of “Chapter 1”!) and, in his copy, Cortázar noted: “Why so many errors, Lezama?” Critical editions usually print photographs of the original manuscript, in which the reader comes to realise with horror that the majority of novelists know nothing about punctuation, ignore accents (on letters), confuse meanings and mess up the rhythm. Not to mention bad handwriting or the celebrated joke made by García Márquez, who said “ditch the proper-spelling thing”.
There have been many chasers-down of bloopers among Cubans – from José Zacarías Tallet to Fernando Carr Parúas. Books about language, such as
’The Dart in the Word’ by Fernando Lázaro Carreter, or the most recent ’Measure The Words’ by the lovely Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, were the best preventative exorcism against Titivilo. Among the current members of the Cuban Language Academy there are few who have the capacity to write text at the level of their predecessors. I’ve just looked at the list and was only impressed by Margarita Mateo.
My ideas for a personal catalogue are so chaotic that they will never find any finance, unless I provide it myself.
Editing is a thankless business. The majority of those who do it, do so only to earn money and don’t do it as a vocation. But how could paranoia be a vocation anyway? Another thing – and this really is a profession that is becoming more and more rare – is ’editor as cultural thinker’, such as one who selects catalogues, or is advisor to an author and a craftsperson of books, whose presentation, obviously, he will have to look after, without this being the core of his work. I’ve known very few editors who were like that – four or five? – and I don’t even dare to say how many of them were Cubans.
For my part, I’m not an editor, although I do edit almost every day. My ideas for a personal catalogue are so chaotic that they will never find any finance, unless I provide it myself. I detest looking for funding, I prefer to produce it myself.
I’ve come to experience true depression when someone else’s text is badly written. It hurts to read a book rotting away with errors, but it hurts more if I’m the one who has to correct them. Life is cruel, we live under the implacable fire of Titivilo and we don’t always have some of those cojonudas to lift our spirits. As enemies of the literary devil, we are also poor devils ourselves.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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