El largo adiós

In my new living room is a bookshelf full of a numbered series of white, hardcover “classics” translated into Spanish, a puzzling & sometimes eclectic series of titles – not just Joyce, Camus, Borges, Neruda & Cortázar, but Hemingway – The Old Man & the Sea, of all choices – Truman Capote, & Sigmund Freud -

- and Chandler, whose “El largo adiós” I started last night, & spent five minutes wrestling, dictionary open, with the first line:

La primera vez que le eché la vista encima, en el interior de un Rolls Royce Wraith, junta a la terraza de The Dancers, Terry Lenox estaba borracho.

“Le eché la vista encima” – this makes almost no sense. Which as near as I can make out means that, in the great game of telephone that constitutes literary translation, especially from Spanish, already a terse language and one liable to destroy the rat-a-tat laconic sneer of the noir original, a genre that the Spanish call negro, the literal English opening of Chandler’s immortal The Long Goodbye, that in its original does not have a single word in it longer than a syllable and clocks in at two dozen words, is:

The first time that I threw out or cast off or tossed away an overhead, as though from an outcropping, wide view upon Terry Lenox, (from an outcrop that was on the inside of a Rolls Royce that itself was adjacent to the terrace of The Dancers), he, Terry Lenox, was and had been drunk.

_

A belated consultation with the original informs me that le eché la vista encima means, “laid eyes on him” – four syllables to eight, Chandler wins by a factor of two – and it is almost enough to make me give up altogether.